Last night, I went to the gym.

It was the first time I had been to the gym in several weeks, unfortunately.  There.  I said it.

I’ve been losing ground the past few weeks when it comes to keeping the lost weight in the “lost” column.  That’s never a good thing.

When I hit the 240 mark a few days back (after having gotten as low as about 228), I guess that was the reality check I needed.

This morning, I was back down to 236, which means I’ve still lost about 54 pounds from my all-time high back in January.  I should weigh less than that by now.  My original goal — which I knew wasn’t really possible going in — was to weigh 199 by the day after Thanksgiving.  It was going to be a 38th birthday present to myself.

(Yeah…I had originally planned to lose weight even through Thanksgiving Day. What was I thinking?!?)

So in the sidebar, I’m keeping track of my gym time, most of which will be on the Elliptical Crosstrainer From Hell™.  My goal is 200 minutes a week, which means an average of 40 minutes over 5 days a week.  If I get slack, I can do less over more days; if I get over-eager, which isn’t likely in a gym, I can do more over fewer days.  It’s a nice dream, anyway.

All of you with drill sergeant experience are more than welcome to get after me when you see the number falling short.

Sometimes, a little public humiliation is just the thing to get the diet restarted.

A local blogger, Josh of Floss Regularly, says he was fooled by a dreaded email forward about a live deer that had been supposedly caught in the ocean off Charleston Harbor.

Upon doing a little research, he discovered that the email wasn’t entirely correct: the deer had actually been caught offshore from Virginia, not Charleston.

He says:

“Never trust a President’s PR photographers, and never, never trust an email that says ‘fwd’ on it.”

That’s good advice, because you never know where these emails really begin.  Gotta love the internet.

I’ve found, working in the media, that when a viewer sends a forwarded email to a newsroom, almost always accompanied with an attitude of disgust or impatience demanding to know why we haven’t covered this “big” event, there’s almost always something about the email that isn’t quite right.

If you’ve never visited Snopes.com, you should.  It’s the first place you should go when you receive a forwarded email that you actually start believing.  Snopes basically is a database for such emails, and it fact-checks them all.  Some are true, some are false, and some, like the deer story, are somewhere in between.

I take what is probably an unreasonable bit of enjoyment in politely referring the more rude emailers to the site when they send us something we’ve “missed” (with inappropriate amounts of condescending attitude) when it turns out that the little email they’ve become so convinced is true…isn’t.

Over the weekend, as I’m sure you’ve heard elsewhere, seven college students were killed in an intense fire at a beach house in North Carolina.

As neighbors tell it, the teens were partying until about 4:30 in the morning or so.  At some point over the next couple of hours, something went horribly wrong.  By 7:00am, a newspaper delivery man spotted the fire and attempted to find out if anyone was inside, but said the door was too hot.  He heard windows exploding above him in the two-story living area.

Six of the thirteen people inside managed to get out.  Seven did not.

At my Alpha meeting this evening, I was talking to the hostess, a mother of two, and she was talking about how unimaginable it would be to raise children past the baby stage, when you have to worry about no end of crises, past the school bullies, the dangers (and horror stories) of the school buse, little league, varsity sports, even learning to drive, so that they make it safely all the way through high school only to have them get killed when they’re in college.

What do you say to people who suffer such a loss?  I’ve got nothing.

With Halloween just days away, many churchgoers are engrossed in the annual debate: should they allow their kids to go trick-or-treating or should they forego the celebration of a “pagan holiday” and go instead to the more “innocent” fall festivals many churches have planned as a safe alternative?

Over at ChristianBlog.com, one writer raises the following points about a planned Fall Festival:

1) This festival has been held the last 3 years and always around Halloween.
2) Children are invited to attend in costume.
3) Children receive candy for playing games.

These three reasons in my mind say that this is nothing but a Halloween party in disguise. Why are we as Christians not only participating in a pagan holiday but holding a party for it in our church. I know for many Christians the pagan routs of this holiday are long forgotten. But that is not the point.

Actually, that is the point. It’s the whole point. And it’s a point that a lot of Christians seem far too capable of missing.

When a child dresses up as a favorite super hero, goes door to door in his neighborhood, and accepts candy from kindly neighbors, is he sinning because he is commemorating the practices of pagans who were only out to sin?

I don’t think so. What he is doing has nothing…absolutely nothing…to do with a pagan ritual. The child isn’t trying to embrace paganism. The child is merely play-acting.

The same kind of fight comes up now in the spring, when it’s time to celebrate Easter. There are many Christian parents who don’t want their children getting anywhere near Easter eggs. Why? Continue reading “Halloween Party or Fall Festival?”

How flexible are you when it comes to the brands of products you use? If you’re anything like me, you are very rigid about some products, like toothpaste, but a little more flexible when it comes to other products like laundry detergent. I’m going out on a limb, admittedly, with this week’s question, because I’m hoping that you might be able to come up with seven brands of a particular product that you’d use.

If you only stick with a single brand, then pretend that this brand is out of stock and you need to buy something different…just once.

First to play last week: Otowi of “Otowi.” Congratulations!

On to this week’s question!

THIS WEEK’S QUESTION:
Name the seven brands of shampoo you’re most likely to use.

Either answer the question in a comment or answer it in your journal and include the link in a comment. (To be considered “first to play,” a link must be to the specific entry in which you answered the question.) You may include this link in the URL space when leaving your comment, or in the comment itself. As long as it’s there in one spot or the other.

My answers:
1. Aussie
2. Pantene
3. Kirkland (Costco’s Brand)
4. Suave
5. Tresemme
6. Flex
7. Pert

I must apologize to my regular players of the Saturday Six for posting so late. No one was more surprised than I was!

What happened was this: I pre-posted this week’s questions. Now that I am using WordPress as the blog platform for this new version of Patrick’s Place, I can post an entry here and set the date some time in the future and have the post not actually appear until that time. Blogger, as I recall, would display the post immediately but with the future date, and I don’t think AOL even gave you such an option.

In any case, I set the date to the 28th instead of the 27th.

I guess I better make sure that I didn’t set the Sunday Seven to post on the 29th.

This week’s questions are a little bit of a departure. For one thing, there’s no quiz. (I may double up next week, but I’ll eventually make up for that.) But the bigger change that makes this set of questions unique is that for each one, you’ll have to choose the greater of two “evils” and explain why you chose that particular one. You might not see both options as an evil; or you might find it impossible to pick one as being significantly worse than the other.

But you should pick which you would find the most offensive, even if you agree with one’s right to take the action, label or position listed.

As always, there are no right or wrong answers…only your own opinions. Let’s give it a try!

First to play last week: Antonette of “Jottings From Jersey.” Congratulations!

Here are this week’s “Saturday Six” questions. Either answer the questions in a comment here, or put the answers in an entry on your journal…but either way, leave a link to your journal so that everyone else can visit! To be counted as “first to play,” you must be the first player to either answer the questions in a comment or to provide a complete link to the specific entry in your journal in which you answer the questions. A link to your journal in general cannot count. Enjoy!

1. Which of the following two would you find more offensive if you saw it out in the open in a family restaurant: two men holding hands or a woman breast-feeding a child? Why?

2. Which of the following would you find more offensive if you heard someone say it: a blond joke or a racial joke? Why?

3. Which of these would you generally consider more offensive: An atheist who badmouths Christians, or a Christian who badmouths atheists? Why?

4. Which of the following ideas about a presidential hopeful would you find more offensive: that a woman shouldn’t run for president because a woman doesn’t belong in the White House, or that a black man shouldn’t run for president because a black man doesn’t belong in the White House? Why?

5. Which of the following political terms or movements would you find the most offensive: “Pro-Life” or “Defense of Marriage”? Why?

6. Which of the following forms of protest are you likely to find most offensive: an animal rights group’s members shedding clothes to encourage people not to buy fur, or a war protest group’s members burning the American flag to criticize war policy? Why?

If you have a Reader’s Choice question you’d like to see asked (and answered), send me an email! I’d love to be able to include it in a future edition of the Saturday Six.

As most of you know by now, I work in television. As I’m sure you can imagine, there are plenty of people who love to jump on media-hating bandwagons often enough that those of us who work for one in the media often feel like we work in a hated profession. Within television, my particular area of interest is marketing. There are lots of people who hate commercials and those who have anything to do with anything that remotely resembles a commercial.

So there are times when I feel the “double whammy” of under-appreciation when it comes to my career choice.

I have debated going for a law degree so that I could become a triple threat, but it didn’t take long at all to talk myself out of that idea.

In any case, every time October rolls around, I hear marketing-weary people complaining about Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and specifically, the marketing of the month-long reminder designed to save lives.

Some people denounce the merchandising, like $30 pink t-shirts from which only five bucks or so is actually donated to breast cancer research. Some people criticize businesses offering various pink-colored products in an attempt to cash in on the month rather than do anything to help fight breast cancer.

The concerns are valid to an extent: I’d have no hesitation whatsoever in joining in a protest for any t-shirt that costs $30, and there are some products that just don’t connect with breast cancer very well.

Such transparent displays of money-grabbing are distasteful considering the real intent Breast Cancer Awareness Month is supposed to have. And there are critics who say that such attempts to make money is taking money away from the research needed to eradicate breast cancer once and for all.

The purpose of marketing breast cancer awareness isn’t to turn a $30 donation into a $5 donation and a t-shirt.

But there is a big difference between fund raising and marketing.

Here’s an example: think of cola. It can be any kind of cola, although by now, a specific brand of cola, like Coke or Pepsi, has already popped in your head. Most of you will note that you came up with the brand before I mentioned it. That little automatic association, in the advertising world, is known as “top-of-mind awareness.” It’s what every advertiser wants you to have about their specific brand.

When you think of facial tissue, you probably think of Kleenex. When you think of copy machines, you probably think of Xerox. When you think of home computers, depending on your platform of choice, you either think of an IBM (or equivalent) or a Mac.

How does this relate to Breast Cancer Awareness? Simple. The purpose of marketing breast cancer awareness isn’t to turn a $30 donation into a $5 donation and a t-shirt. It’s to raise top-of-mind awareness of the illness to the point that when someone sees a pink ribbon or any decoration in pink, the first thing they think of is breast cancer.

When that happens, the marketing campaign has worked, regardless of the fund raising.

There are people out there who might never send a check for $30 to breast cancer research, because they might think that $30 is too small an amount. But they might buy a t-shirt to show support for a friend, relative or colleague who has fought the illness. Given a choice between receiving nothing or $5, which do you think cancer researchers would choose?

What’s more, when someone wears one of those t-shirts, they’re reinforcing that message to other people, who then may or may not choose to donate themselves.

More importantly, cancer rates show that the number of cancer deaths, breast cancer included, have dropped. That’s proof that as medication has gotten better at fighting it, people are getting better at finding it early. And the awareness that has women (and men, since it can affect men as well) performing breast self-exams is the best we could hope for short of a cure.

I can’t imagine that someone who feels passionately enough about fighting the illness would not donate just so that they can buy a t-shirt. The people who are the most dedicated are likely to donate first, and buy goodies later.

As consumers, we have every right to ask a business selling something and promising to donate a portion of the proceeds how much they’re actually donating. If they don’t want to say, we have every right to walk away without buying anything.

But if you’re really committed to helping raise money to find a cure for breast cancer, finding out how much some business is going to donate if you buy something pink shouldn’t be your first concern.

Send your donations directly to where the money can be used. You have enough t-shirts in your closet, anyway.

This was a very simple quiz: just pick the image that most appeals to you and it’ll tell you what kind of career you should pursue.

You Should Be a Doctor

You are practical, sharp, and very intuitive.Optimistic and energetic, you are a problem solver who doesn’t get discouraged easily. You are also quite compassionate and caring. You make people feel hopeful. You’re highly adaptable and capable. You do well with almost any curve ball life throws at you.You do best when you: - Are always learning new subjects - Use your knowledge to solve problems You would also be a good therapist or detective.

What Should You Be When You Grow Up?

My second choice, because it looked “game show”-like to me, would have placed me as an artist. Ah, well….

What is to blame for violence in the world? Many people would quickly answer that question with one word: television.

Violence on TV, they say, makes people violent.

A new study, however, says, “Not so fast.”

Richard Tremblay, a University of Montreal professor who has spent more than 20 years studying 35,000 Canadian children, says it’s not what’s on the small screen but rather a lack of social skills.

It’s a finding that a lot of parents probably won’t like hearing, because they may think that it puts the blame on them rather than that convenient “baby sitter” that sits in the living room (or these days, in nearly every room of the house). But the finding doesn’t completely shift the blame back to parents, either.

All babies are born with violent tendencies, and most learn self-control as they get older. The ones who can’t learn or aren’t taught those skills, he says, are the ones who grow up to be violent.

He adds:

“It’s a natural behavior, and it’s surprising that the idea that children and adolescents learn aggression from the media is still relevant. Clearly youth were violent before television appeared.”

But here’s where things really get interesting: Tremblay says that damaged genes affecting behavioral skills are the likely culprits instead of behavioral influences.

He refers to the fact that pregnant women who drink, smoke or have poor nutrition or are exposed to excessive amounts of stress can cause or contribute to abnormal genetic development in a fetus. And it’s those damaged genes that can prevent a child from learning skills for self-expression, reducing his ability to interact socially, which, Tremblay says, can make him prone to violence.

Of course, social conservative groups have long pointed to other research claims that link violence in the media to childhood behavior, and Congress has been feeling pressure lately to take action against television shows and video games that feature excessive violence.

If Tremblay’s research is correct, such action wouldn’t really solve the problem.

What I don’t understand about the media violence issue is that I watch a lot more television than the average person, in particular since I work in TV, but I always have: the television has always been on in my house long before I ever started working in the business. If the conservative groups are right about the dangers of watching violence on TV, as television has gotten more and more violent, I should have gotten more and more violent over the years.

So why haven’t I?

Author J.K. Rowling has announced, to “gasps and applause,” that one of the characters in the seven ridiculously successful Harry Potter books just happens to be gay.

The character she drop-kicked out of the literary closet was Professor Dumbledore.  She made the announcement at an appearance at Carnegie Hall when she took questions from the audience that included a query about whether Dumbledore would ever find true love.

I haven’t read any of the Potter novels and have yet to find any overwhelming motivation to do so.  This little surprise makes me neither more likely nor less likely to pick up one of the tales.

But I do note this:  how odd it is that people find out that the character is gay after the novel series was concluded.  There are some writers who would have shoved his sexuality down the readers’ throats from the first chapter.

Everyone doesn’t feel so defined by their sexuality alone that they make issue of it to everyone they encounter, and that’s true for some straights and gays.  Not that there’s necessarily anything wrong with being open, but I wonder why some people feel the need to be as open as they sometimes are.

Sometimes, there’s nothing wrong with keeping your business private.

If you’ve been a reader here at Patrick’s Place for a while, you probably know that fall is my favorite season.

Up north, people are probably already used to fall colors.  I would imagine that many leaves have already turned colors and have started falling off the trees by now.

In the Lowcountry, we’re just now getting the first taste of fall:

This one tree has a single patch of yellowing leaves.  The rest of it is is green.  I can’t wait for more of the fall colors to appear.  My living room window has a nice view of several trees like this one.

If you’re like me, you hate the very thought of air travel. But for this week’s question, you’ll have to assume that you must fly somewhere. You can also assume that any airline that operates “normal” routes in the U.S. is available from your nearest airport.

Before first, Annie, of “Head in Knots,” was first to play last week. Congratulations, Annie!

On to this week’s question!

THIS WEEK’S QUESTION:
Name seven airlines you’re most likely to use if you were flying somewhere.

Either answer the question in a comment or answer it in your journal and include the link in a comment. (To be considered “first to play,” a link must be to the specific entry in which you answered the question.) You may include this link in the URL space when leaving your comment, or in the comment itself. As long as it’s there in one spot or the other.

This week, the ayes have it. Make that, the eyes.

But before we begin with the spooky questions, it was BookGal of “Books, Memes and Musings” who was first to play last week. Congratulations, BookGal!

Here are this week’s “Saturday Six” questions. Either answer the questions in a comment here, or put the answers in an entry on your journal…but either way, leave a link to your journal so that everyone else can visit! To be counted as “first to play,” you must be the first player to either answer the questions in a comment or to provide a complete link to the specific entry in your journal in which you answer the questions. A link to your journal in general cannot count. Enjoy!

1. When speaking to someone in person, how often do you look them directly in the eye?

2. How likely are you to notice another person’s eye color?

3. What color eyes does your closest friend have?

4. Take the quiz: What do your eyes reveal about you?

5. If you had the chance to permanently change the color of your eyes, and would never be able to change it back to your original color, would you change it? If so, from what color to what color?

6. If you were a candidate for Lasik^® eye surgery, do you think you’d have the guts to go through with eye surgery?

If you have a Reader’s Choice question you’d like to see asked (and answered), send me an email! I’d love to be able to include it in a future edition of the Saturday Six.

Talk show host Ellen DeGeneres, an animal lover, decided she wanted to adopt a dog back in September. She she went to a private animal rescue service and adopted a black Brussels Griffon terrier mix named Iggy.

She spent $3,000, she says, getting the dog neutered — something most pet adoption agencies have already done before a dog is ever allowed to be adopted — and getting it trained so that it would get along with her cats. Apparently, the training didn’t work and the dogs and cats just couldn’t get along.

She then proceeded to give the dog to her hairdresser, who has two small children who fell in love with Iggy.

When the rescue group called to check on the dog they had placed, as rescue groups are prone to do, DeGeneres says she fessed up, admitting that the dog didn’t work out and that she had given it to another family. Honesty is the best policy, as she implied as she tearfully told the story on her show. However, that action happened to be in violation of the agreement the rescue group required DeGeneres and her partner to sign, and to make a long story short, the rescue group took the dog from the family.

On her show this past Monday, she sobbed — literally sobbed — as she described the situation.

She begged the rescue group to have a heart and return the dog to the loving family.

She apologized for doing the wrong thing and said that the family shouldn’t be punished for her mistake.

She did a nice job of vilifying an agency that is designed to do good things for animals and for people who follow specific rules they have in place.

She did the wrong thing. Twice. Continue reading “Ellen’s Doggie Saga”