One of the the things that's keeping me from pulling the trigger (jargon!) on the gastric bypass is that everyone's going to go "Ooh, couldn't lose weight by diet alone, huh?" And by everyone I mean the meatspace people whom I haven't managed to frighten into not making comments to me that are none of their business.

Seriously, you can't just say "sugar used to be a prescription-controlled substance" and use "I googled it and found references easily" as your proof.

I was wondering if this person was drawing that conclusion from "A Spoonful of Sugar" in Mary Poppins.

Though it is interesting that crystallized sugar wasn't widely known in the West before the Crusades.

Warning:

do not listen to CNN reports of testimony in the Sandusky trial. I am in a fucked up mood today because of a bad day at work and I listened to the testimony, thinking my mood couldn't get much darker.

Guess what?

miscalculation on my part.

I have decided that this refers to the Jensen Ackles scene in Blonde. And that's ALL it can ever refer to because anything else makes me really creeped out.

That's the best thing I've heard all day.

In weird local news, the media trucks in front of the courthouse for Sandusky's trial are going to have to find somewhere else to go this weekend, because the streets are already reserved for a car show. People drive vintage and interesting cars around the town, and there are vendors and a sock-hop. The media trucks, however, are invited to join in. [link] (I seriously doubt they will join. But I suppose that Bellefonte, in keeping with the "charming" and "quaint" and "old-world" reputation from all the background articles, had to be polite and extend the invitation.)

Hil, it's been so weird to me to have Bellefonte in the news - we lived there when I was a small child but moved to south Jersey when I was 4 It's a place that appears more in stories that my parents told than in my actual memories.

Though it is interesting that crystallized sugar wasn't widely known in the West before the Crusades

There's a book I read in college called Sweetness and Power, which is all about sugar, and the meaning of sugar, and the rise of sugar as a product, and its role in industrialization. Fascinating stuff, given that I still remember it so clearly 25+ years later.

But one of the things I learned was that sugar, as a preservative (which it is), was considered to be medicine, and in medieval times was given to the wealthy as a treatment for illness. It's fascinating to look at how things have changed in the last couple hundred years--sugar went from being something only the very wealthy had access to, to being a health hazard in that it's in everything.

Mummies also used to be a medicinal item that only wealthy could afford. For some reason, they never caught on in the same way sugar did.

Finite supply of mummies?

I hope that's not the only reason! There did seem to be a problem with cheap knock offs too.