I need to start compiling a list of all of dietary additives which (within my relatively brief lifetime) were touted as being good to eat but turned out to be bad to eat. The latest is soy, which besides being the obvious base of things like soy milk and veggie burgers, is in 60% of all processed food sold in Britain, a statistic which is presumably about the same in the US. It turns out that the stuff is loaded with plant estrogens, which means that if you (for example) feed soy milk to your baby, you’re giving him/her the equivalent of a whopping big dose of birth-control pills. The article is here. It’s yet another good reason to not eat processed foods, just in case you don’t have enough already. read more

I’m tentatively turning the commenting mechanism back on for this site. I’m trying a security plug-in that theoretically makes it much more difficult for comment spammers to exploit the site. If it turns out to not work, I’ll turn comments off again. We’ll all see how it goes, I suppose.

Another entry for my hypothetical list of Things That Couldn’t Exist Without the Web: a site of photos of cats that look like Hitler. Who would have guessed? Appropriately enough, its URL is http://www.catsthatlooklikehitler.com/. [Found via Lisa Randall’s blog. Thanks, Lisa!]

Paper Jade now carries several kinds of fine stationery made from Japanese paper. It’s nice stuff; I’m particularly fond of the Two-Tone packages.

I’ve been waiting for something like this. It grabs random images from Flickr and fuses them together into a sort of endless, plotless movie. Lovely.

If you’ve been thinking that it’s been unusually hot recently, you’re right, according to the people who keep track of such things. It’s also been dry, unless you happen to live on or near the west coast. Now my utility bills are higher in the summer than in the winter, thanks to having to run the air conditioning basically all the time. The heat doesn’t bother me too much, but Tracie basically becomes immobile in temperatures above the mid 70s.