My friend, Robby, pointed me to this article about a possible mass extinction brewing in our Gulf of Mexico. I don’t want to belittle the seriousness of the oil spew occurring in the Gulf and I don’t want to let BP off the hook in taking full responsibility for all the damage they have done, but it is a little difficult for me to believe that drilling a six inch hole through the sea bottom is going to result in a blow out of the ocean floor that will release the methane gas bubble this article talks about.
But what do you think about this? Am I wrong in dismissing the theory as I am? Could this really be serious or is it just the thing that Hollywood disaster movies are made from?
“You know what it is they say about High Fructose Corn Syrup.”
“No, what is it they say? That it is just like sugar?”
“Well, no, that’s what the corn lobby would have you believe. What THEY say is:”
In soda, it has been found that by using HFCS instead of pure sugar it can make the soda 10 times richer in harmful carbonyl compounds. According to one study, carbonyl compounds are elevated in people with diabetes and are blamed for causing diabetic complications such as foot ulcers and eye and nerve damage. Another study concluded that foods with increased fructose “produced significantly higher fasting plasma triacylglycerol values than did the glucose diet in men” and “if plasma triacylglycerols are a risk factor for cardiovascular disease, then diets high in fructose may be undesirable”. Sounds good, right?
via High Fructose Corn Syrup Vs. Pure Sugar – Is One Worse Than The Other? | The Good Human.
You can eat or drink what you want. That’s up to you. I just think people ought to know as much as possible about what they put in their bodies so you can make an informed choice.
I’ve been doing a little bicycling lately. It’s moving from being an activity I like to an activity that I’m passionate about. My goal with this is to finish a century in the next year. I’m not yet capable of that milage but I’m working on it.
For the past several months I’ve been living in Chattanooga during the week and coming home to Lawrenceville on weekends. Finding places to ride and people to ride with has been easy in Chattanooga, not so much in Lawrenceville. Gwinnett County just hasn’t done a good job of making the roads bicycle friendly.
I’m home for the week so I need to find some places to ride. Tonight I’m going to try a ride sponsored by the Gwinnett Touring Club. It starts in Dacula, meanders up through Auburn and loops back to Dacula for a total of 26 miles. I drove some of the route this weekend just to make sure there weren’t any killer hills on the route.
I’m really looking forward to this ride and hoping to make more contacts around home for riding. I’ve joined the Chattanooga Bicycle Club and will probably join the GTC also. Hopefully between these two clubs I’ll find ways to keep myself passionate about riding. It has already rewarded me by helping me drop about fifteen pounds that I don’t think would have come off with just dieting. I seem to have more energy lately also.
Posted in Fitness
|
Tagged Bicycle
|
Over the past several months I’ve been working in Chattanooga through the week and going back home to Lawrenceville on weekends to be with my wife. This has lead to the some discussions between my wife and I about the possibility of us moving back to Chattanooga. It probably won’t happen but the thinking about it has had me considering what I’m wanting in my next home.
Our sons are now both grown and the house we now live in is way too large for us and not real practical for a couple that should consider future accessibility needs. Having to climb stairs is something that we won’t want to be doing as we get older. A level lawn is something else for which I see a need.
Location is something else I’ve been thinking about. I would love to be able to leave my car parked as much as possible. I would like to be able to safely walk or bike to stores and restaurants and other community activities. I guess I’m getting more urban as I get older. Where we live now is actually close to all of what I’m wanting but the community hasn’t been designed for foot or bike traffic.
I helped a friend find a place to live last week that was on the street where Gerri and I bought our first house. The neighborhood was built in the 1930s and 40s and is in a part of town that had gotten a little seedy at one time but now is coming back. This neighborhood never saw the blight the rest of the town saw so the houses never got in a run down condition to have to be rebuilt, they have just needed to be modernized a little.
I also noticed that sidewalks have been put in on the highway a couple of blocks from the house and those sidewalks lead to restaurants and shopping. A park has been added where an old landfill once sat and a road now connects the neighborhood to easy access to a trendy part of town.
Gerri and I have lived in four different houses over the last 32 years, each one a little larger than the last. Our needs have changed as we have grown older. It just seems funny to me that as I look at it all is that what seems to me as our perfect house is our first house.
I want my first house back.
Let me talk a little about gender equality. I actually prefer saying it this way rather than calling it feminism because I personally see inequalities being detrimental to both sides of the gender gap. I think that to say we want equal rights for women is ignoring that to do so means we must also want equal rights for men.
So before we can start looking at creating equality among the sexes I think we need to understand why those inequalities are there to begin with. Mostly I believe it’s because technological changes occur so much faster than sociological changes can react. It takes generations for our roles to adapt to changes in the environment. If those roles are pressed to change then those in those roles will push back to maintain things where they are comfortable without thinking how much better things might be if their roles do change with changing times.
It made sense, maybe, 150 years ago and earlier that women attended to chores within the house while men took care of those chores outside of the house. I can understand that when work is done with muscle rather than machinery then the stronger people will be the ones doing the work that requires the most muscle. I also understand that prior to the age of baby formula and bottles women were better equipped to take care of the needs of babies. Technology changed all that but we still have our ideas of what roles we play based on the roles our parents imprinted on us that was imprinted upon them by their parents and so on. We don’t like to change and we don’t like our image of what and who we are to change.
Add into this the sexual tensions that relationships can introduce into the picture and I think we can see why we have developed the gender inequalities that we see. So how do we apply that insight into becoming a society that still embraces the differences in the sexes without propagating a culture of sexual inequality?
Personally I think the Apostle Paul has a lot to offer in how we do that but I really want to hear your opinions on this and to promote a discussion on the subject. Feel free to take this whichever way you feel led to take this in the comments.
I’ve been reading a little from the Book of Enoch. While I’ve been familiar with some of its content from various sermons and Bible studies I have never actually read any of it until this weekend. I wish I had done this years ago. I understand and agree with why it isn’t a part of the Bible but I think reading it is necessary to a full contextual understanding of a lot of the Bible.
WordPress 3.0 is out along with a new default theme that seems to have some nice customizations. I was getting bored with the old one so let’s try this one.
Let me know if it’s too ugly.
I am a Facebook user. I’m really not all that crazy about the platform but all my friends are there so I’m there with them. I really like publishing from here, though. So that has me looking at the Facebook Graph API and wondering if I have time to code the plug in for WordPress that I really, really want.
See, I want to synchronize between this weblog and my Facebook feed. Anything under the 400+ word limit on statuses I want to be posted as my status. If it goes over that threshold I want it to be posted to Facebook as a note. There are WP plugins that will do something very similar to what I want but they won’t do exactly what I’m describing.
Facebook claims to allow a sort of pull synchronization in Notes but it doesn’t always work. Make that it hasn’t worked for me without kicking it for several months. So I want to push it from here into Facebook and I want my short posts to be my status and my longer post to be a note.
The plugin for pulling comments on notes that are also WP posts works well. Now I want it to update the notes on FB with comments made here. I’ll take a whack at this project if no one does it soon but I really don’t have time for it now.
For the last few months I’ve been working in Chattanooga and living with my brother through the week. Last night I bailed out of my Wednesday night bike ride and rode down to Chattanooga’s river front to take part in the Riverbend Festival.
At one of the entrances there was a street preacher that I listened to for a few minutes while trying to figure out what to do with my bike. I know the man was preaching out of love but I found his idea of Christianity was pretty much 180° from mine. He seems to be of the opinion that God has always been exclusive, revealing Himself only to Abraham and his progeny before the current era and only through Jesus to those of us in the current era.
While I fully consider myself a Christian and I am fully in agreement that salvation is through Christ I don’t agree with him that God is an exclusive God. I believe that God has been revealing Himself to all that listen regardless of where one was born or through what religion one seeks God.
I also believe that when Jesus said “Believe in me and you will be saved” He was telling us that salvation was achieved through accepting that we are forgiven and looking to God for how to live our lives.
To me this street preacher was telling me that unless I followed him (not God, but him) that I was doomed to hell. I don’t think that’s right. I also don’t think that I can truly listen to what God has to say to me if I am concerned about what that street preacher thinks of what I believe.
To me God is very personal. So much so that for me to get an understanding of what God wants from me I have to relate to Him in a way that probably only really makes sense to me. I can talk theology all day long but with God being so personal I don’t know that my theological understandings can have any meaning at all to any one else.
What I do know is that Jesus tells us we are known by our fruits and that one tree can’t bear the fruits of a different kind of tree. So if I see a kind, compassionate, nonjudgmental person who is feeding the hungry, clothing the naked and comforting the sick I think I’m looking at a follower of Christ whether that person is a Muslim, a Buddhist, a Hindu or a Pagan.
God didn’t just speak to Abraham, he spoke to everyone; just as he does now.
Okay, there isn’t enough detail for me to say a lot about this but the article makes it sound an awful lot like the sheriff was miffed over not being able to show off his departments rescue gear.
Raft guide arrested after helping stranded rafter on Clear Creek – The Denver Post.
Okay here’s my dilemma. I’m running out of gas and have no idea when I’ll come to another exit with gas stations. This exit has three; BP, Shell and Conoco. I’m a socially responsible individual at which station do I purchase my gas, why that one and why not the other two?
Yesterday I sat in a hospital waiting room while my Dad had a quadruple bypass surgery and a carotid artery unplugged. He’s 83. Today he’s resting well and flirting with the nurses. I think he will recover and do the things he needs to get back into good health but I don’t think he will be helping me build any more decks or do any more work with me on my car or truck.
I think I’ve done a fairly decent job of convincing myself that he will be around for many more years. That’s the emotional side of me. The intellectual side of me tells me that he’s 83 and regardless of how he recovers from this every moment from here on out is a bonus that I must cherish.
It finally happened. After about ten years of a weak password on my Yahoo! email account that account was compromised. For those of you in my contact list who received an email with no subject and just a link to a website I apologize. I didn’t send it but my lack of use of a strong password is probably the reason you got it.
On another note, I’ve been silent here way too long. Facebook has grabbed most of my attention because way more of my friends use it. However, posts to Facebook are temporary at best while this is an archive of anything I write and I can be fairly confident that what I write here can be retrieve for years to come. I keep backups.
So since what I write here is suppose to be mirrored in my notes on Facebook I’ll go back to writing most things here. I’ll start looking for a utility that can even move short status updates to my Facebook status.
