Bruner Blog

Tom Traina of Heretical Ideas posted last week a list of 2007 death predictions. Top of the list: Gerald Ford. (James Brown not mentioned.) Given that Ford died in 2006, I wonder if Tom deserves credit. Either way it’s creepy.

They come in threes, right? I dread to see who’s next.

I’ve been busting a nut in recent years to stay in shape. I bike to work and/or hit the gym a few times a week when I can, and I do my best to eat right. (Okay, I did just move on to raw cookie dough this evening after already feeling guilty for consuming too many Xmas cookies.) For a man of my advanced years (41), I feel like I do pretty well.

Then I run into this lying sack of shit web page that purports to calculate your BMI (body mass index) based on your weight and height. In the interest of revealing way too much personal information on this blog, I’m somewhere between 5′11″ and 6′ and 170 to 175 lbs (weirdly, I normally weigh in at 172, my old street address growing up which is a number I seem to notice everywhere). According to aforementioned lyingsackofshit.com, that puts me a gerbil fart away from being “overweight.”

This chart on Wikipedia wants me to weigh between 130 and 170 to be “normal” weight. Let’s call it 150. WTF? “Normal”? As is, normative? The norm? Granted, we Amerikans are buckets of grease with legs compared to most of the rest of the world (though thank goodness they all seem to be following in our butt-chaffing waddle), but I used to be a scrawny kid, and I haven’t weighed 150, much less 130, since junior high school.

I see from Wikipedia the index was invented somewhere around 1830 to 1850, back when 6″ was a circus freak. Isn’t it time that the FDA or USDA or one of those other helpful organizations that tells us to eat heaping helpings of carbs every day and that cloned cows are good for us (mmm, clony) should revisit this thing?

Great piece in the Times today basically saying, as the coffee mug adage has long held, a clean desk is the sign of a sick mind.

Studies are piling up that show that messy desks are the vivid signatures of people with creative, limber minds (who reap higher salaries than those with neat ?office landscapes?) and that messy closet owners are probably better parents and nicer and cooler than their tidier counterparts. It?s a movement that confirms what you have known, deep down, all along: really neat people are not avatars of the good life; they are humorless and inflexible prigs, and have way too much time on their hands.

Of course, I knew this years ago having read Malcom Gladwell’s excellent New Yorker piece “The Social Life of Paper.”

Classic. First there were there Best of the [Year] lists. Then a few years ago, I thought it would be funny to put together a list of the Best of the Best of [Year] List Lists. Then I noticed someone beat me to it, so I didn’t bother. Now several people produce Best of the Best of [Year] List Lists. So, an idea whose time has come, the guys at Lost Remote have put together The Best of ‘The Best of 2006′ List Lists List.

Shout out to YouTube for leading me to my new favorite band: The Big Friend Jazz Orchestra (BFJO Takasago), an ensemble of Japanese school girls who play like the Duke Ellington Orchestra. Will someone please fly them out to an American jazz fest already?

UPDATE:
Lots more links of the band, thanks to Mark.

My step-broheem unearth’s this gem, the retelling of a classic tale for the true meaning of Christmas.

Get ready for rectal exams at the airport thanks to this nitwit: Flatulence, not turbulence, forces plane to land

It’s always such a pleasure to turn on WNYC, my favorite radio station (NY NPR affiliate; yes, I am a member) and hear a friend of mine being interviewed. Luckily, I have enough fancy-pants friends, it happens with surprising regularity. Once a couple of years ago it was for Mucho Maass. A year ago it was Liz Spiers.

Today it was Adam LeBor, journalist, author and all around raconteur. He was a guest today on the always excellent Leonard Lopate Show, and not for the first time, either, as I noted last time he was in town.

Adam’s in town this week promoting he newest book, Complicity With Evil: The United Nations in the Age of Modern Genocide (too bad he missed the summer; sounds like a great beach read). I haven’t yet read it myself, but if its anything like his previous six books, it promises to be well written, expertly researched and an important commentary on a topic that really matters in the world.

Kudos, buddy! Looking forward to hanging out together tomorrow night at the book party!