(no subject)
Nov. 17th, 2019 09:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkat1. Well, after watching Rocketman -- I went online and discovered that the bio-pic much like all bio-pic's is far from an accurate representation of John's life. It's mainly a fantasy focusing on drug addiction, the reasons behind it, the music, and depicting Reid and the addiction as the villains. But leaving out important tid-bits like the fact that John had friends outside of Bernie (who are never shown and rather famous, such as Freddie Mercury and Rod Stewart), and worked for years with John Baldrey -- who helped him embrace his sexuality. Also the movie sort of skirts over John's bisexuality, making him out to be gay solely. (Although John did come out recently as solely gay.) It leaves out his half-brother by his mother as well. I'm guessing these people didn't want to be in the movie and John made sure they weren't depicted?
Much like the Mercury movie -- it places a lot of emphasis on drug addiction, sobriety, and lack of any friends -- which isn't quite true -- as the cause.
Discovering this -- makes me realize something, we are unreliable story-tellers about our own histories and pasts. We embellish the items we wish, and skip over the bits we don't want. Often making ourselves out to be more tragic or more saintly or more crazy than we are.
It's not necessarily intentional lying...just, well, you can't trust someone to tell a story or a history without embellishment of some kind. Which puts in question, if you think about it, all histories and stories told. It's my difficulty with biographies, history, memoirs and non-fiction in general. Fiction seems to be more honest, somehow. At least the story-teller is admitting they are making things up.
2. A Very Old Man For a Wolf
It’s the nature of the wolf to travel. By age two, wolves of both sexes usually leave their birth packs and strike out on their own, sometimes covering hundreds of miles as they search for mates and new territory. Whatever the reason, when wolves move, they do it with intent—and quickly. Humans don’t know how they decide which way to go, but the choice is as important as any they’ll ever make.
One day in 2005 or 2006, a young, black-furred wolf in Idaho decided to head west. He swam across the Snake River to Oregon, which at the time was beyond the gray wolf’s established range. By entering the state, he walked out of anonymity and into a form of local celebrity, becoming notorious over the next few years for his bold raids on livestock and his enduring competence as a hunter, father, and survivor.
In Oregon, that male met another long-distance traveler from Idaho, a silver-gray female. This wolf had been collared by Idaho state biologists, who knew her as B300. She was born to the Timberline Pack, north of Idaho City, and it’s possible to trace her ancestry back to the state’s formal wolf reintroduction in 1996. Her great-grandmother was B23, a black wolf who was born in northern British Columbia and who dined as a pup on moose and caribou in the boreal forest. B23 was captured and moved in January of 1996 to Dagger Falls, in Idaho’s Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness. She would give birth to almost 30 pups before she was killed by federal wildlife officials in 2001 for killing a calf.
In the summer of 2006, when B300 was collared, she was probably already feeling restless. In September, two members of her pack were shot by wildlife officials after they killed a sheep and a dog. By late fall, she’d made the choice to strike out on her own. She too went west and crossed the Snake into territory as yet unclaimed by wolves.
***
The black wolf and B300 mated for the first time in December of 2006 or 2007—nobody knows when exactly. They settled in the high timber of the Wallowa Mountains, a kingdom of pines and wildflowers and cow pies that curves like a palisade around the agricultural communities of Joseph and Enterprise. They made a den inside a huge felled ponderosa and cared for their first round of pups, born blind and helpless in early spring. They were now officially a pack, the first to exist in Oregon for nearly 60 years.
The black wolf and B300 had been preceded by a few other wolves in Oregon, but they were the first to establish roots and start breeding. A male showed up in 1999, and its existence so perplexed state officials that they captured it, put it in a crate, and sent it back to Idaho. Still, everybody knew deportation wouldn’t work in the long run. Wolves were inevitably going to return.
Eventually, the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW) hired a biologist to deal with this trickle of immigrants: Russ Morgan, a lifetime wildlife manager and backwoodsman based in La Grande. While the black wolf was busy slaying elk in the Wallowas to feed his new pups, Morgan was driving the back roads of eastern Oregon at night, literally howling into the dark, looking for wolves.
Morgan, now 54, is a tracker and a hunter, by trade and spiritual avocation. He grew up outside of Bend, going after lizards with a BB gun. His native ecosystem is the juniper and sage high desert of central Oregon, a beautiful place to learn the ways of nature. He would ramble all day in the bush and come home for dinner covered in juniper pitch.
For Morgan, hunting is not about killing and winning, but rather being part of what he calls “the goods and hardships of nature.” Hunting isn’t a sport for him. There’s a lot of care and focus and silence involved when he goes into the woods with a game tag. He typically hunts elk with a longbow and makes his own arrows.
Oregon is a vast territory for a solo wolf tracker, and the new pack produced two rounds of offspring before Morgan caught up with them. Each time, the pups remained in the den for a month or so, tiny and clumsy at first, then increasingly playful and bold. Their mother would stay close, nursing and minding them, even consuming their urine and feces to keep the den clean until they were big enough to go outside. Meanwhile, her mate kept her fed. Eventually, both parents would return to the hunt, bringing food back in their bellies, which they’d throw up as a steamy stew for the pups to eat—a technique biologists call “regurgitative provisioning.”
By three months, the pups were ready to learn the basics of hunting from their parents and older siblings. By nine months, the most adventurous were ready to leave. Others might stay with the family for up to four or five years, helping hunt and care for younger siblings before deciding to strike out on their own. In essence, a wolf pack is a family, often with aunts, uncles, grandparents, and multiple generations of pups worked into the mix.
In 2009, a field team of fish biologists doing a stream survey sent Morgan a cell phone recording of barking and howling. Morgan knew wolf sounds when he heard them, so he drove to the site and started tracking the pack’s prints and scat. Before long, he was able to trap the gray female and collar her with a VHF radio transmitter. Idaho’s B300 became Oregon’s OR2. Now Morgan could monitor the pack from the comfort of his truck, driving around Wallowa County with a portable receiver.
The 2 in OR2 means she was the second wolf collared in Oregon. A male designated OR1, who had a companion—probably a sibling—had been collared in eastern Baker County a few months earlier. When the duo began killing livestock—slaughtering at least 20 sheep in one night—and didn’t respond to deterrents like a collar-activated noise box, the ODFW decided they had to be destroyed.
At this point, decisions about hunting down a wolf were entirely the prerogative of the agency. So Morgan made the call, guided by an ODFW document called the Wolf Conservation and Management Plan, a bureaucratic blueprint that codified how this newly returned symbol of all things wild was to be handled in a landscape of cattle, timber, rock climbers, rivers thick with rafts, and hikers.
About a month after OR2 got her new name and collar, she and the black male, along with their pups, were eating an elk carcass that lay partially submerged in a minor stream called Grouse Creek, about ten miles from Hells Canyon—the especially deep river gorge that separates Oregon and Idaho. Wolves keep to the high ground, as a rule; Morgan calls them “ridge walkers.” But their long, drawn-out pursuits tend to follow gravity downhill, and a lot of prey end up in the bottom of a valley or draw, exhausted, wet, and doomed.
Morgan and a friend hiked down to the creek and saw what Morgan describes as “a whole wad of wolves blowing out.” The female and the pups fled, but the big male stopped 30 yards away from the carcass and turned to face them, howling, barking, and growling. He was black as a starless night and in the prime of his youth.
“He just lit up,” Morgan recalls. “He was so loud you couldn’t hear yourself think.” Morgan pulled out his digital camera and took a few pictures. The wolf ran off.
Man and wolf would meet many times. Sometimes Morgan would count his pups. Sometimes he would chase him with a rifle loaded with tranquilizers, other times with a rifle loaded with bullets. Over the next seven years, they would start turning gray together.
3. The Good Place is continuing to disappoint me this season -- although I do have hope for a good send off. The next episode appears to be philosophy and Chidi centric. Most of this season has lasped into Michael Schurr Office humor territory.
And it's not my sense of humor. Also, while I enjoy the father/daughter dynamic of Michael and Eleanor, there's been far too much focus on it this season and it's become repetitive.
That said, the last episode did have a few clever bits interspersed in there -- such as Multiplying Janets...and the range of Funerals. Also the fact that the only member of the team or only character that understood the non-binary arena of moral ethics...being out of commission. Which I thought was an interesting metaphor for the season as well -- Chidi has been sorely lacking and as a result the heart of the series, what made it work (for me at least) was lacking as well.
I liked the fact that of the characters pretending to be dead for a funeral or a corpse, only Chidi fits the part -- and he's insanely heavy due to his musculature.
And Eleanor could not stay still at all during her funeral -- while both Tahini and Jason were able to. Some nice character bits there amid the dumb jokes about 1990s pop culture. (Jokes about Friends and Ally McBeal aren't funny any more Schurr and not everyone cared about them. They were both very mainstream, and the Good Place is really appealing most to the non-mainstream viewer.)
4. The new biometric clock system at work is stressing me out. It's stressing and irritating everyone.
5. Why We Fell for Clean Eating?
As an aside -- I've struggled with diets my entire life due to severe IBS issues and an auto-immune disease - ceiliac. There's no cure.
And have had to give up all grains, but I'm also now under a Doctor's Care, so being careful on it. I did actually feel great when I was more restrictive, but it's almost impossible to maintain -- and unlike the woman in the article? I continued to eat meat, fish, and poultry. Unless you can digest beans, soy, and various glutens, don't become a vegan or vegetarian. I can't digest glutens, beans, or much soy, and I have to stay away from rice and corn, and diary (so no cheese or milk). Which means if I don't get fish, poultry or meat -- I don't have protein.
And when I went off all grains, I had issues. I've allowed myself clean oatmeal.
I do not recommend the gluten free diet unless you are gluten resistent, gluten intolerant or ceiliac. I also don't recommend vegan or vegetarianism unless you can digest lentils, beans, chickpeas, and various sources of plant protein. Not everyone's body is the same.
In the spring of 2014, Jordan Younger noticed that her hair was falling out in clumps. “Not cool” was her reaction. At the time, Younger, 23, believed herself to be eating the healthiest of all possible diets. She was a “gluten-free, sugar-free, oil-free, grain-free, legume-free, plant-based raw vegan”. As The Blonde Vegan, Younger was a “wellness” blogger in New York City, one of thousands on Instagram (where she had 70,000 followers) rallying under the hashtag #eatclean. Although she had no qualifications as a nutritionist, Younger had sold more than 40,000 copies of her own $25, five-day “cleanse” programme – a formula for an all-raw, plant-based diet majoring on green juice.
But the “clean” diet that Younger was selling as the route to health was making its creator sick. Far from being super-healthy, she was suffering from a serious eating disorder: orthorexia, an obsession with consuming only foods that are pure and perfect. Younger’s raw vegan diet had caused her periods to stop and given her skin an orange tinge from all the sweet potato and carrots she consumed (the only carbohydrates she permitted herself). Eventually, she sought psychological help, and began to slowly widen the repertoire of foods she would allow herself to eat, starting with fish. She recognised that the problem was not her veganism, per se, but the particularly rigid and restrictive diet regime she had imposed on herself.
As Younger slowly recovered from her eating disorder, she faced a new dilemma. “What would people think”, she agonised, “if they knew the Blonde Vegan was eating fish?” She levelled with her followers in a blogpost entitled Why I’m Transitioning Away from Veganism. Within hours of announcing her new diet, Younger was receiving irate messages from vegans demanding money back from the cleanse programmes and T-shirts they had bought from her site (featuring slogans such as “OH KALE YES”).
She lost followers “by the thousands” and received a daily raft of angry messages, including death threats. Some responded to her confession that she was suffering from an eating disorder by accusing her of being a “fat piece of lard” who didn’t have the discipline to be truly “clean”.
For as long as people have eaten food, there have been diets and quack cures. But previously, these existed, like conspiracy theories, on the fringes of food culture. “Clean eating” was different, because it established itself as a challenge to mainstream ways of eating, and its wild popularity over the past five years has enabled it to move far beyond the fringes. Powered by social media, it has been more absolutist in its claims and more popular in its reach than any previous school of modern nutrition advice.
At its simplest, clean eating is about ingesting nothing but “whole” or “unprocessed” foods (whatever is meant by these deeply ambiguous terms). Some versions of clean eating have been vegan, while others espouse various meats (preferably wild) and something mysteriously called “bone broth” (stock, to you and me). At first, clean eating sounded modest and even homespun: rather than counting calories, you would eat as many nutritious home-cooked substances as possible.
But it quickly became clear that “clean eating” was more than a diet; it was a belief system, which propagated the idea that the way most people eat is not simply fattening, but impure. Seemingly out of nowhere, a whole universe of coconut oil, dubious promises and spiralised courgettes has emerged. Back in the distant mists of 2009, James Duigan, owner of The Bodyism gym in London and sometime personal trainer to the model Elle MacPherson, published his first Clean and Lean book. As an early adopter of #eatclean, Duigan notes that he “battled” with his publisher “to include ingredients like kale and quinoa, because no one had ever heard of them”. Now quinoa is in every supermarket and kale has become as normal as lettuce. “I long for the days when clean eating meant not getting too much down your front,” the novelist Susie Boyt joked recently.
Almost as soon as it became ubiquitous, clean eating sparked a backlash. By 2015, Nigella Lawson was speaking for many when she expressed “disgust” at clean eating as a judgmental form of body fascism. “Food is not dirty”, Lawson wrote. Clean eating has been attacked by critics such as the baker and cookbook author Ruby Tandoh (who wrote a much-shared article on the subject in Vice magazine in May 2016) for being an incitement to eating disorders.
Others have pointed out that, as a method of healthy eating, it’s founded on bad science. In June 2017, the American Heart Association suggested that the coconut oil beloved as a panacea by clean eaters actually had “no known offsetting favourable effects”, and that consuming it could result in higher LDL cholesterol. A few weeks later, Anthony Warner – a food consultant with a background in science who blogs as The Angry Chef – published a book-length assault on the science of clean eating, calling it a world of “quinoa bowls” and “nutribollocks” fuelled by the modern information age.
When Dr Giles Yeo, a geneticist at the University of Cambridge, presented an episode of the BBC’s Horizon in 2017 that examined the scientific evidence for different schools of clean eating, he found everything from innocuous recipes to serious malpractice.
He reported on the “alkaline diet” of Dr Robert O Young, who peddled the idea that disease is caused by eating “acidic” foods. After being diagnosed with terminal cancer in her 20s, Naima Houder-Mohammed, an officer in the British army, paid Young more than $77,000 for treatment (including meals of avocado, which Young calls “God’s butter”) at his “pH miracle” ranch in the US in 2012. She died later that year. Separately, Young was jailed in June this year after being convicted of charges including practising medicine without a licence. While he may represent an extreme case, it is clear that many wellness gurus, as Yeo’s programme concluded, tell a “troubling narrative” founded on falsehoods.
As the negative press for clean eating has intensified over the past year, many of the early goddesses of #eatclean have tried to rebrand – declaring they no longer use the word “clean” to describe the recipes that have sold them millions of books. Ella Mills – AKA Deliciously Ella, the food writer and entrepreneur whose coconut-and-oat energy balls sell for £1.79 apiece in British supermarkets – said on Yeo’s Horizon programme that she felt that the word “clean” as applied to eating originally meant nothing but natural, real, unprocessed food. “Now, it means diet, it means fad,” she complained.
But however much the concept of clean eating has been logically refuted and publicly reviled, the thing itself shows few signs of dying. Step into the cookbook section of any book shop and you will see how many recipe writers continue to promise us inner purity and outer beauty. Even if you have never knowingly tried to “eat clean”, it’s impossible to avoid the trend altogether, because it changed the foods available to all of us, and the way they are spoken of.
Avocados now outsell oranges in the UK. Susi Richards, head of product development at Sainsbury’s supermarkets, told me in early 2017 that she had been taken aback by the pace at which demand for products fitting with the clean eating lifestyle have grown in the UK. Families who would once have eaten potato waffles are now experimenting with lower carb butternut “squaffles” (slices of butternut squash cut to resemble a waffle). Nutribullets – a brand of compact blenders designed for making supposedly radiance-bestowing juices and smoothies – are now mentioned in some circles as casually as wooden spoons.
Why has clean eating proved so difficult to kill off? Hadley Freeman, in The Guardian, identified clean eating as part of a post-truth culture, whose adherents are impervious, or even hostile, to facts and experts. But to understand how clean eating took hold with such tenacity, it’s necessary first to consider just what a terrifying thing food has become for millions of people in the modern world. The interesting question is not whether clean eating is nonsense, but why so many intelligent people decided to put their faith in it.
Again, what the article is ignoring is that a lot of people chose to do this because they were ill and suffering. It wasn't something that they just did for trendy reasons. And it has helped some people. We have a tendency to think everyone should have the same diet we do, this is not true. It's why I don't like nutritionists -- they think they can design a diet for you in an hour and they don't listen. The three that I've seen were horrible for the same reason -- they all wanted to put me on the same diet they were on and all their patients were on.
Much like the Mercury movie -- it places a lot of emphasis on drug addiction, sobriety, and lack of any friends -- which isn't quite true -- as the cause.
Discovering this -- makes me realize something, we are unreliable story-tellers about our own histories and pasts. We embellish the items we wish, and skip over the bits we don't want. Often making ourselves out to be more tragic or more saintly or more crazy than we are.
It's not necessarily intentional lying...just, well, you can't trust someone to tell a story or a history without embellishment of some kind. Which puts in question, if you think about it, all histories and stories told. It's my difficulty with biographies, history, memoirs and non-fiction in general. Fiction seems to be more honest, somehow. At least the story-teller is admitting they are making things up.
2. A Very Old Man For a Wolf
It’s the nature of the wolf to travel. By age two, wolves of both sexes usually leave their birth packs and strike out on their own, sometimes covering hundreds of miles as they search for mates and new territory. Whatever the reason, when wolves move, they do it with intent—and quickly. Humans don’t know how they decide which way to go, but the choice is as important as any they’ll ever make.
One day in 2005 or 2006, a young, black-furred wolf in Idaho decided to head west. He swam across the Snake River to Oregon, which at the time was beyond the gray wolf’s established range. By entering the state, he walked out of anonymity and into a form of local celebrity, becoming notorious over the next few years for his bold raids on livestock and his enduring competence as a hunter, father, and survivor.
In Oregon, that male met another long-distance traveler from Idaho, a silver-gray female. This wolf had been collared by Idaho state biologists, who knew her as B300. She was born to the Timberline Pack, north of Idaho City, and it’s possible to trace her ancestry back to the state’s formal wolf reintroduction in 1996. Her great-grandmother was B23, a black wolf who was born in northern British Columbia and who dined as a pup on moose and caribou in the boreal forest. B23 was captured and moved in January of 1996 to Dagger Falls, in Idaho’s Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness. She would give birth to almost 30 pups before she was killed by federal wildlife officials in 2001 for killing a calf.
In the summer of 2006, when B300 was collared, she was probably already feeling restless. In September, two members of her pack were shot by wildlife officials after they killed a sheep and a dog. By late fall, she’d made the choice to strike out on her own. She too went west and crossed the Snake into territory as yet unclaimed by wolves.
***
The black wolf and B300 mated for the first time in December of 2006 or 2007—nobody knows when exactly. They settled in the high timber of the Wallowa Mountains, a kingdom of pines and wildflowers and cow pies that curves like a palisade around the agricultural communities of Joseph and Enterprise. They made a den inside a huge felled ponderosa and cared for their first round of pups, born blind and helpless in early spring. They were now officially a pack, the first to exist in Oregon for nearly 60 years.
The black wolf and B300 had been preceded by a few other wolves in Oregon, but they were the first to establish roots and start breeding. A male showed up in 1999, and its existence so perplexed state officials that they captured it, put it in a crate, and sent it back to Idaho. Still, everybody knew deportation wouldn’t work in the long run. Wolves were inevitably going to return.
Eventually, the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW) hired a biologist to deal with this trickle of immigrants: Russ Morgan, a lifetime wildlife manager and backwoodsman based in La Grande. While the black wolf was busy slaying elk in the Wallowas to feed his new pups, Morgan was driving the back roads of eastern Oregon at night, literally howling into the dark, looking for wolves.
Morgan, now 54, is a tracker and a hunter, by trade and spiritual avocation. He grew up outside of Bend, going after lizards with a BB gun. His native ecosystem is the juniper and sage high desert of central Oregon, a beautiful place to learn the ways of nature. He would ramble all day in the bush and come home for dinner covered in juniper pitch.
For Morgan, hunting is not about killing and winning, but rather being part of what he calls “the goods and hardships of nature.” Hunting isn’t a sport for him. There’s a lot of care and focus and silence involved when he goes into the woods with a game tag. He typically hunts elk with a longbow and makes his own arrows.
Oregon is a vast territory for a solo wolf tracker, and the new pack produced two rounds of offspring before Morgan caught up with them. Each time, the pups remained in the den for a month or so, tiny and clumsy at first, then increasingly playful and bold. Their mother would stay close, nursing and minding them, even consuming their urine and feces to keep the den clean until they were big enough to go outside. Meanwhile, her mate kept her fed. Eventually, both parents would return to the hunt, bringing food back in their bellies, which they’d throw up as a steamy stew for the pups to eat—a technique biologists call “regurgitative provisioning.”
By three months, the pups were ready to learn the basics of hunting from their parents and older siblings. By nine months, the most adventurous were ready to leave. Others might stay with the family for up to four or five years, helping hunt and care for younger siblings before deciding to strike out on their own. In essence, a wolf pack is a family, often with aunts, uncles, grandparents, and multiple generations of pups worked into the mix.
In 2009, a field team of fish biologists doing a stream survey sent Morgan a cell phone recording of barking and howling. Morgan knew wolf sounds when he heard them, so he drove to the site and started tracking the pack’s prints and scat. Before long, he was able to trap the gray female and collar her with a VHF radio transmitter. Idaho’s B300 became Oregon’s OR2. Now Morgan could monitor the pack from the comfort of his truck, driving around Wallowa County with a portable receiver.
The 2 in OR2 means she was the second wolf collared in Oregon. A male designated OR1, who had a companion—probably a sibling—had been collared in eastern Baker County a few months earlier. When the duo began killing livestock—slaughtering at least 20 sheep in one night—and didn’t respond to deterrents like a collar-activated noise box, the ODFW decided they had to be destroyed.
At this point, decisions about hunting down a wolf were entirely the prerogative of the agency. So Morgan made the call, guided by an ODFW document called the Wolf Conservation and Management Plan, a bureaucratic blueprint that codified how this newly returned symbol of all things wild was to be handled in a landscape of cattle, timber, rock climbers, rivers thick with rafts, and hikers.
About a month after OR2 got her new name and collar, she and the black male, along with their pups, were eating an elk carcass that lay partially submerged in a minor stream called Grouse Creek, about ten miles from Hells Canyon—the especially deep river gorge that separates Oregon and Idaho. Wolves keep to the high ground, as a rule; Morgan calls them “ridge walkers.” But their long, drawn-out pursuits tend to follow gravity downhill, and a lot of prey end up in the bottom of a valley or draw, exhausted, wet, and doomed.
Morgan and a friend hiked down to the creek and saw what Morgan describes as “a whole wad of wolves blowing out.” The female and the pups fled, but the big male stopped 30 yards away from the carcass and turned to face them, howling, barking, and growling. He was black as a starless night and in the prime of his youth.
“He just lit up,” Morgan recalls. “He was so loud you couldn’t hear yourself think.” Morgan pulled out his digital camera and took a few pictures. The wolf ran off.
Man and wolf would meet many times. Sometimes Morgan would count his pups. Sometimes he would chase him with a rifle loaded with tranquilizers, other times with a rifle loaded with bullets. Over the next seven years, they would start turning gray together.
3. The Good Place is continuing to disappoint me this season -- although I do have hope for a good send off. The next episode appears to be philosophy and Chidi centric. Most of this season has lasped into Michael Schurr Office humor territory.
And it's not my sense of humor. Also, while I enjoy the father/daughter dynamic of Michael and Eleanor, there's been far too much focus on it this season and it's become repetitive.
That said, the last episode did have a few clever bits interspersed in there -- such as Multiplying Janets...and the range of Funerals. Also the fact that the only member of the team or only character that understood the non-binary arena of moral ethics...being out of commission. Which I thought was an interesting metaphor for the season as well -- Chidi has been sorely lacking and as a result the heart of the series, what made it work (for me at least) was lacking as well.
I liked the fact that of the characters pretending to be dead for a funeral or a corpse, only Chidi fits the part -- and he's insanely heavy due to his musculature.
And Eleanor could not stay still at all during her funeral -- while both Tahini and Jason were able to. Some nice character bits there amid the dumb jokes about 1990s pop culture. (Jokes about Friends and Ally McBeal aren't funny any more Schurr and not everyone cared about them. They were both very mainstream, and the Good Place is really appealing most to the non-mainstream viewer.)
4. The new biometric clock system at work is stressing me out. It's stressing and irritating everyone.
5. Why We Fell for Clean Eating?
As an aside -- I've struggled with diets my entire life due to severe IBS issues and an auto-immune disease - ceiliac. There's no cure.
And have had to give up all grains, but I'm also now under a Doctor's Care, so being careful on it. I did actually feel great when I was more restrictive, but it's almost impossible to maintain -- and unlike the woman in the article? I continued to eat meat, fish, and poultry. Unless you can digest beans, soy, and various glutens, don't become a vegan or vegetarian. I can't digest glutens, beans, or much soy, and I have to stay away from rice and corn, and diary (so no cheese or milk). Which means if I don't get fish, poultry or meat -- I don't have protein.
And when I went off all grains, I had issues. I've allowed myself clean oatmeal.
I do not recommend the gluten free diet unless you are gluten resistent, gluten intolerant or ceiliac. I also don't recommend vegan or vegetarianism unless you can digest lentils, beans, chickpeas, and various sources of plant protein. Not everyone's body is the same.
In the spring of 2014, Jordan Younger noticed that her hair was falling out in clumps. “Not cool” was her reaction. At the time, Younger, 23, believed herself to be eating the healthiest of all possible diets. She was a “gluten-free, sugar-free, oil-free, grain-free, legume-free, plant-based raw vegan”. As The Blonde Vegan, Younger was a “wellness” blogger in New York City, one of thousands on Instagram (where she had 70,000 followers) rallying under the hashtag #eatclean. Although she had no qualifications as a nutritionist, Younger had sold more than 40,000 copies of her own $25, five-day “cleanse” programme – a formula for an all-raw, plant-based diet majoring on green juice.
But the “clean” diet that Younger was selling as the route to health was making its creator sick. Far from being super-healthy, she was suffering from a serious eating disorder: orthorexia, an obsession with consuming only foods that are pure and perfect. Younger’s raw vegan diet had caused her periods to stop and given her skin an orange tinge from all the sweet potato and carrots she consumed (the only carbohydrates she permitted herself). Eventually, she sought psychological help, and began to slowly widen the repertoire of foods she would allow herself to eat, starting with fish. She recognised that the problem was not her veganism, per se, but the particularly rigid and restrictive diet regime she had imposed on herself.
As Younger slowly recovered from her eating disorder, she faced a new dilemma. “What would people think”, she agonised, “if they knew the Blonde Vegan was eating fish?” She levelled with her followers in a blogpost entitled Why I’m Transitioning Away from Veganism. Within hours of announcing her new diet, Younger was receiving irate messages from vegans demanding money back from the cleanse programmes and T-shirts they had bought from her site (featuring slogans such as “OH KALE YES”).
She lost followers “by the thousands” and received a daily raft of angry messages, including death threats. Some responded to her confession that she was suffering from an eating disorder by accusing her of being a “fat piece of lard” who didn’t have the discipline to be truly “clean”.
For as long as people have eaten food, there have been diets and quack cures. But previously, these existed, like conspiracy theories, on the fringes of food culture. “Clean eating” was different, because it established itself as a challenge to mainstream ways of eating, and its wild popularity over the past five years has enabled it to move far beyond the fringes. Powered by social media, it has been more absolutist in its claims and more popular in its reach than any previous school of modern nutrition advice.
At its simplest, clean eating is about ingesting nothing but “whole” or “unprocessed” foods (whatever is meant by these deeply ambiguous terms). Some versions of clean eating have been vegan, while others espouse various meats (preferably wild) and something mysteriously called “bone broth” (stock, to you and me). At first, clean eating sounded modest and even homespun: rather than counting calories, you would eat as many nutritious home-cooked substances as possible.
But it quickly became clear that “clean eating” was more than a diet; it was a belief system, which propagated the idea that the way most people eat is not simply fattening, but impure. Seemingly out of nowhere, a whole universe of coconut oil, dubious promises and spiralised courgettes has emerged. Back in the distant mists of 2009, James Duigan, owner of The Bodyism gym in London and sometime personal trainer to the model Elle MacPherson, published his first Clean and Lean book. As an early adopter of #eatclean, Duigan notes that he “battled” with his publisher “to include ingredients like kale and quinoa, because no one had ever heard of them”. Now quinoa is in every supermarket and kale has become as normal as lettuce. “I long for the days when clean eating meant not getting too much down your front,” the novelist Susie Boyt joked recently.
Almost as soon as it became ubiquitous, clean eating sparked a backlash. By 2015, Nigella Lawson was speaking for many when she expressed “disgust” at clean eating as a judgmental form of body fascism. “Food is not dirty”, Lawson wrote. Clean eating has been attacked by critics such as the baker and cookbook author Ruby Tandoh (who wrote a much-shared article on the subject in Vice magazine in May 2016) for being an incitement to eating disorders.
Others have pointed out that, as a method of healthy eating, it’s founded on bad science. In June 2017, the American Heart Association suggested that the coconut oil beloved as a panacea by clean eaters actually had “no known offsetting favourable effects”, and that consuming it could result in higher LDL cholesterol. A few weeks later, Anthony Warner – a food consultant with a background in science who blogs as The Angry Chef – published a book-length assault on the science of clean eating, calling it a world of “quinoa bowls” and “nutribollocks” fuelled by the modern information age.
When Dr Giles Yeo, a geneticist at the University of Cambridge, presented an episode of the BBC’s Horizon in 2017 that examined the scientific evidence for different schools of clean eating, he found everything from innocuous recipes to serious malpractice.
He reported on the “alkaline diet” of Dr Robert O Young, who peddled the idea that disease is caused by eating “acidic” foods. After being diagnosed with terminal cancer in her 20s, Naima Houder-Mohammed, an officer in the British army, paid Young more than $77,000 for treatment (including meals of avocado, which Young calls “God’s butter”) at his “pH miracle” ranch in the US in 2012. She died later that year. Separately, Young was jailed in June this year after being convicted of charges including practising medicine without a licence. While he may represent an extreme case, it is clear that many wellness gurus, as Yeo’s programme concluded, tell a “troubling narrative” founded on falsehoods.
As the negative press for clean eating has intensified over the past year, many of the early goddesses of #eatclean have tried to rebrand – declaring they no longer use the word “clean” to describe the recipes that have sold them millions of books. Ella Mills – AKA Deliciously Ella, the food writer and entrepreneur whose coconut-and-oat energy balls sell for £1.79 apiece in British supermarkets – said on Yeo’s Horizon programme that she felt that the word “clean” as applied to eating originally meant nothing but natural, real, unprocessed food. “Now, it means diet, it means fad,” she complained.
But however much the concept of clean eating has been logically refuted and publicly reviled, the thing itself shows few signs of dying. Step into the cookbook section of any book shop and you will see how many recipe writers continue to promise us inner purity and outer beauty. Even if you have never knowingly tried to “eat clean”, it’s impossible to avoid the trend altogether, because it changed the foods available to all of us, and the way they are spoken of.
Avocados now outsell oranges in the UK. Susi Richards, head of product development at Sainsbury’s supermarkets, told me in early 2017 that she had been taken aback by the pace at which demand for products fitting with the clean eating lifestyle have grown in the UK. Families who would once have eaten potato waffles are now experimenting with lower carb butternut “squaffles” (slices of butternut squash cut to resemble a waffle). Nutribullets – a brand of compact blenders designed for making supposedly radiance-bestowing juices and smoothies – are now mentioned in some circles as casually as wooden spoons.
Why has clean eating proved so difficult to kill off? Hadley Freeman, in The Guardian, identified clean eating as part of a post-truth culture, whose adherents are impervious, or even hostile, to facts and experts. But to understand how clean eating took hold with such tenacity, it’s necessary first to consider just what a terrifying thing food has become for millions of people in the modern world. The interesting question is not whether clean eating is nonsense, but why so many intelligent people decided to put their faith in it.
Again, what the article is ignoring is that a lot of people chose to do this because they were ill and suffering. It wasn't something that they just did for trendy reasons. And it has helped some people. We have a tendency to think everyone should have the same diet we do, this is not true. It's why I don't like nutritionists -- they think they can design a diet for you in an hour and they don't listen. The three that I've seen were horrible for the same reason -- they all wanted to put me on the same diet they were on and all their patients were on.
no subject
Date: 2019-11-18 03:56 am (UTC)The other thing I notice is most of the women have osteoporosis, and they say, "It's just a fact of aging."
No, it's not. I had below normal bone density at 30. At 66 I have normal bone density. It's a combination of diet and exercise, and vegan diets tend to not provide enough calcium.
no subject
Date: 2019-11-18 04:00 am (UTC)Also, it's hard to get magnesium through a vegetarian diet. It tends to be in meat proteins. Also it helps with the absorption of calcium. Magnesium is very important.
I can't eat a lot of veggies due to IBS. I have to be careful. The plant-based diet is great in theory but not necessarily in practice.
no subject
Date: 2019-11-18 04:03 am (UTC)But you have to be careful with magnesium. People who have issues with depression often can't take chelated magnesium because it makes their depression worse.
The bottom line is there is no one answer for everyone. It's got to be very, very individual.
no subject
Date: 2019-11-18 01:32 pm (UTC)Well, there's more than one type of magnesium for starters. I take Magnesium Citrate which was proscribed by both the gastintestinologist and primary care doctors for my constipation issues, and sciatic going down my leg. It works. The problem is we all have different issues. I've learned NEVER to take medical advice from anyone who isn't a licensed physician. Learned it the hard way. ;-)
no subject
Date: 2019-11-18 02:07 pm (UTC)I liked this ep more than you did. I thought the funerals had the right mix of sweetness and melancholy. And no episode is a loser if it has Marc Evan Jackson giving us undiluted bitchiness as Shawn.
That said... the pop culture references aren't working. They're really only supposed to show how shallow and trendy Tahani is (or was), and now they're infecting the rest of the characters. The Good Place, at its best, has a timeless quality that's a lesson in philosophy for anyone at any time. Talking about Ally McBeal and Friends gives it an era-specificity that dilutes the timeless quality. The Honeymooners is timeless because Gleason and his writers didn't have Ralph Kramden talk about Jack Benny or the Ed Sullivan Show or Bobby Vinton to get laughs. As a student of the sitcom, you'd think Michael Schur would remember that.
Next week: Chidi Anagonye--"the most indecisive human who ever lived"-- has 45 minutes to convince a near-omnipotent celestial arbiter not to destroy the Earth and perfect a new system for judging humanity in the afterlife.
But hey--no pressure there, Chidi.
no subject
Date: 2019-11-18 05:47 pm (UTC)Unless it's the series finale -- then he has 90 minutes. ;-)
I think enjoyment of the series has a lot to do with what you were watching for? Those of us who were into it for well Chidi and the philosophy, and to a lesser degree the Michael/Eleanor father/daughter relationship -- aren't happy with this season at all. Those who love Michael Schurr's comedies, and the quirky characters of Janet, Tahini, Jason (my niece adores Jason, sighs) -- are happy with it.
What made this series stand-out was the moral philosophy bits, but I honestly think the writer's knowledge of it ran it's course by the end of S3, and he's sort of run out material on this point -- and/or saving it for the last episodes of the series. Because he's fallen back on trite 2000's comedy schitck (pop culture references, meta-narrative, and work place commentary). The Good Place is part work-place satire (which does NOT work for me at all. Work place satires tend to annoy me for some reason or other, but that's the main ingredient of Schurr's comedy) and part philosophy/moral ethics witty comedy (which I adore). This season and last season slide a bit too far towards annoying work place comedy..
no subject
Date: 2019-11-18 05:53 pm (UTC)For instance the whole point system bit? That's a satirical dig at work place point systems. I know because my work place has a point system scenario in place for attendance, sick leave....and a lot of work places now do brownie points or the point system for salaries. The whole bit with the Good Place Committee -- totally a dig at work place issues, specifically the "idea" or "marketing guys". And the whole Shawn bits in Hell? Work place satire. If you like work place satire and those types of organizational satire jokes -- it will work for you. I just find it obvious and annoying after a while -- it's why I don't like Michael Shcurr's comedies. But a lot of people love this. I find it silly. I want the moral ethical philosophy. The other stuff is just boring.
no subject
Date: 2019-11-18 06:27 pm (UTC)One of the reasons I like The Good Place is the organizational satire. In fact, I think it's essential in making the philosophical aspects go down easier. The universe's Kafkaesque bureaucracy in The Good Place represents the quotidian aspect of everyday reality on Earth that needs to be acknowledged and transcended in order to advance spiritually. Is it derivative of "The Office"? Well, yeah--they acknowledged it by casting Stephen Merchant as the chief celestial accountant. But for me, the workplace satire works hand-in-hand with the philosophy, not against it.