Diskage:
DVD • Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
CD-ROM • Empty
CD Player
• Alice in Chains - Facelift
• Mad Season -  Above
• System of a Down - Toxicity
• God Lives Underwater - Life in the So Called Space Age
• Metallica - ...and Justice For All

Books Lying Open
• The Encyclopedia of Things that Never Were, Michael Page & Robert Ingpen

Soul-Devouring Worry
• Onion-free pizza.

When I Grow Up:
• Excessive celebration penalties will dog my every success.

Curse of the Day:
• May your friend prove unable to handle his peanut M&M's.

Daily Update
Another day of rooting through my own feces.  In literary terms, that is.  I'm up to July on the old blog sorting, and have added another dozen articles and about 6 reviews, as well as a couple of short stories.  I'm in the process of moving all reviews from the main folder to a sub folder, which necessitates a lot of pasting and new page headers, as well as a new reviews index page.  Same with the Articles, I'm in the middle of sorting those and figuring what to do with the articles index page, since it's getting way too long way too quickly.  None of those are online at this point, but should be tomorrow once I get all caught up and have the navigation in a presentable fashion.

As it's dawn now and I'm yawning like a cave, I shall hit the news and go to bed.  The long thing below about sodium and unhealthy food I wrote last night immediately after the blog, as it occurred to me then.  Good thing, since I couldn't stay awake to write that now.  Or read it, for that matter. Perhaps you'll have better luck.

My dad got a 3-pack of floating Halloween candles as a door prize at some event.  He wasn't going to use them, so I took them for the hell of it.  One is in action there in the measuring cup; they work pretty well, but I don't know what you'd actually use them for.  The water they are in needs to be very still since they are barely buoyant and will extinguish with any sort of turbulence.  It would probably be more fun to just prop them up against something and watch them burn.  You could mimic the screams of agony as the face melts off.

Didn't quite turn out that way.

I dislike that; I'd rather that it burned right down to nothing.  I want a bucket of these things at 6pm, and by the time the last drunk has staggered out the door at 4am there should be a bunch of floating orange O-rings, and little bits of blackened wick in Davey Jones' locker.

Though this way they do end up with a nice "face bitten off" look.

News stuff, briefly.

• I post pictures of bizarre fashion from time to time, usually ones involving bare breasts. No such luck today, but the outfit is bizarre enough to merit comment.  South Korean fashion. Insert "too much poodle for lunch" joke here.

• The mad sniper thing has gotten really weird.  The note he left was apparently very long, like pages, and just gobbledygook, broken English, threats against schools, demands for money, etc.  The phone call apparently did happen, but as the cops are saying cryptically:

"The person you called could not hear everything you said. The audio was unclear and we want to get it right. Call us back so that we can clearly understand," said Montgomery County Police Chief Charles Moose, who has been leading the hunt.

The cops for some reason arrested two guys in a white mini van.  Turns out they have nothing to do with the case, but apparently someone saw them near a pay phone and cops descended, since they had a semi-white van.  Turns out they have nothing to do with anything, and are two illegal immigrants who worked in a hotel or something in the area.  They're being deported.  Wrong place wrong time, guys.

And on top of all that, another person got shot Tuesday morning boarding a bus.  Cops immediately closed off the area, scrambled choppers, etc.  Found nothing.  Schools are closed, business is dying since no one is going out if they can help it, thousands of police are working overtime, etc.

This guy is doing a hell of a job with domestic terrorism, and he's not even trying.  If after the 2nd or 3rd shooting he'd started mailing newspapers the spent cartridges along with notes about targeting specific schools or shopping areas, or sending tape recordings of him ranting about blowing up buildings, can you imagine the chaos?  You don't need any sort of bomb or plans to get one, you just need a hunting rifle and a few murders, and then anything you say will be taken seriously.  One person could close the airport for a major city almost indefinitely, shut down commerce, make threats of hitting a dozen places just to see them under heavy guard and empty all day, etc.

Missile defense shields or not (even if they worked) this gives you an idea of the level of chaos a few terrorists could cause if they were organized and trying.  Imagine the 9/11/01 guys doing this in 10 different cities at once?  Just have to shoot one person a week or so, far slower rate than this current sniper, and spend the rest of the time sending threatening letters to the media and police.

Half the cops in the country would be on the cases, mass panic would erupt, people would be afraid to leave their homes... and really, what's to stop someone from doing it?  It's certainly easier to pull off than hijacking airliners, with the availability of rifles in the US.  This DC guy is showing how easily you can blow away a dozen people in broad day light and not get caught, even in heavily-populated areas.

• A few funny pics on Boners today.

• Now this is a frozen car.
• Now this is a hot sign.
• Interesting barber shop.

The culprit tonight was biscuits.  Just a regular roll of them, 10-pack, store brand, homestyle.  10-13 minutes on 400º.  The nutrition info informs me that each serving has 100 calorie and 360mg of sodium, which is a whopping 15% of my daily recommended intake.  That's not so bad, until you notice that a serving size is 2 biscuits.  Be serious, the whole container is 7.5 oz, so 2 of them is 1.5oz.  Yeah, that's really going to fill you up.

So the whole roll (Which I just ate, minus one biscuit that I fed, uncooked, to the rats.  They go insane for raw dough.) is 500 calories and 75% of your daily salt.  And that's just the dry biscuits; no one eats them like that.  I had them with a light spread of margarine and some Raspberry preserves.  The margarine I have is crap store brand, soybean oil, and it's low on salt, but has a whopping 100 calories and 15% of my daily recommended fat per serving size.  Oddly the raspberry preserves have no added sugar (despite tasting like raw sucrose) and just 36 calories.  I go very light on margarine/jam, so probably just one serving of each total, over the absurdly-classified 5 (4.5) servings of biscuits.

And that's just something I had for a snack.

Canned goods are really bad, check out the sodium on them some time.  A 14.5oz/411g jar of Green Giant cut green beans has 20 calories but 17% of the daily recommended sodium.  Not so bad until, you guessed it, you check the serving size.  The can contains, "about 3 1/2 servings".  Which is about two bites, once you drain off all the water.  I used to eat a big baked potato with green beans (and some chopped onion, and lots of red/black pepper, and melted sharp cheddar) almost every day, and I'd often go two cans of beans with a really big spud.  Just one can is 60% of your daily salt intake.

Two annoying things about canned goods.

You can get the low or no salt versions, but they never seem to have those in the big economy size containers (or in the 12 packs I get at Price Club), and they cost more!  Why the hell would it cost more to put less salt in?  It's not like they have to add other ingredients as preservatives.  Salt costs money, in theory. It should be cheaper with less of it, as well as to encourage people to eat healthier.  Is the salt industry run by the mafia or what?

The other canned good thing that sucks is can size. Forever, the standard can was 16oz.  About 6 or 8 years ago, one of the major brands in the US elected to change to 14.5oz cans, and lowered the price slightly.  This was an obvious scam, since they actually raised the price per ounce, while giving you less product.  But it was cheaper, so you had one brand in cans that looked identical (they changed the size by making them have slightly less circumference, keeping them the same height, since if they were shorter you'd notice they were smaller with the naked eye) to the others, and cost like five cents less.

Consumers, being the idiots they (we) are, bought more of the smaller ones, despite the other brands trying to hold at 16oz for a while. I remember Del Monte (or someone) having "Still 16oz!" in big letters on their cans for a while, before they gave in.  Once every brand was 14.5oz, the prices crept back up to what they were previously, back in the 16oz glory days, despite being 11% smaller.

Things like that make you wish for communist style market control, at times.

Anyway, my point is that processed and canned goods has a ridiculous amount of salt and fat, in most cases. You can think you're eating healthy, can 'o corn for lunch, maybe some chips, and bang, there's 150% of your salt for the day.

How about soup?  Campbell's soup is like 70% salt, it's unbelievable.  One 10.5oz can of Vegetarian Vegetable, taken from my own pantry, has 80 calories, almost no fat, but ouch, 36% of the days sodium.  It's just a tiny can of soup, how many servings can it have?  Try 2.5!  Yes, you mix it 1 to 1 with water, but that's just 21 oz of soup; you can drink that much in about a minute if you're in a hurry (trust me).  You eat the whole can, which everyone but children do, and that's fricking 90% of your daily sodium for less than a meal.  Instant noodles?  Those cheap little $.15 packets of Ramen are 2 servings at 190 calories/18% of your saturated fat/34% of your daily sodium each.  If you have a cup of instant noodles mixed with a can of vegetable soup (which I used to do all the time) you're hitting 150% of your daily sodium.  Throw in some crackers and you're pushing 200% sodium, just with lunch.

The irony is that I think most foods taste painfully salty.  I never add salt to anything I cook, other than FFs once in a while, and then it's just a little shake. I can't eat most corn chips without scratching off some of the salt, most places I end up shaking off their FFs, and I can't eat movie popcorn; it's just ridiculously salty.  Last movie I went to my mom got a big bag of it and we had to take it back after about 10 bites; it was just inedible.  (For us; everyone else seemed to be chowing down pretty enthusiastically.)

I would estimate that the average fast food eating American probably exceeds 1000% of the daily salt recommendation every day, and if you are the type of person who adds salt to everything pre-ingestion, you're doing even better. Is the sodium a bad thing?

Excessive salt consumption poses a threat to health, and is associated with hypertension, or high blood pressure. High blood pressure increases the risk of heart attack and stroke, and affects as many as twenty-five percent of adult Americans. Because high blood pressure does not usually cause pain or discomfort, many people with high blood pressure don't know they have it.

Hypertension isn't the only sodium-related health problem. Excessive sodium in the diet can also exacerbate kidney problems, and can greatly increase water retention, thus causing swelling, or edema.

It's funny that this article was the first return on my google search for salt-related health problems, since it covers most of what I've just been writing about for the last 15 minutes here.  I do wonder why manufacturers put so much salt on everything.  I mean 75% of your daily in biscuits?  Who puts salt on biscuits?  It's not like anyone uses it as a seasoning on them.  Baking requires salt in the recipe, to help them rise or something, but I'm sure they could use a lot less than they do.

The oddest thing is that really salty stuff, like corn chips, might not be that salty after all.  Bag of Kirkland Signature Tortilla Strips I have here, from Price Club, has just 4% sodium per serving.  Sure, it's a ridiculously small serving size (9 chips) but even if you have a quadruple serving, that's still less salt than 1/3 of a can of soup.  But chips taste like they are drowning in salt, so it seems like more.  People will cut back on chips to avoid salt.

It reminds me of at work, with cotton candy.  People will refuse to get their kid one since it's too much sugar, or will get one for like three kids to share.  Meanwhile every kid has a box of Cracker Jacks and a large Coke. As I recall, a 12oz can of Coke has like 8 teaspoons of sugar.  If you ball up a whole cotton candy, it will make a round ball about the size of a golf ball. That's 99% sugar, but you can dissolve that in a Coke and not taste any difference.  We've dissolved 5 or 6 cotton candy's in a medium cup of soda and the person drinking it hasn't noticed any difference in taste at all.  When we make the stuff, the machine takes about 2 big cups of sugar mixed with a sprinkle of flossine.  That will make 25 or 30 cotton candies, depending on how big you are going and how light and fluffy you make them.

Parents happily let the kid eat a box of Cracker Jacks and drink 40oz of soda, yet balk at a cotton candy, which would be maybe 1/40 of their sugar for the evening.  It's all perception, much like the seemingly healthy can of peas, vs. a bowl of corn chips, and the peas actually have 10x the salt.

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