Lights, camera, Antonio
The Los Angeles Times reports that after the Los Angeles Unified School District refused to admit ABC’s Jamie Oliver to its cafeterias, the celebrity chef has been granted an audience at West Adams Prep, one of Mayor Villaraigosa’s cluster schools.
If this is not part of the mayor’s long-running political tug-of-war with the school board, then it looks like it.
For how Oliver has used Facebook to urge parents to write school board members to demand that the district accommodate him, click here.
For how the ABC reality TV program opened Oliver’s nutrition ministry in Westwood, many freeway off ramps never mind bus stops from West Adams Prep (or any low income community), click here.
For how Oliver’s been larking around town conducting stunts, including filling a school bus with sand as if it were sugar, click here.
Meanwhile, for a source other than school lunches …
LAUSD is right to say ‘no’ to Jamie Oliver
When a parent drops a child off at school, he or she is entitled to a small set of reasonable expectations. These include: 1) That their child will be educated. 2) That school meals will be available if the child does not bring a packed lunch. 3) That the child will not be exploited.
Item one is not going well. Item two happens, if not to the standards that some would wish. Item three includes keeping out child molesters and celebrities who view the world as background.
That British TV chef Jamie Oliver has arrived in Southern California preaching the gospel of healthful eating is fine. The city has plenty of pulpits, but the cafeterias of public schools are not among them. If he wants to help the school district improve its meals, then it would have been politic and orders of magnitude more …
Book review: “We have met the Enemy”
Daniel Akst borrowed his new book’s title from “Pogo” creator Walt Kelly, whose “We have met the enemy and he is us” became a slogan marking the first Earth Day in 1970. However, in “We Have Met the Enemy: Self-Control in an Age of Excess,” Akst isn’t interested in saving the planet, at least as a first line of business. He’s intrigued by impulse control in America, what is eroding it and what that means.
The book opens much like a tract on obesity from the Morbidity and Mortality Report if it had been written by a social commentator and not clinicians from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. An anecdote about a corpse too fat to fit in a morgue freezer is followed in short order by the unsparing observation that an obese bariatric nurse at a Texas conference helped herself to a second plate of waffles …
The world according to Wordle
Wordle produced this scatter cloud for Laguna Dirt. Click on the image for a link to a site with an exquisite collection of modern bird studies.
San Diego artist James Soe Nyun got to fiddling around with a scatter cloud program called Wordle and applied it to a number of garden blogs, first Californian, then from around the country. To see what emerged, go to his delightful site Lost in the Landscape.…
“At Home” by Bill Bryson
“At Home: A Short History of Private Life” begins on the roof of the Victorian rectory that Bill Bryson and his family occupy in flattest Eastern England. Surveying the surrounding countryside, the American-born author invokes a local archaeologist who once explained to him that the region’s stone churches aren’t sinking. No, they are slightly below ground because the sheer numbers of bodies buried around them over the centuries have caused the earth to rise.
Having imparted this grisly delicacy, Bryson retreats from his roof but not his house. The author best known in the U.S. for his travel writing uses home to anchor his new book; every room in it is a departure point to discuss how those generations of bodies once lived, how their homes functioned and, surprisingly only recently, began to provide a certain level of comfort.
Click here to keep reading the review of “At Home” …
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