the cat & dragon rag

Who made you get a LiveJournal? Post that person’s LJ, and if this meme spreads, see, you’ll eventually be able to click click click and see who your LJ grandfather, great grandmother, great great grandthing, etc, etc, is all the way back to the pioneer days.

I checked out LiveJournal in February 2001 as a result of email sent to the www.polyamory.org webmaster, which is me, telling me about the polyamory community on LiveJournal. I'm pretty sure that insomnia sent the email. At the time I joined, none of my in-person or net.friends were on LJ -- which was, in fact, the attraction at the time. (I was feeling disillusioned with my on-line communities.)

Tom Cruise is obese and Jackie Chan is overweight, according to new standards.

The claim that excess weight kills 300,000 Americans each year is bizarre in its assumption that overweight people are officially immune to all other causes of death. As insane as it sounds, if Cruise were to kick the bucket for any reason, he would count toward the mythical 300,000 total.

But wait, there's more!

Still, this flawed number finds its way into nearly every public discussion about obesity -- as does the spurious claim that obesity costs Americans more than $100 billion every year. That figure is derived from a single 1998 study published by the journal Obesity Research. This study had serious limitations. The authors acknowledged that their methods allowed for the "double-counting of costs" that "would inflate the cost estimate." They also admitted that "height and weight are not included in many of the primary data sources" that they relied upon.

Worse yet, these bean-counters used the wrong definition of obesity. Traditionally, a BMI of 30 or more makes you obese, but the authors decided to arbitrarily set their threshold at 29. A small error? Not at all. They wound up wrongly including the health costs of more than 10 million Americans.

inspired by snippy

for some folks, online friends don't fill the same social needs as in-person friends.

for those of you who have had difficulty at times making in-person friends, and have found ways to solve that problem, what worked for you?

Some things that have worked for me are

• inviting co-workers to a home-made dinner
  
• joining and organizing ongoing religious/spiritual groups (in my case, eclectic/women's spirituality/shamanic)
  
• participating in and organizing in-person meetings of people I knew from online forums
  

Things that seem to work for other people that don't usually work for me are

• parties
  
• bars
  
• volunteering (I love volunteering, but I haven't usually made friends that way)
  
• classes