Twelve Black Code Monkeys

Oops they did it again. Well, the USDA has taken a crack at revising their food guide recommendations, as they do every five years, and what has all the latest science provided for in this most recent document? Not much.

Going through the guide, I noticed that much of it was basically the same old advise that we’ve been hearing for year, but which either haven’t worked, or more likely which have only resulted in the U.S. getting even more obese. But let’s look on the bright side for the moment - here are the only valuable additions to the recommendations:

1. Avoid Trans Fatty Acids: hooray, the USDA has finally come out with a recommendation to avoid these harmful things found in processed baked goods, shortenings, margarines, and some dressings. The problem is that no specific recommendation is made. Instead it is just recommended to consume “as little as possible.” But who knows how much is “little”? Of course previous documents have basically said that there is really no safe minimum level, and hopefully the new labeling laws that will require these to be listed on labels will maintain the momentum that is motivating food companies to rid their products of these. The other problem I saw is that Trans Fats were lumped in with saturated fats and cholesterol as items to avoid in order to avoid congestive heart disease. Considering that plant-based saturated fats like coconut oil are now being seen as healthful in many quarters, and the fact that dietary cholesterol has been shown not to be a major factor effecting cholesterol levels in the blood, it’s disappointing that Trans Fats were grouped with these other two.
2. Increase fruits, vegetables, and whole grain consumption. Most people would agree that vegetables and fruits provide a great source of nutrients. With most vegetables these even come without the added risk of large dense carbohydrate or sugar loads that effect insulin levels and subsequently can cause health problems in some who are sensative. Fruits are a bit more prone to having large amounts of sugar. Grains, of course, are high in carbohydrates, but the recommendation is to increase whole grains, which have much more fiber which is not converted into sugar thus raising insulin levels. However, if you look at the recommendations, they basically suggest increasing whole grains by about 200-300% from the 2000 recommendations, and to keep the refined (they call them “enriched”) grains the same. So while you may be getting more fiber, they are actually increasing your total carb load.

And that is one of my big problems with the recommendations. Despite all the recent studies which suggest merit with decreasing carbohydrate levels, at very least refined carb levels, the new food guide recommendations still is basically a low-fat/high-carb diet. Not that I expected anything different. After all, the USDA’s main purpose it to support the agriculture of the United States. That agriculture is primarily grain-based, and so there is an obvious interest in promoting grains – and thus a horrible conflict of interest. The USDA’s food pyramid is nowhere to be seen within the current recommendations, but apparently it is in the process of being modified to match the new recommendations. But I can’t really see how it will change much. The base will still be about grains, the top will still be fats and sugar. Perhaps they will rewrite the portions recommendations so that it doesn’t look like you need to eat 11 bowls of pasta per day in order to meet the requirements for grains, but we’ll see. The previous pyramid has developed a great deal of criticism except for the old guard nutritionists who basically use whatever the USDA puts out as their bible.

The unfortunate thing is that this will do nothing to educate or help those who know little about what to eat. Their recommendations are a set of basic guidelines (misguidelines if you ask me) which don’t really teach people why they should eat a certain way, but just tell them to.

I had this idea, kind of random. A lot of people post their wish lists (mostly Amazon.com wish lists) on their blogs or websites as a reference for family and friends. I’ve always thought how cool it might be to get a random item from my wish list sent by someone I know, or even someone I don’t. Actually, whenever I receive a birthday present from someone I never expect to, it’s always a pleasant surprise. It doesn’t matter the size of the gift, just the fact that the person took the time to send something – heck, even a card – was something.

I’m not always the best gift giver or even card sender. We have such a huge circle of friends now, it’s also very hard to think about who we should buy for, and most of the time I lame-out and just let my wife figure it out. Of course this doesn’t work when I need to get her a present! Being someone who’s easily distracted and who has a myriad little projects and other occupiers of my time and attention, being organized enough to be able to send cards out to anyone aside for some close family’s birthdays is somewhat of a pipe dream.

With that in mind, I thought it would be a kind of cool “project” to take the whole sense of obligation and expectation out of the gift-giving process. The idea was to look up a friend or family member’s wish list, if you know someone who has one, and send them something from it. Anything. It doesn’t have to be for any occasion, and ideally it wouldn’t be for any. That way it would be completely unexpected. If you don’t know of anyone personally, perhaps you know a blogger or someone else with a website who has a wish list online? I’m not suggesting myself, I swear! Googling for “amazon wishlist blog” gives a whole bunch of random bloggers who publish their wish list.

Some might say this idea is a bit self indulgent – or at least publishing your wish list is self-indulgent. Maybe this is true, who knows, but in defense of the idea think about those people you know who are really hard to figure out a gift for. If they had their wish list online, you would at least get a sense of what they would like, even if you don’t buy something specifically on the list. Likewise, when posting a link to my wish list, I would never expect someone to just buy something for me for no reason. Family members know where to look for my wish list and have used it often to buy me stuff, because apparently I am one of those people for whom it’s tough to buy presents. (I think it’s because I generally lust after gadgets that are in the $100’s of dollars or more, but can never think of anything smaller and more practical that I need). But I do think that like other things you might share with your readers, a wish list is just another way for them to learn a little more about you, your tastes, etc. Often I just use my wish list as a kind of bookmark holder for things I’ve heard about that sound interesting, or to note down a piece of equipment that I think should be in contention when I consider buying that type of product, but a lot of my wish list is filled with books and music that I think probably says something about me – what I don’t know!

So, that’s my suggestion, anyway. I’m planning on doing this, but I haven’t figured out who to yet. Hopefully whoever it is won’t think I’m some weird internet stalker, or that I’m sending it as a late Christmas present! If you think this is an interesting idea and plan to do this yourself – or have already done this sort of thing – I’d love to hear your comments.

Just a note that I just started a DVD Giveaway contest on my DVDMon.com site:

For many Baby Boomers, Woodstock was a defining moment in their lives, musically and otherwise. For gen-X’ers like myself Live Aid was not quite that defining, but it was still one of the most memorable musical events of my teen years. Warner Strategic Marketing recently came out with a 4-DVD set of this mammoth 1985 concert containing over 10 hours of live music. As luck would have it, we happen to have 3 copies of this DVD set to give away! That’s right. All you have to do is write a small story about how you remember the event in your own life. If you were too young to remember it yourself, ask an older sibling, an aunt, uncle, or friend. We’ll review the answers and post the 3 winning ones here. This contest starts today, January 12, 2005, and wraps up at 11:59:59 PM EST on Sunday, January 16, 2005. Unfortunately, we can only afford to pay for domestic shipping, so we will have to limit the contest to those who want their dvd’s shipped to addresses in the United States. We’ll announce the winners as soon as we can, hopefully by Monday. Good luck! Email your stories to us at levi@dvdmon.com [Actually if folks want to leave their entries here as comments, that would be cool too!] . More about the dvd set can be found here.

UPDATE: Well, it looks like my timeframe was a bit too short, or people have gotten tired of contests. I’ve only gotten a couple of entries so far. To make things a bit more fair, I’ve decided to make the contest a bit more open-ended. I will keep this open until I get 7 more entries, for a total of nine, which means that each entry will have a 1 in 3 chance of winning. Pretty good odds for writing a paragraph or two, if you ask me! Anyway, here’s a direct link to the page with the contest as I will be putting up new news on the site which will push it off the front page: http://www.dvdmon.com/individual.asp?keyNewsID=189

As some of you know, I also run a website devoted to DVD news and reviews. DVDMon.com has been up now for over five years. Recently I got to review a new DVD set put out by Warner Home Video of the first season of the WB series Everwood. I thought I’d include the review here too, because in it I talk about issues around dvd releases, content distribution, and the dilemma that some of us can be faced with when we coming into a series fresh after it’s been going for a while, and still running strong:

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My TV watching has declined a lot in recent years. Part of this was due to moving in with my now wife in a condo that got bad reception and refusing to pay for the high prices of Washington DC cable. Since we moved out to the suburbs, bought a new TV, and a TiVo, we’ve been watching more, but still not large amounts. Part of my problem is that I want to be able to watch a series from the beginning. Coming in on the third season seems like coming into a movie in the middle.

Everwood was a show that I remember hearing about when it came out a couple of years ago, but at the time we just didn’t get the WB network due to poor reception. Luckily Warner Home Video, as they and others have done with many other series, have made the first season of Everwood available on DVD. So I sat down and watched all 23 episodes in less than a week! Yes, I got hooked. And of course when you have an entire season at your disposal, it’s just too easy to say “well, what the heck, let’s just watch ONE more.”

Everwood, for those who haven’t seen it, is about a famous neurosurgeon, Dr. Andy Brown (Treat Williams), whose wife dies in the pilot. Fame had to do partly due to his dedication, but this translates into being a “workaholic” especially when it means missing almost every important event in your family’s life. His 15-year-old son Ephram (Gregory Smith) despises him. He was amazingly close to his mother, but practically a stranger to his father. Delia (Vivien Cardone), Andy’s 9-year-old daughter, is still too young to have garnered anything but love and admiration for her father. Soon after the death of his wife, Andy decides to move the entire family to the small mountain town of Everwood, Colorado where he opens a doctors office where he sees patients for free. So, Ephram hates him even more for taking him totally out of his element (one which he apparently had a shakey grasp on to begin with - being somewhat of a geek-loner), and even Delia struggles to make even one new friend. The main thrust of the first season revolves around Amy Abbot (Emily VanCamp), who befriends Ephram in order to get his father to operate on her boyfriend who is in a coma. Her father, Dr. Harold Abbott (Tom Amandes), also happens to be the town’s only doctor before Dr. Brown and family come to town. His ornery, persnickety nature is only made more so by the freewheeling Dr. Brown who often displays the tunnel vision of an idealist. But Dr. Abbot is not the one-sided villain to Andy’s Hero that you would get from a predictable show. Everwood constantly surprises you by foiling those stereotypes. No one is a villain and a hero so much as they are all humans with their own flaws as well as strengths.

I think of Everwood as kind of a mutated Northern Exposure, but with a lot more family relationship stuff thrown in. Like Northern Exposure, it’s about a New Yorker (or New Yorkers as the case is) going someplace far from home where he experiences culture shock, meets lots of cute small-town characters, and becomes in integral part of the community. The family stuff, though, adds a powerful supplement to what could be seen as a formula, and the excellent writing and acting, similar to Northern Exposure, is always a valuable asset. Everwood doesn’t shy away from controversial issues like porn and abortion, and I found myself cringing a few times, which I suppose is a good thing in a way. The treatment of these issues is ultimately sensitive and multidimensional, but due to their nature if they were handled with too soft a touch, you wouldn’t get the impact that they really should have on many of us. Feeling a little uncomfortable sometimes I think shows that a show is really touching some buttons. And Everwood touches a lot of buttons, not so much because of contrived situations that make us sad, or music that helps it to tough on the heartstrings, but by some dialog that is honest and sometimes brutally so. It’s character development is such that we really understand the impact when one person does or says something to another, we feel it ourselves much more than in cardboard cut-out clichés that make up much of what TV and Cinema has become.

The DVD set comes with 6 DVD’s containing the 23 episodes. In addition to these, there is a 24-minute making of featurette that fills in some of the history of how the pilot was developed and filmed, and then subsequently how Everwood made its way through its first season. Another feature is a short clip of video that is taken first by Gregory Smith, then my Emily VanCamp - basically just candids from behind the set. Finally, there is a series of 10 or so deleted scenes both with and without a commentary track. These were helpful in giving even more insight into the characters. Apparently they often shoot more than the allotted 45 minutes for each episode and have to throw away at least a little for most episodes. So theoretically there might have been even more of these on the cutting room floor, but these give a nice enough taste of what we might have if the show were a bit longer, or without commercial breaks. Warner Brothers also provided commentary tracks for 4 of the 23 episodes - the pilot, the 5th show “Deer God”, the 20th show, “Moonlight Sonata,” and the finale, “Home.” The constants in these were the executive producers Greg Berlanti and Mickey Liddell, but Treat Williams is in most of them as well. In addition, Tom Amandes is in a couple and Gregory Smith and Emily VanCamp are both in one respectively. Generally Berlanti and Lidell do most of the talking in these, although Treat Williams can get a little talkative as well. The others are generally much more quiet. I did enjoy the commentaries and they of course gave a lot of additional insight, but I do wish they would have included more of the actors and allowed those actors to talk more. Instead it seems like the most talkative of the groups got to drown out everyone else. The other thing that bothered me a little was that Treat Williams was constantly joking. It was obviously a very amiable environment on set and that was reflected in these commentary tracks, but especially when some pretty heavy scenes were being shown I would have rather not had Treat goofing about his beard or some other piece of silliness. Nevertheless, these are somewhat minor quibbles; in general I really enjoyed the commentary tracks as well as the other special features.

The first season of Everwood (I don’t know about the 2nd or 3rd), was filmed in standard 4:3 aspect ratio, although apparently they letterboxed the premier episode and the finale. Nevertheless, none of these episodes are enhanced for widescreen. The picture is still very good, although I’m hoping that future seasons get put on HD video. The sound is also quite good, and while it is a very dialog-centric series, of course, the creations of Blake Neely add a lot to the sound of Everwood.

Now the only thing I need is Everwood Season Two. This brings me to something else I wanted to write about - TV Series on DVD. As I mentioned, I’m one of those people who like to see things from the beginning and in order. Now that I’ve seen the first season of this series on DVD, I have a dilemma. Do I just read the season synopses of all the episodes from Season 2 and 3 that I’ve missed and start watching from the middle of the 3rd season? Or do I refuse to watch anything on TV at the moment and wait until Season 2 comes out on DVD? If Season 2 were out now, I would gladly buy it, or at the very least rent it. I realize that getting a whole season of series like Everwood onto DVD is a chore, let alone two seasons. And I know some of this is marketing decisions. I guess it’s figured that doling out a little of a series at a time will garner more hunger for it. But on the flipside of this is the fact that if a new viewer is created by the series making its way to DVD, wouldn’t many of those would-be new viewers (for the show in its current season) be created if all the episodes were available so that these new viewers could “catch up” completely? Maybe I’m the exception to the rule, I don’t know. Maybe I’m also a bit spoiled by my new TiVo, but my basic preference now is of course to be able to view the content that’s been produced and not have to wait for some arbitrary decision by a marketing executive. But maybe that’s just me. I had a similar dilemma with Six Feet Under. I saw the first season live, then didn’t have HBO when the second season aired, and got it back when the third season started. But the availability on DVD always lagged by a couple of seasons, so I could never catch up and get current - especially since I didn’t even have TiVo for most of this time. What I’d really love to see is for content companies to provide these shows to us in a much more flexible way. I know a lot of this has to do with being able to make money with these shows - on TV or via rentals or sales. But I would be perfectly willing to pay if it meant that I could get whatever episode of a series I wanted at any time, streamed or downloaded of the net from the content provider’s site. Hopefully these companies will get wise and offer something akin to this soon. Currently my only choice is to go look for a copy of the show online, a prospect whose legality is questionable at the very least. Offer choices and people will bite, lack of choices often cause people to create solutions for themselves - solutions that don’t make these companies any money, but only causes headaches for both the potential viewer as well as the company trying to prevent unauthorized copying of their intellectual property.