…are getting taller, and Americans aren’t.”

A BRITISH SOCIAL-RESEARCH GROUP details the often-ignored links among poverty and obesity.

…as five p.m. these days, but many of us could still use some Seasonal Affective Disorder tips.

I AGREE COMPLETELY with Mark Rahner: The biggest threat from the mad-cow scare is having to face the smug crowing of fundamentalist vegans. Four close acquaintances have either emailed me vegan sermons or personally taken me to “raw food” restaurants for ice-cold carrot-and-eggplant soup. They remain close acquaintances, but they haven’t converted me.

Yes, the meat-processing industry’s rife with corruption and shoddy “efficiency” practices. But I’m not going to protest sweatshop clothing factories by walking around naked; at least not when it’s twenty degrees outside.

Who’d’ve thunk it? Noam Chomsky, academic-left theoretician and author of obscure incendiary anti-Bush tracts, has become a famous enough name, at least in this town, to become an ad slogan for a regional chain of seven bookstores.

You know you’re a word-usage freak when this sign makes you stop and think not about its message, but about whether it should say “1 in 7 is” or “1 in 7 are.”

Above and below, anonymous sidewalk chalk art found downtown.

ONE OF THE FEW intelligent conservative publications out there, The World & I (founded by pals of Unification Church honcho Sun Myung Moon), has a long, intriguing essay about “The Feminization of American Culture.” The writer, Leonard Sax, implies a connection between the rise of feminine values and a rise in “environmental estrogen,” due to chemical leakoffs from all the plastic products lying around our homes and landfills.

I’d already heard about the latter phenomenon in a Hugo House lecture a couple years ago by Olympia postcard designer Stella Marrs. Marrs didn’t think the pervasiveness of estrogen-like chemicals was a good thing, for women or anybody. Recent medical disputes about the long-term effects of (deliberate) estrogen therapy regimens, such as a possible increased breast-cancer risk, might back her up on this.

Which brings me to the good friend of mine who’s studied a lot about the Greek Amazons, warriors of legend who would undergo masectomies to gain better bow-and-arrow skills. Are the women of the industrialized world, Sax’s article asks, gaining more dominance at the expense of their own health?

When drug companies figured out how to market it as one.

…risk more cavities?

PERSONAL UPDATE #1: In an it-could-only-happen-to-me occurance, I was finally replacing the busted screen on my own laptop last night when I pushed my chair back too far, struck a small table, and sent my new laptop to the floor—busting the screen. (Fortunately, I had a spare screen on hand, the one I was going to have put into my old laptop.)

PERSONAL UPDATE #2: Medically, I still don’t know exactly what happened to me two weeks ago. Two hours at the doc’s office got me only the info that I had an undefinedly “abnormal” EKG. More tests shall occur later this month.

I hope to all known deities it’s not cardiac-esque. My principal death nightmare has always involved (1) having a heart attack, (2) writhing on a sidewalk, and (3) dozens of passersby simply standing around and laughing.

…to Corwin Haeck, Greg Lowney, Anne Silberman, and all the others who’ve written their sympathies following my recent unfortunateness. I continue to gain energy and strength, and hope to find out sometime next week exactly what happened to me.

…this year was based on old patent-medicine advertising, and billed the big event as an “arts festival and mind tonic.”

It was certainly an elixir for me. It may have helped me heal from my recent attack-of-some-sort.

I’d first gotten panicky Monday afternoon and early evening (8/25). Late that night, the real attack set in.

I didn’t fall asleep until after 3:30 a.m., and stayed passed out until nearly 2 p.m. Tuesday. Needless to say, I didn’t do much the rest of that day.

Wednesday, I stayed home and watched DVDs, then felt strong enough to go out for a couple of hours in the evening.

Thursday, all I did was go to the drug store and the grocery store. And I barely got that accomplished.

Then came Friday, day one of the ol’ B-shoot.

I didn’t know on Thursday night whether I’d be capable of going, or even of keeping my prearranged meeting with two friends beforehand. But I awoke Friday at a reasonable hour reasonably energetic, and was able to stick around on the Seattle Center grounds until about 20 minutes into Modest Mouse’s stadium set.

Saturday, I was a bit wearier, but managed to knock around the festival for four hours or so (during which I met, and received healthy wishes from, recent acquaintances John Poetzel and “tyd.” I went to the Two Bells for my longtime acquaintance Earl Brooks’s new alt-country band, but was too exhausted to stay to the end of the (quite good) opening act.

On Sunday I took things a little easier. I got to Belltown around 4:30, hung out with print MISC contributor Julian Fox (who’s had some medical exigencies of his own of late, sorry to say) at the Rendezvous, then finally got around to B-shooting after 6 p.m. I am so glad I was able to stay awake and alert past 10, so I could have the once-in-a-lifetime experience of sharing piano-bar meistro Howard Fulson’s final regular gig at Sorry Charlie’s.

Monday, I awoke feeling better than I’d felt all week. My left shoulder’s still sore in a few spots, but I could effectively use it to lift myself out of bed. After posting Sunday’s photos to the site, I went back to a full final day of B-shooting, including the rockin’ sounds of Ms. Led, the New Pornographers, and Wilco. It all culminated with an enjoyable evening in the stadium listening to the not-at-all-yet-a-nostalgia-band R.E.M. (Pix will be posted later Tuesday.) I wound up walking almost a mile of the road home, grateful for the warm starry (and Mars-y) night.

I’m seeing a doctor in a few days, and hope to have the past unpleasantness behind me for good. Thanks also to Kevin Jerbi and Claudio Todesco, who each emailed their best wishes.

More to come.

…but yr. web-editor just might (repeat, might) have had either a panic attack or a “silent” heart attack late Monday night.

It was at the long-belated end of an extremely long and extremely stressful day, in which I’d found myself gasping for breath to the point of giggling. By the time I finally got home around 11:30, I felt intense pain in my lower abdomen and left shoulder (but not further down either arm). I tried to relax enough to sleep, but only kept getting more tense. At the episode’s nadir, I had to fight to breathe and felt searing pain when I did.

But then I finally did relax enough to sleep, which I did until 2 p.m. Tuesday. Since then, I’ve continued to maintain my regular activities (applying for jobs, writing, schmoozing, shopping). But some shoulder pain has remained, and intense headaches have come and gone.

At no point in any of this has my heartbeat felt too slow, too fast, or erratic.

I still don’t know what happenned. I might not until sometime next week. But for now, I’m trying to take things easy. So I might not see y’all at Bumbershoot ’03. But please rest assured I’m alive and more-or-less well now.

SO AT THE AGE OF approximately 46 and a half, I’ve finally had an intimation of mortality. Until this week, I’d been holding onto the pseudo-invulnerability of youth all this time. Long-term friends have gone bald, had kids, undergone nasty divorces, won Emmys or Pulitzers, or moved to Germany. A few have passed on, due to everything from suicide and drugs to cancer and HIV. Others have valiantly fought back in the face of doom and become stronger, wiser people.

I never wanted to become middle aged. I’d always associated it with those annoying guys whose lives had essentially ended at the end of The Sixties, and who ever since wouldn’t stop alleging that Their Generation was some sort of superior species. I’d planned to stay sprightly and open to new ideas. Either that or become an unabashed crochety old geezer. (My short-lived Tablet column was even titled Back In My Day, Sonny.)

Nowadays, there are at least some role models out there for ’80s-generation fellas growing older, if not gracefully, at least forcefully. Elvis Costello, and to a lesser extent Joe Jackson, are making some of the most provocative music of their careers. Locally, so are Kim Warnick (in Visqueen) and Scott McCaughey (in the Minus Five). Peter Bagge’s comics and Charles Peterson’s photographs keep getting better.

This time has not come for me to, as Charles Aznavour sang, “pay for yesterday when I was young.” It is time for me to start seriously considering what I wanna really, really do with what I fully expect to be the many, many more years I’ve got.

…about a third of the way down this linked page, that Bill Gates’s highly publicized anti-AIDS crusade’s really a prop-up for the big drug companies, and for the intellectual-property regulations that protect their monopoly (and his):

“Gates knows darn well that ‘intellectual property rights’ laws… are under attack by Nelson Mandela and front-line doctors trying to get cut-rate drugs to the 23 million Africans sick with the AIDS virus…. He’s spending an itsy-bitsy part of his monopoly profits (the $6 billion spent by Gates’s foundation is less than 2% of his net worth) to buy some drugs for a fraction of the dying. The bully billionaire’s ‘philanthropic’ organization is working paw-in-claw with the big pharmaceutical companies in support of the blockade on cheap drug shipments…”Gates says his plan is to reach one million people with medicine by the end of the decade.  Another way to read it: He’s locking in a trade system that will effectively block the delivery of medicine to over 20 million.”

…with the hereby-linked commentary by one Dr. David L. Sackett in a Canadian medical journal, containing unkind words about preventative medicine:

“Preventive medicine displays all 3 elements of arrogance. First, it is aggressively assertive, pursuing symptomless individuals and telling them what they must do to remain healthy. Occasionally invoking the force of law (immunizations, seat belts), it prescribes and proscribes for both individual patients and the general citizenry of every age and stage. Second, preventive medicine is presumptuous, confident that the interventions it espouses will, on average, do more good than harm to those who accept and adhere to them. Finally, preventive medicine is overbearing, attacking those who question the value of its recommendations.”

There are also responses to this at the doctors’ weblog Medpundit.

BRIT RESEARCHERS now claim that political protesting may be good for your health. And goodness knows there’ll be plenty of such healthy opportunities in the near future.