Gambler's Weekend

Heading down to The Whale's Vagina with Scarlett this weekend for all kinds of gambling. We're staying with Famous Dad, and visiting the local redman's parlor tonight. Methinks they have more than bingo happening there. And if we're not wiped out, we get to wager who's headed for the glue factory at the famed Del Mar Fairgrounds. Plus there's going to be a huge dinner that night since Scarlett's family (sans her sister) will coincidentally be down there. Ma'am, party of 11, please!

Best of the week: I don't really think local news is all that exciting...unless an elected official gets shithammered drunk and ends up taking out a power pole. Yes, the people giveth him power and he also taketh away.

Westminster City Councilman Andy Quach was charged with misdemeanor driving under the influence after he collided with another car, struck a concrete wall and severed a power pole, knocking out power to more than 300 homes. Quach was also charged with one misdemeanor count of driving with a blood alcohol level over 0.08% and a sentencing enhancement for having a blood alcohol level over 0.20% while driving. Authorities said Quach showed signs of intoxication, including bloodshot eyes, slow and slurred speech, and unstable balance; that he smelled of alcohol and performed poorly on a field sobriety test. A blood test revealed that Quach had more than a 0.26 blood alcohol level. Impressive!

Quach said he is remorseful about what happened and will take "full responsibility for everything."

"I got into a very bad car accident," he said this afternoon. "I'm hurting physically and emotionally right now. But I'm extremely relieved and so grateful that no one else was hurt in this accident." Quach said he was on his way home after having dinner with friends when the crash occurred. "I think I must have nodded off and hit the pole," he said. More like passed out completely. "I wish it's something I can undo, but I can't. We're all human. As far as I'm concerned, it will never happen again." Sure...

"Whatever the legal, financial and political consequences of what happened, I'm willing to face them," he said. "I don't believe what happened will affect my abilities as a councilman. As long as you're not having any lunch meetings with your friends.

Worst of the week: Exercise

Scarlett is a better person than me because she gets up and goes to a spin class twice a week at 6am. I tried the early morning gym thing back in high school with Herr Docktor, and getting up at 4:30am was one of the biggest mistakes ever (the other was not realizing how fast the LSD was going to kick in that night at Charlie's Donuts). Anyhow, the gym and exercise is on the bottom of my list, and for beyond the obvious reasons.

When George Sodini went to a L.A. Fitness Club in Pittsburgh earlier in the week, and opened fire on a "Latin impact" dance-aerobics class for women, he made the ultimate loser statement. His 4,610-word online diary revealed he felt ignored by women and had an "exit plan" to avenge his rage, a nine-month chronology of his plans, ending in carnage at his gym.

He couldn't understand why women ignored him, despite his best efforts to look nice. He wrote that he hadn't had a girlfriend since 1984, hadn't slept with a woman in 19 years. "Women just don't like me. There are 30 million desirable women in the US (my estimate) and I cannot find one. Not one of them finds me attractive," the 48-year-old computer programmer lamented. Well, you'll really change their minds by posting your plans to kill them.

Killed were three women, while six patients remained hospitalized, including the aerobics instructor. Sodini did not have a relationship with any of his victims, according to police.

In his diary, Sodini wrote of planning the attack since at least November and said he tried to carry it out when the same weekly aerobics class met Jan. 6 but "chickened out," he wrote. His anger stemmed from unfulfilled desire: The women at his gym "look so beautiful as to not be human," he wrote. Really. In Pittsburgh? He complained that women "don't even give me a second look ANYWHERE" even though he was tan and fit and claimed to dress well and smell nice. Clearly, not well enough.

Now, if you are going and don't get killed, this story from Time may just convince you to stay home.

Though some dick named John Cloud has the audacity to whine about "gut fat that hangs over my belt when I sit" while his "weight has returned to the same 163 lb. it has been most of my adult life", the point of his writing is that all the physical activity we do may not be doing much.

More than 45 million Americans now belong to a health club, up from 23 million in 1993, and spend $19 billion a year on gym memberships. Of course, some people join and never go. Still, one major study found more of us at least say we exercise regularly. The survey ran from 1980, when only 47% of respondents said they engaged in regular exercise, to 2000, when the figure had grown to 57%. And yet obesity figures have risen dramatically in the same period: a third of Americans are obese, and another third count as overweight by the Federal Government's definition.

People who regularly exercise are at significantly lower risk for all manner of diseases - those of the heart in particular. They less often develop cancer, diabetes and many other illnesses. But the past few years of obesity research show that the role of exercise in weight loss has been wildly overstated. The basic problem is that while it's true that exercise burns calories and that you must burn calories to lose weight, exercise has another effect: it can stimulate hunger. That causes us to eat more, which in turn can negate the weight-loss benefits we just accrued. Exercise, in other words, isn't necessarily helping us lose weight. It may even be making it harder.

Another study formed four groups of 464 overweight women who didn't regularly exercise. Women in three of the groups were asked to work out with a personal trainer for 72 min., 136 min., and 194 min. per week, respectively, for six months. Women in the fourth cluster, the control group, were told to maintain their usual physical-activity routines. On average, the women in all the groups, even the control group, lost weight, but the women who exercised - sweating it out with a trainer several days a week for six months - did not lose significantly more weight than the control subjects did. (The control-group women may have lost weight because they were filling out those regular health forms, which may have prompted them to consume fewer doughnuts.) Some of the women in each of the four groups actually gained weight, some more than 10 lb. each. Most of the exercisers were able to trim their waistlines slightly - by about an inch, but even so, they lost no more overall body fat than the control group did.

Could pushing people to exercise more actually be contributing to our obesity problem? In some respects, yes, because exercise depletes not just the body's muscles but the brain's self-control "muscle" as well. Many feel greater entitlement to eat a bag of chips during that lazy time after getting back from the gym. It explains why exercise could make you heavier - or at least why exercise isn't eliminating the fat.