Weight Loss>
Torch Song
Ack...net lag...I really wasn't ignoring you, Sue -- honest!
Yes, I've read Bailey's books, and heard some of his talks. I just never had any success with dieting and gave up--decided it was better to be pudgy and pleased than dieting and depressed. Now I'm not nearly as large as I was (still don't know the exact weight...scales broken and I don't really care); today I borrowed a shirt from my 15yr old girl (scrawny kid...) and it was too big! No diet, just acceptance of what is...
Go figure...
Sue
Torch Song (don't worry, I have bouts of net lag, too). Are you sure it was *Bailey's* books you read? He's firmly *against* dieting. When I read his stuff, I finally understood why fat can seem to "sneak up on you". It also confirmed what I had intuited--a person who's out of shape (like me) can do a much lower level of exercise (Bailey says, "Start exercising so slowly that other people laugh at you!") and still get your heart into the aerobic range. Aha! just as I suspected! :) I do think one's basic (outlook? spiritual orientation? attitude?) tends to either help or hinder one's progress in life, in many areas . . . :)
ZooKeeper
according to the scales at the dr's office I've only lost three pounds, but the dress that was plesaantly snug through the ribs before I left on vacation was loose enough to slide down and off without unbuttoning when I got back...
go figure...
and I ate like a horse while I was gone too.
sheesh!
Torch Song
<rueful chuckle> I probably have read every darn diet/exercise/fix-up-yourself book around...at least, up until about 4 years ago. Bailey was one of the few who didn't seem to be either spouting the same old stuff or writing anything outrageously weird enough to make mucho money. Not to go into long, boring detail, but my life was long at the point where even if I could have pulled together the willpower to do something I read, I was assured that the outside interferences would sabotage me.
I don't know...I just gave up on "self improvement" and decided to accept me. Three years later--with no change in activity level or food intake--I start dropping sizes fast enough to put a major dent in the clothing budget. I just figure that since I'm reasonably healthy, I'm just losing it the same way I gained it -- steadily and for no apparent reason, which somehow seems to balance things out in a bizarre sort of way.
Bookworm
ZK- :X ( I will try not to comment)
ZooKeeper
thank you bw. ;>
ZooKeeper
eep!
Bookworm
Sorry I've got to comment.
I think the reason is that you had cut out a lot of the fat. I don't think hay and grass has that much fat in it. };>
ZooKeeper
rofdl!
MontyL
Don't forget the cardboard, Bookworm. :)
Bookworm
I was trying to be nice Monty. But of course if I was nice the world would come to an end.
doctor doom
I wish I had Howard Stern's book with me... he had some funny things to say about both of them.
ZooKeeper
no comment bw. none at all.
Bookworm
Why? Because it's true?
ZooKeeper
no, because it's not but as usual no one would believe a damned word I said.
JayDee
liar
MontyL
We wouldn't?
ZooKeeper
see? see?
what did I tellya?
nonebody believes me. never. I think I'm gonna go cry now.
;>
ZooKeeper
nope. not never. not ever. definitely not.
Torch Song
I always believe you! May not be able to understand, but I do believe! ;>
Real Fake Overlord
I'm trying to do better, Doom.
Kagro X
As in keeping a nine-year-old on your lap?
ZooKeeper
awwww...... thanks sis. <sniffle> :>
JayDee
not wot?
Real Fake Overlord
Only if she's not related to you.
Bookworm
I don't believe you because what I said is true.
shoe inhalants
He means himself, dimwit. He was hoping.
ZooKeeper
what, that I eat cardboard? {deleted} little twits anyway... <<mutter mumble grumble growl snarl>> <wandering away under serious storm clouds>
Bookworm
We are already getting rain ZK. You trying to cause a flood. :)
Kagro X
Yeah, yeah, yeah. At the end of the day, only one of us will not have used the computer to lure in and defile an underaged modem geek, or have had a man drill him in the ass. And that'd be me.
ZooKeeper
not that kind of storm clouds. the kind that cause people to be lightning struck.
<<growl grumble mutter mumble>>
Bookworm
Fine just so long as you don't start your place on fire.
ZooKeeper
ccccccccccrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACCCCCCCcccckkkkkkkk!!!!!
lightning struck bw...
Bookworm
That's why I have a lightning rod next to me. };>
Flying Wombat
(here's something that, in a perverse way, relates to weight gain or loss.)
Date: 23 Oct 1994 10:45:18 -0400
C'est la Grrr
In France, PETA's Animal Rage Meets A Formidable Foe. The French.
By Dana Thomas, Special to The Washington Post
PARIS -- A dispatch from the French underground:
Some day in the not distant future, in a location yet to be disclosed for security reasons, at a time known only to the saboteurs themselves, individuals whose identity must remain a secret will carry into the center of a very public place an object covered with a tarpaulin.
The tarpaulin will be removed to reveal ...
An Enormous Goose.
This will be the Mightiest Goose on the face of the Earth, a goose to rival for sheer audacity Howard Hughes's Spruce Goose, the largest airplane ever built. This will be the largest goose ever built. It will look something like Mr. Snuffle-uppagus, with a beak. (We are ferociously guessing here, because construction of the Goose is proceeding under strictest security.) Then: Several individuals, probably of American ancestry, will ascend a
footstool or a ladder and proceed to force the Goose's beak open. They will insert a funnel. They will produce a horrifying quantity of grain, which they will pour down the Goose's throat. The Goose will protest.
Undeterred, they will continue this act of glottal rape. There will be many unpleasant honkings, indicating a goose in mortal distress. The stuff will ooze out the beak, besplatter the ground, and still they will pour, until ...
The Goose explodes.
Goose juice shall besmear the pavement. It may well drool down from lampposts. Someone will take a bullhorn and explain dourly that this is what the French do to geese all the time: force feed them through tubes until their livers swell and explode, because it is only through this process that one can produce the tastiest foie gras, that exquisite goose liver pate' that is an important part of French culture and a not insignificant part of the French economy.
There will be a smattering of polite applause. After all, the French do adore a good show. And then all around, people will return to whatever they were doing before the silly vulgarians with quaint notions about animal rights performed for them. Some of the people, in chic restaurants visible from this public square, will dine cheerfully on foie gras.
In the history of armed warfare, great moments have often come when one combatant passes up easier targets and carries the battle to his most formidable enemy. The results are invariably cataclysmic, and almost always decisive. This happened at Thermopylae. It happened at Gallipoli. At Gettysburg. At Pearl Harbor. It is happening today in Paris.
Call it the Siege of France. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), the controversial international animal rights group based in Rockville, is targeting the French for sustained guerrilla action. The assault began last winter, mink coat season, but it hardly ruffled any fur. PETA reveled in its few small victories, licked its wounds and is coming back to the hunt this winter, to kill or be killed. This will be interesting.
"We certainly have our work cut out for us," concedes Dan Mathews, PETA's director of international campaigns.
That's all? Their work cut out for them?
"It's going to be a nightmare." Bingo. Thank you, Dan.
The French still think of animals the way ... well, the way people used to think about animals in the United States in the 1930 and 1940s, when Eleanor Roosevelt wore a deceased fox around her neck, complete with feet and teeth, and Hollywood spiced up chase scenes in westerns by breaking horses' legs.
In France, animals are for human consumption, decoration and amusement. People love to pamper their dogs, but the woods and countrysides outside Paris are aprowl with dogs abandoned by their loving owners when they go on vacation for the month of August. France boasts 1,400 horse-meat butchers. The fur industry is doing just fine - walk down the street in Paris in the wintertime and you'll see more fur than in the National Zoo. Foie gras vendors claim
business is better than ever: More than 9,000 tons of fatty fowl livers are sold each year in France. Selling pets to labs for experimentation is a very big business here. There are 1.6 million hunters in France - more than in any other country in Western Europe. Ritualistic "shooting parties" - in which wives march through the woods beating out the game for their mates to blast apart, followed by a four-course sit-down dinner - are an important part of the autumn social schedule.
Ecology, in France, is a fringe political movement peopled by do-gooder kooks.
It is all part and parcel of a larger worldview: France is an unabashedly guiltless, selfish society. Here, smoking doesn't give you cancer or deform your fetus, downing a bottle of wine every day doesn't make you an alcoholic, cheating on your spouse doesn't hurt anyone, your dog pooping on someone's front doorstep is certainly not your problem, and speeding down the highway at 100 mph is perfectly normal, so get out of the way.
Add to this mix the fact that this call for animal rights is coming from meddlesome foreigners, of whom the French are notoriously contemptuous, and you have a daunting amount of apathy to overcome.
Spitting Into the Wind
In the United States, PETA can boast some clear-cut victories. American consumption of veal is down dramatically, because of publicity surrounding the inhumane force-feeding and immobilization of calves. Several designers, including Donna Karan and Calvin Klein, have sworn off natural furs. Some cosmetics companies have restricted, or ended, testing on animals. Around the country, animal rights protests are often big news events.
Not so in France. Last December PETA staged a protest here in front of the offices of French Vogue, across the street from the National Assembly, because the publication runs ads from fur companies but will not sell space to anti-fur organizations. Eight women in tattered furs soaked in red paint chanted "Help!" and lay down in the middle of the street, in the rain. They were hauled off by the national police. Passersby passed on by. Small mentions only in the press.
In January, during the haute couture shows, five models posed naked behind a banner that read, "Better naked than wearing fur." Their photo, taken by top photographer Patrick Demarchelier free of charge, ran in newspapers worldwide, and an eight-minute tape of the shoot was broadcast on the French love-the-animals program "Thirty Million Friends." It's a Saturday afternoon show, and its biggest audience is children.
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Flying Wombat
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In March, while the fur industry was presenting its annual collections in the halls of the Porte de Versailles convention center, PETA held a fur funeral out front. Dozens of black-garbed activists wearing skull masks carried coffins draped with bloodied furs and rang bells as a death knell. When the procession was denied access to the fashion shows, the "pallbearers" dropped to the ground and protested more. Several were
arrested. "It was our most successful event," says Mathews. "I think the French like a good Gothic twist."
That is, the French who paid attention. A photo ran in a local weekly. Le Monde, Liberation and le Figaro, three of the city's big dailies, didn't bother to mention it, although Liberation found space to recount a pro-Kurd march and motorcyclists protesting proposed traffic laws. "This isn't the kind of place where women would get attacked or told off for wearing fur," said
a young Parisian businessman on a city street corner one afternoon. "People don't care about things like that here. They really don't." Adds a woman in a fur-lined raincoat: "There are more problems in the world, more problems in France. It's not a scandal here. Like a man in politics here having a mistress. Here it's no problem. In the States, it's a scandal." Mathews responds:
"We believe if people are aware of how these animals suffer, they might change."
The Bardot Factor
Well, that's what Brigitte Bardot thought, too.
Twenty years ago the actress stepped out of the entertainment spotlight and applied all her animal magnetism to saving beasts.
In 1977 she gained international recognition for activism for her campaign against clubbing baby seals to death to make fur coats. The image is still so vivid: The kittenish Bardot, in an anorak and stretch ski pants, with black mascara streaming down her face, sobbed uncontrollably as she watched hunters drag the bloodied baby seals across the Arctic snow.
During the mid-'80s she and PETA joined forces to shut down a Texas slaughterhouse at which 2,000 horses died of starvation and neglect; the ranchers raised the horses for export to European butchers, primarily French. Bardot called for France to "lead the way" in boycotting the importation and consumption of horse meat, which she insists is neither necessary nor healthy in today's society. It never happened.
In her previous life as a bouncy-bosomed sex kitten, Brigitte Bardot was widely respected. Her opinions were sought by august journals of French culture. Brigitte Bardot is now regarded pretty much as a daffy duck-hugger.
She has remained holed up in her 10-room villa, La Madrague, in St.-Tropez, firing off letters of protest to local municipalities, organizing small demonstrations and promoting the well-being of cute furry creatures.
She helped bust up a ring of dog thieves.
She hunted down a gang of kitten torturers.
She once smashed a pet shop window to free the puppies.
In 1992 she plunked down $250,000 on a farm that would serve as a "retirement home" for mistreated animals.
A year ago she incensed the Muslim community in France by declaring in an extreme right-wing weekly that the ritual slaughtering of sheep for the Islamic feast of Aid-el-Kebir was "barbaric." She asked the Muslims to at least stun the sheep with an electric shock first, to make the animals' demise less traumatic. In January she verbally attacked the mayor of Cahors in southwest France for netting
and gassing 1,000 pigeons. She called it "genocide." In June, she announced she was going to leave St.-Tropez because the mayor invited 700 hunters to hold their annual convention there. Six weeks later, she changed her mind.
Then there's the saga of Charly. Back in 1989, Bardot was entrusted by a friend to watch after his donkey for the summer. Charly made himself quite at home at La Madrague, frequently mounting Bardot's 32-year-old female ass, Mimosa. Bardot was terrified that this fervent activity would kill ol' Mimosa and tried to contact the owner to see what should be done. Alas, he was unreachable. A local vet suggested
castration. A frantic Bardot agreed, and Charly lost them under anesthesia by a surgeon's knife.
When the owner found out, Bardot was once again hauled into court. She was acquitted. Unfortunately, all her passionate protesting has not made much of an impact on French attitudes toward animal rights. Part of it is the futility of the cause. Part is Bardot herself. She does not get the best press.
Some 30 years ago, back in her starlet days, Bardot briefly married French actor Jacques Charrier, and they had a son, Nicholas. In no time flat, Bardot split with Charrier and dumped the kid on Charrier's parents. She rarely saw Nicholas in his youth, and he remained estranged most of his life.
In August 1992 they reunited for her marriage to Bernard d'Ormale, top adviser to Jean-Marie Le Pen, the leader of France's extreme right-wing party.
Still, the French often wonder out loud how Bardot can give so much to animals while she abandoned her one and only child.
Since the wedding, contributions to her animal rights foundation - particularly from the Jewish community - have dried up, and she was expelled from a European Parliament news conference after a Danish MP called her a fascist. Her once-popular prime-time television program, "SOS Animals," has been yanked off the air.
"There are some who are 100 percent with me," Bardot scribbled in a swooping scrawl in one of her rare written statements. This was delivered to The Washington Post in lieu of an interview. "Others call me names, say I'm crazy, detest me. At least they aren't indifferent."
Bardot almost never gives interviews in person. "She doesn't like to see people," explained her press spokesman. "It's a bit bizarre."
But she did make a rare appearence here earlier this year when she held a news conference on animal rights in a grand hotel. For three hours she sat in the spotlight, her long blond hair, streaked with gray, piled up in a girlish bun, and introduced Humane Society leaders, tearily narrated films of animal torture, and denounced President Francois Mitterrand for having an Office of Presidential Hunts. (Most French citizens did not know
such a position existed until one day in April, when the official in charge, a deeply depressed Mitterrand crony, put a gun to his head and blew his brains across his desk.)
When Bardot called for the French to stop eating horse meat, a horse-meat butcher in a black leather jacket stormed the podium and screamed, "You're killing my metier! You're stealing food from the mouths of my children!"
Bardot, protected instantly by bodyguards, gently asked in her deep husky voice, "Why can't you change your job?"
"Because I can't," whimpered the poor fellow. "It's all I know."
It was not Bardot's finest moment.
By the end of last year the foundation, which she started in 1986 by auctioning her personal possessions, including most of her movie memorabilia, was nearly bankrupt. In December she told the Paris daily Liberation that her financial troubles were due to her husband's politics, adding, "I should have married a shoe salesman."
In January she emerged from seclusion to appear via live remote on the glitzy variety show "Sacred Night" and appealed to the citizens of France to support her cause. She showed films of baby chicks on conveyor belts, of lambs dangling by one leg as men with knives sliced open their necks, of live pigs torched until their skin peeled off in charred clumps, of hunters hacking the faces of elephants with axes to remove the ivory tusks.
Following the broadcast, both she and the show's host were bombarded with death threats, and a small group of horse-meat butchers filed a libel suit against the emcee.
"What does she eat?" one butcher asked. "Grass?"
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Flying Wombat
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Goosing the Public?
In France, PETA is planning to burn a coffin full of furs, maybe in front of Notre Dame Cathedral. It has petition drives going. It is working on anti-fur campaigns. But the biggest battle lines are being drawn over geese.
Foie gras is a national obsession. Little slivers of foie gras on tiny toast points are de rigueur at official and private receptions. Foie gras is the centerpiece of Christmas and New Year's meals, like turkey is at Thanksgiving. You'll find it on most restaurant menus, from small cafes to grand brasseries. There are stores here that specialize in foie gras and other goose and duck byproducts, such as confit de canard. You can buy it
at the butcher, at the deli, at the 24-hour mini-market, at the airport duty-free shop.
They use it in salads. They use it in stuffing. They serve it pan-fried with a wine sauce, or cold, with toast and a glass of sauternes. They mix it with truffles as ravioli filling. They wrap it in pastry and bake it. They plop a slice of it on top of pasta so it melts into a creamy goo.
"Every country has its brand of cruelty," says Mathews. "In England, it's fox hunting. In Spain, they hang live birds upside down from trees and ride by on horseback and rip the head off, and they bull-fight. Italy is Veal Central. And in France, they stuff geese full of grain until they explode."
To be precise, they put geese and ducks into tiny individual cages, so the fowl can't move. Then, several times a day, they take each bird by the head, yank it so the long, thin neck is straight, and jam an 18-inch-long, two-inch-wide pipe past the beak, down the throat, into the stomach, and pour in the grain. After a week or two, the fowl's liver is so huge - about the size of a loaf of bread - that it blows apart the cavity. Ready for slaughter.
"The people who defend the animals have not proved that the animals suffer when we fatten them," says Andre Bon, head of Foie Gras Luxe, one of the oldest distributors in the city. "It's a question of sentiments, that's it."
"Ducks and geese have been force-fed for thousands and thousands of years," says a colleague. "It's always been done."
It's believed that fattening up geese and ducks dates back 5,000 years to the Egyptians, according to "The Grand History of Foie Gras," an exquisite $80 coffee-table book filled with photos of roly-poly waterfowl waddling across luscious green fields, published in France last Christmas season. According to the lore, the fowl naturally overate for their long migration from Scandinavia to the Nile. The Egyptians found the plump birds so
delicious that they began to nourish the beasts on farms. Archaeologists have found images of Hebrew slaves force-feeding little sausages to ducks and geese carved on ancient tombs.
"I think it's not in the foreseeable future that people stop eating foie gras," says Bon. "It's not like cigarettes or alcohol or drugs. If it was bad for health, yes, then you should stop easily. But since it is not dangerous to eat, it's about someone with sentiments for animals, and that's all."
Indeed.
Somewhere in Paris, right now, a giant Goose is taking shape. 02:57 10-23C9999-----
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