I don't usually watch television. Not when I have a life anyway. About six months after I moved in with my daughter Kitten, son in law Karl and two grandkids, we all unanimously canceled our cable TV subscription because literally no one was watching it. The littles weren't allowed, they had kid video on DVD in a huge library of shows like Between the Lions and Sesame Street that have helped them learn reading, math, all sorts of things. Also we've got a good movie collection and a few old SF series on DVD for entertainment. The current crop of TV fare at the time we dropped it was dull as dishwater compared to our favorites and it just wsan't worth the bother -- not to mention we get real annoyed at the two-minute commercial interruptions that have become standard.

The segment of any show or movie you see nowadays seems to be only as long as the commercial break itself. I noticed this when I bought Meerkat Manor for my grandkids and realized how often it was reintroducing itself. That was scary.

But this just got ugly -- grade school ugly. I was surfing the news off my Google widget, happened to follow a story on Fox News and clicked on a video title in curiosity. The news segment, basically filler, was about a Boston program to have obese children visit some seals at an aquarium and imitate their movements.

Okay, the idea was sound -- anything that could make exercise more fun for kids is probably going to give them good habits. A visit to an aquarium would beat being screamed at by humiliating gym instructors to any kid. Marine mammals are graceful, playful and interesting. The program had a good premise.

So I clicked on the video.

I haven't seen such a flamefest against fat kids since I was an overgrown fat kid in grade school. The entire two minute segment made fun of the program in a snotty, grade-school tone. I know what the bullies grew up to do -- they work for Fox News. One blonde starlet-looking female was snottily going on about how kids couldn't possibly be inspired by coruplent sea mammals, they should be exposed to famous-name female celebrities that she implied were fit and trim and of course Hollywood-gorgeous.

For children. Yeah right. Rub it in that they don't look like TV personalities or like her.

I noticed all four of the people featured in the segment were white, looked wealthy, one was a bit heavy but the one female in it was one of the types of overly skinny over-made-up glamor gals while the guys just looked bland but prosperous. This was downright scary.

Child obesity is a real problem, something the children themselves usually have very little control of. What they eat is often determined by parents. What they see on television constantly prompts them to eat, especially fats and sugars, but the school environment demands they sit still for most of the day with as much exercise as your average cubicle slave. They don't get time off any more, they get homework assignments that if they completed all of them is a shift as long as a second job -- again, sitting still doing what they're told.

Then for entertainment what they get is interrupted every two minutes by a food commercial. Human beings respond to food commercials. I noticed that my appetite dropped when I quit watching regular cable with commercials -- simply because I wasn't being reminded of food constantly over and over again. It's not that these commercials are so hypnotic that I had unreasonable cravings for Red Lobster or Applebee's in particular. It's more that the reminders begin to mount up.

Most people don't pay attention to commercials, or like to think they don't. They're annoying so they get tuned out -- but they will still have an influence. Just the same way a person who's in a room for an hour with a toddler's constant attention demands will get stressed and irritated, the commercials are going to get on people's nerves -- but not always noticed as such because it's not really worth mentioning unless a specific commercial is especially funny or annoying.

The numbers of children affected by clinical obesity are staggering. It's up to about a third of the kids in the country. It's not one kid in a classroom of skinny kids, like when I grew up and grew too fast and matured too fast while being stocky. I look at kids today and many more of them look the way I did or much fatter. In high school, I was stocky and crooked and everyone else shot up past me to wind up skinny and long-legged. Now, if I see teenagers, a significant third of them are heavy too -- sometimes extremely so.

It hurts their health and worse, it can distort their minds. The levels of humiliation about it haven't changed at all. You'd think with it being that common it'd start being taken for granted as common, but it's not. Instead the shrinking number of kids who do get enough activity and eat healthier diets are just as vicious as they ever were toward kids that have a weight problem.

And now on Fox News, on a network that hosts a whole lot of children's programming, there's this snarky segment going on about how one creative approach to treating childhood obesity (which often leads to adult obesity) is so ludicrous, "replacing gym teachers with animals" and other stupid remarks.

I tihnk the Boston program is pretty cool. It may help a lot of kids. It may also help them associate outings and science and activity with fun. Some of them may even become more environmentally active too, coming to like the seals from seeing them up close and enjoying their play.

What kids today need is peer time, play time, running around and screaming and socializing the way most of the normal kids got to when I was growing up. They need to get out of the building and be able to run down the street playing pirates or climb trees or play on jungle gyms. It's gotten so dangerous and so paranoid that kids never get unsupervised time any more -- so they get fat and passive, every activity supervised and structured by adults.

If you give kids a ball they will invent games for it. They will pass on children's culture generation by generation, creating and deciding the rules gives them some idea of how social decisions get made. It prepares them to participate in government and community direction actively. But when the leaders of every single thing children do are adults with their own grim agenda, you wind up with young adults who have literally no idea what to do next once they grow up and move out of their parents' home.

I've had housemates like that, young men who didn't know how to buy groceries or look for work, who sat around day after day bored and played video games ad infinitum. Video games are the only opportunity kids get today to do things in a nonstructured environment -- they can socialize online with other players and the fantasy might be illustrated but the appeal of the games is that it's something to fill a real need for socializing with equals. No one learns to lead just by following and obeying or giving up and rebelling, without any context other than being an underling.

There have been many articles all my life dealing with how bad television is for children. Most of them focus on the targets of the Puritanical crowd -- oh horrors, there's sex and violence in the content. It's not the sex and violence. It's the harmless boring commercials for fast food, sugary breakfast cereals and expensive restaurants with their glowing presentations of food that are doing a lot of harm - along with the appearance-oriented products all presenting a shallow yet perfectionist view of self ranked by looks and wealth. No one real is ever good enough to compare with those commercials.

That content pounds in, interrupting every two minutes, no matter what the content of the shows are. It's honest, each one is just an advertiser's attempt to present its particular company's products and gain sales. But the fact that it's gotten that far out of hand shapes the national psyche. Reminders to feel guilty and ashamed of enjoying good food are just as common -- you get the triple whammy of food commercial, diet commercial and appearance-related commercials all in the same segment which creates the social role of "you're not good enough, comfort yourself with fatty foods and hate yourself for doing it."

Anything that breaks that mold gets laughed at -- like the idea that sending obese kids to a sea aquarium where first of all they've got the activity of going to the outing itself, which does take some walking and moving around and is special enough to get some heartpounding excitement, followed by a vigorous playful event watching and playing with sea mammals -- that gets treated as though it's the dumbest thing invented since commercials.

It made me sick to see what Fox has descended to, because there was a time years ago when the Simpsons were new that Fox was the oddball station you could find cool stuff on and views that broke the monolithic conservatism of the three majors at the time. Now it's major and it's worse than its predecessors.

More than ever, I think that we're exercising the right kind of parental controls -- purchasing the programs and movies that are entertaining, high quality and good for the kids while leaving out the worst of the content altogether.

And once again I'm glad to get my news on the Internet, where it's not linear -- where it's rare for me to wsate my time on something as viciously stomach-churning as that Fox News filler bit. I choose my own headlines to read when it comes to filler, and the Odd News tends to have fun and funny bits that don't involve blaming kids for things they can't control while putting down anything that could conceivably help them.

One anthropological reason for obesity in children and women is that since the 1950s, breast feeding became taboo. Children raised on cow's milk formulas with corn syrup have metabolisms geared to high sugar and crave it the rest of their lives, they get fat. Obese babies are so common that obesity is considered the norm and medically obese babies get considered cute -- and then people wonder why they were fat as little kids, teens and adults.

On the mother's side of it, women who breast feed their kids take off the pounds after their pregnancy fast. Their bodies put on those pounds to pump it right through as nutrition to the baby -- hundreds of thousands of years of evolution prepare female mammals to eat for two. Not while they're pregnant so much as afterward. Women who don't breast feed have told their bodies the baby's dead, so that hoard of fat gets saved for the next one and the next. Then mysteriously a ludicrously high number of women wind up overweight after having kids and the stereotype is that mothers aren't thin or sexy.

Every woman I've known who actually breast fed her babies has taken that extra weight off and kept it off, completed that natural process by putting the calories where they belong, into a healthy growing child. Their babies look different too -- longer and more muscular, not as blobby looking. They get actual baby fat -- but one way you can tell real baby fat is that it comes and goes overnight.

One day Gabriel would look pudgy with overlapping knees and rounded limbs -- and then the morning after he'd be obviously a lot taller and a lot more compact and muscular. Both of them wound up that way. He's got a stocky build unlike her tall lanky build, but both are healthy looking in a way that a lot of little kids aren't. They also got used to fruits and vegetables and grains as snacks and don't expect candy or sweets very often, they think of things like that as special treats over a very long term. They crave fruit and get it.

I look at the obese children that I used to see in the school that was across the back road behind our Kansas house and know that their mothers' decision to breastfeed or not, their parents' decision what to feed them every day has a lot to do with how they wound up with that problem. Tell a kid or brag to adults that "the children aren't allowed any sugar" and it feeds into the dieting-guilt-overeating cycle. But my daughter doesn't do that. Instead, when she gives them those infrequent treats she makes a big deal of them as treats, they are more special, they aren't all-or-nothing forbidden. Instead each kid gets a chocolate birthday cake to do whatever they want with including make a mess.

There are ways to raise kids without either obesity or the social self-punishment cycle the ads are inadvertently selling.

Then there is another series of real science articles I've read in better places, many of them science periodicals. Dieting itself causes the body to hoard food. The dieting industry rests on this idea of periodic self-punishment and failed diets, if anyone ever succeeds at losing weight and keeping it off then they're no longer a customer. Periodic intermittent starvation resets a person's metabolism to where digestion gets ruthlessly efficient. Every possible calorie gets drawn out of anything that goes into the system... and then the dieter can't stand the deprivation any more, goes off the diet and everything on the binge gets grabbed and hoarded by the same metabolism -- which has adapted to an environment where food is not always available but copious when it is.

Humans adapt the same way as other animals. The only way to keep weight down is to gradually start introducing healthier foods and gradually change your habits till you're eating healthy portions for maintenance, get more activity and keep digestion moving fast. To turn off the scare alarm that you're going to starve next week or month and those extra pounds could mean life or death, in favor of adapting to an environment where food is plentiful and good.

And don't forget actual nutrients. Malnutrition and lack of vitamins or essential minerals creates cravings -- and sometimes something can be in a bad food in trace quantity that creates enormous cravings. Satisfy those mineral and vitamin cravings, eat the broccoli when you can't get broccoli off your mind, and weight stabilizes because you don't need as much broccoli to get its minerals and vitamis as you would getting artificially flavored imitation cheese food. (Imitation cheese or imitation food? Sorta both really.)

But most people don't seem to know about them or care. Let alone the children themselves, it'd be a rare child who understood these things and had enough freedom of choices in life to gradually lose weight and gain strength and activity. The culture is immersive and it comes off the tube in much more consistency in the ads than the programming -- except for Fox News, which hit a new low in that little filler bit today.

That's right. Take some first or second grader watching the news to get items for a school report and then show these privileged high-status white adults making fun of a program that would be fun instead of the miserable grind of fake-drill-sergeant gym instruction and large dollops of humiliation. While taking many pot shots at the fat kids themselves threatening to put them in cages with mountain lions to make them have to run for their lives. It's all good for a cheap laugh.

They don't know why they wound up that way, they're kids. They only know from the point they hit television age that they're destined to a life of humiliation, self-punishment and deprivation.

News announcers act like they're trusted authorities, they've always had that image. But these three acted like the worst brats on the schoolyard. What message does that send? Bullies do well in life. Indulge in picking on people. You'll wind up running everything.

They're actors, paid to entertain. But a lot of the content is determined by advertisers and their sales numbers, so everything that reinforces that starve-and-binge outlook on life has geniune financial feedback. They'll make more money promoting unhealthy, disfunctional behavior and attitudes, so they will choose programs that make the commercials make sense and the content all has a seamless message. Give up, you'll never look that good so you might as well binge before you have to diet. Or, if you do look that good, continue the viciousness and put down anyone who's not perfect, you'll go far.

LOL -- great synchronicity! The Internet of course, Google and Yahoo and other assorted news sources on the Internet. Television news is bad for my health and sanity, especially its commercials. It's easier to ignore a sidebar ad than to sit through an unwanted message to get through more unwanted messages to get to the story I'm interested in than to choose headlines on a menu. The synchronicity is that I just wrote a good thorough rant against a Fox News filler segment that disgusted me with how it was nothing but a flamefest against obese children and a program that might actually succeed in helping them. One that sounded more fun than structured calisthenics and competitive sports under a cruel gym teacher. I wish they'd had that program when I was little, it didn't need to be put down by news announcers. But good programming wouldn't sell sugary breakfast cereal and high-calorie fast food or expensive dieting products nearly so much, so we're not likely to see it.

Snow Roller


3 Barrels, San Juan Capistrano


Cactus

All three in Pitt Artist Pens on white wirebound ProArt sketchbook paper, the big 8 1/2" x 11" sketchbook. Photo references by JustChaos for the July 3-5 Weekend Drawing Event at WetCanvas.com. I have three more references in the set to complete, but I wanted at least sketches of every one of them before the week was out. The man-made objects and architecture are the toughest ones for me.