I never ate really huge quantities. But I was the Queen of Processed Foods. If it had high fructose corn syrup or transfats or came out of a drive thru window, I was SO there. Combine that with no exercise of any kind and only remembering to eat after 3 pm and never drinking water...well, it's no wonder that I packed on the pounds.

I have had Doritos (or similar) for dinner more times than a respectable grown-up should.

Mike Brady's angry Shakespearean critique of the Brady Bunch scripts

Robert Reed, who played Mike "Dad" Brady on The Brady Bunch was a frustrated, classically trained Shakespearean actor who sent stroppy memos the show's writers explaining How Drama Works to them in minute, enraged detail. They are a treasure. Here is one of them:

Once again, we are infused with the slapstick. The oldest boy's hair turns bright orange in a twinkling of the writer's eye, having been doused with a non-FDA-approved hair tonic. (Why any boy of Bobby's age, or any age, would be investing in something as outmoded and unidentifiable as "hair tonic" remains to be explained. As any kid on the show could tell the writer, the old hair-tonic routine is right out of "Our Gang." Let's face it, we're long since past the "little dab'll do ya" era.)

Without belaboring the inequities of the script, which are varied and numerous, the major point to all this is: Once an actor has geared himself to play a given style with its prescribed level of belief, he cannot react to or accept within the same confines of the piece, a different style.

When the kid's hair turns red, it is Batman in the operating room.

I can't play it.

I'm trying really, really hard to avoid high fructose corn syrup.

Um, except for all of the Christmas candy and cookies in the house that were given to us as gifts.

I'm trying really, really hard to avoid high fructose corn syrup.

I've been trying, but it's pretty much everywhere....

Also, is "Batman in the operating room" sorta' the '60s version of jumping the shark?

I'll eat high quantity when I'm eating the beloved cheap white carbs. With those gone, my appetite becomes much more like a normal persons.

I'm trying really, really hard to avoid high fructose corn syrup.

Um, except for all of the Christmas candy and cookies in the house that were given to us as gifts.

"Only Home Made Goodies" can be a good line to draw that eliminates most hfc.

Of course, the psycho line that I'm drawing is "if it doesn't get eaten by midnight tomorrow it gets tossed". The thing that makes this nuts is that I will spend the next 36 hours mainlining cookies.

Then this weekend the rest of the simple carbs will go bye-bye until Valentine's day. Six weeks of hard-core healthy girl will feel very good right now.

Kat, I wonder how the school district would react to some bad publicity from the local paper. Because the press loves "stupid callous bureaucrat" stories.

The school district is sick-making, Kat.

My office effed up and didn't withhold for my health insurance for a year and a half... so they spent the next year and a half doing double. It sucked, but they didn't charge me INTEREST for their freakin mistake.

Seriously, someone ought to talk to a lawyer about this. Most lawyers will do a 15 minute free consult to determine whether it is worth talking further. But the press is cheaper, and it is amazing what bad publicity wills sometimes do.