matthearn.com

Here’s a lengthy commentary on the state of the “drug war,” why it’s always been doomed to failure, and why the administration is legally prevented from even discussing stopping it. Interesting fact:

Since 1998, the ONDCP has spent $1.4 billion on youth anti-pot ads. It also spent $43 million to study their effectiveness. When the study found that kids who’ve seen the ads are more likely to smoke pot, the ONDCP buried the evidence, choosing to spend hundreds of millions more on the counterproductive ads.

The New Yorker explores why we’re mostly fatties. The topic of “Supersizing” is particularly interesting:

In the early nineteen-sixties, a man named David Wallerstein was running a chain of movie theatres in the Midwest and wondering how to boost popcorn sales. Wallerstein had already tried matinée pricing and two-for-one specials, but to no avail. According to Greg Critser, the author of “Fat Land” (2003), one night the answer came to him: jumbo-sized boxes. Once Wallerstein introduced the bigger boxes, popcorn sales at his theatres soared, and so did those of another high-margin item, soda.

A decade later, Wallerstein had retired from the movie business and was serving on McDonald’s board of directors when the chain confronted a similar problem. Customers were purchasing a burger and perhaps a soft drink or a bag of fries, and then leaving. How could they be persuaded to buy more? Wallerstein’s suggestion—a bigger bag of fries—was greeted skeptically by the company’s founder, Ray Kroc. Kroc pointed out that if people wanted more fries they could always order a second bag.

“But Ray,” Wallerstein is reputed to have said, “they don’t want to eat two bags—they don’t want to look like a glutton.” Eventually, Kroc let himself be convinced; the rest, as they say, is supersizing.

Eek. If you have time for a little long-form journalism, check out this GQ piece on a teenage boy in Wisconsin who posed as a girl on the interwebs to lure other male students into sending nude pictures, which he then used to blackmail them into sexual activities. Way creepy.

Mark “The Shark” Titus talks whitewater rafting, The Ladies, and why “I want to put sex on your face” is the only pickup line you’ll ever need.

I have found a new comic that you should read: Girls With Slingshots! Like all good webcomics, you need to start at the beginning and read through. Here’s an amusing one to whet your appetite:

What in the hair-raising hell is this all about?

Let’s just cover everything in rapid-fire list form, ’cause that’s how I be rollin’ fo sho. (I don’t understand many of the things I just typed.)

• I’m down to 249 as of this morning, despite drinking more than I should have over the weekend; I attribute the continued weight loss to constantly working on my house and not eating much. Saturday I was 750 calories under where I should be, which is roughly the equivalent of a cheeseburger. I compensated on Sunday by sharing half a Bobbie and drinking a lot of beer.


• How about that old Tom Watson yesterday? I wish he’d made that last putt on 18. Perhaps he should borrow my new putter; I am a horrible golfer, and yet the first time I used my new clubs I was dropping 8-12 footers like what. I was an unstoppable putting deity. I’m just saying, if Tom wants some pointers, he should totally call me.


• Progress on the purchase of a new house and sale of the old one continues apace; the home inspection on the “new” 150-year-old home revealed that, in the words of the inspector, the house is “totally rockin’.” We also discovered that the radiators, which we thought had been disabled in favor of a modern heat pump, are fully functional and heated by a boiler in the basement. My new house has the same heating system as Harlan Elementary School, and in no way is this a bad thing. Apparently the boiler is just about the best one money can buy, it’ll last for 40 years, and it was installed just three years ago. Acres and acres of win.

  
  On the current home front, we’re cleaning and scrubbing and patching holes and just generally making the place look less like the family home of 4 dirty people and more like Felix Ungar lives up ins.



• Why don’t people name their kids Felix anymore? If HW and I have a third kid I’m totally pushing for that.

Are you a grammar nazi like me? Do you enjoy secret societies? Well then have I got a club for you!

On the subject of overeating and large portions, James Joyner writes (via Andrew’s guest blogger Patrick Appel):

…[O]ne of the things that has long occurred to me about restaurant dining is that, because every customer must be served the same portion size (within allowances for human error) they’re naturally going to provide huge amounts of food. If you serve a 275 pound man an amount of food that would be appropriate for a 125 pound woman, he’s going to still be hungry at the end of his meal and therefore a dissatisfied customer. Because the marginal cost of additional food (especially pasta, potatoes, and the like) is negligible, it’s just good business to pile it on. Naturally, everyone else will be given too much to eat and all but the most disciplined will overeat.

It might be “natural,” but it’s still stupid. I myself weigh roughly 250 pounds, and if I go to a restaurant and am very, very hungry, I’ve been known to order and eat two meals; they arrive at the same time and I shovel them both in at the same time, usually in under 10 minutes.

At higher class restaurants, the servings are smaller, but because they usually have more courses (appetizer, salad, meal, dessert), which are spaced out over the course of over an hour, I find that I’m just as satisfied having eaten less, of higher quality food.

Big chain restaurants can argue that they’re just offering what Americans want, but that’s a cop-out. Drug dealers are only meeting a demand as well. I’m not saying we need to enact legislation to limit how much food chefs can put on a plate, and I’m certainly not saying “if it weren’t for McDonald’s I’d be totally skinny,” but big chain restaurants who focus on stuffing food into their patrons need to stop dodging their share of the blame for the obesity epidemic.

I honestly don’t know if this is good or bad. Luckily, it’s funny.