Children: Mine vs. Ours

An op-ed called Strong Homes in a Weak Village Won't Do rounded out an altogether interesting page in today's Star Tribune. Daniel Shaw, a speech language pathologist from Minneapolis, wrote simply of the divergence between "my" children -- who have been nurtured and prepared for school -- and "our" children, who "are raised in a world where the relative poverty of words and lack of interest in learning reflects the broader poverty of their existence."

He noted the following:

As winter break or summer vacation approaches, children in poverty begin to get wilder [at school]. Teachers tell me, with conviction, that this behavior is a "preaction" to the coming of a sustained period of unstructured life.

Five days a week of breakfast, lunch and a structured day with caring adults will disappear -- to be replaced by the day-to-day uncertainty of life in poverty.

Just another example of why U.S. test scores are what they are, largely driven by poverty levels, rather than caused by "bad" teachers.

Practical Goods (and Some Less Practical)

Because you never know when you'll need a pair of lederhosen...


Only $70 at Practical Goods, a fun and funky resale shop at Snelling and Randolph avenues in St. Paul. (Although the lederhosen are a bit less practical than most of the rest of the goods.)

The store almost had to close because of hassles with the landlord, but it sounds like things have been worked out, at least for the foreseeable future.

Sino Tangent

The irony is so obvious it's almost not funny.


This set of small-town buildings, meant as a Christmas decoration, is made in China, despite its all-American name.


Liberty Falls, jeez. It's like an elbow in the ribs.

And were they America's growing years or were they its "growing years"? (That's one for the Blog of Unnecessary Quotation Marks.)


But worst of all is the problem with the school house. It's cute and all, but we expect more from our institutions of learning.


Like how to spell the word grammar.

The Latest Survivor of the Constantly Strong

When I started college in the late 1970s, I was a 17-year-old girl from a small, all-white town, who asked for a room on the "quiet floor" so I could be sure to be surrounded by studious geeks like me. So of course, my roommate was a wealthy preppy party girl from Boston who smoked pot and was glad to get Cs.

She did, however, have great taste in music and introduced me to many artists I had never heard of, including Gil Scott-Heron. I don't remember the first time I heard him and his then-partner Brian Jackson on her stereo, but I soon knew every bit of First Minute of a New Day and It's Your World.

I loved the songs but also the monologues, which are filled with sharp rhetoric and rhyming invective, reflecting Scott-Heron's politics and perspective as a black man in America. I think they resonated with me so strongly because, not long before, I had been immersed in a high school English elective about black literature from the Harlem Renaissance to the 1960s. And I had read Claude Brown's Manchild in the Promised Land multiple times. Part of my fascination with the world outside my small town, I guess.

The album Bridges came out later that year. So many good songs, including this one that Ta-Nehisi Coates at the Atlantic posted today, "95 South (All of the Places We've Been)." Listening to it here in Scott-Heron's older, less-supple voice made me cry. It's always been one of those songs I listen to when it seems like the world can never change for the better, and I need a reason to keep going.



I kept listening to Scott-Heron through the 1980s (and saw him play live in Washington, D.C., once), but I fell out of touch with what he was doing eventually. After recreating my LP collection in CD format about a decade ago, I started wondering what he had been up to. Then, a few years ago, the cartoonist Andy Singer recommended an album called Spirits (which had come out in 1992) to me, and he was right -- it's some of Scott-Heron's best work.

But by this time in the 2000s, Scott-Heron was in prison for cocaine possession. I read his Wikipedia page at the time and recall it quoted him, insisting he was being persecuted for his politics. A New Yorker article from last summer made it clear that Scott-Heron's brilliance was dimmed by crack. Even so, the article included glimpses of his spirit:

On his then-current obsession with cartoons from the video store: “Your life has to consist of more than ‘Black people should unite,’ ” he said. “You hope they do, but not twenty-four hours a day. If you aren’t having no fun, die, because you’re running a worthless program, far as I’m concerned.”

On being recruited to an exclusive private school when he was a sophomore in high school: “They looked at me like I was under a microscope,” he said. “They asked, ‘How would you feel if you see one of your classmates go by in a limousine while you’re walking up the hill from the subway?,’ and I said, ‘Same way as you. Y’all can’t afford no limousine. How do you feel?’

As much as it illuminated Scott-Heron's history, it was a sad article -- and mental preparation for hearing about his death yesterday. I guess no one can be a survivor of the constantly strong forever.

Jeff Zuckerman Redux

From the Star Tribune letters page during the week that led up to the vote on same-sex marriage, which also included the Bradlee Dean prayer debacle and two votes restricting access to abortion:


I assume this is the same Jeff Zuckerman who wrote a column for the Minnesota Daily in the late 1980s, which was one of the most consistently funny bits of writing I've ever read. (Unfortunately, there's no trace of them anywhere on the interweb.) He's been teaching at Walden University and the University of Minnesota since then.

Thanks, Jeff! You've still got fans here in this cold theocracy-wannabe we live in.

Good Bad-Hair Day at F Minus

Another startling laugh from Tony Carrillo's F Minus.

Boys and Grills

A Facebook friend recently posted this to her status:


As she described it: "Spotted at Panera: panini-style baby changing station."

(Here are my past posts on the iconography of diaper-changing stations.)

Hey, a Logo I Like!

It's unusual for a logo to find itself in the pages of Daughter Number Three unless that mouthy woman wants to make fun of it. But not today.


This logo was part of a Ford Motor Company ad. I suspect the yellow around the edges of the letter is the result of a printing problem, but I like it with or without that. Its dynamic asymmetry makes it feel active and exciting. Plus, it's bold and graphic enough to jump off the page at the viewer.

A four-pointed star to the designers!

Salaam Alaikum, Cousin

Twice in the past week, while paging through the Star Tribune, I did a double take when perusing articles about the situation in Syria.


What was our former governor and newly minted presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty saying about Syria that was news-worthy?


Oh, wait -- it's not Pawlenty, it's Bashar Assad, hereditary leader of Syria and long-lost cousin of TPaw. Side by side and feature for feature, I admit the resemblance is not as strong as I thought it was, but the similarity of visual gestalts was enough to confuse me.

And that's Minnesota me, who's been looking at pictures of Pawlenty for over eight years. If I get the two mixed up, what will others think? Is this the beginning of rumors that Pawlenty is a secret Muslim?

Living in Harmon-y

On a day that is post-Rapture, post-legislative decision to put an important civil right up for a majority vote, and mid-debate on how to cut state and federal budgets (and whom to hurt with those cuts), comes this ad from Target, memorializing the recently deceased Minnesota Twins player Harmon Killebrew.


Interesting choice, Target.

No Sex Please, We're Parenting

It all started when Cory Doctorow posted this bit on BoingBoing.

It's a story from a Canadian parenting site about a family with three kids, ages 5, 2 and 4 months. The parents are clearly countercultural, and their older kids, both boys, have managed to develop a love for pink, purple and things that sparkle; they've also kept their hair long and styled in ways unusual for their sex these days. As you might expect, they are frequently assumed to be girls.

So when the third child, Storm, was born, the parents decided to not tell anyone outside the immediate family the child's sex. And it sounds like this has confounded most people they come in contact with, including the commenters on the original post, and to some extent, the BoingBoing commenters as well. Many folks seem to think the two older boys have been forced to have long hair and wear some pink clothes, when the story makes it clear that it has been their choice. Others pontificate that the kids will all end up in therapy. A few advocate that the children be taken away from their parents and placed in the hands of the state.

The strong reactions reveal the throbbing unease about gender that lies just below the skin of social conventions.

When I was in graduate school, I was acquainted with a woman, an undergraduate anthropology major, who was doing something similar in raising her child, then about 18 months old. I didn't know her well, and never met the child. As I recall, she and her (male) partner also didn't refer to other children as boys or girls -- they called them all just "kids" when talking with their child.

That child is about 25 years old now, and I have occasionally wondered how things turned out. My suspicion is that s/he (I use that pronoun because I never was told sex the child was) affirmed a gender by around the age of 5, but that s/he continued to be more open-minded about gender identity than the average person. Who knows, though; maybe it turned into an Alex Keaton/Family Ties situation, and instead s/he became a Stepford Wife or a hyper-masculine linebacker.

I've been persuaded by the likes of Steven Pinker that there is more to gender and sex roles than just socialization, but I continue to hold that it's not a binary as much as it is a continuum: that there is a noticeable area of overlap, with only some people at the extremes whose behaviors and self-presentations could most appropriately be described as binary oppositions.

And I also believe that the forms gendering takes are largely social. The famous examples are that pink was considered a masculine color up until World War II, or that all American babies wore long white lace dresses and had long hair up through the end of the 19th century.

This doesn't mean I think the many people with young daughters/granddaughters who will only wear pink or dresses are deluded. But the way those girls came to insist on pink or dresses is a social construction, not a biological one. The fact that they chose a color or clothing style that "fits" their sex is probably based in biology, but there are also girls who don't like pink or dresses and boys who do like them, and that doesn't make those kids any less a girl or a boy.

When Daughter Number Three-Point-One was born, I impressed on my friends (and family as much as possible) that we wanted to raise her in as gender-neutral a way as possible. My mother-in-law was chagrined when I asked her not to make little smocked dresses, but she cooperatively made other clothes in colorful prints. There were a few dresses along the way, but DN3.1 mostly wasn't interested in them, or in clothes generally, until she was almost a teenager.

We consciously refrained from referring to all the unspecified animal characters that crowd childhood popular culture as "he." We even had our own version of the "Where is thumbkin?" song that left out the "sir" bit. (What an odd idea for a girl to think that her thumbs are male.)

She liked Legos (her father's influence) and never cared for baby dolls, but she was obsessed with organizing sets of animals, blocks, and other miscellaneous toys into groups and making up stories about them. She liked trains and cars, but was never carried away by them.

Was this all just her genetics playing out, as the biological child of relatively androgynous parents? There's no way to tell. But any people who insist that she'll need therapy or that we were unfit parents because of the choices we made should check the walls on their glass house.

The Gorilla in the Room

I know it's difficult to speak extemporaneously, especially to the media, no matter how practiced you are. Still, I can't help but chuckle when idiomatic phrases get chopped up and shuffled together like a deck of cards.

Today, Bill Ingebrigtsen, chair of the state senate's Environmental and Natural Resources Budget and Policy committee, was talking on MPR when he referred to the state's budget deficit as the "5.2 billion dollar gorilla in the room."

It would have been okay if he'd said just "5.2 billion dollar gorilla," since in that case the dollar amount would have substituted for the more usual "10-ton gorilla." But once he added "in the room," he was mixing in that darn elephant that's in the room but no one wants to talk about. I'm sure the elephant also weighs 10 tons, but that's never mentioned.

Maybe the elephant is sensitive about the subject of its weight.

More on Voter ID in Minnesota

Here's a recent, cogent piece by the Minnesota ACLU's Chuck Samuelson on why the voter ID requirements are a bad idea.

Two key terms to use in future discussions: "internal passport" and "poll tax."

Now if only we can get 31 percent of the voting public to read just one article making these obvious arguments against the constitutional amendment, assuming it gets onto the ballot. (A recent poll found that 80 percent of Minnesotans supported the idea of requiring photo ID in order to vote.)

The Only Good School Is a Private School

Wow. Just wow.

If I had any doubts that the purpose of the "school reform" movement was anything but dismantling the public schools, it's gone after reading this. I generally have a hard time believing in vast, right-wing conspiracies, but when I hear that the school voucher movement has been funded by one wealthy family named DeVos, which is connected to Amway and Blackwater, I can't help but wonder a bit.

Explicitly advocating a change in terminology from "public schools" to "government schools," the movement has used No Child Left Behind to chip away at public confidence in schools to the point where even Minnesota is about to pass legislation eliminating tenure, preventing teacher strikes, evaluating teachers based on student test results, and paying for vouchers so students can switch to private schools if their public school is "underperforming." (Despite the fact that test scores of Milwaukee kids attending private schools courtesy of vouchers are lower than comparable kids in the public schools.)

How did we get here?

For years I saved a 1990s City Pages (or possibly Twin Cities Reader) article about Julie Quist, our local version of these educrazies. I'll have to go and get a copy from their archives because I can't find it now, but I'll bet that most of what Quist was advocating has come true or is up for a vote even as we speak.

In case you don't know who Julie Quist is, she was involved with an organization called EdWatch (now Education Liberty Watch), and was most recently district director for none other than Michele Bachmann. Her husband, Allen Quist, ran for governor in the 1990s on what seemed then like a laughably right-wing agenda, but which has become the mainstream of Republican politics since.

Reading about the DeVos family made me wonder if Quist is connected to them or vice versa. I'll have to look into this further.

__________

Here's an archive of some of Julie Quist's writing, primarily on education topics.

e.g., Glenn Beck

Another intriguing quote from the Star Tribune's L.K. Hanson. (Too bad his work wasn't mentioned in the A Little Depth Looks Great on You ad.)

This illustration makes me want to take a class on Walter Lippmann and John Dewey. The issues they argued over are still unresolved today.

A Little Depth Looks Great on You

The Star Tribune has been running this ad for the past week or so.


Given its design aesthetic, I'd say it's an appeal to young audiences.


The small type at the bottom says: "BE ABLE to find Iran on a map. Know what the city council's up to behind closed doors. Find out how to make a Peanut Butter Icebox Pie from scratch. Get it all in the newspaper -- online or in print. Because a little depth looks great on you. PRINT DIGITAL TODAY TOMORROW"

It's an odd duck, this ad.

If young people were reading the paper enough to see the ad, the ad wouldn't be necessary. Plus, two out of the three examples given (finding Iran on a map and making a pie) are things any web user could find in one second via Google. And the third example -- which is one of the most valuable roles of the local newspaper -- is less likely to be valued by the average young reader.

Seeing the page was a fresh recognition of the decline of the newspaper medium, highlighted in hipster art and four-color printing.

Seedswomen of Minnesota

Over the weekend, I got the chance to catch the tail end of the Seed Stories exhibit at the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum. Lots of reproductions of seed catalog art, which is much more visually interesting than you might assume.

The part that caught my attention the most was the wall labeled Minnesota's Own: 3 Seedswomen, which told the stories of pioneering businesswomen who had their own seed catalogs in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Carrie Lippincott was first, starting in 1886 and publishing her first catalog in 1891. According to the exhibit card, "She targeted women customers, a first in this business, and focused solely on flowers, another first." The artwork is classic late Victorian, lithographs in full color, showing exaggerated flowers and archetypal figures.







Jessie Prior started her business, located in Minnetonka, west of Minneapolis, in 1895. Her husband was already in the business, and there appears to have been some controversy among her competitors that the use of Jessie's name was only a marketing gambit. Jessie did apply for membership in the all-male American Seed Testing Association in 1903, however, only to be turned down because she was a woman.







Emma White followed with a catalog in 1896. In the early years, she often used pixie figures to accompany the flower art in her materials, which differentiated them from the more straight-laced visuals of Prior and Lippincott. Her photo, which was printed in the catalogs, provides a somber contrast to the light-hearted illustrations.







When looking at the artwork, I couldn't help wondering who the artists were. The few attributions visible were to litho houses in Manhattan, so it appears it wasn't done locally. I wonder what those litho houses were like for the artists to work in, and how much input these seedswomen had into the final artwork that represented them.

It seems like there's a good book in this topic, if not a novel based on the rivalry.

Babes in Fame Land

Okay, it's not the worst-written temporary sign I've seen, but it sure assumes the reader already knows the context of the message (that the sign is for a child care center). Otherwise, those would have to be some famous babies!

And is it really so hard to put spaces between the segments of the phone number? Why include it if no one can read it, especially when driving past at 30 mph?

Makena: Money for Nothing

A month or so ago, I wrote about a "new" drug called Makena, which is used to prevent preterm labor and therefore improve outcomes for babies born prematurely. I put "new" in quotes because Makena isn't new at all -- it's a formerly open-source drug that was prescribed without a fancy marketing name until the FDA handed over exclusive sale rights to a company called KV Pharmaceuticals.

Guest blogger Harold DeMonaco over at HealthNewsReview.org reports on a new study of the cost of the open-source preterm labor drug vs. the exclusive Makena:

[the open-source drug] has been available from compounding pharmacies with a 20 week course costing about $300. Earlier studies demonstrated the Number Needed to Treat is 14 so the cost of preventing a premature birth is $4,200. The direct cost associated with a premature birth is $33,200. That was until the FDA approval.

K-V Pharmaceuticals has priced Makena at $29,000 to the pharmacy for the same 20 week treatment. Based on this pricing, the direct costs for preventing a premature birth is $406,000.

Wow. The number needed to treat -- a key piece of information in determining whether a treatment is worth the cost -- went from $4,200 to $406,000 overnight.

DeMonaco continues:

These drugs represent significant health policy issues. Both deserve considerable thought and assessment prior to any judgment on the part of the public. So, while there has been some news coverage of these drugs, journalism could provide a better public service by dropping back to address the bigger picture for news consumers and health care consumers…. help citizens understand why we lead the world in percentage of the GDP devoted to health care spending without a concomitant world-leading rank in health care quality and outcomes.

I have a friend whose daughter is currently experiencing preterm labor while she waits (on bed rest) for her twins to be born. So I admit I'm extra-sensitive to the greed of KV Pharmaceuticals. They make a big deal of doling the drug out at a low cost to uninsured women, but they'll make out like bandits from anyone who has insurance, which will then have a clear effect on all of our insurance premiums.

And the only goodies KV Pharmaceuticals brought to the table are an awkward name like Makena and a marketing budget.

Take My Vote, Please

Thursday's Star Tribune greeted me with two depressing headlines:

Gay Marriage Amendment Moves Closer to the Ballot

and

Big Show of Support for Voter Photo ID [from the Minnesota Poll]

For those playing along at a home that isn't in Minnesota, both of these issues are likely to be put before the voters as amendments to our state constitution in 2012.

As I've written before (and MinnPost's Jay Weiner has ably demonstrated), there's no valid reason to change voting requirements, and the proposed changes would disenfranchise legal voters without catching even a minor number of unqualified voters. The most likely category of unqualified voters -- released felons -- would not be turned away under the bill: just people who don't drive, or who move a lot, or who are students. And it will cost towns and cities a bunch of money they don't have, and risk technological snafus that could disenfranchise even more people.

My reasons for opposing the "gay marriage" bill are probably apparent enough. I see no reason for the state to say two people can't legalize their commitment to each other. If same-sex couples could legally marry, there's no way that any dissenting church would be forced to perform such marriages. On the other hand, passing a constitutional amendment that prevents the state from marrying two consenting adults appears to me to be a clear governmental establishment of religion.

But almost worse than the establishment of religion, in this specific case, is the use of the state constitution to deprive a minority of a right. The proposed amendment puts the rights of a minority to a vote of the majority. As has been pointed out by other commentators, imagine where civil rights would be in the South if those rights had been subject to a vote by the Southern majority.

All of this makes me question the idea of initiative and referendum. I'm no scholar of the question, but the devolution of California's governance since the state moved to government by referendum is clear. And none other than my favorite economist Ed Lotterman wrote on this very question the same day as the Strib articles.

Writing in the Pioneer Press, Lotterman convinced me that I shouldn't have voted for the 2008 Legacy Amendment, which placed a sales tax into the state constitution, and dedicated the money to natural resources, the arts and culture (you know, the one with the logo I wrote about a while ago).

Lotterman argues that "in the long run, [dedicated sales taxes] add little to overall spending on the specified purposes because legislators tend to make offsetting decreases in regular appropriations." Even though offsetting decreases were prohibited by the amendment, they're already happening.

His second reason for opposing it was that "since a dedicated sales tax automatically generates a pot of money, agencies that have access to it without overtly going through a legislative request tend to be more casual about spending it than they are about funds for which they have to compete." The current example is the local brouhaha over Neil Gaiman's $47,000 honorarium for speaking at the Stillwater library. Lotterman appears to have nothing against Gaiman, but he asks: "What if the Metropolitan Library Service Agency had looked at its own budget and asked itself, 'Would spending $90 per person for a less-than-two hour event be a good use of money compared with other things we might spend $47,000 on?' I doubt that they would have chosen this particular event."

That does sound about right, I have to admit. Lotterman writes:

It is not that all funds from the dedicated tax are wasted, nor that there is no system for allocating these funds (there is). But the inherent nature of such dedicated taxes is that they diminish incentives for ranking priorities and for careful consideration of competing needs. The result is that society gets fewer of its needs and wants satisfied for each tax dollar than if the same amount had gone through regular budgeting channels. This is what economists call an efficiency loss.

But as a voter who supports a clean environment and arts funding, it would have been very hard for me to vote against the amendment. It's just like dangling an "ooo, shiny!" object in front of a toddler or a crow. And the voter ID amendment is similar -- the "common sense" response is to say, Well, yeah, I have to show an ID to cash a check, why shouldn't everyone have to show one to vote? Or, yeah, it's gross thinking of two guys having sex. They shouldn't be able to get married like me.

And that's it -- it's all too easy to never look into the many, many reasons against a referendum measure before going to cast a ballot to take away someone else's rights. There's a reason we have legislatures, as flawed as they may be.
______

Update: I originally wrote this piece on May 12, but couldn't post it because of the great Blogger crash of 2011. Today's Star Tribune led with a story on another finding from the Minnesota Poll: 55 percent of Minnesotans say they oppose the state constitutional ban on same-sex marriage. It makes me feel better, but doesn't change the fundamental point that a right should not be subject to a majority vote.

Geography of Hate

Richard Florida took the Southern Poverty Law Center's list of hate groups by state and correlated group prevalence with other criteria about each state (voted Obama or McCain, religiosity, socio-economic status, and others).


Florida calls it the Geography of Hate. Minnesota, it turns out, has the lowest number of hate groups per million people. Vermont has the lowest number of groups (two).

The two states with the highest concentration of hate groups are Mississippi and Montana; northern plains and southern states round out the top ten list. Florida's premise is that frustration from low education and economic status leads group members to take out their aggression on the "other" -- based on race, sexual identity, or immigrant status. Which seems pretty obvious, but when you look at his scatter graphs, it doesn't explain Montana.

On the "working class" criterion, for instance, Mississippi swings toward the blue-collar end of the spectrum, but Montana is in line with states like Minnesota; Wisconsin, for instance, is much more working class than Montana but is second lowest on the concentration of hate groups.

Education level is even more anomalous -- Montana has one of the highest levels of education; for religiosity, Montana is in the bottom third of states.

I have some speculation about why Montana comes out so high on the concentration of hate groups list (small population, large land area, tradition of leaving each other alone, which attracts outsiders with a crazy agenda), but Florida never mentions any of that.

By the way, the SPLC defines a hate group as one that has "beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics."

All Equally Important

Sometimes the absurdity of modern life just hits you in the face.

Truck Truck Prius

Parking lots are places of juxtaposition. I've written before when I've observed contrasting politics or cars parked beneath signs that indicate the driver may be making a statement.


Food co-op parking lots are a place where you see a lot of small cars, a few minivans, and the occasional junker, driven by someone who can't bear the idea of consigning so much waste to the junk heap. The percentage with bumper stickers tends to be higher than average. Not to mention the hybrid-to-non-hybrid ratio.

Recently, though, I saw this vehicular sandwich at Seward Co-op in Minneapolis, so I guess my assumptions aren't always correct.

Too Late

Oops.

Seen at a plant sale on Mother's Day weekend.

I Fear for Our Law Schools

Check out this search phrase that turned up recently from a visitor to my site:

is 73%ile on olsat considered average

Wow. I'm pretty sure I've never seen so many errors in so few characters. Illiteracy compounded with innumeracy multiplied by idiocy. Maybe the prediction I recently heard that many of our law schools will go out of business is not such a bad thing after all.

I suppose I should be glad this person spelled "considered" and "average" correctly.

Maybe It Will Be Worth Something Some Day

I was cleaning out a subterranean closet the other day and found a large cardboard box half-full of packing peanuts.

As part of my current cleanup frenzy, I also plan to pack up some under-used dishes, so that box seemed like it had potential as a dish holder. I set it aside for re-use.

Later, when I opened the box and pushed aside some of the peanuts, I felt something in the bottom of the box. It arose from the among the peanuts like a flattened goddess coming out of the sea...


I almost felt nostalgic.

Silly, Fickle Pens

Seen at the New French Bakery, Minneapolis.

Ship of Ghouls

What do you think this is?

My polling place is in the student center of a small seminary in my neighborhood, and this piece of art was suspended above my head as I picked up my ballot.

Since it's a Christian seminary, I quickly figured out it's meant to be a boat, as in "fishers of men."

But doesn't it look a bit more like some type of medieval torture device?

Signs of a Mess

These signs adorned my room when I was a teenager. I just refound them while excavating the basement. I think I've held onto them long enough that they now have some vintage value.

It's interesting how this type of "excuse me, my place is messy" sign is still in vogue. A few I remember seeing in recent years include "Martha Stewart doesn't live here," "A messy house is the sign of a happy quilter," "A clean house is a sign of a wasted life," and "If a messy house is a happy house, this one is delirious."

Maybe It Runs on Used Vegetable Oil

The recently opened Ramsey County Library in Roseville, Minnesota, has about five parking spots near the front door that are reserved for fuel-efficient vehicles. I don't think it's enforced, particularly, and I seem to remember some disgruntled letters to the editor about the spots a few months back. You know, the usual thing about nanny statism.

I swung by the library a few days ago; all the spots were full with compact (but not hybrid) cars, except this one, occupied by a conscientious objector:


P.S. - It's still a Cadillac, even if you remove the name above the grille.

Unintended Consequences of Liposuction

I admit the idea of liposuction has sometimes seemed slightly seductive to me. I'm one of those women who gains weight on her hips and thighs -- which I know is better for my health than if it were at my waist, but still. Wouldn't it be neat if, suddenly, it wasn't there?

Other Americans appear to agree with me because, unlike me, some of them have done something about it: Liposuction is the third most popular cosmetic surgery among both men and women.

Well, there's some bad news for those folks, and a bit of reinforcement for me in my decision to never seriously consider the option. A recent study has found that a year after liposuction, the fat that was surgically removed reappeared, and this time it had moved to parts of the body that are associated with greater health risks. Health blogger Peter Janiszewski described it this way:

Specifically, while fat removed from the thighs and buttocks tended to stay ‘off’, abdominal fat increased to essentially compensate for any initial fat reduction (regardless of whether or not abdominal fat was removed during the procedure). There was a particularly significant growth of fat in the visceral depot.

So, essentially, liposuction can permanently reduce fat stores in areas that may be beneficial to metabolic health (butt, hips and thighs) but increase fat stores in areas known to lead to metabolic problems (abdominal, specifically visceral fat).

Pretty damning stuff.