Oh, one more miscellaneous bit of miscellany which arose from the general gift-givingnes of the weekend arose on Saturday when we got everyone together at my sister-in-law and her husband's house. My sister had wanted one of those Eat This, Not That books in which it's explained how you can still go to a Carl's Jr if you don't eat some insanely overly-caloric overly-fat thing like the Medium Cheeseburger With Bacon-Dipped Batter-Fried Cheese, which is larger than my head, and instead get something that's relatively healthy, like the Mediumer Cheeseburger With Turkey Bacon-Dipped Soy-Batter-Fried Cheese. This is particularly funny because there's no Carl's Jr anywhere near here, and the only time I've entered one was back in Singapore when they began occupying Suntec City and Plaza Singapura.
So every one of us started flipping through the book, looking for any fast food places where we might actually eat, and learned that things we had never considered eating in the first place were not as healthy as some other things we had never considered eating. The only usable advice I took from it was that I shouldn't have a Triple Whopper With Cheese, which contains enough fat to have supplied Canada with all its munitions needs for the Second World War. I can avoid that easily enough; I haven't even had a Double Whopper since a day back in grad school when I had nothing else all day and a half.
Although there are no Popeye's places within an hour's drive that I know about (the one that I thought was around is, in fact, an Atlanta Bread Company; there is one at the Changi Airport in Singapore, and while in the kids' section they are constantly playing Video CDs of Popeye cartoons, they're the 1980 Hanna-Barbera series), it did advise that one should not have the Fried Chicken Breast, substituting in its place ... the Fried Chicken Breast. What they meant by this was that you shouldn't eat the skin, which is understandable since that's the fun part to eat. You may as well not involve the chickens at all at that rate, to the chickens' gratification. I bet they also disapprove of the Cajun Fries.
Trivia: Skylab 2/1 astronaut Paul Weitz bounced a rubber ball 111 times around the ring of storage lockers on the workshop wall before the ball died. Source: A House In Space, Henry SF Cooper Jr.
Currently Reading: The Equation That Couldn't Be Solved: How Mathematical Genius Discovered The Language Of Symmetry, Mario Livio.