Seventh-inning stretch

To continue the recent baseball theme, I figure that the All-Star break is sort of like the 7th-inning stretch: a breather that's a little more than halfway through the game. OK, so that's stretching things a little bit. Sue me. Anyhow, the Astros are 44-44 at the break, which is not exactly the end of the world. Of course, since we were supposed to win the World Series and everything, it's a little bit of a disappointment. Thus the whole new manager thing. I am skeptical, but god knows the boys needed a shakeup, so we'll see what happens.


I was going to try to think up another catchy metaphor for this, but it's too much trouble. Sarah Bunting has written the greatest rant about the low-carb craze. It says everything I would want to say if I were a person given to rants. (Which, you may have noticed by now, I am generally not.)

The entire country has a bizarre, conflicted relationship with food and weight that whips around the punish-lavish axis, aggravated by bad nutritional information, predatory marketing, McDonald's sponsorship of school lunch programs, the cult of celebrity, and the default collective belief that beauty is exactly skin-deep, but instead of dealing somehow with the societal issues that got us here, let's just cut out bread, because it's easier than thinking.

(Oh, and I found this via Utopia with Cheese. Where I am apparently becoming a regular.)