i don't like being outdoors smithers. for one thing, there's too many fat children.

there are three sides to every story. that's what i've heard anyway; your side, my side, and the truth. so monday night, during a commercial on monday night raw, i surfed the channels; i mean world's fattest blackest mark henry was on, you would have changed it too, or resorted to self-immolation had you been unable to find the remote. luckily for me the remote was easily located and so i stopped on ABC, which was showing this investigative deal on what i guess was the state of nutrition on america. basically it was peter jennings railing on the food industry for making america the fattest population on the planet, and in the subsequent interviews, food industry figures making the case that they were simply giving the public what they said they wanted in the way of more food, which is basically to say larger portions, increased convenience and the like. further copping out, they gave the somewhat oversimplistic explanation that if americans wanted to avoid becoming overweight and obese, the answer was to excercise more.

the truth, as always, lay somewhere in between both accounts, or perhaps beyond them, if you're a philosophical type who doesn't dig continuums (continua??) . i got the impression while watching the thing that the media were (was??) trying to make the food industry its next scapegoat, like what they did with tobacco. bascially what it boiled down to was peter jennings suggesting to the food industry execs he was interviewing that they are responsible for people's individual choices to overeat, simply by providing the means to do it as well as the kind of enticement that no average person would be able to overcome. kinda like the way the tobacco industry was deemed responsible for people who chose to smoke.

the flip side of that was that the food industry folks were in full denial of any responsibility at all. true enough that exercise and increased activity helps people from turning into total fatasses, simply encouraging people to eat their fill, or perhaps more, and proposing excercise as a catch-all is pretty irresponsible. what really seemed to rub me the wrong way was their approach to adbertizing, especially as it concerned kids. they were accusing parents of not shouldering enough responsibility for their kids' nutrition. which made tons of sense, i mean since they never market directly to kids, you know, through using cartoon characters or making their packaging appealing to them.

it was pretty instructive, but probably not in a way that any of the parties involved expected or hoped for it to be. what i got from it is that, basically everyone wants to hold someone else responsible for their excesses.

feeling: invigorated
thinking of: good timing
music: "american badass" kid rock