SEX, BOMBS & BURGERS

Looking to lose weight? Well, you may not have to give up eating fast food. You may, however, have to learn how to eat slower.

A new study finds that eating quickly stops the release of a hormone that tells the brain your stomach is full. People who eat lunch at their desks without taking time to have a proper meal are therefore at a higher risk of obesity, according to Stephen Bloom, a professor at London's Imperial College who worked on the study.

"Speed-eating, eating at work or when you're doing spreadsheets on the screen so that you keep stuffing food into your face are likely to increase the risk of obesity," he said.

Oh really? Well, if that's true, how does he explain this:

Some people get inspired to start their own companies when McDonald's screws up their orders. Other people? Well, they call 9-1-1.

Raibin Raof Osman, a 20-year-old Oregon man, just couldn't take it. After a McDonald's in Aloha, a town near Portland, forgot to give him the box of orange juice he ordered, he called the police and complained. Staff at the McDonald's insisted they got his order right and that he never asked for orange juice, and they also called 9-1-1 after Osman refused to move out of the drive-thru and started banging on the windows.

How do we know all this? Because a recording of both calls is available here. It's priceless, it really is. Especially the 9-1-1 operator's initial reaction to Osman's complaint. She replied in really the only way a person could in that situation: "Uhhhhh..."

The officers who responded to the call tried to explain to Osman that they were not in the business of sorting out fast-food orders, and in the end he has to pay a $300 fine for misuse of the emergency service.

Sigh. Exactly how much more persuasion do fast-food companies need to replace their staff with robots? Robots can't screw up orders - and in the off chance they do, they can just terminate the customer.

Further to the post the other day about MMA fighter "War Machine" and his budding porn career... it is worth nothing that while it's usually porn stars who are looking to cross over into the mainstream, some people do occasionally go the other way. There have been plenty of rock stars who have in one way or another released their own home-made sex tapes (i.e. Poison's Brett Michaels and nearly every member of Motley Crue) and of course there was Snoop Dogg's foray into the business, although as far as I know he simply "presented" the action and didn't actually take part.

Perhaps the best example of crossover, though, is Evan Seinfeld, who was the bassist and singer for metal band Biohazard (he also played biker Jazz Hoyt on one of my all-time favourite shows, Oz). In 2004, he married porn star Tera Patrick and decided to, well, get in on the action. The two formed their own distribution company, Teravision, and Seinfeld became her exclusive on-screen partner. Surprisingly, the two announced a split just over a month ago.

I interviewed the pair earlier this year and while I've previously posted a clip of Patrick, I thought I'd share a few highlights of what Seinfeld had to say:

On the internet and porn:
“The barrier to entry is certainly lowered a lot by technology. You can shoot some video and build a website in one day. Will anybody go to it, I don’t know?”
“If you’re independent, now is your time. You don’t need to go through a Vivid or a Wicked or a Hustler to get into the business. You can just open yourself a website and if you have something unique or good, you have the technology to get it out there and it’s the wild west. Have a good time.”

On having to do affiliation deals with free porn sites:
“Until porn becomes advertising driven, it’s just going to be the way it works.”

On porn driving technology:
“The mainstream is slow on the go. They need a hundred people to make a decision. In a corporate structure, people are afraid to go out on a limb because if something goes wrong they could lose their jobs. In adult, if you came to Tera and myself and said, ‘hey, I’ve got this new technology to deliver your content to people via an iPhone,’ we could run a check on your company in a matter of days, have a contract and be up in running within a week. We don’t have to check with anybody, Tera’s the boss.”

On competition in the industry:
“I wish I could say our movies are twice as good as anyone else’s but when it comes to shooting sex, it’s not that anyone does it all that much better than anyone else. It all comes down to your branding, marketing and your crossover into mainstream.”

On sex and its social acceptance:
“Sex has always been more powerful than anything - money, religion, power. The only reason a guy wants more money, a fancy car, power, is to get sex. People are more willing to embrace the reality that sex is the most powerful force in the world.”

I wouldn't normally criticize my employer (!) but a recent report on The National that asked "Is NASA a waste of money?" was so astonishingly bad that I just couldn't let it go. Especially given that I sometimes have to report on space news, and I may want to actually have NASA folks return my calls.

The report, found here, had host Wendy Mesley questioning how much NASA spends and joking about how the space agency's recent "bombing of the moon" was met with yawns. She had a consumer watchdog in the U.S. suggesting that space exploration should be privatized because "the thrill of going to space is gone," and because "there's no need to go to Mars." Mesley even took to the streets of Toronto to see what passersby, including a young girl, thought of the billions spent by NASA each year (they weren't impressed).

NASA's budget, y'see, is about 40 per cent of what the U.S. spends on education, and African people could spend that money on "a snack," Mesley said. Clearly, the young children she spoke to are eminently qualified to critique fiscal policy.

To round out the debate, however, she did mention some of the technological advances NASA has supplied, include weather prediction and satellite communications. Phew, good thing we got those things.

I'm not even sure where to begin in pointing out how bad this segment was. How about with this: many people have asked whether the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (for whom we both work) is a waste of taxpayer money. It most certainly is not, but as the saying goes, those who live in glass houses should not throw stones.

NASA's contributions to every-day life are actually almost too numerous to count. Let's take HAACP as just one example. Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points was created by Pillsbury as a thorough system for testing food safety for the moon mission back in the sixties. Over the years it has been expanded and adopted by just about every food producer in every developed country in the world. Without it, thousands or even millions of people would be getting sick or even dying from the food they ate every day.

That sure seems like a contribution worthy of what amounts to a drop in the bucket of the U.S. government's annual budget.

There are a zillion other things that have spun off from NASA research, like safer tires for our cars, solar power, just about every aeronautical invention over the past 50 years, bioreactors for developing drugs, oxygen gauges for operating rooms, sensor technology from telescopes that's used in arthroscopic surgery, even margarine (a byproduct of rocket fuel). NASA has a full database of its spinoffs, chock full of technologies and goods derived from the pursuit of space exploration.

Ultimately, NASA has more than paid for itself many times over - even if we had never set foot on the moon. And that's not even getting into how many jobs it has created over the years. It's the farthest thing from a waste of money.

UPDATE: Bob McDonald, host of CBC radio's Quirks & Quarks science program, agrees with me. As Bob puts it: "If you want to talk about ways we waste money, don’t pick on the space program."

It seems like I may have found a spokesman for my book: mixed martial artist turned porn star War Machine (a.k.a. Jon Koppenhaver). Adult Video News reports that Koppenhaver, who has legally changed his name to War Machine, has officially filmed his first scene for Digital Playground and is actively looking for a career in the business.

Mr. Machine, who has been on Spike TV's UFC show, told AVN that he's simply pursuing a dream of doing what makes him happy:

I’m still going to be fighting, [but] I’m a free agent now. It’s my passion. Porn is just another way for me to get paid for doing something I love to do. My mentor told me to find something you’re passionate about. That’s why I fight — and I love to f*ck, so this is going to be good.

So basically, he's got two of my book's three themes covered. If he goes out and does some Burger King commercials, we're going to have to put him on the cover.