| Please Tell Britney Spears What is Going On In The Middle East
Recently I have been trying to keep up with current events. I have been watching the news on the television and reading the news in the newspapers and online. One thing that I have learned is that there are countless self proclaimed experts out there blogging, writing articles and commentating on television and on the internet all around the world. Imagine that this was medicine, heart surgery. A man suffers a heart attack. The man comes into the hospital. The expert in medicine, the doctor orders an angioplasty. He sees that one artery is 90% blocked. He cuts a tiny hole in the mans thigh and sends up a tiny microscope, inserts a stent, opens up the artery, sends the man home the next day with a prescription for blood thinners and the man is golfing the next week and lives another 20 years.
Helping kids be healthy
IT PROBABLY shouldn't have come as a surprise that the new University of South Alabama Healthy Life Center is awash in patients. We've all seen the stories and statistics detailing Alabama's problem with obesity. If Alabama is the second-fattest state in the nation, then it stands to reason that obesity is a problem for young Alabamians. And young people are the Healthy Life Center's targets. Nevertheless, the Press-Register's news report Sunday was alarming: Since it opened five months ago, local pediatricians and other doctors have referred nearly 200 obese youngsters to the center. The young patients are suffering from such health problems as diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, sleep apnea and acid reflux -- conditions that more often afflict adults.
Kicked to the curb by Madison Avenue
In last Sunday's paper, Jay Dyckman wrote a column for USA Weekend called "No longer hip" bewailing the fact that he would soon leave the 18 to 34 age range. It's considered the coveted demographic. Advertisers and marketing groups kill themselves vying for the attentions - and funds - of such a trendy, snarky group. When you're 18 to 34 you're young, pliable and will pledge allegiance to a product if that product is cool enough. And during those 16 years, you know all about cool because that's when you produce your special cool genes. They tell you what to wear, what to eat, what music to listen to and where to find a social life. But the day you turn 35, your official membership card in Club Hip expires. The grownup fairy swoops in and changes all your cool genes to responsible genes.
Sleep Under an African Sky With Elephants, Hyenas -- and Snakes
Jan. 18 (Bloomberg) -- Every sound is amplified when you are awake at night in the bush, listening out for the rumbling tummy of an approaching elephant. A cicada whirs like a pneumatic drill. A blade of grass snaps under the weight of a flying cockroach. Shamwari Game Reserve in South Africa's Eastern Cape is where Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie go to escape the Hollywood rat race. I am getting even further away from it all than they do, shunning the sumptuous lodges to sleep in the bush, surrounded by wildlife. It's much cheaper this way. A room for two in a Shamwari lodge costs at least $1,250 a night in high season, while we paid $89 a night each on the reserve's Wilderness Trail. And luxury has many different guises. There are no showers and our camp food is far from gourmet, yet I am sharing 3,000 hectares with just three people and a host of elephants, hyenas, eland and hartebeest.
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