Jonathan's blog

Last night's episode was pretty painful. The white girl rap...ouch, that hurt. It's remarkable how negative, critical, insecure, and judgemental The Sparks seem to be. There's something poisonous there.

Today I finished watching Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002,PG). From Wikipedia:

Rabbit-Proof Fence is an Australian film based on the book of the same name by Doris Pilkington Garimara about three young half-caste Aboriginal girls (one of whom, Molly, was her mother) who ran away from a Western Australian settlement at Moore River, just north of Perth, in which they were placed in 1931, in order to return to their Aboriginal family. The film follows the girls walking for nine weeks along 1,500 miles of fence to return to their mother's community at Jigalong. The fence is "rabbit proof", preventing rabbits from crossing.

I give it 4 out of 5.

From an AP article titled "Soda Targeted in Fight Against Obesity" by Marilynn Marchione on Yahoo News:

One of every five calories in the American diet is liquid. The nation's single biggest "food" is soda, and nutrition experts have long demonized it. Now they are escalating the fight. In reports to be published in science journals this week, two groups of researchers hope to add evidence to the theory that soda and other sugar-sweetened drinks don't just go hand-in-hand with obesity, but actually cause it. Not that these drinks are the only cause - genetics, exercise and other factors are involved - but that they are one cause, perhaps the leading cause.

The article goes on to describe how some folks are promoting a "fat tax" on soda and fast food and describes the debate regarding the "food police" and their "indictment of soda and its sugar-sweetened co-conspirators."

Elliot turned five today! We had his "knight-themed" party with twelve or so of his friends on Friday. His big gift from his mom and dad was a new bike. He got a ton of new games from his friends. Here are some pictures:

the whole crew

An interesting new TV show premiered on FX last Wednesday at 10 PM, "Black. White." It will air weekly at that same time. Not that I'm a fan of reality shows, but after one episode I like this one. It seems like it may be a worthy successor to FX's previous reality show 30 Days which I really liked (I'm glad to hear that a second season of 30 Days is coming this year). In "Black. White.", a white family and a black family find out what it's like to switch lives. The main conflict in the first episode is that the white dad who is in black disguise thinks that the black dad is obsessed with the subtle signs of racism and sees them everywhere. The black dad who is in white disguise thinks the white dad can't recognize the subtle signs because he doesn't have the experience of a lifetime spent as a black man in a white society.