Happy New Year!

Yeah, so I'm a day late.

I've written checks and gotten the year right, so wonders truly will never cease.

There was a Bones marathon yesterday. Today, I unexpectedly had a lot more child care than I thought I would. T. went over to B.'s house, and R. went to work, so it was just me and A. for hours and hours. After sleeping in, eating a leisurely breakfast and deciding to do nothing useful beyond cleaning up after breakfast, I loafed in the glider rocker all day nursing A. and watching Bones.

Bones is not as fun as NCIS which, in turn, just isn't as much as Stargate was. But I've seen all of SG-1 (including the two specials), and don't care for Atlantis, and I'm waiting for the rest of season 5 of NCIS in the mail so Bones it is. There are a wide variety of really entertaining essays that could be written on how certain news items are really appealing to the writers of police procedural TV shows (as near as I can tell, that idiot who did all the Gone Wild crap and his subsequent arrest and trial is just irresistible, but bodies being blown into the ceiling is also really tempting). But I'm not in high school -- or even college -- any more.

ETA: Oh, yeah, and the whole kiddie pageant thing. It's like crack for police procedural screenwriters.

Fosamax might be causing bone problems: this time, the jaw

I have an Issue with bone health, which largely derives from my mother freaking out about me not getting enough milk because I'm allergic to it. She believed (presumably still does) that not drinking milk would cause me to get osteoporosis. When I finally put my foot down and cleaned all the milk out of my diet (and thus dramatically increased the likelihood that I'd live long enough to develop osteoporosis, praise be to the Great Goddess Who Smirks Down on Us All), she then proceeded to lean even more heavily on me to take calcium pills. Those just gave me horrible stomach and intestinal pains; as a result, I quit supplements, too, and didn't resume until I developed some gum problems when T. was small.

So when Fosamax and similar prescriptions appeared to try to prevent osteoporosis, you can imagine my reaction: deep and abiding hostility and suspicion.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090101135207.htm

Every few months or year or so, some little tidbit shows up to support the validity of my deep and abiding hostility and suspicion. And not just to Fosamax; my anger and rage are remarkably well-targeted for something so seemingly random and irrational, not to mention baseless -- or at least based on extremely small samples.

Wow. Get a tooth pulled and your jawbone dies if you take this crap. Stay away. If you are short, light skinned and weigh about 100 pounds or less (only one of which applies to me) and therefore at elevated risk of osteoporosis, keep your blood sugar under control (and don't challenge it excessively) and get consistently weight bearing exercise. Those are your best bets. Honest. The whole blood sugar/bone health thing is still inadequately understood, but you can still Do the Right Thing.

Oh, yeah. And eat your dark green and leafy vegetables. Maybe take a little cod liver oil.

The End for Vice: Bullying? Bullying?!

http://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/2009/01/wall_street200901

According to this piece, one of the things that drove spendthrift wall-street luxury was peer pressure.

"“The culture was that if you didn’t spend extravagantly you’d be ridiculed at work,” says a former Lehmanite."

I could not possibly make that up. You know, we used to have sumptuary laws to prevent extravagance. It became _mandatory_?