Help! Drowning in basil!

Well, ok, it's not really that bad, but we have a nicely growing basil plant in the Aerogarden* my mom gave us for Christmas that is SUCKING UP ALL THE LIGHT and crowding out the thyme and chives that are also growing there, so I need to make something with ALL THAT BASIL to give the other two a fighting chance.

So. WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE PESTO RECIPE?



* Don't Google for the price as you will be appalled. Definitely not worth it. But Mom got it free, and for free it's perfectly fine.

And one more thing...

I'm reading Mega Whalen Turner's latest, A Conspiracy of Kings, right now, and since I've also been playing Civilization IV, I now have a particular segment sometime before the halfway point of the book pictured in my head with Civ IV graphics. I suspect those of you who have both read that part and played Civ IV will know what I mean.

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OH MY! Commercial for Sharp featuring George Takei. myrialux and I saw it a couple of days ago and have been saying "OH MY" to each other ever since.

Takei does do that so well, doesn't he?

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Via bookshelves of doom: The Most Depressing Childrens' Books Ever Written.

Avatar. The other Avatar.

In case you didn't know, a couple of the bloggers over at Tor.com are doing a rewatch of Avatar the Last Airbender, episode by episode.

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(I SPAM YOOOOOU!)

Matt Treyvaud over at No-sword has been looking at a 19th century Japanese book for children about the nations of the world. In this post, he features a couple of pages about the political arrangements in Victorian Britain, which seem to be strangely polyandrous. (One of the commenters refers to the history rather accurately as the result of a giant game of Telephone, which really makes me wonder what the string of mistranslations and misapprehensions must have been to end up as this. Makes you look at history books with a skeptical eye!)

Also, I'd totally read a novel based on this alternate version of British history.

*sigh*

I really hate misleading articles and studies. Witness: this BBC news article on a study of women which suggests that you need to exercise at least an hour a day to stay slim.

It followed 35,000 women over 13 years, and only the women who exercised an average of an hour a day or more did not gain weight over that thirteen years.

You know how much the average weight gain over that thirteen years was? "The average age of the women was 54, and the average weight gain was 2.6 kg over the 13 year period."

FIVE POUNDS. FIVE FREAKIN' POUNDS.

OH NOEZ! I GAINED FIVE POUNDS IN THIRTEEN YEARS! I'M A FAT SLOB GOING TO DIE OF A HEART ATTACK ANY DAY NOW

I think a gain of five pounds in thirteen years is (a) not enough to call you "not slim" unless you happen to be, say, a cat, and (b) completely negligible when it comes to health effects. Not to mention that as you age, those who are slightly clinically overweight appear to have significantly lower mortality rates than those who are "normal" weight, so you probably want those five pounds if you were slim to start with.

I will be right up there saying that as we evolved in a high-exercise environment, getting lots of exercise is a good idea, but the health significance of that hour a day has nothing to do with the five pounds not gained and a lot more to do with how exercise conditions your muscles, bones, hormones, etc.

ETA: Gah, reading the article again made me even angrier. You see, the weight-gain preventative effect was only present in those of "normal" weight to begin with, and absent in those who were already overweight at the beginning of the study. So instead of saying that perhaps exercise doesn't have anywhere near as much to do with weight loss as previously thought, and that maybe it has a lot more to do with what we eat, they said instead that overweight people might have to exercise more, up to 90 minutes a day, to prevent weight gain of that eeeeevil five pounds.

I guess me losing 50 pounds in 2007 when exercising 20 minutes a day didn't really happen, huh? I made a vow that I wouldn't exercise more than an hour a day unless I was training for something specific, because for me, that felt too much like obsessive behavior. I'm trying to get into the exercise habit again because of the gains in health, the prevention of osteoporosis, the ability to stay active in my later years, etc.