In the next couple of days, the scale should show a number that starts with a 1. Hooray! That will be a relief. Plus, yesterday someone from outside my immediate family commented on my weight loss. Positive feedback - yay! Too bad that conversation involved the daughter saying “no, Daddy doesn’t exercise!”
The fatblogging train rolls on…
Gov. Kaine has proposed amendments to the Assembly’s kind of pointless post-a-sign-if-you-allow-smoking bill that would ban smoking in any public place where food is served. Unlike most who push these smoking bills, Kaine at least acknowledges the obvious - these laws hurt business:
A conversation with the owner of a prominent Richmond restaurant persuaded Gov. Timothy M. Kaine to seek a legislative ban on smoking in all eateries.”‘I’d like to go no smoking for my employees, but I worry if I do, I’ll lose business’” Kaine quoted the owner, whom he did not name. The restaurateur urged Kaine to apply a ban to all eating establishments.
“I thought that was a fairly compelling insight,” the governor said.
So why did the governor propose the law? A variation of the protect-the-children rationale used to support all nanny state laws, of course.
He proposed the sweeping prohibition to the General Assembly primarily to protect restaurant workers, not customers.
Despite the documented dangers of second-hand smoke to customers, Kaine emphasized, they can choose a nonsmoking restaurant or stay at home and eat.
But it’s not as easy for workers to find other jobs, he explained.
This argument is a big, fat, stinking, moldy-under-the-gills red herring. Here’s a thought experiment - if a restaurant agreed to hire only smokers, would smoking then be OK? After all, surely first-hand smoke is more dangerous than second-hand smoke is. These workers don’t need protection, so smoking should be OK, right? Of course not, since these laws are all about the government telling you what is good for you and restricting what private property owners allow on their property.
This non-smoker hates cigarette smoke as much as anybody. I’d love it if I woke up tomorrow and all restaurants were smoke free. I’d also love it if people didn’t yak on their cell phones while driving, didn’t wear those stupid Bluetooth headsets at the grocery store, didn’t stink up elevators with bad cologne and didn’t wear stupid-looking topical print shirts. But I don’t ask the government to ban any of those things on my behalf. Non-smokers don’t have a right to a smoke-free restaurant any more than smokers have a right to smoke. Private property owners, however, do have a right to control what legal activity is allowed on their property, free from government interference.
So what’s the solution? As with all things, the market. Don’t want cigarette smoke with your smoked turkey? Patronize the many, many restaurants that are already smoke-free. Business owners will get the message. Don’t want to work somewhere where smoking is permitted? Get a different job (and despite what the governor says, there are other jobs). When workers for non-smoke-free restaurants become more scarce, business owners will have to pay more, increasing the economic pressure to go smoke-free. Customers don’t have the right to use the power of the state to remake businesses into what they want them to be. They do have the power to take their money elsewhere.
Hopefully the General Assembly will vote down the governor’s nanny state amendment.
Maybe I haven’t plateaued after all, as I’m beginning to suspect yesterday’s 204 was an aberration. The pollen count in Richmond is way high, and Claritin and Benadryl both seem to cause quite a bit of water retention. Posting more regularly also helps keep me on track. Never underestimate the power of shame.
Another weekend approaches quickly. No Busch Gardens this time, but we do plan a visit to a friend for dinner, so Sunday may be a day of fasting to recover from fasting.
Today’s favorite food product:
Made a taco salad last night using the El Pinto sauce, which added some nice green chile kick without being overwhelming. The medium heat was perfect - the hot would have been too much.
It takes real talent to anger both the Bushies and the anti-Bushies, but Garrison Keillor has managed to do it. First he launched a bizarre tirade against Rudy Giuliani:
Back in 2000, for a City Hall roast, Mr. Giuliani got himself dolled up in drag and made a video in which Donald Trump flirts with him and kisses his breasts. It’s included in a new movie, “Giuliani Time,” and you can see it on YouTube just by typing “Giuliani in drag” into the search box.
Say what you will about the Current Occupant, there is no video out there of him waltzing around in a long lavender gown and a brassiere, and blond wig, while an aging tycoon nuzzles his chest. He may have sunk low back in his drinking days, but he managed to keep his adventures private. I doubt that Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney or Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) ever donned women’s apparel for the cameras….
There are plenty of bigger issues. But the video has a creepy fascination to it. The man in the lavender dress and the blond wig surely never contemplated running for president. It was the two planes hitting the towers a year later that made him a celebrity and then a candidate, nothing he had accomplished himself in public office.
Mr. Giuliani should put the issue behind him by answering a few questions: (1) How much did he have to drink that night, and what was he drinking? (2) Whose idea was it–his own or an aide’s? If the latter, was there wagering involved and how much was bet? (3) Were the garments new or used, and who picked them out? And was he wearing male or female underthings? (4) On a scale of 1 to 10, how good did he feel in that dress?
Now he’s taking on gay marriage and gay parents:
I grew up the child of a mixed-gender marriage that lasted until death parted them…. Back in the day, that was the standard arrangement. Everyone had a yard, a garage, a female mom, a male dad, and a refrigerator with leftover boiled potatoes in plastic dishes with snap-on lids….
Under the old monogamous system, we didn’t have the problem of apportioning Thanksgiving and Christmas among your mother and stepdad, your dad and his third wife, your mother-in-law and her boyfriend Hal, and your father-in-law and his boyfriend Chuck. Today, serial monogamy has stretched the extended family to the breaking point. A child can now grow up with eight or nine or 10 grandparents—Gampa, Gammy, Goopa, Gumby, Papa, Poopsy, Goofy, Gaga and Chuck—and need a program to keep track of the actors…
And now gay marriage will produce a whole new string of hyphenated relatives. In addition to the ex-stepson and ex-in-laws and your wife’s first husband’s second wife, there now will be Bruce and Kevin’s in-laws and Bruce’s ex, Mark, and Mark’s current partner, and I suppose we’ll get used to it.
The country has come to accept stereotypical gay men—sardonic fellows with fussy hair who live in over-decorated apartments with a striped sofa and a small weird dog and who worship campy performers and go in for flamboyance now and then themselves. If they want to be accepted as couples and daddies, however, the flamboyance may have to be brought under control. Parents are supposed to stand in back and not wear chartreuse pants and black polka-dot shirts. That’s for the kids. It’s their show.
Of course, Keillor’s act has always been based on his fuddy-duddiness, but he does seem to be going off the deep end a bit, seeing a chartreuse-panted cross dresser around every corner. Now that both the conservatives and the liberals recognize that he’s an ass when he’s not rolling out the well-worn Guy Noir schtick, can we just kill his syndicated column already?
Although I managed to shed almost 40 pounds before hitting a plateau, it appears to be Mesa City this week. Of course, the way to get to the downslope on the other side is to get more exercise, but time has been short lately. Time to bust out the bike.
Like the graph to the right? It’s entirely done within Wordpress, using Pasi Matilainen’s Simple Graph plugin. The text block under the graph is automagically generated using the plugin’s database entries and PHP. I used to do something similar using EditGrid, but this solution works better and doesn’t rely on the availability of a third party site.
