The City of New York wants its visitors and citizenry to eat healthy. Whether they want to eat healthy is another issue.

It has occurred to me that i might try to make a habit of posting my literary efforts here or else announce the addition of them to magpiebridge.net here. Would folks like for me to do that?

tanka #191 (in memoriam to the people who died on 9/11/01)

In the autumn days
The nights grow subtly longer
Smells in the air change
Some leaves fall mutely away
Others fall to earth ablaze

Judge Aiken is asking whether there were warrents issued to spy on some environmentalists and the goverment has until the 12th of this month to respond.

Recently in Australia a baby whale that was found stranded on a beach was euthanized because that option was considered the most humane and in the whale's "best interests". Given the arguments opponents of euthanasia in that country give for why euthanasia is a bad thing, i can't help but wonder (again) about the quality of life for the average Australian.

I don't really need to spell out why i think this is so ironic, do i?

A 93 year old woman with a degenerative disease that left her in chronic pain has traveled from Australia to Switzerland to die. Right to Life Australia's response was to condemn the woman's choice; if they had any constructive suggestions as to how a person could obtain satisfactory pain relief, the news media elected to not include it in the coverage of this news story. Given their babbling about how suicide makes life "cheap", though, i doubt that they actually had any such suggestions to offer.

Israeli police montitor chats for purpose of suicide intervention

Somehow i thought they had enough to do with trying to prevent suicide bombings. Shows how much i know.

Girl commits suicide after being barred from a key exam

You need to lay down your burdens and just show them what you know, Li said.

This is advice coming from a psychiatrist who seems to think that Chinese students are too stressed out and just need to relax, but given that they are in an environment where they can be harassed and penalized for something as petty as how they wear their hair, i can't help but wonder if this expert has any real grasp of the realities these students contend with.

Five girls in Vietnam commit suicide together by drowning.

Freud would have had a field day with this
Evidently there's something in the U.S. called the "Purity Ball", wherein girls, sometimes as young as 7 years old, pledge to their fathers that they won't have sex until marriage. The fathers, in turn, pledge as the "high-priest" of the family to essentially guard the kid's virginity.

Aside from putting the girl in a cloister, i'd like to know how he proposes to do that. On second thought, i don't want to know. It's kinda creepy to contemplate.

I wonder which alternative is worse for military morale: pulling out soldiers who are depressed about being stuck in a hell-hole situation or having said soldiers blow themselves away.

Recently a man in the United Kingdom has apparently committed suicide by jumping in front of a train. Evidently this is the second train suicide within a week. Two suicides does not a trend make, but it would be interesting to see whether additional instances of suicide by train in that country are reported in the news any time soon.

If i understand the whole affair properly, cannibal Armin Meiwes being found guilty of murder (overturning a previous court's decision to find him guilty of manslaughter) seems to be based on the argument that Meiwes "should have known that Brandes was disturbed and should have questioned his motives for wanting to be killed." As i'm not privy to the exact details of how the two individuals interacted, i couldn't say one way or the other whether Herr Meiwes should have decided Brandes was incompetent to make his own decisions. But i'm certain i don't understand a legal system that allows a conviction to be effectively upgraded to a more serious offense; wouldn't the hearing that resulted in the change of the charge/conviction from manslaughter to murder be a form of double jeopardy?

Should i laugh or should i cry?
GlaxoSmithKline, which is one of the bigger pharmaceutical companies, has won over $1 billion in contracts to make flu vaccine. This is the same company that makes paxil.

YASPIJ
body count: 2; the usual method

Ms. Goodman recently wrote an op-ed piece that criticized the bloggers who harshly criticized Jill Carroll for saying certain things while being held at gunpoint by her captors in Iraq. A number of the things that have been written and said about Ms. Carroll are admittedly rude and inappropriate; describing a complete stranger as a "spoiled brat", when the individual making that judgment probably knows less about her subject than about slander laws, gives the impression that, for that particular blogger at least, blogging is more about venting spleen than about rationally and objectively discussing whatever topic is at hand. And, yes, a number of people out in the blogosphere probably owe Ms. Carroll an apology.

But whether this damages the respectability and credibility of blogging in general is an open question. Has the New York Times gone out of business since the exposure of Jayson Blair's fabricated stories? Did people stop reading the Washington Post when Janet Cook's Pulitzer Prize winning story about a child drug-addict was revealed to be a hoax? The reputations of the individual authors in question, certainly, are tarnished, and the exposure of their frauds has definitely proved to be a turning point in their respective careers, but mainstream media doesn't appear to have suffered a loss of respectability on their account.

Which is really too bad. It isn't clear which is worse, to issue a knee-jerk villification of a journalist who participated in creating a propaganda piece to save her skin or a journalist participating in the creation of propaganda because he or she thinks the story is more important than the reality it supposedly portrays. In the sphere of journalism, is the former worse than the latter, or vice versa? People look like fools for the former but are more likely to get fired for the latter, so perhaps the latter is the worse of two faults in the transmission of ideas. And yet, bending facts to fit theories and fables is so commonplace; Blair and Cook are not alone in being caught doing this and one can only guess how many stories are being circulated whose fictional element is not exposed. And for each story that contains an outright lie, one can only guess how many news stories there are that ignore facts that don't support the reporter's own bias.

A cautionary Tale
Hailed as a hero by the press, a woman decides to intervene on an attempted suicide after reading an online suicide note. I'd like to know how much concern do-gooders demonstrate for a stranger they intervene on, say, six months later.

YASPIJ
body count:3; usual method
Lest there be any confusion, please note that this one involved 2 men and a woman whereas the previously reported incident involved two women and a man.

Not all attempts to suicide succeed
Latest pact in Japan leaves 2 dead and 1 in critical condition.

YASPIJ
body count:4; usual method