New Glasses

On saturday, Nelly and I stopped by the Lens Crafters in Paramus (it's conveniently located on my way to work). I purchased my current pair of glasses in Sophomore year of high school (HIGH SCHOOL). So, by my calculations, that was something like 12 years ago. Which seems so outrageous, but I think it's absolutely true.

So suffice it to say that my glasses (and as it turns out, my self) are completely out of touch with the latest trends in fashion opticals. Nelly was very helpful on this front. We looked at several frames that were very similar to my old ones (made by the always classy Brooks Brothers). Any of those would have been fine. But we were not going for "fine". We were going for "You buy glasses once a decade, so these had better be some pretty fantastic frames."

And so we continued to look. We wandered over to the center display, where the trendier & more pricey frames are located under lock-and-key. And in that place Nelly and I discovered, as though put there by some force beyond our comprehension (perhaps the store manager?), my new glasses.

They are Versace. (Woooooooooooooo)


I am moving up in the world, but I haven't changed. My love don' cost a thing. I'm still Jenny from the block.

Let it not be said that I do not listen to my fans.

bonus

Thank You, Frank Rich

It may well be that I am not reading the right articles at the right time, but I have found the new coverage from all corners on the Porter Goss resignation very dissapointing. As I stated here previously, the problem is the gross incompetence of officials in our government, up to the very highest levels.

However, news coverage is either matter-of-fact reporting or a focus on the more salacious tidbits.

Frank Rich finally took the time in Sunday's Week In Review to step back and refocus on the actual problems (Times Select subscription required), the root causes.

From the article:

What really angers the White House and its defenders about both the Post and Times scoops are not the legal questions the stories raise about unregulated gulags and unconstitutional domestic snooping, but the unmasking of yet more administration failures in a war effort riddled with ineptitude. It's the recklessness at the top of our government, not the press's exposure of it, that has truly aided the enemy, put American lives at risk and potentially sabotaged national security.

And later...

Besides driving out career employees, underperforming on Iran intelligence and scaling back a daily cross-agency meeting on terrorism, Mr. Goss's only other apparent accomplishment at the C.I.A. was his war on those traitorous leakers. Intriguingly, this was a new cause for him. "There's a leak every day in the paper," he told The Sarasota Herald-Tribune when the identity of the officer Valerie Wilson was exposed in 2003. He argued then that there was no point in tracking leaks down because "that's all we'd do."

Also, I hadn't heard this, but apparently:

The Qaeda cell that hijacked American Flight 77 and plowed into the Pentagon was based in the same town, Laurel, Md., as the N.S.A., and "for months, the terrorists and the N.S.A. employees exercised in some of the same local health clubs and shopped in the same grocery stores."

(Frank Rich attributes that last piece to James Bamford in The Washington Post)

So thank you so much Mr. Rich for finally saying what no one else has seemed to be willing.

This is gross

My friend Jon sent me this link to the (perhaps a tall and certainly incredibly gross) tale of a man who cured his serious adult-onset asthma by contracting Hookworm in Cameroon. He did this mainly by walking barefoot through public latreens.

His theory goes that in the western world asthma and other auto-immune system diseases (such as Crohn's -- thus my interest in this article) are becoming increasingly prevelant because we are increasingly avoiding the dirty world. Our immune systems, built up over tens of thousands of years to deal with the worst nature can throw at us, are now bored and so take to picking on healthy tissue rather than just going on vacation.

Hookworms, in order to avoid being destroyed by the body, produce a compound that suppresses the immune system's response (by sending it a free all-expense paid ticket to the destination of its choice, perhaps?). And lo, the symptoms of the auto-immune disease go away... Hookworm's die off and do not breed in the body so the benefits of this treatment are dependent on a continuing vector for hookworm infection.

While I salute this man's gung-ho attitude, and I appreciate the desperation that led him to this course of action, I must say that I most certainly do not want this hookworm treatment. It's really just gross.

There's a couple articles on the BBC: here's a pretty old one, and here's one that's even older. (The BBC sure loves it's close-up pictures of hookworm.) And here's a pretty recent reference in The Observer. Note how none of these articles understands (or even discusses) the mechanism hookworm uses to suppress the immune system. As they say in Legend of Zelda, It's a mystery to everyone.