I manged to either get my daughter's cold and/or I am having a bad allergy day. I'm hopped up on meds to take the edge off, but feel like a monkey in an experiment going seriously wrong. Hopefully I will feel a little better tomorrow, but I have a feeling an early bedtime is in my future.
Venus can be thanked for bringing this to my attention. Every Voxer should have a look at this. It does raise some interesting points about the increasing amount of advertising we're seeing on Vox.
I would be happy to give Vox some of my money to allow me to control if I want ads, what ads get shown, and whether or not I make money on those ads.
I paid $3.17 a gallon when I filled up the minivan on Sunday. Holy crap, that's a lot of money. Apparently, the Washington State Attorney General also thinks so too, and is launching an investigation. It's going to take a while, of course, and I assume we will be breaking some state records along the way. Meanwhile, the oil companies will probably report another quarter of record profits.
Every once in a while, I will hear someone of a couple of generations ago refer to the noon-time meal as Dinner and the evening meal as Supper. I certainly understand what they mean, but it's a little bit of a context switch. I was always under the impression it was just different back then, but it turns out, reading this history of mealtimes, that the concept of what "lunch" and "dinner" were pretty fluid, even 50 years ago.
In general, dinner used to be the main meal of the day. Due to the fact that there wasn't much in the way of artificial lighting for the majority of the population until the late part of the 19th century, the main, largest, most elaborate meal had to be when there was the most daylight, which would be around the time we typically have lunch today.
Lunch was created by upper-class ladies as a time to eat between breakfast and what was becoming a later and later dinner time, more around the time we typically have it these days. It used to be a ladies-only affair, though that also changed as the world became more industrialized and people started working through the afternoon.
The meals used to be named around how big they were or how elaborate they were. Now they are named strictly by time: breakfast is the morning meal, lunch is the afternoon meal, and dinner is the evening meal. Read the whole article for a lot more detail.
This is quite an eye-opening program on PBS about weight and weight loss. One interesting factoid that came about from this program about bariatric surgery: it's apparently not the shrinking of the stomach that helps so much, but rather the nerves that get cut in the gut as part of this process.
Also, this article from the New York Times explains what is behind the phenomenon where the cheapest food is often the least healthy. Nobody's talking about that, either.
In what I'm sure pisses off some religious people, Governor Gregoire signed into law a bill that gives "domestic partners" rights that are similar to those of married people. I wonder if they also mandate that insurance companies also provide protection for domestic partners as well.
In any case, I'm happy this law got passed. Love is love, partners are partners regardless if the "partners" are the same sex or not.
