Back before the Alaska trip, I listened to Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food.  Most of the time, I don't particularly care if I get everything out of a book.  Mostly, I listen while driving, and it's better that I devote attention to other things.  But this book was interesting enough that I wanted to listen to it again.  For some reason I don't remember, I decided to play it through the audio system in the kitchen.  Nicole ended up listening, too.  Pollan makes some interesting points.  The ones that stuck with me are these:

• Legally, a food is defined nutritionally.  This means that "peanut butter" isn't "butter made from peanuts."  It means, "so many calories, so many grams of fat, so many grams of protein, so many carbohydrates, these vitamins, those minerals, and some other stuff."  Peanut butter doesn't have to include peanuts!  As long as it meets the nutritional definition of peanut butter, it's legally peanut butter.
• Americans don't think about food, Americans think about ingredients (as in, nutritional components).  This is bad, because we don't know what nutritional components we need (there are almost certainly some that we don't know about, yet).  Even if you assume we know all our nutritional requirements, we don't know the correct proportions.  Let alone things like how those proportions change with age, pregnancy, illness, etc.
• So, we define what we eat in terms of things we don't understand.  This makes us constantly change how we eat.  Every new study is also a marketing opportunity.  Which is why our food is so heavily processed.  It's much easier to introduce the latest "celebrity ingredient," or omit the latest nefarious one, when the food is nothing but ingredients.
• Our ancestors did just fine, eating food (as opposed to ingredients).  Many non-Western people continue to eat food (as opposed to ingredients), and they are far healthier for it.

So, the interesting thing about this is that Nicole's quietly changed our diet.  I come home to find her cooking dinner, more often than not.

I've just finished Jasper Fforde's first 3 Thursday Next books.  It's an interesting idea, but I think he tries way too hard to make his book-world internally consistent.  Having never read Great Expectations, I was surprised by Miss Haversham's demise.  I was annoyed to reach the end of the 3rd book, and discover Thursday's husband is still eradicated from history.  There's no resolution to any of Thursday's major problems.  There's a fourth book, which I'll be hearing soon.  Hopefully it doesn't suffer from these short-comings.

The most-recent book is Plato & a Platypus Walk into a Bar.  This is a history/explanation of (Western) philosophy's major ideas, using jokes to illustrate each.  As an example, the authors use the joke "Doctor, there's an invisible man in the waiting room."  "Well, tell him I can't see him!" to illustrate Kant's idea of "the thing-in-itself."  (An invisible man exists, but can't be perceived.  None the less, the receptionist is aware of him, somehow.)  The book isn't as funny as you might think.  It's certainly not as funny as the authors thought.  On the other hand, some of the jokes are funny.  Most annoying, the joke-free portions of the book are frequently concise, understandable explanations of major philosophical ideas.  It probably would have been a better book without the jokes.  Of course, it would have been a completely different book, and I might not have picked it up without the hook.

Almost through reading (not listening to) Mary Roach's Stiff.  This is a look at how Americans (and others) treat corpses.    Most interestingly, I was talking with a friend at work, and mentioned that the book had a section about automotive collision testing using corpses.  GM & Wayne State are heavily mentioned.  From the book, between them they accounted for some 50% of the published cadaver tests in the automotive collision field (during the 50s & 60s, anyway).  My friend said, "I know.  I used to run those collisions.  That job you described, about wiring (in both senses of the word) sensors into cadaver's chests?  I used to do that job."  So, that was an interesting conversation.  (Used to be, surviving a car-crash was largely a matter of your heart beat.  Impact accelerates your internal organs, within the "cage" of your ribs.  If your heart happened to be filled with blood (just about to contract) at the moment of impact, the acceleration increased it's weight to more than the aorta can support.  Which leads to a torn aorta and death.  If your heart was empty, you were far more likely to survive.)  Strangely, militaries (not just the U.S. military) avoid using cadavers in testing.  You'd think it'd be an obvious fit.  If you want to know what a bullet does to a human body, shooting a dead human body is clearly the way find out.  Apparently, it's OK to experiment on bodies for humanitarian or medical purposes.  But it's not OK to use corpses to learn how to better make more corpses.  So armies don't do it.  (But they do experiment on live soldiers.  Go figure.)  Oh -- and I now wonder why it's OK to harvest organs from cadavers, but not blood?  We could probably solve our blood-supply issues easily.  But we won't.  Lastly, Chinese culture and law are way more lenient about what can be done with "discarded" medical tissue (think "aborted fetuses").  Think hard before consuming any Chinese folk remedies.

"YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY!"

Nicole ran the Capital City River Run 5K this morning.  She had a personal best time, and finished 13th in her age/gender group.  That put her into the top 20 for her age/gender group, for the first time.  She was in the top 100 women runners, and the top 50% of runners overall.  She averaged 9:53/mile, first race with a sub-10-minute mile pace.

Congratulations, Nikki!  Good job!  Have a doughnut.

In case you don't know, the Detroit Lions are (apparently) even worse than usual this season.  Today was the home-opener, and only the second game of the season.  They still had trouble selling seats.  In fact, the game would have been blacked-out save for a local furniture retailer buying the remaining seats for promotional purposes.

This was good for us, because they were playing the Packers.  So Nicole bought us a pair of tickets (below face-value), and I went to my first professional football game.  Here are some thoughts:

• Man, can that place be loud!
• But it usually isn't.  I can't believe how inconstant Lions fans are.  At one point, the entire stadium was booing and chanting for the GM to be fired.  Ten minutes later, the Lions were tying the game and the cheers were probably annoying people in Windsor.  For most of the game, the crowd was quiet.  Aside from the drunken loud-mouths in desperate need of anger-management therapy.
• Incidentally, I disagree with the loud-mouths.  I think Kitna is a decent Quarterback.  I think he doesn't have an offensive line.  That forces him to do things quickly, without the possibility of allowing opportunities to develop.
• Initially, the venue seemed small.  One can see the ball clearly, one can distinguish individual players, the field is dwarfed by the seating.  But then I started thinking about it in relation to Van Andel Arena.  At that point, I realized Ford Field dwarfs Van Andel.
• $20 for 2 Labatt Blues and a single pretzel?!!
• I did not see a single instance of a Packers fan being abused.  Not that there were that many.  Several years ago, when the Lions management noticed that there were as many Packers fans in the stands as Lions fans, they instituted a restricted-sale policy.  (Tickets in Green Bay are impossible to get, nearly-so in Chicago, and Detroit is fairly close.)  Even so, the last 4 minutes of the game, the crowd turned green.
  
• For me, the best part was the Packers 2nd touchdown.  I watched them line up, pointed, turned to Nicole and said, "Watch Donald Driver.  He's not covered."  3 seconds later, Rogers threw the ball to Driver.  It was great.
  
• All-in-all, it was a lot of fun.