Archive for March, 2008
Combination of eating disorders and alcohol abuse not good for you?
Posted by kemibe in The Medical Tent on March 8, 2008
Medical professionals are tentatively suggesting that combining two well-known health hazards, anorexia (or bulimia) and binge drinking, does not produce a canceling-out-of-risks effect, but rather is even worse than either behavior alone.
As people like Elton John could attest, today’s college women are not the first hominids to come up with the idea of intentionally staving off hunger by dumping alcohol into the belly, and similarly are not pioneers when it comes to trying to lay down a buzz more quickly by toping on an empty stomach. But because someone — probably a blogger-American — has managed to coin the portmanteau “drunkorexia,” media outlets would have us believe that excessive drinking and eating disorders have not been intimately acquainted for a long time.
Bulimia nervosa is very often accompanied by substance abuse (straight anorexia not so much, for obvious reasons), and both are often seen in conjunction with other compulsive behaviors, including stealing. It makes intuitive sense that sufferers of anorexia, which can be viewed as a form of “overcontrol,” would be less driven to treat their behavioral symptoms with mood-altering chemicals than people with bulimia, in which a given activity is habitually out of control.
An Experiment of One (Water Version)
Posted by jim in The Running Ape on March 8, 2008
It has been said that running training and the resulting personal performance level is an experiment of one. While there are certain general training characteristics to which all humans undoubtedly respond, the speed and level of adaptation to a specific training stimulus vary from individual to individual. Further, there is little doubt that the individual’s response changes over the long haul. Next month I’ll be turning 50, and like most competitive runners, I look forward to moving into a new age group. (No more pesky and quick 40 and 41 year olds to worry about.) Unfortunately, my zeal, coupled with a stubborn streak and lack of self-perspective, has led me to injured status. I am the not-so-proud owner of a stress reaction to the navicular bone in my right ankle. This has been biting me since summer although I was under the impression that it was soft tissue damage (such as the posterior tibialis tendon). In February, after little to no progress, the sports doc ordered up an MRI and discovered the bone damage. Prescription? Six weeks of no weight-bearing sports (i.e. no running, XC skiing, etc.), and then ease back into it.
What to do?
A Brief History of Slime (6): Marion Jones starts prison term
Sprinter Marion Jones, sentenced in January to six months in prison for doing what practically everyone involved in the BALCO and Major League Baseball doping scandals continues to do (i.e., lie to investigators), turned herself in to a facility in Fort Worth, Texas on Friday to start her term. She should consider herself lucky; because she’s in the pokey, she’ll be insulated from the general citizenry of Fort Worth.
The AP article, though as desultory as most wire-service stories, contains a few curious elements. One is this:
Red-shouldered hawk executed by firing squad
Posted by kemibe in Floridiocy on March 7, 2008
A professional golfer named Tripp Isenhour killed a protected species of hawk in Orlando with a hit ball on roughly his tenth try. Isenhour was upset that the bird was being noisy during the filming of a television show.
Brian Baine, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission officer, wrote in a report that Isenhour first took aim at the bird when it was 300 yards away. After hitting balls at the bird and missing, he gave up, but only until the hawk was in a closer tree around 75 yards away when he allegedly said, “I’ll get him now,” and took aim. “About the sixth ball came very near the bird’s head and [Isenhour] was very excited that it was so close,” Baine wrote.
After a few shots Isenhour hit the hawk, and it fell to the ground bleeding from both nostrils.
Isenhour claims he was “mortified” and loves animals. He does own three cats that he got from an animal shelter, but apparently he’s taken lessons from them on how to treat birds.
There’s a reason some animals have to be named “protected” and not usually from each other. I’d like to see a judge hand down a particularly creative sentence to this asshole, like requiring him to clean up bird shit at Disney’s nearby Animal Kingdom every weekend, or worse, making him tour the park every day during peak hours.
Anyway, Florida continues to have greater concerns than one dingbat using a nine-iron as a musket and a fairway as a killing field. Last fall, the state toughened its rules regarding the “pay-and-bury” policy that has resulted in the “entombment” 0f 80,000 gopher tortoises since 1991, but the Florida Wildlife Commission remains a whore of the slowly foundering land development industry.
Red-shouldered hawk executed by firing squad
Posted by kemibe in Floridiocy on March 7, 2008
A professional golfer named Tripp Isenhour killed a protected species of hawk in Orlando with a hit ball on roughly his tenth try. Isenhour was upset that the bird was being noisy during the filming of a television show.
Brian Baine, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission officer, wrote in a report that Isenhour first took aim at the bird when it was 300 yards away. After hitting balls at the bird and missing, he gave up, but only until the hawk was in a closer tree around 75 yards away when he allegedly said, “I’ll get him now,” and took aim. “About the sixth ball came very near the bird’s head and [Isenhour] was very excited that it was so close,” Baine wrote.
After a few shots Isenhour hit the hawk, and it fell to the ground bleeding from both nostrils.
Isenhour claims he was “mortified” and loves animals. He does own three cats that he got from an animal shelter, but apparently he’s taken lessons from them on how to treat birds.
There’s a reason some animals have to be named “protected” and not usually from each other. I’d like to see a judge hand down a particularly creative sentence to this asshole, like requiring him to clean up bird shit at Disney’s nearby Animal Kingdom every weekend, or worse, making him tour the park every day during peak hours.
Anyway, Florida continues to have greater concerns than one dingbat using a nine-iron as a musket and a fairway as a killing field. Last fall, the state toughened its rules regarding the “pay-and-bury” policy that has resulted in the “entombment” 0f 80,000 gopher tortoises since 1991, but the Florida Wildlife Commission remains a whore of the slowly foundering land development industry.
My Friend Flugel: An Ode to an American Kestrel
Posted by in Habitats and Humanity, Nostalgic Reverie on March 6, 2008
A conversation with a fellow raptor fan and Kevin’s recent entry pertaining to the injured bald eagle congealed and triggered a few of my geriatric neurons, prompting the following nostalgic reverie about a former pet: an American kestrel.
Sarasota Marathon winner disqualified
Posted by kemibe in Floridiocy, The Running Ape on March 6, 2008
Since I’ve been writing about track athletes who cheat to gain an edge, it’s only fair to include mention of those who do so by non-pharmacological means. (Also, I happened to run the Sarasota Marathon myself; albeit this was “only” to keep a friend company, but it was the first time I completed a 26.2-mile race in over three years.)
Many, including those who don’t follow the sport, will recall the story of Rosie Ruiz, who in 1980 crossed the finish line of the Boston Marathon ahead of all other women and and two and a half minutes in before the “runner-up,” Jackie Gareau of Canada. Despite video monitoring and suspicion among officials and competitors in the immediate aftermath, officials did not disqualify Ruiz, who apparently jumped into the field with her number on at crowded Kenmore Square near the 25-mile mark, until a week after the race. Since then, Ruiz has run afoul of the law on multiple occasions, once for embezzlement and another time for drug trafficking. As the butt of jokes, she is probably more of a household name than most genuine world-class runners will ever be.
How banning comments fom other bloggers can backfire
Posted by kemibe in Sheer Procrastination on March 5, 2008
Every now and again Ed Brayton or I will take a token swipe at the titillating degenerate known as Gribbit, but the person who really has his brutal way with the sap is Meatbrain. The two most recent posts on Meatbrain’s blog, Thinking Meat, deal with Gribbit’s unusually lazy, dishonest, or incompetent treatment of a wire-service article (Gribbit complained that Ban Ki-Moon said nothing about Palestinian violence, while the article he linked to himself quotes Ki-Moon as saying, “I condemn Palestinian rocket attacks and call for the immediate cessation of such acts of terrorism”) and Gribbit’s misunderstanding or distortion of the facts concerning waterboarding.
Gribbit is never going to be level-headed or enlightened, and berating him is rather like rocking a wasps’ nest once a day just to ascertain that its inhabitants never get complacent and will be just as pissed off on the hundredth day you do this as they were on the first. Still, I occasionally leave comments at Gribbit’s blog just to see how long they survive, because he routinely bans whatever proxy IP address I use to surf to his site and deletes my comments within about 15 minutes.
At 6:52 p.m. EST today, I left the following words under Gribbit’s waterboarding post, which he titled “Dems Clambering to Tie McCain to Bush (?)”:
Hiaasen takes another book-length swing
Posted by kemibe in Hootworthy on March 4, 2008
| Carl Hiaasen has written another book. When I first learned that it was nonfiction I was selfishly disappointed, but this didn’t last. On May 6, Knopf wil release The Downhill Lie: A Hacker’s Return to a Ruinous Sport, a personal journal detailing Hiaasen’s misguided return to a game he always sucked at after three decades away.
Even for those with no use for golf, the book is likely to be worth the fifteen bucks or so just because few writers describe willful futility more entertainingly than Hiaasen, and no activity other than distance running involves more goofiness, flailing, and willful futility than golf. |
 |
A School Library Journal review includes this nugget: “What really comes through is how Hiaasen thoroughly and rationally studies an issue such as dimples on a golf ball, realizes that after a certain point the discussion is largely irrelevant, and then buys into the hype anyway. In this, he speaks volumes for all golfers.”
A Brief History of Slime (5): Gatlin poised for reinstatement?
Justin Gatlin, the 2004 Olympic 100-meter champion and 2005 double World Champion (100m and 200m) who has been under a doping suspension since May 2006 after a failed testosterone test, will receive support from the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) when he appeals his ban — originally set at eight years in August 2006 by a U.S. arbitration panel — to the Court of Arbitration in Sport, an international body.
With this announcement, Gatlin now has both the IAAF and, oddly, the U.S. Anti-Doping Association (USADA) advocating for his reinstatement. Specifically at issue is whether Gatlin’s 2006 positive may be considered a first violaton, which would require that Gatlin’s 2001 positive test for a banned stimulant to be retroactively ignored owing to Gatlin’s previously documented ADHD. The IAAF reinstated Gatlin in 2002 after he served about half of the standard two years on the sidelines for a first offense, and his career quickly blossomed.
An appeal in January reduced the original eight-year ban — which, in accordance with IAAF rules pertaining to second offenses, could well have been a lifetime ban instead — to four. If Gatlin’s new appeal is successful, he’ll be eligible to compete in the U.S. Olympic Team Track and Field Trials, which will be held in June in Eugene, Oregon.
The entire affair is something of a curiosity. It would be one thing if Gatlin were simply appealing a positive doping result — i.e., if he were hoping to overturn a nascent or impending suspension. But here is a man whose entire doping history has been interpreted and reinterpreted in a variety of jurisdictions and who, regardless of whether or not he took stimulants on purpose seven years ago, seems almost certain to have knowingly juiced with testosterone before being caught in 2006.
For better or for worse, though — and many in elite track circles believe that Gatlin, while technically as guilty as the next doper, is more likely than most to have been victimized by his various handlers — with both an adamant drug-testing body and the world’s sole authority on elite-level track both in Gatlin’s corner, betting against his reinstatement would seem like an act of folly.
Crass Exodus
Posted by kemibe in We're Doomed on March 1, 2008
People’s ability to adduce evidence to their claims is often inversely proportional to their willingness to engage or even tolerate arguments against those claims. Nowhere is this unfortunate vagary of human psychology better exemplified than in the realm of religion, where factually corrupt ideas and incoherent moral imperatives rely on groupthink rather than reason for their sustenance.
Christians as a group flaunt mean-spirited, hypocritical, and objectively poor ideas in an impressive variety of areas: education, biomedical research, medical ethics, and the earth and natural sciences are only a few of the realms in which adherence to mythological contrivances produces school boards with an aversion to science, abstinence-based “education” programs reminiscent of Saturday Night Live skits, and achingly incompetent perceptions of reality itself.
But nothing on God’s pink and triangular Earth tweaks them like human homosexuality does. The race is not even close. Creationist Web pages are merely loopy and doggedly dishonest, and some are unintentionally funny. But the “pro-family” swath of sites out there are only funny until one realizes how much energy has been invested in combating the existence, the very idea, of homosexuality.
-
You are currently browsing the archives for March, 2008
- Doc Bushwell is a biochemist and a medical writer who serves as a slavering minion of the dark lords of Big and Little Pharma; Jim is an engineering professor with a fondness for running shoes and drumsticks; and Kevin Beck is a self-exiled member of the clan who refuses to stay gone.
<-- Subscribe to our dreck
Sort by Tribe Member
kemibe
docbushwell
jim
What Hominids are Saying