There were several Democratic primaries on Tuesday. (There were also several Republican primaries that day, but we aren't concerned with those at the moment.)
One of them was in Texas. The Texas primary consisted of two parts - a primary election to allocate some of the delegates, and caucuses afterwards to decide the rest. Hillary Clinton got more votes in the election part, and Barack Obama got more delegates in the caucus part.
The net result of all this was that Obama got more delegates than Clinton. At the convention in a few months, the candidate with the most delegates will get the nomination.
Despite this, every single news outlet is reporting that Clinton "won" the Texas primary.

It's as if you lost a baseball game 6-4, but claimed that you won because you got more hits than your opponent. And further, that you somehow convinced the newspapers and commentators to also report that you won. Sorry, but the "hits" column isn't the one they pay off on. And the column they pay off on at the convention is delegates, yet Clinton wishes us to ignore that, as do the news outlets.
As Alice might have said, this gets curiouser and curiouser.

About a year and a half ago, I read Michael Pollan's book, The Omnivore's Dilemma.
It's an excellent, very insightful book about where our food comes from. In it, Pollan makes some powerful arguments for eating organic, locally produced food when possible. Such food usually has taken less fossil fuel to go from seeds to your plate, and is healthier for you. The book's also entertaining, and a fun read.
A couple of months ago, I heard that Pollan had a new book out, called In Defense of Food. I immediately purchased it, and read it. While The Omnivore's Dilemma is mostly about where our food comes from, and deals mainly with *how* to eat, In Defense of Food goes into more detail about the makeup of our food, and explores *what* to eat.

The central premise of the book is that modern nutritional science is bunk. This sounds audacious and ridiculous, with the amount of nutritional advice we're given by the government and the media, but Pollan makes a very persuasive argument. He points out that despite numerous directives from the nutritional science establishment over the last 25 years or so -- eat less animal fat / eat fewer carbs / eat fewer trans fats -- people in the U.S. are less healthy than ever. He also points out that some of the advice we've been given in the past has proven to be wrong (eat margarine instead of butter). Considering the track record of nutritional science, we might be better off ignoring it.
Perhaps food is too complex a system for science to be able to single out a nutrient here and a vitamin there to account for the beneficial effects of whole food. Maybe the whole food is more than the sum of its parts.

Pollan also points out that many things marketed as food today wouldn't be recognized as food by your great-grandmother. The supermarket is full of processed foods loaded with corn syrup, soy derivatives, and processed flour. He discusses the history of the processed food industry, starting with the development of refined flour. This flour became popular because it took much longer to spoil than the more coarsely ground flour that had been available before that, and Pollan points out the reason -- most of the nutrition has been removed. Microbes have no interest in infesting a food product devoid of nutrition. This is also the reason that such flour is enriched today, because refinement removes most of the nutrients. Pollan also dicusses the effects on our bodies of this assault by simple carbohydrates (from all the refined flour, corn syrup, and sugar), and suggests this is responsible for the increases in heart disease and adult-onset diabetes.

Well, if we are to ignore nutritional science, and reject the processed items in the supermarket, what are we to do? Pollan has a simple answer: eat food.
That is, eat whole foods -- food that your great-grandmother would recognize. Societies that subsist today on a traditional diet are generally much healthier than we are. It's a simple plan, and I was persuaded. For about six weeks now, I've been eating only whole foods. No refined flour. No sugar. No white rice. Nothing that isn't a complete type of food. The results have been spectacular. I've been losing weight steadily for the first time in a long time. I had a lab test at the doctor's office last week, and got a call that the results are much improved from the last one.

The best part of the transition I've made is that it'll be very hard to go back to the way I used to eat. If Pollan is right, going back to eating processed food would be foolhardy. As long as I believe that the arguments Pollan makes are correct - and it seems unlikely that I'll be persuaded otherwise - this is the way I'll eat for the rest of my life.

A while ago, I posted a tirade about Barack Obama's inclusion of an anti-gay minister on a Southern tour. I'm still not happy about that, but I've come around to the idea that he's the best candidate standing. We need someone who can carry the public with him on a new road, and Hillary Clinton will never be able to do that. There's a large chunk of the population that's been taught to hate her so thoroughly that even if she could get elected, there would be constant acrimony.

I've always had a fairly high opinion of Hillary Clinton, but recently, that's begun to change. Her campaign spokespeople keep bringing up the subject of the delegates from Michigan and Florida. I've heard this several times in interviews.
A little background: When Michigan and Florida moved their primaries to occur earlier than the agreed-upon limit, the Democratic Party imposed the agreed-upon penalty; their delegates wouldn't be counted at the national convention. The state parties agreed to this ahead of time, and everyone knew the rules.
Obama withdrew his name from the ballot in Michigan, and no one actively campaigned in either state. The voters in those states knew their votes wouldn't affect the choice of candidate. Clinton got the most votes in each state, among the people that bothered to go out and vote under the circumstances.

Despite all this, the Clinton camp is now trying to make a case that those delegates should be reinstated - under the Clinton column, of course. They're making arguments about disenfranchisement while a real, fair election hasn't been held in either state. It's a nakedly opportunistic power grab, completely disregarding ethics, fairness, and the rules.

It's a tactic worthy of Bush. I expect more from Democrats.

There was a lot of tabloid-style drama in baseball last week, as Roger Clemens and his former trainer, Brian McNamee, gave testimony to a Congressional committee investigating steroid use.
Having followed the story a bit in the news, I don't think it looks good for Clemens. McNamee named other players as steroid users that were confirmed later, and he has said that he injected Clemens with steroids. Clemens says that McNamee is lying. His teammate, Andy Pettitte, has said that he also used steroids, and that Clemens told him he had used them. I think an objective observer would have to ask why McNamee would lie about Clemens after having told the truth about other players, and how Pettitte could be so mistaken.

An interesting thing happened during the testimony, though. The congressmen were divided along party lines in their attitudes about Clemens' guilt. The Democrats asked questions leading toward the conclusion that Clemens was lying, and the Republicans thought McNamee was lying.
I wondered why this was so, when the case doesn't revolve around politics.
It could be that the congressmen are so accustomed to opposing each other that, once the Democrats indicated that they didn't believe Clemens, the Republicans automatically took the opposite position. I think this might happen sometimes, but I'd like to think the Repulicans are at least a little bit sincere, and aren't being contrary just for the sake of it.

It could also be as simple as, the Republicans are saying they believe Clemens merely because Clemens is a Republican. That would be consistent with their usual approach.

Then another possibility occurred to me. It has also been established that McNamee has lied to investigators about other things, although not under oath. Maybe the Republicans are so wedded to the idea that everything can be reduced to black and white, that having established that McNamee has lied in the past, they're incapable of believing he can ever be telling the truth. In their minds, it would follow that since McNamee is lying, Clemens must be telling the truth. Where there's a liar, there must also be a truth-teller. Black and white.

Of course, that scenario doesn't explain how the Republicans reconcile the fact that McNamee has told lies in the past with the knowledge that he has also told the truth about other steroid users. Then again, they don't let little things like facts bother them; no shades of gray allowed.

A few months ago, I talked about the new touch-screen iPods that had come out, and guessed that I'd be making some excuse to buy one before long.

Well, I didn't buy that iPod, but I did a bit of transference and bought two other things instead.
One of them is an iPod, but not the one I was thinking of. I got the iPod Nano, on the theory that it was a lot smaller, and would let me carry around a music player without so much bulk. It's also a lot cheaper than the touch-screen iPod.
I thought that would satisfy my gadget lust, but as it turned out, not for long. I decided that I also wanted a new phone. There was nothing wrong with the phone I had - it was a very versatile Samsung phone that played video and music, could browse the web, could act as a modem, and if you got tired of all that, you could make phone calls on it.
Still, I like having a Palm device with me for reading books and taking notes, which meant I was carrying around my Palm device and the phone. Sprint started carrying a new Palm phone a few months ago called the Centro. I had owned the slightly larger model, the Treo, a couple of years ago, and had trouble with the keyboard after a few months.
On the theory that the redesigned Centro might not be subject to the keyboard problem I was having, I decided to get one. After some haggling with Sprint to get the discount I was entitled to, everything worked out.

I'm delighted with the Centro so far. It's small enough to be carried around easily, without feeling like there's a big, bulky object in my pocket.
Of course, I also use the Centro as a music player. The most popular music player for the Palm OS is Pocket Tunes. I'm used to seeing album art for all my songs on the iPod; the ability to display album art was added to Pocket Tunes a while ago, but for some reason, Pocket Tunes is much more finicky about recognizing the album art files than other software, and it only displayed on about 10% of the songs. So, after spending most of a weekend reencoding the album art on all my songs, I can play them on the Centro with the album art displaying, just the way I like.
The point of the big album art discussion I just went into is that since I now like the music player on the Centro enough, my new iPod Nano sits idle 99% of the time.

And so it goes - the life of the gadget junkie, always looking for the next fix.