albatross @ 103
As an adult, a lot of what you do to improve yourself or your life involves ignoring some levels of unpleasantness or discomfort or even pain. For example, eating less food to lose weight is unpleasant--it involves ignoring fairly urgent signals from your body, signals that evolved to keep you alive but now are encouraging you to kill yourself by overeating.
Funny you should mention that. The other day my newspaper ran a glowing front-page article about a real estate agent-turned-motivational speaker who runs very expensive, high-energy seminars for Toronto businessmen, teaching them to lose weight by just not eating as much. According to this guy, weight loss brings happiness, wealth and success. Some of his clients are indeed a lot thinner. It took me the better part of an afternoon to figure out why the article creeped me out. I eventually realized that the reason was because the rhetoric sounded exactly like a pro-ana website. There's a scam for all of us, I guess.
albatross @ 103
As an adult, a lot of what you do to improve yourself or your life involves ignoring some levels of unpleasantness or discomfort or even pain. For example, eating less food to lose weight is unpleasant--it involves ignoring fairly urgent signals from your body, signals that evolved to keep you alive but now are encouraging you to kill yourself by overeating.
Funny you should mention that. The other day my newspaper ran a glowing front-page article about a real estate agent-turned-motivational speaker who runs very expensive, high-energy seminars for Toronto businessmen, teaching them to lose weight by just not eating as much. According to this guy, weight loss brings happiness, wealth and success. Some of his clients are indeed a lot thinner. It took me the better part of an afternoon to figure out why the article creeped me out. I eventually realized that the reason was because the rhetoric sounded exactly like a pro-ana website. There's a scam for all of us, I guess.
Random factoid: The droit du seigneur is itself a myth that came about as a result of political propaganda.
Tomorrow afternoon I have a medical appointment with a geneticist who I expect will tell me that I have tested positive for a breast cancer gene mutation. If I were an American, this would make me uninsurable and probably kill my dream of ever becoming a full-time author. I thank the gods that I'm Canadian.
Tim @#6
I thought the correct spelling was wales, as in the Middle English word walen, to raise wheals.
What smells like new-mown hay?
The picture of John McCain that was posted the other day gave me an idea for a jack o'lantern. Thank you Making Light!
Eeriness in Europe
A few years ago I was backpacking on the cheap through Romania. One night I stayed at the Continental Hotel in Cluj-Napoca. It had obviously once been a very grand establishment, but the twentieth century had not been kind to it. The marble floors had bare concrete strips where the carpets were supposed to go, and elaborate acanthus-leaf brackets on the walls contained bare lightbulbs. Night was falling but the staff, being thrifty, had decided not to turn on the lights in the upstairs hallways. To find my attic room, I had to get out my backpacker flashlight and shine it into all the doorways and alcoves, all the while cackling "Velcome to Transylvania!" under my breath.
It was only after I had returned to Canada that I realized that the Continental Hotel, Cluj-Napoca, Romania is the former Hotel Royale, Klausenburg, Hungary which makes an appearance at the beginning of Dracula.
All this reminds me of a section of the early seventh century Alamannic laws: "If anyone breaks another person's head so that the very bone is detached from the head and makes a sound when thrown at a shield across the road, let him pay six solidi..."
I used to have a history professor who liked to use that passage to point out that, unlike modern legislation, medieval laws were not written with the intent that they should be interpreted literally.
As a general rule, I am immediately suspicious of any book whose publishers felt the need to include the letters Ph.D. after the author's name on the title page.
Also, it's prudent to assume that all books on the Templars are complete hooey until proven otherwise.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2009 | 6 |
| 2008 | 3 |
| 2007 | 2 |
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