News

How to gain weight

December is a good month for putting on a few extra pounds, even if they are not needed. Most people do not gain weight on Halloween or Thanksgiving or Christmas, says Kim McClintic of Illinois, a registered dietitian. Rather, it's eating the leftover candy on the days after Halloween and the feasts that follow Thanksgiving, Christmas and the other holidays that does it.

Source: The (Bloomington, Ill.) Pantagraph

Diet and diploma

"By the time they graduate, the members of this year's senior class at Lincoln University [in Pennsylvania] will have met the usual academic requirements for a diploma," Dan Hardy writes for The Philadelphia Inquirer. "But for the first time in the school's history - and perhaps for the first time in the United States - those whom the school judges to be unhealthily overweight will have to surmount another hurdle before they get to cross the stage. They must take an exercise class designed to help them lose weight and stay healthy. Student reaction at the university ... has been sharp, with some saying the policy unfairly targets one group and intrudes on their lives."

Performance review?

"With the recovery tenuous ... it seemed an odd time for Japan's biggest and most austere banking group to be telling its staff to knock off early," the Times of London reported last month. "Particularly when they realized how they were supposed to be using the extra one hour and 50 minutes of free time. The national birth rate is low, ran the round-robin e-mail that landed in people's inboxes ... so let's all enjoy 'family time.' " A woman who works on the bank's Tokyo trading floor said: "The company is constantly telling us to do things, but I think this is the first time the corporate agenda has made its way to the bedroom. I'm not sure how many more babies will be conceived this week, but the bar next door to the headquarters should do well."

The moose did it

"A Swedish man who was arrested on suspicion of murdering his wife has been cleared, after police decided she was probably killed by an elk," BBC News reports. "Ingemar Westlund, aged 68, found the dead body of his wife Agneta, 63, by a lake close to the village of Loftahammar in September, 2008. He was immediately arrested and held in police custody for 10 days. Now the case has been dropped after forensic analysis found elk hair and saliva on his wife's clothes. ... The European elk, or moose, is usually considered to be shy and will normally run away from humans. But Swedish Radio International says the animals can become aggressive after eating fermented fallen apples in gardens."

Risky rides

Millions of Americans are taking their lives into their own hands as they drive around for the holidays, according to the Rubber Manufacturers Association. The trade group's surveys reveal that 11 per cent of motorists have at least one bald tire. And only 9 per cent of vehicles have four properly inflated tires.

Source: Dow Jones Newswires

This Punk'd Age

"Tareq Salahi, a polo-playing winemaker, and his wife, Michaele Salahi - the White House crashers who sashayed into the most closely guarded party in the world - fall into an emerging mould: Those who'll risk jail time for a fleeting shot at fame," Patrik Jonsson writes for The Christian Science Monitor. "So why are people crashing the White House and setting off silver helium balloons for a show? Call it the Punk'd Age, where propriety cries out for a good prank and where all the world - even the White House - is a stage. ... The Salahis follow in the footsteps of others desperate to shake their obscurity in order to become one of a rather crowded field of household names. ... Moreover, an increasingly desperate and fragmented media world is ready to push any Internet phenom out onto the broader waves, driving the growing obsession with fame at all costs. Robert Thompson, a pop-culture expert at Syracuse University, told The Wall Street Journal: 'The media business is the new Ellis Island: Give me your talentless, give me your hoaxes and I will put anything on my air.' "

And you'll pay me?

A British university has advertised for a £31,000-a-year ($54,000) research post - to study lap dancing, The Sunday Mirror reports. Leeds University wants to find someone to examine "the place of sexual labour and consumption in the night-time economy." The government-funded post will see the researcher interviewing 300 lap dancers in bars across northern England. The successful applicant must have "prior experience of conducting research in the female sex industry."

Thought du jour

"Sooner or later we must realize there is no station, no one place to arrive at once and for all. The true joy of life is the trip."

- Robert J. Hastings