Seattle.BloggersPub

Canadians are healthier than Americans, according to a new study published in the American Journal of Public Health.

Americans are 42 percent more likely than Canadians to have diabetes, 32 percent more likely to have high blood pressure, and 12 percent more likely to have arthritis…

Coming hard on the heels of a highly credible study showing that Americans are much sicker than Britons, the new comparison should give US policymakers pause. Comprehensive health care coverage in Canada may be a factor, but I suspect that much of the difference may relate to these two facts:

• About 21 percent of Americans said they were obese, compared with 15 percent of Canadians.
• And about 13.5 percent of the Americans admitted to a sedentary lifestyle, versus 6.5 percent of Canadians.

But can policies make a difference in obesity and physical activity? You bet.  

Ephraim Halevy
Robert Rosenberg reports this interesting Israeli television interview with a former spymaster regarding what Israel’s position toward Hamas should be:
There are cracks in the Israeli establishment regarding how to deal with Hamas — former Mossad chief Ephraim Halevy, for example, is arguing that Israel should judge Hamas by its deeds and not its rhetoric, […]

In Britain, the two major academic professional groups have been debating Israeli boycott resolutions for the past few months. One group, the Association of University Teachers, passed a pro-boycott resolution a few months ago only to rescind it a few weeks later. This week, the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher […]

I promised a roundup for Konnyaku Day… Alas, thanks to my rather late announcement, there are only a couple of entries (at least so far). A number of people wrote in that they were planning to participate, so hopefully there will be a few more. However, I’d be happy to add anything that comes in this week. Just post a comment and I’ll add yours.

From Obachan’s Kitchen & Balcony Garden comes two treats: Konnyaku no miso ni and sashimi konnyaku. Konnyaku no miso ni is a clever variation of a typical braised vegetable dish, most commonly applied to eggplant. I definitely want to make this dish.

I’m also jealous that Obachan has access to unusual flavors of “sashimi konnyaku” which aren’t readily available in the U.S. She made yuzu konnyaku and aonori konnyaku with a sumiso (vinegared miso) sauce.

From Hiromi’s blog (in Japanese), we have Houtou with Konnyaku. You may remember Hiromi made Houtou shortly after we came back from Japan in March. She did the hard work on this as well, though I helped twist a few of our konnyaku slices into twisted shapes following her instruction.

I’ll extend the Konnyaku day roundup if anyone has some other dishes, even if you’re just getting around to posting your entry this week… Post a comment and I’ll add you!

August 20th will mark the ten year anniversary of my creation of Bernie’s Jenny McCarthy Page, a website dedicated to Jenny McCarthy that now allows me to make outrageous claims like my “websites have been uniquely visited by millions of people” and retain complete honesty. Between 1996 and 2004, that site alone brought in nearly 2.5 million unique visitors.

In 2004, because Jenny’s career seemed to be winding down (mostly due to her marriage and the subsequent birth of her son, Evan), I made the tough decision of closing the site’s doors. It was tough because I had made a lot of good contacts, had actually achieved indirect contact with Jenny and her people (I have a personalized autographed t-shirt to prove it), and had established the site as the definitive source for Jenny McCarthy information online. A lot of things change between the ages of 16 and 24, though, and at the time, it was the right decision to make.

This month, just shy of the ten year anniversary, I’ve decided to reopen the site’s doors, albeit slightly rebranded as Bernie’s Jenny McCarthy Site, since this isn’t the nineties anymore I’ve covered the technical aspect of it in my design section, but I wanted to point it out here as well…admittedly to get a little Google Juice behind it, but also because I’ll be hitting the ground running, trying to build the site back up to what it used to be in the “glory days.” If I learn any lessons along the way, you can be sure I’ll post them here. In fact, I already have.

In case you’re really bored and interested in the history of Bernie’s Jenny McCarthy Page, you can take a gander at a couple of the previous iterations. Otherwise, feel free to head over to the present-day version. If you have any comments, I’d love to hear.

Why Jenny McCarthy, you may be asking? I’ve been asked (and have answered) that question too many times. Just for trivia’s sake, though, I should mention that if it weren’t for Jenny I probably would have never met my girlfriend. But that too is a story for another time…

I spent the long weekend in San Francisco, and found myself in town for another historical Barry Bonds homerun.  I was also in town when he hit 71, 72, 73 in October of 2001. 
A good friend of mine found that the weekend presented the perfect opportunity to sport his latest brilliant t-shirt idea, which is […]

This week is Greek Week and we are reviewing Sophocles’ Oedipus plays, and Jean Anouilh’s Antigone. And by we I am I. Unlike March’s Aristophanes trilogy, these are not funny and there are no crab people and they will probably never be adapted by Matt …

Damn, where does the time go? It’s been a busy month for me and I’ve made much less progress than I’d like on just about all my personal projects from stuff around the house to online housekeeping. And it doesn’t…

It occurs to me that The Fan used to get a lot more comments when we were still on Blogspot. Comments have slowed to a trickle since the move to our own domain and the WordPress platform. Don’t know why that is, and don’t have time for serious navel-gazing over it, but just in case […]

A couple things today. One, Justin Everett-Church posted that Yahoo! is hiring a slough of Flash Developers. If I understand the post correctly, I assume this may be part of a Flash section under the Yahoo! Developer Network. Their User Interface Library is awesome, and I think an equally high quality Flash library would be amazing.

Second, the ColdFusion podcast guys have a great episode up this week that talks about Flex. I think they’re getting better and better. This was a fun one to listen to because they tackle some important topics and hash out some nice conclusions. They also mentioned that someone they know has registered the domain name “flexpodcast.com”. Whom might that be? David Hassoun perhaps? Seems like the Rocky Mountains are poised to become Adobe podcast central.