CritterKeeper

If you think those are small, your scale has clearly been knocked askew by too many things on the mega-jumbo-supersized end.

I think it's only chocolate chip cookies that mlooney is arguing there is One True Recipe, and that is because there *are* no older recipes for them -- they were *invented* by the owner of the Toll House Inn.

Heck, they could probably get a thousand bucks a month, and the insurance companies would even pay it, happily, because it would reduce the incidence of so many other diseases that they'd end up saving money.

That sort of rapid forced weight loss is neither healthy nor effective. Sure, extreme conditions can make people lose weight, but as soon as you take away those extreme conditions, the body is very effective at getting itself back to what it thinks it should be. Exercising five hours a day might get you in great shape, but who actually has time to spend that much time, every day, day in and day out, for the rest of their lives? Likewise extreme calorie restriction can cause weight loss, but the body sends floods of neurotransmitters and hormones to the brain, increasing appetite to starving-to-death levels, slowing metabolism to hold on to every calorie it can, and it does not stop -- even a full year later. Imagine starving to death for over a year, with a feast right there in front of you and only your own willpower to stop you from filling your aching belly. All day, every day, without cease. No wonder most weight loss studies that carry on for more than a few months show very little long-term change. And all to correct an inborn error in their metabolism that is extremely genetically determined. We're talking about twin studies, adoption studies, etc showing that body condition is on par with height in how heritable it is. People studying obesity have tried to make naturally thin people fat, even temporarily, and have found that forcing a healthy-weight person to gain more than about twenty pounds or ten percent takes measures just as extreme as forcing an obese person to lose that much weight, and keeping that change is just as difficult, too. For "normal" people, twenty pounds makes a visible difference; for someone not so lucky in their genes, the difference between 260 and 280 isn't really all that great, so they can do just as well at losing weight as the "normal" person, and still be obese. Hypothyroidism can cause severe weight gain. We figured out what wasn't working and found a way to fix it, with replacement hormone therapy. We're starting to treat mental conditons like Depression as medical conditions, instead of just telling people to "cheer up" or "snap out of it," because people started researching and treating them as illnesses instead of moral failings. We now know of a whole bunch of other metabolic disruptions causing weight gain, but they are much more complicated, involving interactions between hormones and causing all sorts of changes in the brain. It will take a lot more research to figure out how to fix these medical problems. Yet research into curing obesity is chronically underfunded and ignored.

And that TPTB continue to treat it as a moral failing instead of a medical condition. If a drug had as poor a success rate as "Tell the patient they need to lose weight" then it would never make it past even the initial stages of getting approved. And yet that continues to be the best modern medicine has to offer.

Absolutely! Doesn't matter where you got the recipe from, if it involves mixing flour, sugar, baking soda and/or powder, and using a mixer (or a lot of hand stirring, I suppose), it counts as homemade in my book.

That, or I could have told it in the chat room. (Note the link up at the top of the page :-)

There's a similar saying in medicine, "If you hear hoofbeats, think horses before zebras." Often phrased as "not zebras" but the fact that horses are far more common does not mean that you'll never encounter a zebra. In fact, one of my favorite CE lecture titles in recent years was "Horses, Zebras, and Gerenuks." Another similar 'old saying' which seems to make sense but leads to wrong conclusions is, "Where there's smoke, there's fire." That makes the assumption that you can tell smoke from steam, dust plumes, evaporating dry ice, and the smoke machine someone set up to try to convince people their opponent's pants are on fire and dustract from their own glowing flames. ;-)

I've sometimes thought that being able to experience being in a modified body temporarily would be a great way to motivate people in physical therapy, dieting, strength training, etc. Imagine someone who has been heavy all their life getting to feel what it would be like to be thin. Not just how it would look, but how easy it would be to walk, bend, climb stairs, etc. I think that's something that would be a great mitivator! Or someone considering getting a new prosthetic could try out different versions, and see which would work best for them, rather than go to all the trouble and expense only to find there's some hidden flaw that makes their choice a poor one for their individual body. So far, 3-D modeling seems to be the closest we can get on the prosthesis one. I'd love to see someone use the sort of science-based computer modeling they use to age-progress missing children, to show people how they would actually look after a significant weight loss, but that's the closest I can see us coming to the Sarah sort of experience in the foreseeable future. Man, now I'm really hoping Sarah gets the ability to bring other people into her simulation eventually.

I'm rather fond of this mash-up of RHPS and MST3K. :-)

I did a murder mystery game years ago where everyone was assigned a character to play ( I think this was before the term LARP was in use, or at least common use), and my assigned character was a gypsy jewel thief. I decided she was a cross between Jenny Calendar on Buffy and Amanda on Highlander (which probably dates the game pretty well, come to think of it. My character was supposed to steal a set of jewels from a safe. I had the safe open when another character caught me red-handed....so I screamed, stepping back from the safe as I did so, and as soon as others came to see what had happened, I loudly declared that I had caught him stealing the jewels. He was startled and thus a bit flustered, and his hesitation in making his own claim only helped convince the others that I was the one telling the truth. :-) My sister told me about a LARP she was in where a friend told her that if he didn't like the character he was assigned, early on in the game he would be heard to say, "Oh, boy....." and he'd spend the rest of the game talking to an invisible hologram. I rather like that tactic, especially if you're in a group likely to have lots of other Quantum Leap fans.

We had a murder mystery dinner thing for our office Christmas party tonight, and while I didn't get the killer right (no one did), I apparently did the best job at summarizing almost all of the clues, because I was declared the grand prize winner! This entailed receiving a little gift bag with a mug, an Alfred Hitchcock DVD, and a gift card for a free attendance at a future murder mystery dinner. :-)

FYI, Kinsey's scale included "X" for "asexual."

I thinnk Tedd already told Susan and Nanase that he'd been planning on telling everyone about his spell at school on Monday, but I suppose he might have just said "on Monday." *checks* "I figured we'd all bring each other up to speed on Monday, and..." So, it's still possible that they have Monday off and were *all* going to get together somewhere on their day off. Given that half the gang goes to a different school, it would at least have to be an after school get-together, not just chatting at lunch, so I guess it doesn't matter too much, school day vs holiday.

So where does the term "Great Aunt" come in?

There were a couple of residents while I was a vet student who you had to talk to for at least a couple of minutes on any late-night/wee-hours phone call before they were actually awake enough to understand what you were calling about, make a sensible reply, and/or remember the call the next day. Indeed. One of the student organizations raised money by selling T-shirts with a "Top Ten Reasons I'm Not In Medical School" list. "My handwriting isn't bad enough" was somewhere in between "I don't know how to golf" and "Medical school is for wimps who want to learn one-eighth what a vet does in twice the time!"

We don't get it for free like a few other magazines, but I'm tempted to at least find out how much a subscription is. On the other hand, maybe that would give us too much of a "waiting room" feel, since that seems to be the main place a lot of people see Highlights, and Readers Digest and the like.... We have a little shelf of childrens' books of various target ages, as well as some nice stuffed animals. Until a couple of months ago, we'd had a plush Clifford dog for years and years, but someone finally seems to have walked off with it. :-( Cats either read through osmosis or more specifically through their butts, depending on which expert you consult.

Would there be any interest in starting up an online game of what I have heard described as "Werewolf," "Ultimate Werewolf," or "I Am Not A Werewolf"? Basically, it's a game about lying your butt off and/or trying to figure out who else is lying their butt off. In the most basic version, the players are divided into Villagers, Werewolves, and a Seer. The werewolves know who each other are, and once every night they get to pick one player to devour. During the day, they try very hard to act like a normal villager and not give away that they are a werewolf. The villagers spend the day talking, and trying to figure out who among them is a werewolf. If enough villagers think that someone is a werewolf, they can vote to lynch that person (maximum one lynching per day), at which point they find out whether they were right. The villagers win if they find and kill all the werewolves, and the werewolves win if they equal or outnumber the villagers. The Seer is on the side of the Villagers, and every night they get to check one person to find out if they are a werewolf. This naturally means that the werewolves would really like to know who the Seer is, and if they figure it out they will likely devour them. The Seer therefore has to try to steer the rest of the group's decisions without actually revealing that they are the Seer and know for a fact that they are about to, say, lynch an innocent villager, or that they really should vote to lynch a particular person. I've played this game a great deal in person and it can be a blast! The only problem I can foresee is that all of the discussion is really supposed to be within the group as a whole, so we'd have to all agree not to send PMs to anyone except the game moderator about the game, or to discuss the game in private in any other format. There are a bunch of other roles/characters that can be brought in if people enjoy the first game or two.... So, is there any interest in trying this? Or should we wait until the first EGS Convention to play in person? ;-) A word of warning, if I'm moderating this, there may occasionally be times I can't reply right away, so you'lll have to have a little patience.

Either that, or start keeping a dream journal, take out a PO box in Schenectady, and sell the dream ideas by mail-order....

I know I loved that magazine, but I can't actually recall what was in it. I do remember the insects in the cartoons along the bottom of the pages in Cricket magazine....

Do the highlights I added help? :-)

Fixed that for you. Vladia has been quite clear and consistent about her reasoning here. His first and only attempt at transforming almost killed him, and he hated the form he was stuck in. The beam he was hit with was not a normal CMD beam, and its effects weren't normal either (no facial tentacles). She does not know for certain that she can transform safely, and she likes this form a heck of a lot better than her old one, so she does not want to take the risk of attempting it, and possibly wind up either dying or ending up in a less-normal form. I suspect that Dan was planning on Vladia playing a role in some final climactic battle, possibly choosing to transform in order to save someone's life. Personally, I'd like to see what Vladia's reaction would be to an offer to transform her with the TFG. If it was an outside force changing her instead of her own (questionable) powers, and the change was to a perfectly normal form, would she find that more of an acceptable risk? Or would she still consider it to be risking too much for the limited potential gain? That last link in your post looks like a guest strip, but I still like it. She may claim she never considered herself a man anyway, but it seems right that it would take a little time for her to adjust, and for her family to adjust too. This scene shows her starting to enjoy her body, even though Hedge snickers at her and embarrasses her into making threats. My imagination can't help coming up with images like Hedge escorting Vladia down the aisle at her wedding. :-D

Yeah, I do too. It had just been a lot longer than usual, so I was surprised it was still there. :-)

I certainly didn't mean to do that! It may not be the rapid hair growth on its own, but I'm highly suspicious that Akiko is well aware that Nanase can do magic, so if she did realize it was magic, she probably just thought her big sister was especially cool when it happened. Little kids are good at telling when something is a secret, and Akiko is smart enough to get that Nanase doesn't want Mom to know about her magic. Only real question is whether Akiko has or will overhear Mom talking with someone else about Nanase's magic, or otherwise find out that Mom knows more than she lets on.

Akiko is canonically a Tangled fan, at her age she likely doesn't know exactly how far off the norm that spurt of hair growth was. Nanase using her spell to change style, length, and color without either going to a stylist or disappearing into the bathroom with a box of dye is more suspicious, especially occasions when she might make her hair change length the wrong way -- even an eight-year-old would notice her sister having pixie-cut black hair when she left for school and shoulder-length red-and-black hair when she got home. With all her experience changing clothes so her mom would think she was dressing conservatively at school, she's probably going to remember to keep the same hair color and style at home, but it would only take one or two slip-ups....