The Blaisdell Blog

I constantly fight my weight.   How about you?   I live an active life, but I am nowhere near my fighting weight (and I’ve got a fight or two left in me) so I work at my diet constantly.   The rules are simple: calories in minus calories burned equal weight gained or lost.   Science and practice both tell me that the key is actually the calories “in” part.   Successful diets (the ones you can stay with for a lifetime) involve changing our eating habits so that we are (1) mindful of how many calories we are taking in and (2) disciplined enough to do something about it.   There is also an element of reality here.   I know that I like a drink in the evening.   If that means sticking to fruit and salad during the day I don’t whine about it.   If I want fettuccini Alfredo, fine, but the rest of my caloric intake that day is going to be mighty skinny.   I am making choices.   The pounds are receding by ounces.   It is s...

Church today was a sea of red.   It is Reformation Sunday and red is the traditional color.   Of course, if you are not a Lutheran, Reformation Day may not mean quite as much.   To the general public, Martin Luther is often depicted as a brooding, personally troubled man.   The pictures of him show a square-jawed German with a grim mouth and a furrowed brow.   Growing up in a Lutheran home, I was sure he had been a brave but angry man, nailing his 95 Thesis on the door of the church in Wittenberg and starting a religious revolution.   Even his decision to enter the priesthood, a vow to St. Anne if she would deliver him from the fury of a sudden storm, seemed to be born of fire.                Luther, who was not a simple monk but a highly educated theologian, is a frequently misunderstood revolutionary.   He profited from being the right man at the right moment.   Luther’s ideas ...

Ms Paltrow is again offering medical advice.  This time it is about bras being the cause of breast cancer.  This made me decide to rerun this column--a recent one, but maybe worth a second look.   In case the title did not convince the men in my audience to forgo this column, let me warn you right now that both some of the language and one of the references will make you squirm.               It seems that Gwyneth Paltrow is advocating that all women get their vaginas steam cleaned.   Does Bissell even make an attachment for that?   The first thing I though when I read that was “…what on earth did she spill down there?”   But one must consider the source.             Gwyneth Paltrow is a movie star, but that term just doesn’t mean the same thing now that it did when Kathryn Hepburn and Bette Davis were on the silver screen.   Palt...

Bridgeton , Missouri is a small, blue-collar community in suburban St. Louis .   The people who live there are subjects of an evacuation order developed in secret a year ago by the St. Louis County emergency management.   The reason is deadly.   For five years an underground fire has been burning in the Bridgeton Landfill.   It is now burning less than 1,000 feet from a nuclear waste dump that contains the largest amount of thorium-230 and radium-226 in the United States .   This dump is also soaked in water and when the fire and nuclear waste combine the superheated steam could jet into the heavy St. Louis air creating what the government calls a catastrophic event. All of the usual suspects downplay the danger.   According to County Executive Steve Stenger the plan "is not an indication of any imminent danger."   Russ Knocke, spokesperson for Republic Services which owns both the Bridgeton Landfill and the West Lake Landfill (where the ...

The one take-away I got from tonight’s Democratic debate was that if you are a woman, an illegal alien (which, for some reason, the Democrats persist in calling immigrants) or a member of the LGBT community you are down with the Democratic Party. The best I could figure, we are going to provide free education, free health care, free dope and a get-out-of-jail-free card to everyone who self-selects as an American.   This bill (estimated at $15 trillion dollars a year, by the way) is going to be paid by the ever popular “…tax on the wealthy.”   [Check the definition of wealthy, by the way, because that means the income of two people, working 40+ hours a week, and making better than $100K/year.   If you are a teacher and your husband a fire fighter, you are part of the wealthy and better plan on paying for all those freebies.]   But I digress.             What I really want to talk about is the one grou...