Slime, Head Pat, Downer, and White Goo

[livingdeb]

Scandal

Today's coverage on the scandal was anticlimactic. There was another front-page story, but it just talked about people getting defensive. Oh, all those lunches were nothing and no one even knew who was sponsoring what, anyway. According to one of the head guys. Yeah, right.

There were no editorials.

I was glad yesterday that people were acting shocked, but today, it's like we're just one of those places where this stuff happens. And we are. Everyone knows about politicians and lobbies and campaign contributions and pork barrels. And I think most people know that magazines and TV stations are influenced by their advertisers.

Did you know that certain big-box electronics stores don't let companies make a profit on what they sell there, and sometimes even take a loss? They do it anyway for name recognition.

I'm starting to wonder about my own part in this culture. I actually do get a lot of those free lunches that are not supposed to exist. For example:

• Businesses donate lunches for meetings of campus professional associations. In return, we think good thoughts about them, sometimes even find out that they exist and that we like their food.


• Businesses donate money for professional association all-day conferences. Also supplies such as notepads and pens with their name embossed on them. I guess this gives them advertising and helps us feel good about them because they are so nice to us.


• Some offices send donuts or other treats to other offices to thank them for their good work and/or (if it's holiday time) to inspire them to provide good work in the future.


• Bosses sometimes take their employees out for lunch. This makes the bosses feel better about not giving very good raises, right?


• Charities send me address labels and even greeting cards. Apparently this makes enough extra people make donations to more than recover their costs.

I'm pretty clueless about politics, office politics, and that kind of stuff. Maybe there's all kinds of wheeling and dealing going on just over my head.

I'm particularly wondering if my credit union is slimy or not. I definitely get a lot of office supplies from them at various functions. And according to the article I linked to yesterday, they also "treated the financial aid office to dinner at the Texas Land & Cattle Steak House and to an El Arroyo fajita lunch." Should I write the president of the credit union and ask what's up? Previous presidents have responded very well to pressure in the past (as when, for example, they replaced the checking account they were offering with a range of "better" checking accounts, all of which were worse for me in some way).

And if they are slimy, can they really be any slimier than actual banks, who are probably doing all the same things as well as all the extra bank sliminess? If so, should I move my finances to my discount broker and/or mattress?

There's a general feeling of disillusionment that I don't like.

Ego Stoking

I got to look really good at work today. Three of us are working on, well, a probably useless project, but we're filling in this grid with very important rhetoric and experts are coming over to help us make sure we're doing it right. We started with the grid of one of us a few weeks ago, and the feedback she got helped the other two of us go back and do major re-writes. The second person went today, and we only spent about half as much time on each of her items. There was still a little time left in our two-hour meeting so we started on mine, and most of mine were already just fine so we finished mine, too.

It's so easy to fantasize that somehow your work won't need so much editing, only to find that there's plenty of room for improvement, but today the fantasy came true.

Same old

One of my users said something was broken, but actually it's working exactly the way we programmed it to. I'm still waiting on a response to my question on why my user thought it was broken. So, I don't know what the total level of frustration will be. But for now: Grrr.

Diet substitution

My favorite weight loss eating strategy is to replace foods I like with other foods I like that are healthier. I have seen absolutely no results from this strategy that I can measure, but it must be a good idea.

My latest change has been to expand on the idea of making deviled eggs with mayonnaise and sour cream instead of just mayonnaise. I tried a mayonnaise/sour cream mixture in making tuna salad, and this also worked for me. This is good, because my old strategy of using less mayo was making me not like tuna salad very much any more, so I wasn't eating it anymore, except at restaurants.

Then this week I tried mixing mayo and sour cream to spread on a turkey and muenster cheese sandwich. (No onion roll, llcoolvad--I'm using whole wheat bread most of the time.) This also worked! Then I tried just spreading sour cream on the bread instead of mayonnaise. I can't get my tongue to fall for that little trick. Oh well.

Still, the nutritional differences between sour cream and mayonnaise are great. The following apply to one tablespoon of lowfat sour cream and regular canola mayonnaise. (Normally I get fat-free sour cream, but I couldn't find any on my last trip to the store. I have tried lower calorie mayonnaises, but haven't liked them at all except for the ones that do it by just adding water.)

Calories: mayo - 100, sour cream - 17.5
Fat: mayo - 11 g (1 g saturated, 0 g trans fat, 3.5 polyunsaturated fat, 7 g monounsaturated), sour cream - 1 g (0.5 g saturated, 0 g trans fat)
Cholesterol: both - 5 mg
Sodium: mayo - 70 mg; sour cream - 12.5 mg
Carbohydrates: mayo - 0 g, sour cream - 1.5 g (1 g sugar)
Protein: mayo - 0 g, sour cream - 0.5 g
Vitamin A: mayo - 0%, sour cream - 2%
Vitamin C, iron: both - 0%
Calcium: mayo - 0%, sour cream - 3%

So, both are pretty empty calories, but there are significantly fewer in the sour cream.