Since I hadn’t watched it in over 20 years, I decided I wanted to watch the Belly “Gepetto” video tonight. And I found this:

Now during the 90s I watched the “Gepetto” video about 900 times. That’s probably not much of an exaggeration as I was absolutely obsessed with Belly. So I was confused as I distinctly recalled Tonya having ear-length blonde hair (not red) and wearing a white dress in the video, and a bunch of kids running around clipping guitar strings and such. But it’s listed as the “official video” so I thought maybe my memory from all those years ago was just faulty.

After a bit more searching, though, I found the below video which is actually the one that aired all the time around 1993 or so, not the one listed as the “official” video. Why the change and re-writing of history, I don’t know. But the video that actually aired is better. And if you listen closely, you’ll notice that the mix and song is slightly different too. Also, Gail Greenwood (the bass player) is not in the first video, and is in the second one (and that’s whose very toned belly is featured in the thumbnail). It’s a 90s mystery!

The second video and song is definitely better — the bass really slaps as Greenwood was a more talented bass player than whoever was playing in the first version of the song.

The first 10 on today’s playlist:

Oh god, not this again. The work of the antidiet crowd asks anyone touched by diet culture to entertain the possibility that body weight doesn’t, in itself, cause health issues.

Unfortunately, this is absolutely not supported by science. Quite the opposite. Even being moderately overweight increases your risk for these ailments to various degrees: diabetes; heart disease; cancer; high blood pressure; complications in pregnancy; kidney disease; fatty liver disease; sleep apnea; osteoarthritis.

And if you’ve read the (wrong) study that being moderately overweight has some protective effect, it was incorrect. See here for why and where it went wrong.

Using data from three large cohort studies, comprising over 225,000 individuals, the researchers demonstrated that, no, there was no protective effect of being overweight. In fact, there was a small, but significant, added risk for all-cause mortality.

This is not quite as horrible as intuitive eating but it’s close. The sad thing is that it is glancingly close to wisdom but instead it dives into the abyss of dopey feelgood inane goofy wishful thinking.

People it seems just want an escape from things just being hard. But that’s life. Sometimes it’s difficult. A slog. A sore trial. There’s no deliverance from this, and definitely none if you want to improve yourself. It makes me really glad I became a paratrooper and did the other very difficult things I did in my life. I know just how hard the world can be. After those tribulations, all else came to seem easy. What stresses other people just seems barely a gnat to me. People wonder how I can just walk out of meetings or confront people in public. But I’ll tell you why. Death held my hand more than a few times, pulled me close in the dark, told me its secrets, and after that I became untouchable, the master of myself. No one else had dominion. Borrowed time is the best time because I never plan on paying it back.

There’s nothing wrong with being weak and soft. I truly believe that. I sometimes wish I were both of those things. My life would’ve been easier. But there’s also no reason to lie about it, to deny the truth of how the world works and the danger you expose yourself and others to with those lies, those distortions.

Even if you are weak and soft, you still owe others truth. Or at least you should.

It’s hilarious to watch economists dismiss the social sciences as pseudoscientific when economics itself is 80% malarkey and hogwash while the social sciences are only 50% worthless dead ends and sewage.

But economics has more math! So it has to be better! Mathing it up, though, only means it’s just as wrong, but more abstrusely, and with more of the Greek alphabet.

I wish I’d had zero math education after elementary school and had been able to start advanced linguistics, literature, language, anthropology, etc. classes in sixth grade or so instead of wasting so much time on something so worthless to me. Even attending a college instead of sixth grade would’ve been fine. I was more than capable of it.

Any of that was impossible for several reasons: my middle and high schools were fairly bad and there were maybe two other students at most in the whole county who could’ve handled the same material I could’ve. So there was no reason for it to be offered. No money, no market.

I do wonder sometimes, though, how it would’ve been if I’d had better educational opportunities and better teachers, but then that likely would’ve pushed me into academia which for me would’ve been a huge mistake and something I would’ve regretted. It worked out in the end, and not just in a sour grapes way. But I do still wonder if I’d grown up elsewhere what would’ve been different.

I expect with Google about to destroy effective ad-blocking in Chrome that Firefox will soon enough follow suit. Mozilla isn’t smart enough, alas, to do anything else and it’ll give them cover to do what they’ve wanted to do for many years now anyway.

I can still block ads with other methods but for most people that’ll be that.

There should be an Oscar for performative offendedness. There are so many greats clamoring for an award in this category and we simply have no way to recognize them.

I had no idea that chest freezers were so cheap.

Still thinking like a poor person, I guess, because when I was a kid these were special and expensive. We move too much to make getting one of these practical I think, but I’d like some resilience against both the conservatives and the liberals and their variously-intentioned depredations.

I need my meat. And though I don’t think anything in particular is likely, it’s called “insurance” for a reason. I suspect in the worst case, food supply disruptions are more likely than electricity disruptions — in the US, at least.

I’ll never be a prepper or anything like that. I’ve always liked, though, to have some stopgap against things people fervently insist can never happen. Because most of the time, they do happen.