“Mmmm … bacon.”

Though apparently never actually uttered by Homer Simpson according to The Simpsons Archive (he did say “mmmm … unexplained bacon” in one of the Hallowe’en episodes) I know many people who feel this way when it comes to bacon.

According to a story in Sunday’s National Post, bacon and cheesecake have the same effect on your brain as heroin and cocaine. When rats that were raised on regular, healthy rat food were given unfettered access to high-fat foods, they became so addicted that even mild foot shocks weren’t enough to convince them to stop eating to excess. The changes in the rats’ brain chemistry noticed by the researchers were the same ones noticed in cases of additions to heroin and cocaine.

To break the addiction, they had to use a special virus that sort of “reset” their dopamine receptors so they would start eating healthy food again because after two weeks of being forced to go “cold turkey” (so to speak) the rats had not returned to their healthy diet. It seems they would rather stave than eat healthy.

This explains much.

On men blogging: Among many of the male bloggers I know — especially the ultra successful ones — there’s a sort of rivalry to see how much stuff they can pump out, how quickly. That’s really a guy thing, don’t you think?

Ultra-competitiveness is not a male-only activity. Women are into one-upmanship, too.

Margaret Wente wrote an opinion piece in the Globe and Mail entitled “Why are bloggers male?” She basically states that blogging is “more of a guy thing” and goes on about it being related to why talk shows and opinion pages are “still dominated by male voices” and similar piffle.

The piece is accompanied by a picture and a tagline that reads “Guys get pumped by going higher, faster, farther than anyone else. That’s why they spit out instant opinions”. The tagline is attention grabbing hyperbole, so meh. The picture, on the other hand, is a little more controversial.

If you’ve been paying attention to the news lately, you may recognize this as a photo of snowmobiles at the site of an avalanche in Revelstoke that killed at least two people a few days ago.

Now, I don’t know whether it was Wente or some random editor that chose the photo to accompany her opinion piece, but whoever it was is lacking in good judgement. I’m sure that the families of those who died are thrilled at being used as the example for Wente’s piece.

Oh, and the last time I checked, some of the biggest talk shows on the air are hosted by women – Oprah and The Ellen Degeneres Show are just a couple that spring to mind. @benlucier on Twitter pointed out that The View should also have sprung to mind.

And at a recent gathering of bloggers from the Ottawa area, the ratio of male to female bloggers was evenly split, or possibly skewed in favour of the women. A quick review of my Ottawa blogroll shows that about half of the blogs listed are run by women.

Apparently, she’s pissed off women bloggers because they’ve added an editor’s note at the bottom of the piece that there’s going to be an online debate between Margaret Wente and female bloggers at noon on Friday. Should be interesting to watch.

As for the title of this blog entry, it’s taken from her opinion piece:

All you have to do is write “Margaret Wente is an idiot” and hit send. Instant gratification!

At least she’s right about something (and it’s not the instant gratification).

Updated to include a reference to The View.

A story posted on the National Post’s blog caught my attention in my RSS reader and screamed “click me”. The headline was “Woman aspires to weigh 1,000 pounds” and was based on a Daily Mail story.

So I clicked. And then I wished I hadn’t.

(more…)

A couple of days ago I posted a link to an incredible video on YouTube of a flight taken from the perspective of a small camera mounted on the nose gear of a 747-200. In the video, the nose gear is lowered well-before the main gear, which led a couple of people (including myself) to wonder how they did it.

According to a new “making of” video, it’s really not that complicated because there are controls that allow them to manually lower each landing gear independently.

Usually, flying videos are taken from cameras mounted in the cockpit with the pilots or mounted on the nose. Gadling featured a video taken with a camera that was mounted on the nose gear of a 747-200, which is definitely worth watching.

A colleague asked me about pop-up website surveys that some websites have. Every nth visitor is presented with a popup window when they visit a site that asks them questions related to their visit. She didn’t like my answer of “annoying” in response to her question of “what are they called?”, so I did some Googling to see if there was a formal name and came across a page at SiteExperts.com about them.

Ironically, their page about pop-up surveys tried to pop something up that Firefox stomped on: