Wanna know what I think? Well, I'll tell you what I think.

As you'll discover, my point of view is definitely different. Read my thoughts, learn a few things, have a chuckle.

June 5, 2003

According to the Centers for Disease Control, the obesity "epidemic" [that's the word they use but obesity is not contagious so it's not really an epidemic, is it?] is not just due to the fact that we're eating more, it's also due to the fact that we're walking less. Why? Because suburban sprawl neighborhoods are zoned in such a way that you have to get in your car to go anywhere. You even have to take the car to go to the gym... so you can walk on the treadmill! If instead, you could walk or jog to the gym, you wouldn't even need to go to the gym. Hmmm.

City neighborhoods and villages for thousands of years have been designed around a center you can walk to in a few minutes and get to shops, restaurants, schools, and places of worship. Why don't we have that in this country? Because it's so cheap and quick for developers to turn a field into a street with 100 houses, sell them in a few months' time, and move on. The solution is urban planning but that takes forethought and political will which have been sorely lacking in this country. Instead we spend billions on new highways instead of on revitalizing decaying inner cities. What you get is ever longer commutes, more pollution, less family time, more stress, more divorces, less exercise, bigger booties...

In Europe, people pay a premium to live near the city center. In the U.S., inner city = crime so people move to ever farther suburbs to flee crime but crime keeps following them because guess who commits crimes? People! There's a metropolitan area in the Midwest that covers ten times the area it did 100 years ago, even though its population hasn't changed. How is that for sprawl? At the rate they're going, one day the metropolitan area will end up encompassing the whole state.

A few cities are finally waking up to the problem, but more need to do so. Some developers are touting their new, pedestrian-friendly subdivisions as if they had invented the wheel. It's nice but not enough. Before we spend another dime to add more highways and more lanes to existing highways, our local governments owe it to us to come up with comprehensive urban planning to enable us to live, work, study, and play in our neighborhoods. How will you spend the hundreds of hours per year you will not be commuting?

June 10, 2003

People without advanced degrees rate themselves as happier than do people with advanced degrees. According to New York psychologist Dr. Morton Schillinger, "people with higher educations are most likely to be psychologically self-aware. They have a higher standard for self-satisfaction." So ignorance really is bliss. Can I return my advanced degree?

June 12, 2003

Hard to believe but true: Ben Affleck gave Jennifer Lopez a $105,000 toilet seat studded with rubies, diamonds, sapphires, and pearls. The romantic man designed the seat himself and proudly declared: "Jennifer is my princess and she deserves only the best, even when it comes to toilet seats." It's nice to know that Jennifer's priceless rear end isn't getting shortchanged, even given that $105,000 would be enough to sustain about 300 third world families for a year.

During a visit to Ben and J Lo's, I had the privilege of sitting on the princely throne and found out that diamonds are a royal pain in the ass. They're nice to look at, but not made to ~~shit~~ sit on. The pearls on the other hand were quite smooth.

June 14, 2003

I don't play golf. I have no respect for golf. First of all, don't call it a sport, it's a game of skill. Has anyone ever broken a sweat walking from one green to the next? Just to be on the safe side, golfers get someone else to carry their clubs and hand them to them so they don't overexert themselves. Oftentimes, even walking is too much. They prefer riding a cart. And what's with the whispering? Is this a library or the great outdoors? Even when you're engaging in an extreme sport where you life is on the line, you don't whisper. Golfers are trying to impress upon us how difficult their game is and how much concentration it requires. Guess what? It's not working. It makes them look like dorks.

Then there's the gaudy clown clothes and shoes, the "initiation" rituals to get into that exclusive country club with its ridiculous fees, the expensive golf trips, "no females allowed, no blacks allowed, no Jews allowed, it's our exclusive little good old boys' club, so we can network and get even richer..." They're just big, spoiled, haughty children.

And don't tell me you play golf because you "love being outdoors, the beautiful landscape, the trees, blah, blah, blah." If you loved the outdoors, you would strap on a backpack and head into the mountains. Golf courses are an affront to Nature. They are created with bulldozers. An 18-hole golf course requires 100 million gallons of water per year -- the same as approximately 1,400 households. In Colorado alone, there are 300 gold courses. There's also the fertilizers that pollute streams, the pesticides, the vehicular traffic... If that's the way you love Nature, please try to love it a little less. [At least someone is listening: in September, a golf course will open in Mancos, Col. that will be the first all-artificial-turf eighteen-hole golf course. It will require less than one million gallons to sprinkle the landscaping around the fairways.]

Do me a favor, will you? Just forget about golf.

June 17, 2003

In northwestern Mexico, 35,000 sea turtles a year are illegally killed and eaten. They are served during Lent because they are considered fish, not meat. In July 2002, a California conservation group wrote to the Vatican, hoping the pope would clarify that turtle flesh is really meat but only received a standard acknowledgment. To me, it's simple: during Lent, you're supposed to fast. Turtles are slow. Clearly not what you need.

It seems some people think turtles are fish because they swim. Well, they're not. They're reptiles. If those poachers think swimming is enough to qualify a creature as a fish, I'm looking forward to catching some pretty big fish the next time these poachers go swimming.

June 21, 2003

According to the March 2003 issue of National Geographic, "the novelist who invented Shangri-La -- James Hilton, in his 1933 Lost Horizon -- insisted the place was mythical. But now China's government has turned fiction into fact. In 2001 the Yunnan city once known as Zhongdian beat out 12 towns to be renamed Shangri-La. Some ten billion dollars will go for development in the region to help take tourists, and their money, to paradise." I think they'll just be taken.

June 23, 2003

Bob Potter, the owner of C.O. Jones, a Mexican restaurant in Connecticut, was forced to change its name after the town realized it was a pun on "cojones." Will the town council have the balls to take on Hooters next? Oh, and by the way, the town also decreed that Mr. Potter couldn't name his son "Harry" because that would violate J.K. Rowlings' rights.

Have you noticed that when someone doesn't know the answer to a question, he'll just "forget" to reply to it in his response?

June 26, 2003

I came across this ad in the June 30, 2003 issue of Newsweek.

Scroll down to read my comments next to the pertinent text in the ad.

Think of how much money the folks at A&E must have spent on this ad. And yet, they couldn't find a decent enough writer or proofreader to know the difference between "flair" and "flare"!

Instead of getting "fair" pay, the writer should be given bus "fare" and be sent home. Odds are, he won't know the difference.

Scroll down for more...

How about this oddly constructed sentence (with my comments in brackets): "Who's [singular] next to prove their [plural] strength and become an [singular] international success?" Whoever wrote this sentence went to great lengths to avoid using "his" instead of "their" because there is a woman on the list and he or she didn't want to seem politically incorrect. There's an easy fix for that: "who's next to prove his or her strength and become an international success?" Now, wasn't that simple?

I know for sure who's not going to become an international success: this writer given "their" poor mastery of "their" craft.

Scroll down for the next entry.

June 30, 2003

When I correspond with others by email or fax, if they don't know the answer to one of my questions, they'll just "forget" to reply to it in their response. Don't you find that annoying? It makes them look cowardly or careless. If I don't know the answer to a question, I'll just come out and say it and offer to research the answer if the other party feels it's important.

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