United States #1 Status in Danger

Unless Americans start eating more the United States is in danger of losing its status of being the Fattest Nation on the planet. Mexico is rapidly gaining on us and is currently the #2 Fattest Nation. At its current rate of growth Mexico is on track to surpass the U.S. as the World's Fattest Nation within 10 years, according to Mexican Health Officials.

Less than 29 percent of Mexican women are not overweight. Approximately 34 percent of Mexican men are not overweight. In other words more than 71 percent of Mexican women and 66 percent of Mexican men are Fat.

Mexico's weight gain has been quite rapid. As recently as 1989 less than 10 percent of Mexican adults were Fat. Since 1989 Mexico has seen a big increase in the number of American fast food joints like McDonald's and Kentucky Fried Chicken, along with modern grocery stores stocked with modern American food.

Speaking of Kentucky Fried Chicken, relating to the obesity epidemic, KFC announced yesterday that their American restaurants would soon be sporting new neon signs saying "Kentucky Grilled Chicken." I don't know if the KGC will have that special taste that KFC has. It will be lower in fat, salt and calories. KFC/KGC will also be adding some healthy side dishes to go along with the mashed spuds and gravy and macaroni and cheese.

I don't know if this Kentucky Grilled Chicken idea appeals to me. I mean, if I want healthy chicken it is real easy to just roast a chicken myself. Every few years I'm in the mood for Kentucky Fried Chicken, original recipe, and that's what I get. Then after a few bites I remember why I only have it every few years.

Here in the South we have KFC Buffets. You can really overload on Kentucky Fried Chicken at a KFC Buffet. Along with way too many biscuits. There are good reasons why Texas is the Fattest State in the Fattest Country in the world.

Texas Obesity Kills

Being obese can cause all sorts of risks to ones health. Let alone what it does to ones appearance. As everyone in the world knows everything is bigger in Texas. Including the people.

In Texas obesity can be deadly in disturbing ways. Like this week in La Joya, Texas, that is in Hidalgo County, near the Mexican border in the fattest part of Texas, an obese babysitter fell on top of a 2 year old boy and crushed his skull, killing him. A local justice of the peace was quoted as saying "It didn't look like there was any foul play from what I saw."

Men's Fitness magazine does an annual list of the United State's Fattest and Fittest Cities. The list varies wildly from year to year which would seem to render it sort of silly. Like in 2005 Seattle was the Fittest City while Houston was the Fattest. In 2005 Arlington, Texas was the 22nd Fittest City, but somehow, within 3 years, Arlington became the 2nd Fattest City, with Fort Worth being the 4th Fattest. San Antonio, this year, is the 3rd Fattest, El Paso 5th Fattest, Houston has really improved from its #1 Fattest position in 2005 to being only the 10th Fattest in 2008. I guess that Fitness Campaign in Houston has really paid off.

So, Texas has 5 cities in the Top Ten on the Fattest list. That is quite an accomplishment. Now, living here, this does not surprise me. You see a lot of really really BIG people here. I remember in August of 2004 I flew up to Seattle, Seattle being the Fittest City at that point in time. I had not been up there for almost 3 years. So, Lulu picked me up at the airport. She had to deliver some stuff to a gallery in Pioneer Square in downtown Seattle. It was February. Unlike here, in Texas, there were a lot of people walking about downtown in Seattle. And what was so striking to me was, after my long exile in Obese Texas, it looked to me like the Seattlites had had the air let out of them. I was so used to seeing so many bloated up Texas Balloon People it'd warped my perceptions of what humans look like.

One thing I have noticed during the course of my exile in Texas is there has been a noticeable increase in the number of people I see exercising in the various parks I go to. Like when I first discovered River Legacy Park in Arlington I was very impressed with what a nice park it is and very surprised at how few people used it. That is no longer the case. You now see a lot of people biking, walking, roller blading and playing, with only, maybe 25% of them appearing to be obese.

So, it sort of surprises me that Arlington is now supposedly the #2 Fattest City in the U.S. That is quite a fall from being on the list of Fittest Cities in 2005. Now, it does not surprise me to see Fort Worth being listed as the 4th Fattest City. I can pedal for miles on Fort Worth's Trinity River trails and see nary a human except for a bum or two sleeping under a bridge.

I live in Fort Worth and I'm doing all I can do to try and get Fort Worth off the Fattest List and onto the Fittest. But I am only 1 of over 660,000 people. I can't do this all by myself. Some other people in Fort Worth are going to need to put down the doughnuts and get off the couch.

Hillary and Whitewater Falls

I'd intended to Blog about Hillary today regarding some surprising details I read in a book I just finished, that being Barbara Olson's "The Final Days: The Last, Desperate Abuses of Power by the Clinton White House." Barbara Olson died on 9/11 in the plane that crashed into the Pentagon.

It is very strange reading all these books about the Clintons. Each of them cover the same ground, tell the same story, be it Dick Morris, Gail Sheehy or now, Barbara Olson.

Each seems to focus on some different aspect, with all sorts of detail I'd not learned before. I remember all the Clinton scandals during the White House years, be it Travelgate, Filegate, Vince Foster suicide, Monicagate and Pardongate. But the main media coverage of Clinton's deluge of dubious pardons during his last few days in office, well, I had no idea how scandalous this was, how much of it was tied to Hillary's run for the New York Senate and just how sordid it all was.

And somehow, as is the norm with Hillary and Bill, the Pardon Scandal did them no lasting damage.

Anyway, I'm in too good a mood to have fun detailing the Clinton Pardon Scandal right now. It's a beautiful day. I went on a good hike at Tandy Hills Park. It's starting to get green. Today I took a picture of the Tandy Hills Park Waterfall, which is what you see above.

Alice Tonasket and Wee Cheng

Yesterday I mentioned an email I got from someone who felt I'd hurt her feelings and disrespected her home away from home, that home being Scarborough Faire. I got an email from another person yesterday in which the emailer asked me who my most memorable out of the blue emailers have been. I could only think of two who I actually remember by name, mostly because they both became constant emailers.

One is Alice Tonasket. She'd been at my webpage about Mount Carmel and the Branch-Davidians and somehow thought I had something to do with that debacle. She was rather inarticulate back then so it was really hard to understand what she was asking. It sort of seemed like she was interested in joining my church. So, I replied to her. Told her it cost $200 to join my church. She decided to pass on the offer.

Alice is well known in her local zone for her home brew. Alice makes about 4 kegs worth of beer a month. What she doesn't drink she sells, bootleg style, bottling it herself in classic old beer bottles that she makes labels for. Alice calls her beer, "Alice Doesn't Drink Here Anymore Ale."

Over time I learned Alice has a bit of an amnesia problem. This made it sort of fun to play with her. She is easily confused. Currently she is emailing one of my pseudonyms named Igor and has forgotten that Igor is me. She now thinks Igor is my brother. So, she emailed me yesterday complaining about my brother Igor being mean to her.

Alice lives in a very small town in an isolated part of eastern Washington (the state, not the city), but, even though it is a small town, Alice is surrounded by constant Soap Opera turmoil and drama. A couple years ago Alice's Soap Opera was spinning out of control. I suggested she use her MySpace webpage to deal with various issues. For a slight monthly fee I agreed to create several MySpace characters and write blog postings for Alice. The various characters then opined in with their two cents on Alice's issues.

It did not take long for the targets of Alice's disdain to feel the sting of her pointed tongue. The zenith was reached when one of the targets showed up at Alice's house threatening Alice with the law if she didn't stop telling the truth. Of course, Alice blogged about this the next day, thoroughly chastising the trouble causer. Who is now a meek lion afraid of the Roar of Alice, rather than the other way around. The days of Alice the Meek have long vanished.

Alice now finds herself the recipient of new found respect among all the characters in her cast. It has become common for Alice to hear pleas of "Please don't blog this." To which she warns "Don't do it if you don't wanna read about it."

And then there was Wee Cheng from Singapore. Way back in the 1990's I had a website called Dialing Doctor Durango. It was supposed to be a tongue in cheek know-it-all advice type thing. But, for some reason way too many people took it serious. I finally killed that website when I learned it'd been listed as one of the top 20 medical websites on the Internet on some German university website and then got an email from a woman in the UK asking me for medical advice about her uterine tumor. That was enough. It had to stop.

But, long before I killed Doctor Durango I heard from Wee Cheng. Asking me for relationship advice. Anyone who knows me knows I'm the last person you'd wanna be asking for that type advice. Wee's ex-boyfriend, Teck Seng, was moving back to the island from London and he'd let Wee know he wanted to get back together. He'd broken Wee's heart. Wee didn't know what to do. Her mother told her to take him back, that if she didn't she'd end up like a cuttlefish. This stuck in my mind because I had no idea what a cuttlefish was. Wee explained it's a dried up stinky fish that is used in Asian cooking.

So, I told Wee to give Teck Seng a chance. And so she did. The romance re-bloomed. Wee agreed to marry Teck. I was invited to the wedding. I did not attend.

The Wee Cheng/Teck Seng wedding was probably 4 or 5 years after I'd first started exchanging emails with Wee. She'd send me things in the mail, like antique postcards. One time she asked me if I could ship her some wonderful cheese she had in Japan. It was Cheez Whiz, you know that stuff you spray out of a can. I shipped her 3 cans and some real cheese. Shipping was expensive so I took the cheapest option, basically a slow boat to China. By the time it got there Wee'd found Cheez Whiz in Singapore. I never heard how the real cheese faired.

Wee called me a couple times. She's a teeny little thing but her voice is real deep and very guttural and her English is very hard to understand.

Wee's mom died before she got married and before she had a baby. So, Wee's mom never knew that Wee did not end up like a cuttlefish. The last I heard from Wee Cheng Seng was in 2003. Her husband Teck Seng is very anti-American. He works for some high tech company and was stationed in California for a year. Hated the Americans he worked with and pretty much everything else about America. Why, I do not know.

So, when King George invaded Iraq Wee Cheng emailed me in quite an irate mood, as if I had anything to do with what George did. She told me if America invaded any more Asian countries she would not have anything to do anymore with anything American. I replied, in full umbrage mode, and asked if that meant she'd be giving up the Internet, it being an American invention of Al Gore's, after all.

I never heard from Wee Cheng again. I hope she's all right. I tried to contact her after the 2004 tsunami, she liked to vacation on those beaches in Thailand. But I never heard from her again.

Alzheimers's Hits Home

I know Alzheimer's is a serious subject and nothing one should make light of. But how does one know if this is what one is dealing with?

I won't name names, but yesterday I agreed to drive someone up to this town called Flower Mound for an appointment. The first thing this person forgot was his wallet. So, I had to buy gas. After driving for a few miles this forgetful person decided to call to make sure the appointment was on track. No phone. Left it at home. Along with the wallet. So, I turned around to head back to the phone. Found the phone. With a message saying the appointment was cancelled.

Now, the above was not too bad. But then today I've had to work with this person on a project and it has been one confusing muddle after another. The confusions bordered on the bizarre. I won't detail them because to do so would not only be laborious, it would also cause me to re-live the pain.

Do Alzheimer's sufferers get a deer in the headlights lost look when they are caught up in a moment of confusion? Do they stammer and stutter a lot? Is there an Alzheimer's for Dummies book?

On a totally different, non-Alzheimer's note, have I mentioned Scarborough Faire and the brouhaha I accidentally caused myself when I webpaged my impressions of my visit to that event a few years back? Well, it's about to start up again, and so I am starting to get emails about it again. I hadn't added any of these to my website for awhile, but today I did, because today's email amused me, so I added it and one I got a couple weeks ago.

You can read those emails and see what awful thing I did that caused so many people to get so upset and others to find it all very funny by going here to read the Feedback from emails and newsgroup postings and here to go to the webpage that caused the death threats.

Jerry Jones & the Dallas Cowboy Stadium Scandal

Both my long time readers may remember me mentioning, a time or two, my total disdain for the way Jerry Jones and the city of Arlington went about building a new stadium for the Dallas Cowboys. It's a scandal of monumental proportions that has not quite entered the national consciousness yet. But, here in north Texas there are many who are quite aware of this corrupt use of the perfect valid concept of using eminent domain to obtain private property for the public good. Here in Texas that legal tool was perverted to steal dozens of homes, ruin who knows how many businesses and kick hundreds out of their apartments. To build a football stadium. For the public good. Public being those who can afford a ticket.

So, there is this brilliant Fort Worth Blogger, no, it's not me. I'm in East Fort Worth. Anyway, this guy named Allen has this brilliant Blog and awhile back, on his Blog, he made reference to my chronicling of the Cowboy Crimes in Arlington. The second 'click here' below in Allen's post goes to the full blown beautifully illustrated rant he's referencing and that would be me doing the ranting in the full blown beautifully illustrated rant.

"The City of Arlington took the homes from their owners. No one had a choice. The homes and apartments were bulldozed, and a new stadium is being built for the Dallas Cowboys. Arlington technically took possession of the land, but the land is now underneath concrete that belongs to Cowboys owner Jerry Jones. Click here for a great analysis of the stadium problem, as blogged by a Houston lawyer. Click here for a full blown beautifully illustrated rant, a diatribe that should make our blood boil. It's a harangue that would cause us all to drive over to Arlington with torches and pitchforks if we weren't a nation of sheep."

This morning I got email from the author of the above paragraph, Allen, he being the brilliant Fort Worth Blogger of a Blog known as "The Whited Sepulchre", pointing me to the illustration of Jerry Jones you see above. Allen told me I could use the beautiful Jerry Jones artwork for whatever purposes I wanted. And so I have.

Annoying Weather Reports and Kelly Clarkson

Yesterday in a very rare personal whining indulgence I complained about one of my few pet peeves, that being how TV here in Texas can get interrupted during stormy weather by inane TV weatherperson's inane reports.

And so what do my grateful eyes see this morning in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram letters to the editors but an extremely insightful Fort Worth native also bemoaning the insanity of how the local TV stations cover storms. The letter writer is much more adept than I at describing the insanity. I'll copy and paste the letter below. And then below that I've got some fresh whining about another inanity that I've whined about before.

Some Sanity Please!
KXAS/Channel 5 pre-empted NBC’s national news program at 5:30 p.m. during the recent “winter storm.” We then got to see a reporter in the station’s parking lot scuffing slush with his tennis shoe, then a reporter in Dallas on an access road. Traffic was flying by and we then got to see a car turning onto a side street into the slush. Let’s see if he makes it. He does!

There was mayhem in Israel, a presidential race, medical news about the effect of inoculations on children, etc. But we didn’t get to hear about those events; children in Denton were making snow angels.

Interrupt the news if you need to for an emergency, but this type of weather coverage has gotten out of hand. I learned nothing during the 30 minutes that couldn’t have been covered during the regular local news at 6 p.m. Let’s put some sanity back into the news and weather coverage.

— Mary McCoy, Fort Worth

---

Okay, I'm back whining now. That photo you see above was taken in the Texas town of Burleson at the premiere of a movie starring Kelly Clarkson. That is she you see entering the movie theater. I've mentioned before how that paper I like to whine about, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, has an odd habit of always pointing out the local Texas connection to any celebrity or pseudo-celebrity. I blogged about this previously which cause odd commentary from the paper's TV editor explaining that this practice has to do with trying to connect the locals to the story.

Now, notice in the paragraph above where I mention Kelly Clarkson being at a theater in Burleson? I did not feel I needed to write Burleson native Kelly Clarkson, or Burleson raised Kelly Clarkson. And I've got readers way outside of Texas who would not know this, if they cared, which they don't. Now, those who read the Star-Telegram live in Texas, live near Burleson, they know Kelly Clarkson is from here.

And yet any time the Star-Telegram mentions Kelly Clarkson they seem to feel they must re-inform their Texas readers that she is from Burleson. This seems sort of insulting, like they are underestimating the memories of their readers.

Just today, on the front page, under the headline, "Kelly Clarkson to Sing for the Pope", it said "Burleson-raised pop superstar Kelly Clarkson...". And then on the front page of the Entertainment section the Star-Telegram, in another article about the same subject, alters its usual Burleson modifier and says "Fort Worth-born pop superstar Kelly Clarkson...". Further down in the article, in case we've forgotten, we are told again that Kelly Clarkson is from Burleson, as in "Clarkson, who grew up in Burleson...".

This week I've not yet noticed the Star-Telegram making note of the Texas connections to the current American Idol contestants. My favorite of those is when the paper repeats for the umpteenth time, "Michael Johns, married to a Fort Worth native, who has visited Fort Worth."

Weather Gone Mad in Texas

It was a long dreary windy night with a lot of annoying noise, mostly trees being blown up against the roof, sounding like a Monster slapping its hand overhead over and over again. It was very warm all night long and very humid.

It must be almost Spring and tornado season. This morning it's been non-stop heavy rain with lightning. No tornado sirens yet.

This time of year in Texas always seems to activate one of my pet peeves. That being how I can be peacefully settled in and enjoying watching something like LOST. And then the weather interruptions will start up. First an annoying chime and then the shrinking of the picture to accommodate a weather warning crawling across the bottom of the screen. That repeats a few times and then ends with another chime and then the same info is repeated, without the chime, in the upper left corner.

The warnings repeat about every 3 minutes. It's totally distracting. And then, God forbid, if the Doppler Radar detects anything remotely indicating the circular motion of a possible tornado, anywhere within a couple hundred mile radius, then there will be the live interruption where the Ted Baxteresque local weather dunderhead earnestly tells you about the extreme weather.

Now, if you are safely inside watching TV why do you need this information? Usually if the storm gets real bad you lose power and so you can't see the TV warning. Most people have battery operated storm radios to turn to when the weather gets dicey. If you are out in the weather, or driving your car, what good does the TV weather interruption do you? It is so mindlessly idiotic and annoying. I mean, if you are home and watching TV and the weather is bad and you hear the tornado sirens you know what that means, as in head for shelter.

Now, there have been complaints, and as a result, maybe, the local ABC station (one of the worst offenders) has stopped, for now, the annoying chime. I guess that is progress in the right direction.

Last year after a particularly annoying bout of TV weather interruptions I read in that paper I'm always complaining about, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, a puff piece yammering on about the brilliant job the local weather Ted Baxters do to protect us during a storm.

I pointed it out to the Star-Telegram that those brilliant weather interruptions probably kill more people than they save. Example, during the Fort Worth tornado of 2000, the TV weather reporters earnestly warned of incoming damage causing hail. A kid from Costa Rica saw that warning on the TV and asked his boss if he could go move his new pickup. On the way to his pickup he was hit on the head with a baseball size chunk of hail. And killed.

I know several people who were stuck in the the path of the Fort Worth tornado of 2000. None got out of harm's way due to a TV warning. The power got knocked out early in the storm. They had no TV. But they did have the common sense to head the warning sirens and head for safety.

So, the bottom line with these idiotic weather interruptions, if you are able to listen to one then you are likely totally safe. Those who might benefit from the warning don't have access to a TV. So, why is it so difficult for those who can say yes or no, to say no to the local Ted Baxter weather guys who want to break into regular programming to point out a circular hook over some distant lightly populated location in North Texas?

It perplexes me. I'll let you now the first time I experience this nonsense this year. Complete with screen caps. If my power doesn't go out.

Foul Mood and Thunder

I'm in a foul mood. Have been up since before 5am. It is being stormy in more ways than one this day in Texas, thunder is supposed to arrive soon. I thought maybe some endorphin medication might help rid me of my foul mood so I went on a long hike at Tandy Hills Park. That did not work. I'm pretty sure I was aerobic enough to cause endorphins to be released, but apparently not in an amount sufficient to make me feel better.

Why have I put this DIGG thing on each of these bloggings? Someone somewhere told me this was a good thing to do. But I don't know why. I asked Lulu if she knew. She didn't. She's getting "Blogging for Dummies" so that we/I might have some help at solving these riddles.

On my way to Tandy Hills Park I saw a bizarre billboard that said "I'm So Over You Sarah Marshall". In small print there was a website address, as in http://www.ihatesarahmarshall.com/. I looked at the website. I've no idea what to make of it. I mentioned the billboard to a deluded self-proclaimed marketing guru I have the misfortune of knowing and he told me he's seen the "I'm So Over Sarah Marshall" billboards all over the Metroplex.

On a totally different subject, the weekly column by Joseph Galloway was in this morning's Star-Telegram. He writes about military matters. He is very very aghast at the incompetence of our current president. Pretty much that's what all his columns are about in one way or the other. Today's first paragraph made note of the fact that this month marks the start of the 6th year of the War in Iraq. It is now the second most costly war in U.S. history, second to only WWII. United States participation in WWII ran from 1942 til August of 1945 (the U.S. declaration of war came after Pearl Harbor in December of 1941, but the offensive towards victory did not begin til 1942).

Galloway ended today's column with an interesting thought, saying "The next time we Americans start thinking about electing someone with no known talent and limited useful experience, what say we just leave the presidency vacant and the White House shuttered for eight years or so?"

Fossil Rim Wildlife Center Zebra Attack

A couple years ago I webpaged a visit to Fossil Rim Wildlife Center. In one of the rare times that something I did, website-wise, actually generated anything worthwhile for me, I was sent a Season Pass to visit anytime I wanted, along with 2 guest passes.

Yesterday I realized I can not remember the last time I had been outside this Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex zone. So, with gas being only $3.15 a gallon and with Fossil Rim Wildlife Center being only about an 80 mile drive it seemed like a good idea, at the time, for another visit.

Fossil Rim is like a drive through Safari. Which is very appropriate because I drove my Safari van. At the Visitor's Center you can purchase a bag of animal food. This comes in handy because the animals are very pushy with their demands to be fed. Like the zebras. If they don't get some instant gratification they will stick their head in your open window looking for food. The one you see above took a bite out of my steering wheel. I don't think he liked how it tasted.

I also had an ostrich get a bit aggressive. I guess there are good reasons why you are advised to keep your windows rolled up. Which seem a bit confusing to me, as in how did they expect you to feed the animals with the food they sold at the same time they were saying to keep your windows up? When I snapped this picture of this ostrich it must have thought my camera was something to eat because it lunged at it causing me to back away really fast. And then I rolled up the window.

To see more of my photos from Fossil Rim Wildlife Center go here.

Fossil Rim is near the town of Glen Rose, a very scenic town with a very cool courthouse square. Also nearby is Dinosaur Valley State Park. Outside Dinosaur Valley State Park there is this anti-evolution thing called The Creation Museum. I guess its purpose must be to prove that dinosaurs did not exist. And a new bizarre thing has been added right outside Dinosaur Valley State Park. That being another Dinosaur Park called Dinosaur World. It looked pretty lame. Sort of Flintstonesque.