Extra, extra, read all about it

So, this morning the Mr. left for Naples, where he will be speaking for five hours (FIVE hours!!) on the subject of Turkey's accession to the EU. This is one of the reasons HE works at the Parliament and not ME. I don't know if I could talk about anything for five hours straight, even books.

Sans the Mr., I am planning to work much, and perhaps start packing some boxes. First I need to get boxes. Oh, and also I would like to make something to eat that is tasty.

Also, I am going to avoid the internet, because it is currently crawling at a dying-in-the-desert-without-water pace. I can't figure out how it is that we download 1 G of stuff, which is our limit (are there limits in the US? I feel outraged by the whole limits thing), after which we are bumped down to a pitiful crawl. All I do is download a few songs (mostly the free ones from iTunes because I'm cheap like that and also haven't found a place here that sells iTunes cards...any suggestions?) and my e-mails. Is it possible that I reach 1 gigabyte with just that? 1 gigabyte, as I found out through googling because I don't know these things offhand, is over 1,000 megabytes. A thousand! Surely it would take longer than a month to reach that. Someone who is tech savvy, please advise.

Besides these clearly headline-worthy bits of information, I have nothing to report. So I will direct your attention instead, to some actual recent headlines.

*A girl was found in the Cambodian jungle who, sensationalists are claiming, has lived in the wild for eighteen years (her parents claim to recognize the scars of a daughter who disappeared that long ago). She doesn't seem to speak any recognizable language, and refuses to wear clothes. Yet, strangely enough, her hair is short and was when they found her...hmmm.

*Several EU states boycotted the meeting held in Madrid to discuss the EU constitution. Basically, scuppered again.

*In Sunday's New York Times, there is an excellent article by Michael Pollan about food, and what he calls "nutritionism," basically an overly strong faith in scientific findings about our food. One of his most interesting points is that even if they can tell us about one nutrient that is in an avocado, there is still exponentially more that we don't know about how it interacts with other nutrients in that very food, and the nutrients in the foods that we eat it with. Science tends to look at things in isolation. So his advice is simple: "Eat food [as opposed to processed pseudo-foods]. Not too much. Mostly plants." Amen.
Link to the article.

*The Doomsday Clock is now at 11:55 pm.

*Which probably has something to do with the fact that a whole bunch of scientists got together to tell us what we already knew--that global warming exists, and that furthermore, it's going faster than we thought. The ice in the Arctic is likely to melt entirely over the summers of the near future. (Both of these last items are from today's Times.)

Happy Tuesday! Go eat whole food, and don't make any greenhouse gasses if you can help it. For the sake of sea-level citizens everywhere.