Micro

It's funny (sad?) that we have more ways to work out than ever, and certainly more diets (some that work, some don't), but Americans still face massive obesity issues. Why it would be easy to dismiss us as lazy McDonald eating fat fucks, I have to think there is more to it. Is it the "perfect storm" of several things, or can we point to one thing?

I'll just generalize some factors and you can agree/disagree as you will.

1. High fructose corn syrup replacing sugar.
2. Portion sizes (SUPER SIZES).
3. High carb/fat snack items. (...snack in general like potato chips)
4. Time (or the lack of) - eating at [Insert Fast Food Joint] in 3 minutes, versus 30 minutes in the kitchen.
5. Lack of nutrition education.
6. Desk jockeys - lack of manual labor jobs by Americans.
7. Diets - yes, diets. Fad diets replacing just reducing calories and exercising has caused an overall increase because the fad diets are unrealistic, difficult to stick with and usually cause weight gain after the fact.

Personally, I don't think I could point to any ONE of the above. It's probably different reasons for different people, but I think we certainly aren't doing much as a country to change things. Sure, places are eliminating transfats, but that's not going to be enough.

People may laugh, but I find this to be a bigger problem in this country than terrorism could be. Rising health care costs due to the multiple problems caused by obesity are going to put a huge strain on the economy. It's also just a general health concern. I'm confused why more action isn't taken. No, I don't think there needs to be government intervention, as they "intervene" enough already, but I don't know why more insurance companies or employers don't pay for things like gym memberships and weight loss clinics.

A healthy healthcare member is going to live a lot longer and pay out a lot more premium (with less cost), so it only makes sense to subsidize a gym membership or some other program.

So, I've already said I can't pick one in my list, but I will so it will fit my topic. I'm going to say number 2. with portion sizes, but I honestly believe it's much more than that. That said, you CAN go to many restaurants and eat your daily calorie intake in just the appetizer alone...

Micro

Let me expound a little on my ideas for the music video contest. As I see it know, the lyrics will be God whispering to the first man. First giving him life ("Wakey wakey"); then coming to him as a flowering tree losing it's petals, giving him comfort in an unfamiliar world ("Watch me fall... in pretty patterns"). Perhaps this can be seen as early man's polytheistic identification of nature as God. As the video progress (fast, I might add. the song moves fast so one of my biggest worries is I won't be able to handle the fast transitions) God and man have a falling out, ("We thought you had it in you but no") and the rest of the song is spent on God having it out on the Man who has forgotten him. 

To be sure I have a lot of work to do, at this point I've barely begun storyboarding and am only attached (maybe a bit to much) to about two scenes. 

Faust ARP

I've been bouncing ideas around my head about this Radiohead music video contest all week. I've set my sights on using their song Faust ARP to animate along to, since its the shortest on their album at 2:10. I'll write what I have so far in screenplay format, like a real writer!

FAUST ARP
An animation project by Sam White

The video opens with a close up of a closed eye, submerged underwater. The track “Faust ARP” begins.

00:00-00:02

Thom’s voice begins counting and the submerged eye opens and begins to look around.

00:02-00:08

As the guitar riff begins the scene transitions to a man clawing his way out of a water filled holed in a dry riverbed. The man is gasping for air and is slowly crawling out of the hole onto the bedrock. The man starts to rise as Thom begins singing “Wakey wakey/rise and shine”

00:08-00:17

The focus switches to a landscape shot of the dry riverbed, the horizon taking up most of the shot. As the lone man walks from the left of the shot to the right, the sun and the moon rise and set on the horizon. The rocky landscape is desolate and the broad arcs of the sun and moon are humbling in comparison to the tiny man.

Anyway thats about as much as I've put on paper yet. My biggest concern is how I'm going to animate it, I don't have any experience at animating. At this point I'm thinking I will draw each frame individually in an impressionist style (to facilitate a quicker progress) and scan them into my computer and compile them together.

Pink Pearl

I found out about this contest to animate your favorite Radiohead from their new album, In Rainbows. I've spent the past day or so listening to it intently and have decided to enter it, at least the first stage (which is to storyboard your music video). I have some ideas, I'll update the blog when I have some done.

Dying of a Snake Bite in Colorado

New things

Reading "The Lucifer Effect" (Zimbardo)

Reading "Learning More About your 35mm Camera" (Clark and Woodard)

Doing another Apple drawing

The Church of Seperation of Family and Faith

I often wonder about how an alien race wold perceive us. What of our practices would they find insane? Government, economics, race relations, eating habits? Conversely, what would they find to be genius? I wonder what they would be like, would they be perfected forms of life that have existed for so long that they have had time to answer all of life's profound questions, or would they be critical and overbearing tycoons quick to befriend us and quicker to take our resources to fuel their own purposes? I often have this image in my head of a spacecraft filled with aliens huddled around a TV set they had stolen from a garbage heap furiously taking notes as tapes of old Saturday Night Live clips showed Chris Farley imitate a motivational speaker.

Seven Deadly Sins *updated*

(1) genetic modification
(2) human experimentations
(3) polluting the environment
(4) social injustice
(5) causing poverty
(6) financial gluttony
(7) taking drugs

Great, now my favorite Brad Pitt movie is out of touch.

Creative Brain Vomit

The only thing humans have to inform their ethical decision-making is the evidence they have at the moment and lessons from the past. We aren't precognitive, we can't predict the bizarre, counterintuitive possibilities that MIGHT occur in the far-flung future. We never have the benefit of hindsight before the fact. All we have is the evidence, and (when it wasn't quashed or laughed off by Administration apologists) every ounce of it pre-war said that invading Iraq was going to be a horrible, stupid idea that would've resulted in chaos and waste.

Essentially, justifying any action with "Yeah but in 40 years it might just turn out I'm right" only gives people a free license to be grossly irresponsible and afterwards free from answering to anyone because, hey, we don't know what miracles might occur from that guy's incompetence. Let's remain agnostic on the issue and let history be the decider.

Imagine a guy shooting wildly into a crowd and kills a teenager at random. They put him in jail as they rightfully should. However, a year later, some investigators find the murdered teen's private journal and discover the kid was planning on shooting up his school. Is the original shooter exonerated? Are we supposed to applaud him for his crazed, irrational misconduct?

And what if the shooter maintained from the beginning that "Hey, that kid MIGHT have been the next Hitler or something. I have absolutely no evidence but hey, who knows? Let history be the judge and quit you whining." Are we supposed to offer a mea culpa and a "You were right all along, here's a medal?"

THAT is what Bush is expecting us to do with his reasoning for the war. When the evidence fails him and the brute force of rationality is threatening to sweep his legacy away, he babbles that a flimsy branch rooted on mights and could-bes will save him from his own incompetence.

16 Military Wives

Today, in a conversation with my friends, it came up that I keep a journal that I fill with my ideas that I have during the day and write my dreams from the previous night in. For some reason they found this to be completely queer and berated me for being a strange person, but to me it seems like a perfectly logical thing to do. I can't be expected to keep a hold of every thing that pops into my head that I find entertaining, can I?

A Lot of Pressure Being Black

As a child, I was curious - not so much afraid - about the possibility that my parents weren't human. I'd lie awake in bed at night, wondering if - after they tucked my brother and me in - they would take their faces off and be robots or lizard people or aliens or something. I would sneak down and peek around the corner of the stairs sometimes to check and see that they did, in fact, still have human faces. Once back in bed I'd wonder if - being robots or some such - they might have some way of sensing my approach, giving them time to put their faces back on. I think I must've seen part of an episode of "V" or something at some point.

Baby's Got the Bends

Poachers should be baiting their traps with ADD medication, because I feel like I could jump out of skin right now. Well, thats not fair, its probably the many things that sprang out of the ether thats stringing me out right now. Not the paranoia inducing drugs.