i’m back to working on jef’s xmas present… and by “xmas” i mean “jesus’ birthday,” and by “jesus” i mean “jef.” january 26 is the big deadline now.
if this is gonna happen at all, i’m going to have to haul needle for the next three months. so i’ve started the megabirthdayboy photo gallery and will (theoretically) post daily pics of my progress.
check it out (and pardon the horrible pic from yesterday; can’t fix it cause i’ve already done a lot more).
(this is a friend’s dog… a friend who clearly wants the terrorists to win.)
despite what the goddamn hippies say, the world is a much better place now than it was even a hundred years ago—at least health-wise. and i can prove it, with this rather poorly written article from the NYT/IHT.
highlights:
“Research from around the world has begun to produce a picture of humans today that is startlingly different from what humans looked like in the past. Over the past 100 years, says one researcher, Robert Fogel of the University of Chicago, humans in the industrialized world have undergone what he calls a form of evolution that is ‘unique among the 7,000 or so generations of humans who have ever inhabited the earth.’”
“The biggest surprise is that many chronic ailments like heart disease, lung disease and arthritis are occurring an average of 10 years to 25 years later than they used to. There is also less disability among older people today than previously, according to a U.S. study that directly measures the problem; human bodies do not break down as they once did.”
“Common chronic diseases—respiratory problems, valvular heart disease, arteriosclerosis, and joint and back problems—have been declining by about 0.7 percent a year since the turn of the 20th century. And when they do occur, they emerge at older ages and are less severe.”
so much for the sedentary lifestyle being the root of all evil. it really pisses me off how quickly people forget that things used to be really bad. like an old friend of my family’s who wouldn’t get her kids vaccinated because there was a vaccination-related outbreak of polio when the vaccine first became widely used in the early 70s. she had obviously never seen america’s pre-vaccine numbers for polio… or the world’s.
i’m sure there are a lot of sources for this sort of info, but my first hints at how much better things have gotten came from reading The Devil in the White City. yeah, cars produce pollution. but when they die, they don’t decompose in the street. it’s like some friend of jef’s said: would you rather die of cancer when you’re 80 or typhus when you’re 14?
this was a little present for jef—my first attempt at 8-bit stitching.