Misc

I can't believe the whole thing:

Willoughby said she thought they would be able to return for the animals, and that she had arranged with a neighbor to bring them food and water.

But Willoughby departed in January, over nine months ago, and Willoughby's dogs have been the subject of much discussion. 17-year-old neighbor Brittany Henson said some of the dogs have died from neglect.

"There used to be 10 ... in there, and there's like three or four now. There were puppies that me and my boyfriend tried to rescue, but they ended up dying," said Henson.

Another neighbor said that there were multiple plastic bags on the property with dead dogs in them, but Willoughby said she hadn't heard about anything like that. She said she had asked a neighbor to check on the dogs just an hour ago, and had been told that there were no dead dogs currently on the property, and that the dogs were fine had food and water.

Willoughby did admit some animals have died, however.

This woman should have called an animal rescue group at the very beginning. ALL of the dogs would have survived and lived in good homes.

This just pisses me off.
_____

Actress Kim Novak and her husband resolved a two-year problem after failing in getting federal permits to place large rocks along the Rogue River to help ease erosion.
_____

Bigotry about body size (sizeism or fatism) is fashionable in this country; some people think they are so goddamned superior.

Most of it is directed at women, of course, who aren't valued for anything other than their bodies.

This spells it out, I think:

Fatness has always been seen as a slight on the American character. Ours is a nation that values hard work and discipline, and it's hard for us to accept that weight could be not just a struggle of will, even when the bulk of the research—and often our own personal experience—shows that the factors leading to weight gain are much more than just simple gluttony. "There's this general perception that weight can be controlled if you have enough willpower, that it's just about calories in and calories out," says Dr. Glen Gaesser, professor of exercise and wellness at Arizona State University and author of BigFat Lies: The Truth About Your Weight and Your Health, and that perception leads the nonfat to believe that the overweight are not just unhealthy, but weak and lazy. Even though research suggests that there is a genetic propensity for obesity, and even though some obese people are technically healthier than their skinnier counterparts, the perception remains "[that] it's a failure to control ourselves. It violates everything we have learned about self control from a very young age," says Gaesser.

In a country that still prides itself on its Puritanical ideals, the fat self is the "bad self," the epitome of greed, gluttony, and sloth. "There's a widespread belief that fat is controllable," says Linda Bacon, author of Health at Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight. "So then it's unlike a disability where you can have compassion; now you can blame the individual and attribute all kinds of mean qualities to them. Then consider the thinner people that are always watching what they eat carefully—fat people are symbols of what they can become if they weren't so virtuous."

_____