Shannon > Recent Status Updates

Any improvement to the nutritional profile of a product can in no way diminish its allure, and this has led to one of the industry's most devious moves: lowering one bad boy ingredient like fat while quietly adding more sugar to keep people hooked.

Oh, this, definitely. Check any low-fat or fat-free item at the grocery store against its full-fat equivalent next time you shop. Frankenfoods are not the answer!

Many of the biggest slaughterhouses would sell their meat only to hamburger makers like Cargill if they agreed not to test their meat for E. coli until it was mixed together with shipments from other slaughterhouses. This insulated the slaughterhouses from costly recalls when the pathogen was found in ground beef, but it also prevented government officials and the public from tracing E. coli back to its source

Yoplait had already transformed traditional unsweetened breakfast yogurt into a dessert-like snack. It now had twice as much sugar per serving as Lucky Charms, the company's cloyingly sweet, marshmallow-filled cereal. And yet, because of yogurt's well-tended image as a wholesome, life-giving snack, sales of Yoplait were soaring, with annual revenue topping $500 million.

Switch to Greek and always read labels!

Yes, I am reading another non-fiction book. No, I haven't finished any of the others that I started. Yes, I am now in the double digits on my currently-reading shelf. No, I will not feel bad about spamming with updates because I already know this has a ton of interesting and important information in it. Yes, I will still probably eat a Cadbury egg at some point while reading this because CADBURY EGGS.

"You can love someone as many ways as water falls from the sky. Sometimes it falls with thunder and lightning; other times it falls silently. Sometimes it falls as cool snow, and other times hard balls of ice beat down. If you want the water, you don't get to choose how it falls."

Opium and cocaine were the main targets of the uniform federal drug law, the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914, which required their controlled distribution from pharmacies. Many bigots encouraged the passage of the law using blatantly racist rhetoric. "It has been authoritatively stated that cocaine is often the direct incentive to the crime of rape by the negroes of the South and other sections of the country."

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... This legacy stretches from the very first drug laws in the country, which were aimed at Chinese opium users, to the very latest—one introduced in 2010 to finally even out the steep penalties for people arrested on crack cocaine charges, who are usually black, with the less severe penalties for people who are arrested with powdered cocaine, who are usually white.

The more plausible motive, espoused by Wishnia and many others, is that racism drove the anti-marijuana legislation. For evidence, he points to the country's long and shameful history of racial prejudice, which is readily obvious in the justice system as a whole and drug laws in particular ...

Throughout the War on Drugs, demand for pot has fed an underground economy worth billions, all of it circulating untaxed on the black market. As a cash crop, marijuana is America's most valuable, worth an estimated $35 billion, more than hay, soybeans, and corn.

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More than King Corn?! That's insane.

The War on Drugs has been, by every measure, a complete failure, especially as it relates to marijuana. More than 40 percent of the U.S. population over the age of twelve has at least tried the illegal weed, 26 million have smoked in the previous twelve months, and 15 million admit to being regular users. It's often easier for high school students to get their hands on a few joints than on a twelve-pack of beer.

[Marijuana is a] Schedule I narcotic under the 1970 Controlled Substance Act [...] the most restrictive category of drugs, defined as having no medical benefit and a lack of accepted safety even under medical supervision. Foster would have had better luck using a medical defense if he'd been caught with cocaine; that drug is in Schedule II, meaning it can be used by doctors for certain medical procedures.

Oklahoma still comes to mind only behind the likes of China, Singapore, and Thailand, which are among the countries that execute drug traffickers, when thinking about the worst places to get caught with any amount of pot in any form. You could hijack an airplane in Oklahoma and expect only a maximum of twenty-five years; if you grow [pot] the possibility that you could die behind bars is quite real.

Oklahoma is where Larry Jackson, a frequent offender with a string of nonviolent crimes on his record, was given life in prison for felony marijuana possession after he was arrested at a friend's house sitting next to a burned roach containing 0.16 grams of marijuana. It's the state that sentenced James Geddes to 150 years and two days for growing five marijuana plants.

Pot laws in Oklahoma are extraordinarily harsh. This is the state that sentenced Jimmy Montgomery, a wheelchair-bound paraplegic, to life in prison (later reduced to ten years) for intent to distribute two ounces of marijuana. The pot was his personal stash, which he used to keep his legs from trembling so violently that they often bounced him right out of his chair if he wasn't strapped in.

"How much of himself should he have to sacrifice for duty?"
"However much is necessary," he said, tilting his head.
I nodded. I agreed only because I should agree, because everyone had always agreed. But I often wondered why people invoked duty as the reason to keep doing what was destroying them.

"I hope you will find your own story. Remember, if America is everything you hope it is, you should stay there. Forget China. If you want a new life, you have to turn your back on the old one."

Hrm. What about ... remembering your roots?

Here's the essential truth about me: I killed a girl when I was fourteen. Her name was Lila, she was my best friend, and I loved her. I killed her anyway.

Think I'm going to listen to Lucy from now on when she tells me I should read something.

Somnambulism isn't all that uncommon in kids, boys especially. I looked it up online after waking in the driveway when I was thirteen, my lips blue with cold, unable to shake the eerie feeling that I'd just returned from somewhere I couldn't quite recall.

I like where this is going ...

Argh. Confucianism and patriarchy always piss me off! I can't blame the author for being historically accurate though.

I'm sort of getting Scooby-Doo vibes from this, as in; there are all sorts of "supernatural" things going on but in the end we're going to find out the villain was just a guy in a costume. Jinkies!

If I began this story with the words "Out of the mist of time comes the story of Jade Moon, the Fire Horse girl," you would expect it to throb with adventure and end with heroics. If I began it with "It is said" or "There is an old saying," you would search the story for wisdom. But this is not a story of heroics or wisdom; it is my story.
There once was a girl, a Fire Horse girl.

Bringing forth something as vicious and powerful as a Fire Horse destroyed my mother. Her last breath mingled with my first. Stories are like that too—deep breaths, one ending so another can begin. One sacrificed so another can survive. We often dwell on the endings of stories, forgetting how they were born, but you must inhale to exhale.

In honor of Chinese New Year, and also since Kara just finished and loved this, I think I'll start this tonight.

I wish every day could be Halloween. We could all wear masks all the time. Then we could walk around and get to know each other before we got to see what we looked like under the masks.

The thing is, when I was little, I never minded meeting new kids because all the kids I met were really little, too. What's cool about really little kids is that they don't say stuff to try to hurt your feelings, even though sometimes they do say stuff that hurts your feelings. But they don't actually know what they're saying.
Big kids, though: they know what they're saying. And that is definitely not fun for me.

I'm being an awful buddy-reader. Sorry, Alicia!

This book is ... interesting. So far, nothing has happened. I find this is my problem with most straight fiction that doesn't at least have a strong romance: there's just not enough action or conflict. And can we talk about the fact that they're furnishing a boat with a piano?! Tell me, why exactly you "need" a piano for your trip down the Nile?!

First buddy read with Alicia!
(This also might be the first time I've ever been in the middle of two mysteries at once ...)
Yay for branching out!

The word Shin uses again and again to describe those first days [after escaping] is "shock."
It was not meaningful to him that North Korea in the dead of winter is ugly, dirty and dark, or that it is poorer than Sudan, or that, taken as a whole, it is viewed by human rights groups as the world's largest prison.
He felt wonderfully free and, as best he could determine, no one was looking for him.

"What were you thinking?" the superintendent shouted at Shin. "Do you want to die? How could you be so weak that you lost your grip? You're always stuffing your face with food."
"Even if you die, the sewing machine can't be brought back," the superintendent added. "Your hand is the problem. Cut his finger off!"

Because ... that's a sane response when someone drops something. I just ... can't with these people.