Too Fat to Diagnose

   Another addition to my entries about obesity. I found this little blurb in a Friday news story. According to the results of a fifteen-year study published in the August issue of "Radiology", more and more patients are presenting radiologists with a weighty problem. The medical establishment is finding that these people who weigh more than 350 pounds are either too large for x-ray scanners or that their x-rays are difficult for radiologists to read because the fat tissue is too dense.
   I just kind of shook my head when I read that and forgot it for a while, but today I kept seeing it again in my mind's eye as I did some shopping at Costco. There were five or six employees set up with their taste samples at aisle's end and each one of them was surrounded by eager shoppers, hands out for their share. What struck me about each such scene was the number of girths already too wide that were waddling away with a fistful of unneeded calories.
   I know Costco does this to sucker people into buying food products they might otherwise bypass. What I don't know is why so many people line up like pigs at a trough to partake in this pathetic little porker ritual. Maybe Costco could start a new handout tradition - in order for anyone to receive a food sample, rather than lining up, they should be expected to do fifteen minutes on a treadmill first.
   Do you think it would sell?

   I was feeling quite at sixes-and-sevens tonight. You know the feeling - nothing's quite right, nothing's flat out wrong. What to do with myself? Toronto is in the middle of a nasty heat wave. The humidex today took the temperature up over 40 celsius. I hate the summer, but I have to put in one every year as the price tag I pay to get back to the winter. Since I couldn't beat the weather, I decided to venture out into it to see if there were any breezes at play. I found heat. It felt like eight in the morning instead of eight in the evening.
    I reached the point after half an hour of striding forth where I felt that striding back was in order. Still much disgruntled, I turned on my heel and found myself looking at a tiny bird, no more than perhaps eight centimetres in length. Resting on a wild flower, it looked at me from under a cap of black perched jauntily on its tiny head, like a beret slouched forward over its orange beak. Clad in feathers the colour of a lemon, he began to lift his black wings as though to fly, and then he stopped. For a second, he seemed to be watching me, waiting to see my next move. I stopped. Stood perfectly still. Stared back.
   For that moment, we stayed there in our frozen pas de deux, and then he took off. He dipped down toward the sidewalk and seemed on a collision course until the last second when he wheeled about and executed one swoop after another, dipping and weaving his way along the short stretch in front of me. Then he flew back to the thistle and lighted on its stalk, clinging there with feet no bigger than a breath of air. One last look at me said, "Cheer up! After all, you have seen me now. What more could you need?" Then he was gone, floating through the stand of thistles in an undulating flight pattern that looked as much like a child at play as it did an adult bird off about its business.
   Lovely little goldfinch. Thank you for your gift of beauty tonight.

The entry below details an eyeful for those able to see. For those who are losing their vision to macular degeneration, however, the Mars/Earth duet will be lost to a disease that destroys the macula, a small area at the centre of the retina. Without it, there is no detailed central vision . Macular degeneration is a disease listed in medical journals as one with no cure. If VisionCare Opthalmic Technologies receives the federal approval they are seeking, it will not remain a disease without hope for very long.
The device they are ready to bring to the market is the Implantable Miniature Telescope, a pea-sized telephoto lens to be implanted in one eye of the patient with moderate to profound vision loss due to dysfunction of the macula. Central vision provided by the implant would combine with the peripheral vision provided by the other eye, and a full single image would again be available to those who thought never to see such a sight again.

Mars Alert

   Keep an eye on the night sky in the upcoming weeks to see something that will not happen again for many a moon.
   Mars and Earth are nearing the closest approach between the two planets in recorded history. Thanks to Jupiter's gravitational pull on the red planet, its orbit is affected in such a way as to have brought it this close only once in the past 5,000 years. It may take as long as 60,000 years before the two celestial performers dance an encore.
   At the beginning of August, Mars will rise in the east at 10:00 p.m. and reach its azimuth at about 3:00 a.m. By the end of August, Mars will rise at nightfall and reach its highest point at 12:30 a.m. The denouement will take place on August 27th when Mars will be within 34,649,589 miles of Earth and, next to the moon, will be the brightest object in the sky. Use a telescope if you have access to one, but don't worry if you don't since Mars will appear as large as the full moon to the naked human eye.
   "Pack up the babies and grab the old ladies!" Take the whole family out there and lift up thine eyes!

From the Sublime to the Ridiculous?

   Adrian Bradbury - Zinedine Zidane? Hmmm ... Bradbury, Zidane? I think I'd go with Bradbury anytime. (see below) At least he's contributing something positive to the world, trying to make it a little better place.
   If you don't know about the infamous head-butt, you might just want to skip this, but if you do, maybe you're finding it all just as unbelievably trite and immature as I am. I was reading about Zidane's supposed apology this morning and found myself looking at the kind of thing that I spent years in the classroom trying to teach my students about. He has now issued one of those non-apologies that I always told them was nothing more than a waste of breath. You know the kind. They're the ones that end with a "but..." clause. They always mean "I'm not really sorry at all, and I'd do it again." Zidane's sorry routine was a supposed apology to all the little kiddies watching, who saw his act of violence, and a quick follow-up with the declaration that he feels no regret for it. Originally, a teammate was trying to excuse his behaviour by saying it had been prompted by a racial slur made by the Italian player Materazzi. The Italian denied it. Now comes Zidane's statement that the provocation was a "harsh insult" against his mother and sister.
   You would not believe the number of times when I have intervened, especially between boys in grade eight, in exactly this kind of scenario. Grade eight. You know, 13 years old, not yet adults. Zidane, on the other hand, is old enough to be suffering from a drastically receding hairline. Hasn't he been around long enough to learn anything yet? He says he feels no regret because if he hadn't reacted violently that "would mean (Materazzi) was right to say all that."
   God, the endless hours I spent trying to explain to the boys that the listener is not responsible for what the speaker says. To react with violence neither verifies or nullifies the statement, but it can say a lot about the intelligence level of the listener. Think about it. If someone came up to you tomorrow and vehemently declared the world to be flat, would you feel obliged to haul out an Uzi and teach him the error of his ways? Wouldn't you be more likely just to look him at with a "whatever" smile of derision and walk away?
   I tried and tried to get the message to the kids that while violence can create a Pandora's box of problems, it actually solves precious few. If Zidane knows the world is round, he doesn't have to head-butt anyone to prove it. If he knows his mother and sister are not what Materazzi supposedly said, then he does not have to head-butt anyone to prove that, either. Does it never occur to these macho-idiot defenders of female virtue that their violent denials might actually suggest the opposite of what they intend? After all, one could say - with all due apologies to Shakespeare - "Methinks the soccer player doth protest too much."

More Guluwalking

   I started to keep you posted on the Guluwalk a while ago, and I update the info every time I get something new to share. Today's latest is the announcement of an award being given to Adrian Bradbury, one of the walk's co-founders. Read on.

Toronto, ON, July 14, 2006 GuluWalks Adrian Bradbury is among the first of six Canadians to be awarded Global Youth Fellowships by The Walter and Duncan Gordon Foundation today. This new program recognizes and supports young Canadians who work in the international arena on the most pressing challenges of this century including political unrest, climate change, human rights and global health pandemics.Bradbury is the co-founder and director of GuluWalk an event that started with just two people in Toronto and now takes place in countries around the world to raise awareness for Ugandan children impacted by war and for their nightly walks into towns like Gulu to avoid rebel groups intent on kidnapping them and turning them into child soldiers and sex slaves. In 2005, Macleans magazine named him one of its newsmakers of the year. The Toronto-native will use his Fellowship to develop tools for civil society to support the United Nations responsibility to protect policy which holds the international community accountable to intervention when a nation is clearly unwilling or unable to protect their own citizens.Canadians, like Adrian, play an extremely valuable role internationally, with the potential to make measurable improvements to the lives of so many around the world and at the same time enhancing Canada's reputation on the world stage, said Patrick Johnston, President, Walter and Duncan Gordon Foundation. The Global Youth Fellowship was created to encourage younger Canadians to continue their efforts to find innovative and constructive ways to make an impact on these tough global challenges.
The Walter and Duncan Gordon Foundation was established in 1965 by Walter Lockhart Gordon, his wife, Elizabeth, and brother, Duncan. As a registered charitable foundation, The Foundation aspires to the ideal of a sovereign Canada that is dedicated to the security and well being of all Canadians and committed to tolerance, pluralism and democratic participation. The Foundation is dedicated to the development of sound and innovative public policies, founded on those values fundamental to Canadians, and designed to foster the continuing evolution of a dynamic and independent Canada. For more information on the Walter and Duncan Gordon Foundation please visit www.gordonfn.org.

   Last night, I saw a legend, a woman of inspiration. I saw Buffy Sainte-Marie performing at the concert and dining venue, Hugh's Room, in downtown Toronto. The room is nice enough, the food not bad, but none of that was the reason I had come and none of that really had my interest. It was all part of passing the minutes until she stepped onto the stage.
   From her first moment up there, to the last whisper of sound from her encore, I saw nothing else but her. She connected immediately with her audience, and held them with the spellbinding combination of her personality and her words. She made the room disappear, and the stage with it. She took away the distance between her and each person there, and sang personally just to them. She worked magic.
   She made her way onto that stage from a trail that has wound its way across 40 years of embodying the music of life. I have loved her music since I first heard it back in the 60's, and if it has changed at all, it is only to take on even richer tones, just as her wonderful voice has done. That voice soared its way last night through classics of her repertoire, such as "Piney Wood Hills" and "Up Where We Belong". It played games with us while it lilted its way through "Cripple Creek". It held her listeners enthralled while she raised it in glorious salute to the Native heritage, punctuating some of her creations with ululating calls that sought out and filled every corner of the room.
   From her song "The Big Ones Get Away" come two lines, "Hey don't the wars come easy / Hey don't the peace come hard" that encapsulate the message she has sought to bring to people for decades. Her song, "The Universal Soldier" comes from her early days, when the Viet Nam war was raging. It was certainly one of the songs that caused her name to appear back then on the White House list of those whose music "deserved to be suppressed". She performed it last night, since it is still so sadly relevant today. The crowd saluted it with long, drawn-out applause.
   "The Universal Soldier" speaks to the issue of just how easily the wars do come, and the fact that the world's shrinking will allow us less and less opportunity to disavow involvement and responsibility. We are all responsible. "His orders come from far away no more / They come from him, and you and me". The song's plaintive ending, "Can't you see? This is not the way we put an end to war" left the crowd's voice momentarily quiet. She didn't abandon her audience in the hopelessness that song seems to suggest, however. She told them instead that our species has already survived thousands of years of struggle simply to stay alive, to "find something to eat before they got eaten" and assured them "we can do this, we can put an end to war".
   She ended her set with a joyfully rousing "Star Walker" that had people clapping along in rhythm and happily tapping their feet on the floorboards. She tried to make that her last song, and then walk off the stage, but she didn't actually leave the room. She couldn't. The tie she had forged between herself and her audience was still alive, still pulsing with the joy of having been in her presence. It needed to be broken gently, the way a mother carefully lays a sleeping baby down in its crib so as not to break the magic spell of its sleep. She did that with her achingly beautiful "Goodnight", moving both me and my other half to tears. After she had caressed the last chord of that song, the audience was able to let her go.
   Buffy Sainte-Marie blows into a room on the breeze of her own joie de vivre and she wafts it out over everyone present. She smiles her way through repartee that spaces out her offerings of tuneful admonitions to take better care of the earth and the people who share it, and audience members come away not even knowing they've just been given a lecture on changing their ways. She is one awesome woman. Her words, her beauty weave a web of gossamer threads about her listeners, a dream-catcher that shimmers with the jewels of her wisdom and wit, and seems deceptively fragile. It is, however, a web strong enough to capture imagination and that is a mighty feat, indeed.

Divorced, Beheaded, Died, Divorced, Beheaded, Survived

   Want to totally astound someone with your vast store of trivia? Especially if you have to go to a meet-and-greet tonight for some stuffy suits, wait for just the right moment - you know, that moment when the conversation is lagging and everyone seems awkward - and then dazzle them all with this one. Today, July 12th, is the anniversary of the 1543 marriage of King Henry VIII of England to his last wife, Catherine Parr. Then recite the little ditty above and tell them that's a neat little summation of the fates of his six consorts. You'll be the absolute life of the party

More to Share

   OK, here's another one. This site is Neuroscience for Kids. It's a great one for several reasons, one of them being that they include a section titled "Women in Neuroscience". We need to get more of our daughters hooked on science. Their neuroscience postcards and games, like "Synaptic Tag" are a good way to spend some time learning, and having fun while you do it.
   Of course, while we're on the subject of fun, here's another site for you. Called the "Yuckiest Site on the Internet", it offers "yucky fun & games", "gross & cool body", and "Whack-a-Roach", among other delights. Spend some time here with your kids or just with your own inner child, but especially spend some time here with your kid(s) if you have any. It will be an investment in their future.

Another Must-See

   As a lifelong-learner myself, as will as an educator, I can't resist passing on a really great site if I have found one. I've given a link or two to others before, and today I just have to do it again.
   Take a look around this site if you're at all interested in heart facts, or mark it for your kid's next science project. It's packed with the kind of facts that get an "A" on school projects, like the number of times your heart will beat in one year, and the amount of blood it pumps around your body three times every minute.
   Check out the Map of the Human Heart, a colour graphic of a heart in cross-section; Amazing Heart Facts; The Artificial Human, with "everything from hips of steel to lab-grown skin"; Pioneering Surgeon: O.H. Frazier, the man who has done more heart transplants than any other; and Operation: Heart Transplant.
    The last mentioned part of the site will walk you through a greatly simplified heart transplant that will outline all the basic steps required in this life-saving procedure. You'll need Shockwave software so you can enter the virtual operating theatre and pick up your scalpel. Be aware that the site does not treat this operation as a joke but rather as a learning experience. They start their visitors off with an acknowledgement of the almost 800 people who died last year in the Stated while waiting for a donor.
    As I said, if you have a minute to spare, a visit to this site will expand your mind for sure, and maybe provide just that extra bit your up-and-coming genius needs to take first prize in this year's science project.

The Land of the Free?

   Here's a little something for the States to be proud of --- they are number one! In what, you ask? Well, it seems that nearly three-quarters of online fraud reported to the FBI last year originated from within the Great Home of the Free. It seems the bad guys aren't always those nasty-wasty foreigners, after all.
   Those interpreting "free" as meaning a share of your bank account are the perpetrators. They're so good at what they do, that last year, 2005, saw cybercriminals dipping their sticky fingers into Joe Public's accounts for a whopping $183 million, almost three times more than they got in 2004. Those interpreting "free" as meaning they get something for nothing are the ones they dupe. The scams used are varied, but most of them work on the basis of a deal that's "too good to be true". What I don't understand is how so many people are incapable of realizing that when something sounds too good to be true, that's because it damn well is!
   "Phishing", an online confidence scam tricks people into giving away confidential bank details, and last year's phishing saw a profit increase up 103% from 2004. E-mails are sent at random asking recipients to verify pin numbers and passwords, through replica websites. The legitimate websites always say they would never ask for such personal info, and one suggestion they make to avoid being caught in this spider web is to be suspicious when you see obvious spelling and grammar mistakes. Duh. Do people really not see those? Check out the link below to see a sample scam approach and take note of the liberal sprinkling of errors.
    The average loss to the Nigerian Letter scam reported in 2005 was up 67% from 2004. The RCMP site will walk you through a sample letter and explain to you all the points that should be jumping off the page at you. The sender, for instance, is often a government official in their country who is somehow contacting you at random to tell you that a sum of millions of dollars is at stake unless you "help", and offering you a tempting commission for doing so. The proposal is always urgent and sent in strictest confidence, and the sender asks for personal information, like your bank account number.
   How could anyone not see through such a scam? Could cupidity so overwhelming that it stifles common sense contribute to such successful blindsiding? Does the States' taking the gold medal in this little competition say something about them?

   I went to see "An Inconvenient Truth". It is more than worth the ticket price. It gives viewers a glut of information and food for thought. Please, set aside one evening; one afternoon outing to see this film. If you have children, or ever think you might; if you have nieces or nephews or know any kids at all, think of seeing this movie as something you're doing for them. It's not an action movie, but it does have a body count, although it might not come quite in the form Hollywood has you used to. It's not easy viewing either, but you might well be more than glad that you went.
   Please, go.

   I don't often share the same opinion as Stephen Harper, but this time I do. He expressed disgust when informed that a man had relieved himself on the National War Memorial in Ottawa, on Canada Day. Retired Major Michael Pilon, a veteran, was present and he took a photo of the idiot to present to police. Ottawa Police Detective Mike Walker says police have been in touch with the vet and that charges will be laid. The offensive photo was in the newspaper and the attitude of the pisspot is clearly visible. He was deriding the vet with his response to the photo being taken. He was treating the memory of every one who has given their lives with a disdain beyond belief.
   I have nothing but immense disgust for this piece of human garbage. What a shame our civilized ways won't allow for the offending member to be lopped off, sans anaesthetic. He's so creative about ways to relieve himself. I have no doubt that he could overcome this slight setback with no problem at all.

   Last night I was watching a documentary about the First World War Battle of the Somme. Horror and destruction. God, the images of war stay the same, no matter the year of the conflict. It always comes down to combatants far too young to be cut down in such brutality. It always comes down to the individual soldier, facing down their own terror so that they can enter the fray in defense of whatever cause the evildoers threaten. The young faces of yesteryear looking out at the viewer from cherished old photographs, the young faces of today looking out at us from the pages of the newspaper - it never changes. War is always a terrible waste of life.
   Whatever your personal feelings about the involvement of our troops in Afghanistan, I hope you remember the men and women behind the debate, the ones who are over there right now, laying their lives on the line every day. They are no different than you or me. They deserve our support. Take a minute today. Take a look at some of their faces.