Author: matthew

Yep, by popular demand (OK, two people) I’ve uploaded The Right Of Way. This was Wayward Sun’s second album, and number seven on Justin’s list of what it’s about darn time for. I’ll be putting a bit more history up on my weblog regarding the making of this album later, but for now, here are the songs. Special thanks to Justin Timpane for going through the painstaking effort of ripping, fixing, de-noisifying, and encoding these files.

I’ve also linked these from Matt’s Music Page so people can get two-click access to these tunes.

The Right Of Way: This link allows you to stream the entire album from start to finish. Requires WinAmp, xmms, or compatible mp3 player and a broadband connection.

The links below allow you to download the songs individually; they are generaly 5 to 6 megabytes apiece (You do the math to see how long they’ll take to download on your computer). Right-click and “save as” if you want to save it to your hard drive instead of play it immediately.

1. Compulsive Fire: “You’re telling me lies… so shut up and die!”. Yet another rebel tune by Sammy G, master of angst, anger, and attitude.
2. All Over Again: Growing up, Matt Barnson’s family had a habit of picking up stray people and letting them live with us for a while. Two of them were beautiful girls who, of course, the prepubescent Barnboy got a crush on. This was written for them. The author no longer has a crush on either one 🙂
3. Leave It All Behind: Written by Matthew Barnson, it was supposed to capture the essence of making it big in the music business. It ended up being kind of a lengthy, boring, almost-metal wannabe tune.
4. Afterlife: OK, if I recall correctly, this one was by Sam and Ben? Correct me if I’m wrong guys. And after years of only contemplating the meaning of this song when I was really, really bored, I still haven’t figured out exactly what it’s about. “We float about on pencil tips searching for the end of the torture that we suffer”? Hmm, Ben, you didn’t tell us about any psychoactive substances in your high-school years…
5. Chica’s Rag: Ode to a fangirl of the band. Her real name was, erm, Cathy, I think. She was very nice and quiet, but devoted. The song started as a jam session, with everybody kind of goofing around. Kevin was enjoying a new beat he’d made up, Sam was just barely learning bass and began a pretty simple riff, I decided to play some seventies-style “Wokka-Wokka” on the guitar, and Ben figured out a chord progression. Then one day Sam strutted in with some lyrics, Ben fleshed out the harmonies, Kevin elaborated on the drums, I stuck with the “Wokka-Wokka”, and Chica’s Rag was born.
6. House Of Dreams: The intro is a piano duet that nobody remembers how to play. Another Sam & Ben collaboration, combining Sam’s angst with Ben’s meaningless but elegant lyricism. It makes for a powerful combination saying… something 🙂 The first of our tunes where the guitar actually seems to be both prominent and reasonably good-sounding. The execrable “Leave It All Behind” doesn’t count :).
7. Kevin: Obviously, Kevin had no idea this song was going to go on the album until the last minute. Dani Haslam sang vocals, and it was a totally synthesized song. If I recall correctly, Kevin had been going through one of many crises at the time we were laying down this album, and this was kind of a “pick you up” tune. Some love it, some hate it.
8. One Man: This song by Matthew Barnson is best noted for the fact it has been remade at least four times. The first time was on Sam’s T-1 synth, sequenced in memory. I lost that copy. The second time was this album. The third time was on “No Further Questions”, the album the band did after I moved. The fourth time, I did it, and you can hear it elsewhere on this web site. Still not entirely done, though some people think the latest version is fine as it is.
   Anyway, I wrote it, as with most my songs, to impress a girl. This girl was named Jenny, whom I hadn’t seen since fifth grade. She was a pacifistic-type person, thus the line “Some would say the use of force is letting Nature run its course; they can’t see time passing them by”. She loved it. Too bad I can’t remember her last name.
9. Breathless I was goofing around with an introduction that I was trying to make a song from. Sam asked, “Hey, Matt, mind if I borrow that?”. Since I hadn’t managed to make anything meaninful out of the chord progression yet, other than a noodle, I said “sure”, and a few weeks later, Sam came out of the recording study at UMBC with this tune.
10. Don’t Let The Song Pass You By: Mucho Thanko to Juli Graber for providing the “Aye Aye Aye Aye” part of this tune, the most memorable thing about it 🙂 Ultimately written by Matthew Barnson, but with lots of input from other band members, and a gaggle of partially-drunk party-goers as well.

I thought you might be interested in the results from my first three weeks on Atkins:

Dropped 12 pounds from 240 to 228.

Lost (almost) two inches on my waist. Curiously, my hips and chest are just about the same size as when I started — too large :).

Energy level is constantly high.

Mood swings gone. Entirely. No more “three o’clock crash” at all! I go to bed around midnight, and wake up right around 7 AM (Mmm, there are some fun things about being out of work) and I’m perky and chipper the whole day through.

Eczema (very dry, cracking, bleeding skin): virtually gone. My case was never very serious to begin with, but very annoying. As far as I’m concerned, this is a very, very dramatic improvement.

Irritable Bowel: The jury is still out on this. I’m still in Induction, which tends to cause mild diarrhea. Since I was normally moderately diarrheic on a pretty regular basis before ever starting, it doesn’t feel that different (except I’m going a whole lot less). It will be interesting when I introduce more fiber to see what happens. However, I do not get the, erm, “explosive” qualities unless I overdo it on certain artificial sweeteners.

Headaches: Gone. Haven’t had one. Almost had one one day while we were on vacation (a very slight ache), but that also happened to be the time when I was fudging a bit too much on my diet. Drinking more water and steering clear of carbs I’m not familiar with cleared it up.

I’m still irritable occasionally. I’ll have to see what happens as time goes on. I seem to be irritable less often than before, but that’s a really tough call.

So far, I’m really impressed. I’m eager to see what the long-term effects are!

So I learned something new Thursday…

My son, Elijah, loves devilled eggs!

I thought about this for a few minutes, and realized why.

Little children love bright-colored food, particularly reds and yellows. Devilled eggs, if properly prepared with mustard included, have very bright yellow yolks, that are then sprinkled with bright red Paprika.

Kind of exciting, that. I prepared two-dozen devilled eggs this afternoon, and remembered why I like them so much. Immediately after I made them, there are… two dozen minus three 🙂

“No diet will remove all the fat from your body because the brain is entirely fat. Without a brain, you might look good, but all you could do is run for public office.”

-George Bernard Shaw

So I read this disturbing article today from Googling for "Atkins nutritionally incomplete". I picked up on that phrase from Medical Research Council’s Dr. Susan Jebb.

Although I realize that people are allowed to have differing opinions on Atkins-type diets, such as the South Beach Diet, Somersizing, Cave Man, etc., it really bugs me when articles completely distort the truth. I feel the need to refute a few glaring misconceptions. I believe the misconceptions are on the part of the reporter writing the article, not on the part of Dr. Jebb who was very selectively quoted. It’s natural for the medical establishment to go slowly when entering new territory; it’s the nature of the Hippocratic oath to “first, do no harm”. So I don’t blame her, but it seems like these misconceptions are endemic to the misconceptions of people who have not read the available literature and many long-term (thirty years so far, in some cases!) studies thoroughly.

1. “The Atkins diet cuts out carbohydrates and boosts consumption of protein without having to avoid fatty foods.”

   This is a totally misleading statement. I’ve now read two of Dr. Atkins’ books, and nowhere do they say to "cut out carbohydrates". It’s true that, for the first two weeks of the diet, he encourages those who are significantly overweight (more than 10-20 lbs for women, or 20-30 lbs for men) to go into “induction”, which involves reducing total carbohydrates to below 20 grams per day. Those 20 grams must come from green leafy vegetables, certain low-carbohydrate but highly nutritive vegetables such as broccoli, and cheeses or other foods in great moderation. "Cut out" carbs? I think not. Sensible low-carb plans obviously reduce carbs, but carbohydrates are a vital part of one’s body chemistry. We low-carbers simply become more selective about which carbohydrates we’ll allow to pass our lips, and in what quantity.

2. “On the other hand, large-scale studies looking at the general effects of eating different kinds of food had yielded a wealth of data.
   They showed that people who ate the most carbohydrates had the lowest rates of heart disease.”

   The unfortunate fact is that, in combination with a way of eating high in refined carbohydrates, saturated fat kills. On the other hand, in combination with low-carbohydrate eating habits, all the classic warning signs of heart disease tend to drop dramatically. Atkins developed his original plan for heart patients, and it was enormously successful in that capacity, often allowing patients to get off cardiac medication.

   On the third hand, Dr. Atkins went into cardiac arrest in a restaurant at the age of 72, roughly one year before his death from a fall. However, it wasn’t due to the traditional clogged pipes; instead, his heart had been damaged by an infection for which he’d been in treatment for two years, which was the cause of his arrest. All the pipes leading to his ticker, and the muscle that had not been damaged by the infection, were in perfect working order.

   Low-carb eating patterns improve cardiovascular health, lower triglycerides, improved HDL concentrations, and tend to lower LDL. We’re all going to die from something, but the chances are good if you begin low-carbing early enough in life, that it won’t be from clogged arteries.

   One important exception: idiots that attempt to go low-carb/low-fat kill themselves. Now that has been well-documented. In addition, as more people hop on the low-carb bandwagon, people will focus on their diet rather than thinking of these deaths as a tragic accident. It’s kind of like when a Catholic priest molests a child, it’s front-page news, whereas when Joe Schmoe molests a child, it ends up on the court report page. When someone who has done Atkins dies of heart problems, it’s a big deal. When someone who isn’t on Atkins dies of a heart problem, it’s not. I have to find myself wondering, as well, if these “Atkins-related deaths” that are fashionable in the news lately were from people that really were going about it in a safe, sensible way and had read the book, or if they’d tried to concoct their own diet regimen that resulted in heart damage. An interesting thought that needs more study to find out, I think.

3. “Fibre, found in carbohydrate food, helped the body eliminate toxins and was associated with reduced levels of cholesterol.”

   The reporter here seems to assume that those on Atkins don’t get enough fiber. I beg to differ; I’m eating more fiber today than I ever did on any other “diet”. And I’m eating significantly more healthy dietary fiber as a result of following Dr. Atkins plan, even though I’m on induction, than I did in my usual standard American diet (SAD).

   Atkins does, however, recommend fiber supplements for those people who get clogged up. I’d recommend the same to anybody on any diet — if you’re getting backed up, start taking some stuff to flush it out rather than crapping a brick once every two weeks. As for me, my intestinal problems tend to err on the other side of that scale, and all the bloating, cramps, and other symptoms of irritable bowel seem to have largely disappeared for me. Except when I got too excited about some imitation sweets… even a few of those seem to cause pretty severe gastro troubles for me, as well as a bunch of other people.

4. “Carbohydrates were also the source of essential vitamins and plant nutrients, which anyone on the Atkins diet would have to consume as supplements.”

   Another totally off-base statement. Dr. Atkins recommends supplements to fend off dietary insufficiencies due to many vegetables and fruits found in supermarkets today lacking the nutrients they would possess if grown more organically, rather than mass-produced in soil that is long-since depleted and living on fertilizer. You could choose to address those deficiencies by using organically-grown fruits and vegetables with the diet.

   The supplements Dr. Atkins recommends are the same that most Americans should probably be taking anyway. Cover your bases, be sure you have sufficient vitamins, minerals, and essential fatty acids. The dude went from being a cardiologist to a specialist in nutrition therapy; it’s natural that he suggests supplementation or behavioral changes in certain areas to correct problems without traditional medications. The problem is not a low-carbohydrate diet; it is that man evolved for millions of years living off the land. Only in the last six thousand years have we learned agriculture, and with that monoculture, we introduce some dietary deficiencies that today we can alleviate using supplements. People who supplement B vitamins, even on the best of diets, tend to have fewer mood swings. People who supplement potassium, or make sure that their diet includes potassium-rich foods, avoid muscle cramps from the lack of it. Supplementation on Atkins is just that — a supplement, not a replacement for proper nutrition from one’s diet. I personally have mega-dosed vitamin C for a long time to avoid colds, and it seems to work like a charm. Although I can get sufficient from my diet, why not use a tool if it’s available?

5. “There was also good evidence that eating excess protein can cause kidney damage, and may lead the body to lose calcium.”

   This is simply untrue, an urban legend, and a twisting of evidence to fit opinion. There has never been a single case where someone with healthy kidneys damaged them by doing Atkins. In the case of individuals with advanced kidney disease, a diet high in protein or in water can further damage already sensitive kidneys. But in most cases, the kidney damage was caused by excessive glucose in the bloodstream in the first place, which is directly attributable to a high-carbohydrate diet! In some cases I’ve read about, going to low-carb diets allows the kidneys to repair some of the damage caused by the high-carb diets.

   Additionally, Atkins need not be considered “high-protein”. It’s only “high fat” or “high protein” compared to low-fat diets and the horribly imbalanced “food pyramid” idea, really. Induction isn’t nearly the entire eating plan, and the other phases of Atkins feature a pretty darn significant percentage of calories from carbs as well as proteins and fats.

   But people in advanced stages of kidney failure shouldn’t be making drastic changes in their diet without the supervision of a knowledgeable physician, anyway.

6. “A study published in the Lancet last month also shows that eating too much fat can double a woman’s risk of breast cancer.”

   Once again, this is only in the case of a high-fat, high-carbohydrate diet. High-fat, low-carbohydrate diets, with adequate fiber (which the Atkins plan provides for easily) appear to reduce cancer risk across the board.

   One must wonder, though, if they reduce the cancer risk just because people are finally really watching what they eat 🙂 Similar cancer risks happen in healthy, non-overweight vegetarians, so one has to wonder if perhaps reduction in cancer risk is simply the result of following any eating plan that covers all the nutritional bases, like Atkins does.

7. “It was psychologically easier to follow than harsher low-fat regimes, but worked the same way as any diet – by reducing calorie intake.”

   While I must agree this diet is much, much easier to follow than the “eat less” plan I’ve always followed in the past to drop a few pounds, I have to disagree on the “reducing the calorie intake” bit. I’m averaging 2400-2900 calories per day at six feet tall, thirty years old, and 230 lbs (woot, go me! 10 lbs lost in two weeks!). The results are all out of proportion to the calorie intake.

   And people who say “it’s all water” are just lying. I know people who have lost over 100 lbs in a year in the OWL phase (Ongoing Weight Loss — much less strict than Induction) of Atkins. That’s a heck of a lot of water.

   There’s a well-documented "metabolic advantage" to a low-carb regimen. The body shifts from primarily carbohydrate-burning mode into fat-burning mode. The switch is automatic, and seems to be rooted in our hunter/gatherer evolutionary heritage. There would be lean times, where the only food one had was that mammoth carcass sitting out in the snow. And the tribe would eat it for weeks. Ketosis/lipolysis begins in the liver, where it converts fats and proteins into glucose for use by the body. Blood sugar remains amazingly constant when one is in this mode, which tends to prevent hunger, reduce cravings, and generally keep one’s spirits up. This, too, seems to be an evolutionary advantage for our species.

   What’s the “metabolic advantage”, calorie-wise, to low-carb eating habits? The chemical reactions required to sustain ketosis/lipolysis occur at far less than 100% efficiency. The most common statistic bandied about is “58%”. So the reality is, eating exactly the same amount of calories as one normally would to maintain weight, but doing so on a low-carb regimen, results in weight loss due to his inefficiency. The ketones that are “left over” after the chemical reactions are all done show up in one’s urine. This is a perfectly safe reaction, far different than “ketoacidosis”, the diabetic condition that also results in ketones, but in the presence of wildly out-of-control blood sugar being dumped into the urine in the body’s desperate attempt to overcome high-carbohydrate ingestion without insulin production.

   Anyway, here’s the fact: you can eat the exact same number of calories you were eating in high-carb, on a low-carb plan, and lose weight doing so. Of course, calorie reduction accelerates the process. And if you’re significantly overweight, you’ll reach a point where you need to crank back the calories in order to continue losing. But that point is far more calories per day than the same individual could sustain in a high-carb diet without gaining weight.

   A calorie is a calorie is a calorie. Until you are talking about the human body when it switches from carb-burning mode to ketosis/lipolysis. And then the rules change. A lot.

8. “Dr Ogden said with any diet, about 60% of people succeed in losing weight at the start. But over the next three to 10 years, 95% to 99% of dieters regained the weight they lost.

   She said: “Some gain even more weight than they had in the first place.””

   Sad but true. The advantage of the Atkins way of eating is that it is much easier to maintain than a lifelong “eat less” regimen. I don’t have any statistics on retention rates, but the amazing thing about people who remain low-carb for life (and I intend to be one of them — no diabetes for me, thanks, I’d be stupid to eat like I’ve been eating with my massive family history of diabetes) is that they can continue to eat satisfying, filling, wholesome foods, as long as their carbohydrates are only consumed in moderation while avoiding all refined carbohydrates. From the people I know who have stuck to it for years, it’s the easiest way of eating to maintain known to man.

End of my rant. I just hate it when people automatically assume that because I’m doing Atkins that I’m gorging on red meat and avoiding all fruits and vegetables. I’m eating far more veggies on my Atkins regimen than I ever did on my standard American diet. Eventually, I’ll get into more fruits, but that’s several weeks away at least. It’s simply a healthier way of eating, for me, and for many other people who have pretty bad reactions to refined carbs.

Of course, there are people blessed with different metabolisms that thrive on high-carb diets. And I wish them well. But I think I’ve definitely found a way of eating, in avoiding the refined carbs that are the plague of the 20th and 21st centuries, that suits my body chemistry and have already helped me keep much more even energy levels and avoid unpleasant side-effects of a refined carbohydrate diet.

All in all, this piece sounds like a PCRM (Physician’s Committee for Responsible Medicine) publicity piece. PCRM is a front for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, a militantly anti-meat group. More information available about PCRM available here.

My mother has often told me a story from my childhood about myself that I will relate here, although I have no first-hand memory of it.

My mother was attempting to potty-train me. In those days, around 1975, although disposable diapers were catching on, they were still expensive compared to using old-fashioned cloth diapers. I was raised to the cloth, I guess 😉

Those of you who know me well know that I am very literal-minded. Although I have grand dreams and aspirations, I’m very grounded in the real world; I tend to take things very literally. It often impacts my comedic timing, because I won’t realize someone’s telling a joke. I’ll take the barb personally and try to carefully consider what the person was saying, completely missing the sarcasm.

Anyway, the way my mother worked on training me was to show me where the poo-poo goes. (I apologize for the plethora of poop stories here in the last week, my brain is focussed a lot on excretion lately I guess.) To give me a sensible understanding of where I’m supposed to do my duty, rather than in my pants, she would take me by the hand and lead me to the bathroom. There, she would patiently remove the soiled undergarments, dump the contents into the toilet, say “ooh, yucky,” and flush the contents down. If I recall correctly, she would then rinse the worst of the mess off the diaper there in the toilet so there was less to wash off later.

I watched her do this several times, and she finally became very excited when the light bulb seemed to turn on, and I got it!

I approached my mother, took her by the hand, and led her carefully to the bathroom. There I raised the toilet lid, pulled down my pants, took off my soiled diaper, dumped the contents in the toilet, said “ooh, yucky!” then flushed it down.

The moral of the story? Actions speak much louder than words… or intentions 🙂

Sadly, I only kept one journal entry for the entire four days or so I was in St. George and Las Vegas. Darnit. Oh well, we have a few pictures I’ll upload later. And I apologize for the second half of this blog sounding like a Worldmark advertisement! Anyway, here’s the entry…

---

Barnson St. George Vacation, Day 2

The sounds of a waterfall and the squeals of delighted children waft up to my ears on the second floor balcony of the “Worldmark the Club” St. George resort.  Some more hardy souls, all children, brave the sixty-eight degree weather to snorkel in the pool beneath the small waterfall.  As I peer down now, though, most are, instead, hanging out in the hot tub.

My children are playing on the playset in the sand near the pool, obliviously sliding down the slide, swinging, and traversing the horizontal bars, without a care in the world.  They seem grateful to be outside playing in a small “park” after several weeks of cold weather in our native Tooele.

It’s amazing to me what a difference in the weather a few thousand feet of elevation and five and a half hours of driving can bring.  Utah’s Dixie is really, really different from the area around Salt Lake we just left.  In the Salt Lake/Provo area, we had left in the midst of a driving rain/sleet combination, with the precipitation falling so fast and thick that we were often relegated to driving forty miles per hour in the midst of a sixty-five zone.  Traffic was heavy, accidents were littering the sides of the freeway, and it was rather stressful.  About ten miles south of Provo on I-15, though, traffic finally cleared out, the rain lifted, and the rest of our trip was rather uneventful, except for a few bathroom breaks and a gas stop.

We scheduled this trip, ostensibly, to attend the wedding of Christy’s first cousin, Heidi.  Heidi’s getting married in Vegas to some guy who’s name neither one of us can recall at the moment.  Apparently, the two knew each other in high school.  They had crushes on one another in high school, and never pursued anything… apparently, he’s been married and now divorced after several children.  They ended up on the same airplane together, began comparing stories, and decided to begin seeing more of one another.  They did a long-distance dating thing, with him in Las Vegas and her in Orem.  And now they’re getting hitched.  Pretty cool for them, and a great excuse for us to get out and chill out!

The St. George Worldmark resort is pretty nice.  If you aren’t a Worldmark owner, and have a chance to sit through a Trendwest Resorts presentation, here’s what I suggest:

1. Be sure you have about $8,000 to spare.  That’s the going rate for a minimum entry into “the club”.  For those yearly vacations, I consider this number totally worth it.  We haven’t been to a Worldmark resort yet that we did not like.  If you can’t afford that amount of money in cash (you can bet your butt we didn’t have that kind of dough laying around), then you can normally get financing for under $200 a month.  Trendwest, Worldmark’s promotional contractor, will finance you, but they charge relatively high interest rates.  Better to walk in knowing exactly how much money you have to invest.  That $8,000 will buy you roughly the equivalent of a week of vacation at a nice resort somewhere in the western U.S.
2. Ensure you can afford about $400 per year in maintenance fees.
3. Hawaii, Australia, and RCI exchanges are relatively expensive places (in points you purchased) to attend.  Even with a modest amount of points, though, you can make it there on a minimum investment.  You just need to save all of last year’s points, use this year’s points, and borrow against next year’s points 🙂  Not too big a deal.
4. Here’s our favorite part: make sure you have some Worldmark resorts close enough to drive to easily.  They have a feature called “Bonus Time”.  Basically, if the resort has rooms free, if you schedule with two weeks notice or less, you can go to the resort without spending your yearly points, and just pay a fee based on the season and “color” of the resort you’re going to.  The Las Vegas resorts, for instance, are red year-round.  Bear Lake, in Utah, is very cheap in the spring and fall because, well, you can’t ski there in either season, and you can’t swim very easily there in either season.  It’s very nice for a cozy getaway for two or for a family.
5. Your membership is an asset.  You can sell it, give it away, or let friends use it.
6. Once you’re a member, expect every-other-month calls from a Trendwest representative trying to get you to buy more points, sign up for some new promotional deal, or whatnot.  That’s a small annoyance, but it doesn’t take us much to say “no”.  I make sure and  differentiate the marketing company, Trendwest, from the wonderful resort company, Worldmark the Club.  The Club rocks; the marketing company is, well, a marketing company 🙂

We really love it.  Our traditional arrangement these days is a 2-bedroom condo.  They are quite nice.  They always have a kitchen with good cooking amenities (for us, pretty equivalent to our home, but fewer dishes), and a pull-down “Murphy Bed” built into the wall of the common room.  This room we’re in now has huge walk-in closets for both bedrooms.  We’ve never been in a Worldmark room that wasn’t really well-designed and comfortable.  They spend a lot of time on the decor of their resorts, and it shows.  This is no hotel room.  We really feel like we have a temporary home here.  And often, we find ourselves wishing we could stay a lot longer!

Heh, the only tough question is, “is it worth the $8000 debt and $400/year we spend?”  In my opinion, absolutely.  We’ve paid some interest, but built great memories.  And knowing that we have a yearly budget for vacations that amounts to several thousand dollars, and points we need to spend or else they will expire, gives us an incentive to make time every year to go on vacation together as a family.

These are precious memories that are worth any price, in my opinion.

So, I’ve been on Atkins a couple weeks, and now I’m starting to experiment here and there with some “fake foods”. My latest research involves Maltitol. I thought I’d share some of the results of that research…

Maltitol is a sugar alcohol that is not completely absorbed by the small intestine. The result is that, despite its very sugar-like taste and bulk, it doesn’t generally spike insulin levels, and many of the carbs go down the crapper unabsorbed by your body. But it turns out, to most of the bacteria in your low intestine, a carbohydrate is food. Period. Even if it’s a sugar alcohol. This results in interesting effects that are generally tactfully referred to as “the laxative effect”. Thought I’d share:

Maltitol makes me fart. I had thought that I lost that capability after seriously starting to low carb and it was sad because I had a pretty good reputation as a stinky ripper! I had an identity crisis in the works.
Now, I can joyfully report that I’m back in action thanks to the **tol sugar alcohols. Of course, the aroma is not nearly as devastating as it once was but at least the “sounds” are there so I can at least offend one sense. I guess you can’t have everything.

–“Tony D.”, usenet, asdl-c

For a few, the laxative effect is pronounced, and even a small amount will trigger unpleasant symptoms.

—lowcarb.ca tip

>Funny story, I found some jelly belly jelly beans at an airport store
>one night waiting for a connecting flight. On the front it said made
>with Splenda. One serving is 35 beans. So, I counted out my beans and
>ate em. About an hour later, on the plane, I thought I was going to die!

Same here. Those things wiped me out — cramps, diarrhea, the works. If you read the fine print on the package (VERY fine, I might add), they suggest that if you’ve never had them before that you should eat *half* of one serving.

I don’t handle sugar alcohols well, and those things were by far the most terrifyingly explosive mistake I’ve made so far. Yikes! Never again.

–“Dawn”, Usenet asdl-c

I had bought a shitload of Russel Stovers Pecan Delights (the SF Maltitol kind)…..they were in a big pile on the kitchen table — right there where I could see them everytime I walked by. So, Friday, Sat night, and Sunday were “Attack of the Maltitol Consuming Monster” on RS Pecan Delights (not Sat daytime ’cause I had a date then so I had to get myself under control long enough for that) . It was quite the explosive & smelly weekend too:(

–“Roger Zoul”, Usenet, asdl-c

The moral of the story? Be very, very careful when playing with fake food. It may blow up on you, and not in your face.

That said, I bought a box of Russel Stover mint chocolates tonight — the low-carb kind (that seem really similar to the “sugar free” kind, except they cost twice as much). I guess being unemployed is as good a time as any to experiment with potential gastrointestinal disasters…

I’m gone for the weekend. I’ll be back on Monday. In the meantime, Justin, Jon, Sam, whomever — you guys toss some funny stuff up here, would you?

Unfortunately, this means that I also won’t be approving any anonymous comments, and I fear for the state of my inbox. But hey, it’s nice to get away for a while, and I’ll be taking my laptop to record some of the experiences!

In case you are interested, we’re heading to St. George, Utah. It’s about an hour northwest of Las Vegas. We’ll be hitting Vegas for one day over the weekend, but since neither of us really likes to gamble, our money will be staying safely in our wallets. A wedding will take place Saturday afternoon in Vegas, which is the ostensible reason for us going. And we plan to spend a good part of the evening watching the free shows along the Strip. If I recall correctly, even in November, Vegas stays comfortably in the sixties and low seventies, so here’s hoping it’s windbreaker weather rather than heavy coats!

Over at slashdot.org, they have a pretty nifty feature. As a subscriber, for free, you can keep a “journal”, or “blog”, of sorts. It doesn’t have nearly the nifty features I get here with Drupal, such as photos, private messages, recipes, etc… but nevertheless, since they are hosted on such beefy servers, over such a massive connection, with hundreds of thousands of daily readers, it’s a compelling proposition to maintain one’s weblog there.

This morning, for the first time in several months, one of the people I’ve flagged as a “friend”, Ironica, posted a new journal entry. And it’s compelling.

Ironica offers a potential way to begin returning more accountability to the health care industry. Not doctors, specifically, but requirements for the common good of mankind that certain drugs (AIDS drugs, for instance), after the company has recouped their investment, begin mandatorily lowering prices. I’m not a fan of government intervention, but there are certain industries where it is ethically acceptable, and possibly even necessary, that regulation intervene in the interest of protecting consumers from otherwise rampant fraud and extortionary pricing.

What do you think about Ironica’s idea?