My fears have been realized. I took my computer in on Friday and during the diagnostic check it decided it had had enough and shut itself down. So they’re sending it to the hardware replacement center, but I had to back everything up first. I suppose if the threat of losing my hard drive is the only thing that will make me get off my ass and do a backup then this can’t be all bad. At least they didn’t wipe it without telling me like Gateway did a few years back. I’m glad I didn’t have a digital camera back then - if I lost all my pictures now, someone would be getting a mighty big ass-kicking. Anyway, I’m sure not having my computer will not keep me from blogging, so fear not. My inane ramblings and Orlando pictures stop for no man! I might even get some things done around the house without the internet to tempt me. Then again, I wouldn’t want to raise expectations.
You may notice that it’s 2:30am on a work night that I’m posting this. I guess taking a 5-hour nap this evening wasn’t the best idea. I didn’t think walking 5 miles would make me that sleepy! Johnny and I did the March of Dimes Walk America today. It was actually pretty pleasant, despite the fact that it rained the whole time. A light, drizzly rain that made me feel like I was in Seattle. We walked with the Columbus Scrappers team, and Johnny and one of the other women’s husband talked sports, video games, Simpsons, Star Wars, and more sports. After getting that much exercise we felt obligated to eat a lot of food, so we went to Buca di Beppo and gorged ourselves on various forms of carbohydrates. Atkins would have had (another) heart attack. Then we came home and I took that 5-hour nap, waking up at 10pm. I think I need a time-stopping machine, that I can use when I sleep. That way I can sleep whenever and for how long I want, but then I still have all day to do everything else I want to do.
Speaking of carbohydrates, I have to share this with you all. And for the record, I think the Atkins diet is a bunch of crap. While it’s true that many of the low-carb options available also mean lower fat and calories, cutting out bread and pasta and replacing them with meat and cheese is not a good idea. I think the original idea of the plan was to eat less carbs and more veggies, and it got twisted somewhere along the way. Not to mention that people who are losing a lot of weight quickly by doing that are getting gout, and putting the weight back on almost immediately once they start eating carbs again. Not that anyone should listen to me for diet advice, but that’s my opinion.
Confessions Of A Closet Carb Fiend By DAVE BARRY
I probably shouldn’t admit this to you younger readers, but when my generation was your age, we did some pretty stupid things. I’m talking about taking CRAZY risks. We drank water right from the tap. We used aspirin bottles that you could actually open with your bare hands. We bought appliances that were not festooned with helpful safety warnings such as “DO NOT BATHE WITH THIS TOASTER.”
But for sheer insanity, the wildest thing we did was — prepare to be shocked — we deliberately ingested carbohydrates!
I know, I know. It was wrong. But we were young and foolish, and there was a lot of peer pressure. You’d be at a party, and there would be a lava lamp blooping away, and a Jimi Hendrix record playing (a “record” was a primitive compact disc that operated by static electricity). And then, when the mood was right, somebody would say: “You wanna do some ‘drates?” And the next thing you know, there’d be a bowl of pretzels going around, or crackers, or even potato chips, and we’d put these things into our mouths and just … EAT them.
I’m not proud of this. My only excuse was that we were ignorant. It’s not like now, when everybody knows how bad carbohydrates are, and virtually every product is advertised as being “low-carb,” including beer, denture adhesives, floor wax, tires, life insurance and Viagra. Back then, we had no idea. Nobody did! Our own MOTHERS gave us bread!
Today, of course, nobody eats bread. People are terrified of all carbohydrates, as evidenced by the recent mass robbery at a midtown Manhattan restaurant, where 87 patrons turned their wallets over to a man armed only with a strand of No. 8 spaghetti. (”Do what he says! He has pasta!”) The city of Beverly Hills has been evacuated twice this month because of reports — false, thank heavens — that terrorists had put a bagel in the water supply.
But as I say, in the old days we didn’t recognize the danger of carbohydrates. We believed that the reason you got fat was from eating “calories,” which are tiny units of measurement that cause food to taste good. When we wanted to lose weight, we went on low-calorie diets in which we ate only inedible foods such as celery, which is actually a building material, and grapefruit, which is nutritious, but offers the same level of culinary satisfaction as chewing on an Odor Eater.
The problem with the low-calorie diet was that a normal human could stick to it for, at most, four hours, at which point he or she would have no biological choice but to sneak out to the garage and snork down an entire bag of Snickers, sometimes without removing the wrappers. So nobody lost weight, and everybody felt guilty all the time. Many people, in desperation, turned to disco.
But then along came the bold food pioneer who invented the Atkins Diet: Dr. Something Atkins. After decades of research on nutrition and weight gain — including the now-famous Hostess Ding Dong Diet Experiment, which resulted in a laboratory rat the size of a Plymouth Voyager — Dr. Atkins discovered an amazing thing: Calories don’t matter! What matter are carbohydrates, which result when a carbo molecule and a hydrate molecule collide at high speeds and form tiny invisible doughnuts.
Dr. Atkins’ discovery meant that — incredible though it seemed — as long as you avoided carbohydrates, you could, without guilt, eat high-fat, high-calorie foods such as cheese, bacon, lard, pork rinds and whale. You could eat an entire pig, as long as the pig had not recently been exposed to bread.
At first, like other groundbreaking pioneers such as Galileo and Eminem, Dr. Atkins met with skepticism, even hostility. The low-calorie foods industry went after him big time. The Celery Growers Association hired a detective to — yes — stalk him. His car tires were repeatedly slashed by what police determined to be shards of Melba toast.
But Dr. Atkins persisted, because he had a dream — a dream that, some day, he would help the human race by selling it 427 million diet books. And he did, achieving vindication for his diet before his tragic demise in an incident that the autopsy report listed as “totally unrelated to the undigested 28-pound bacon cheeseburger found in his stomach.”
But the Atkins Diet lives on, helping millions of Americans to lose weight. The irony is, you can’t tell this by looking at actual Americans, who have, as a group, become so heavy that North America will soon be underwater as far inland as Denver. Which can only mean one thing: You people are still sneaking Snickers. You should be ashamed of yourselves! Got any more?
I love Dave Barry. But I won’t post pictures of him. Instead, I give you:
Currently Stuck In Head: John Linnell, Maine
