Photo via Splash

I am kind of crushing on Jimmy Kimmel after reading Sarah Silverman's quip that he loves her thigh fat, even though she doesn't. It reminds me of a bonding moment I had with my male best friend, who has repeatedly declared that he finds my upper arms to be absolutely beautiful. For years, I thought he was poking fun at my admitted insecurity regarding my grandma arms, because I couldn't understand how he could possibly find my bingo wings "charming." However, I now believe that he's telling the truth.

And while I doubt I'll be wearing a sleeveless dress out to the clubs anytime soon, he has allowed me to be a little more kind to myself and I am buoyed by the idea that should my arms accidentally be exposed, it's not like they will be pelted by villagers wielding torches.

I am so appalled by the news that part of the Phi Epsilon sorority initiation involves branding the initiated's genitals with a hot fork. I'm somewhat stymied in general by the idea of Greekdom. When I was in college, I was actually courted quite heavily by a non-official sorority that was seriously not scary. I actually didn't pledge, because I figured that I'd rather spend $1,000 a year on books and having a bed to sleep in rather than paying someone to be my friend. I ended up getting adopted as a "little sister" by a fraternity through my involvement in student government and ended up hanging out with the sorority anyway. So maybe through my non-pledge status, I narrowly avoided getting my hootchie scorched by a utensil stolen out of the cafeteria, but I'm also pretty sure that I would have noticed weeping scorchmarks on the nether regions of my friends in our painfully non-private dorm showers. I want to believe that such things are isolated incidents, but then a friend told me about how everyone in his fraternity was assigned a nickname based on the special unique traits of their penis.

But this branding? With a hot fork? What the heck? Can someone explain this to me, as I am trying desperately to parse the information and I just can't.

image via elana's pantry

Spring spring spring spring summer, achoo. The weather changes, and then it is time for being sick, which seems deeply unfair. Being sick should be entirely the province of the cold months, with the bundling up and the huddling under the covers. Unfortunately, germs wait for no woman, illness is pan-seasonal, and homemade chicken soup is still the most comforting cure of all. Hot soup on a hot day is almost as much a travesty as being sick in the sun? I know! But what about hot chicken soup that tastes fresh, a little sweet, and a little spicy to cut right though all the nasty stuff? Elana makes a mean (organic, gluten-free) Thai chicken soup that seems so incredibly simple you can make it even when you're hopped up on cold medicine, and looks so pretty and delicious, I bet it's curing me right through the computer screen.

Would you like a side of morality judgment with your Big Mac? Lawmakers in New Jersey are thinking about treating fast food the way they treat cigarettes or liquor and charging a "sin tax" for your chili cheese fries and deep-fried apple pie. The extra revenue is a possibility for funding New Jersey's hospitals.

The state Senate president opposes it, stating, "That's a tax on poorer people and people with kids." Er, sorry, no. People eat at fast food restaurants because it is cheap and people in lower socio-economic brackets might also eat there because their neighborhood has a Taco Bell and a KFC but no grocery store. If it's too expensive, they will either stop eating fast food or just eat it anyway (using money they would have normally used for other essentials). Or by nature of capitalism, another enterprise will pop up and take advantage of this opportunity for selling to this demographic. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing.

As for a behavior deterrent, is there really a reduction in drinking or smoking caused by the sin taxes already in place? No, not really. Also, while you can't argue that fast food is not the healthiest nutritional choice, I question the idea that the majority of illnesses treated in hospitals are directly linked to consumption of fast food. The lawmakers are implying causality by going after fast food joints to pay for the hospitals and not, say, better schools or teacher pay.

Of course, a great deal of it is the sun talking. A bike is the most perfect transportation solution for me! I should not get a car, which is terrible for the environment and increasingly expensive in a number of very troubling ways, including ethically, environmentally, and physically speaking, even! I just paid my taxes and cannot afford a car anyway! Not to mention the fact that shopping for a good used car that will not blow up, explode, detonate or die quietly in any number of ways smacks of a great deal of effort and also exceptional luck, of which I have a very small-to-nonexistent amount. This is why I do not push my luck. This is why I need a bike!

When I first moved to Littletown, here in the heart of Utah, I was pretty convinced that I would die horribly and alone without owning a car; that I would be isolated, cut off, dependent, and always out of milk. It turns out that--well, it would be very convenient to have my own wheels, to be able to make a grocery run without scheduling it with other people and hoping the dwindling of my supply of yogurt coincides neatly with their requirements for whole wheat pasta and US Weekly. It would be nice to be able to run up to Target whenever I needed to, to be able to head out to the coffee shop that's a bit of a hike without making elaborate plans, to be like, totally free! It would be nice. But I am, as ever, surprised at the difference between what is nice and what is necessary.

Kim's got a new healthy water bottle, proving she'll fall for anything, and jewelry designer Katharine Sise is back showing us how to wear big, chunky pieces, including a bug-filled 1940's bracelet that sends Kim on a Fear Factor freak-out. Photos via Splash.

One of the things Allen Zadoff is very adamant about, in Hungry, is the fact that he did not go on a diet; he identified his issues with food, and took (fairly drastic) steps to diminish and eliminate those issues, but he never once talks about a food plan, or a system or a group or a diet. In fact, he's pretty against diets--go see a nutritionist, talk to your doctor, figure out how to eat healthily for your lifestyle and for your body, but no diets.

No diets! That seems like a damn fine way to live. No feeding ourselves fake foods and scary sweeteners, no splitting a dry green salad and a sliver of steamed halibut with your crazy friend, no worrying about following the rules and doing things right and trying, desperately, to not screw things up. That's what's always got me about diets--that panic that you'll screw up, and everything will be ruined.

My priority, during the heat of the summer, shifts to wearing as few and as skimpy items of clothing as possible because, holy hell, I do not deal well with this heat stuff. Head to toe, I want as little as possible touching my body, please. If I could get away with SPF one thousand and four, and blindfolds for everyone else, I totally would. Unfortunately, decency laws require being clothed, and sensible hygiene insists that that include shoes. Boo.

The medical community is slowly but surely coming around to Fat and Fit theory, noting that being active reduces risk for things like heart disease, even when a person is overweight or obese. While we're still a long way from the whole societal acceptance of "health at any size," judging by the pessimistic headline given the same study by MSNBC, this study proves that those overweight women who reported significant regular exercise have a reduced risk of developing heart disease than women who were overweight and considered inactive. The article does not mention the risk for thin women in the same age bracket who are considered inactive, but the Mayo states that even inactive thin people are at higher risk for heart disease than active counterparts. It should be noted that the women studied were an average age of 54 and the activity was self-reported, not measured scientifically. And there's some controversy surrounding these findings. From the same pissy MSNBC post:

University of South Carolina obesity expert Steven Blair, a leading proponent of the "fit and fat" theory, said the study is limited by relying on women's self-reporting their activity levels. That method is not as reliable as a more objective fitness evaluation including exercise treadmill tests, Blair said. These tests include heart-rate measures to see how the heart responds to and tolerates exercise. In Blair's research, overweight people deemed "fit" by treadmill tests did not face increased risks of dying from heart disease.

Intriguing! There's more on the Blair study if you're looking for inspiration, but regardless of numbers within populations, risk factors and whatnot, the only person that matters is yourself and what you are doing to keep yourself long, strong and bound to get the friction on. So I choose to take from this that regardless of your size, there are positive health benefits from physical activity. Even if you are not exercising to lose weight, you're still doing a body good.

What can you do to increase your fitness and overall health in a one-two punch? Check out these five not-too-scary options:

Sex and the City is a movie! It's coming out so soon! It's so exciting! You're going to have to explain to me why it's so exciting, because I truly don't understand, though I wish I did--it's everything I like in my fluffy television: pretty ladies, fancy clothes, and storylines about love and doing it a lot. There's a lot of doing it--which is right and reasonable, considering that anything else would be false advertising and everyone knows that that is an extremely rude thing to do.

I've seen two and one half episodes of the show, and this is perhaps an unfair stretch of evidence upon which to base my completely un-objective and totally biased opinion, but it strikes me as a bad show, and a shallow show that tries to hit hard at the Universal Experience of Women and just mostly reduces everything to a sad joke, never quite goes far enough, always pulls back from the truly interesting and the risqué. Wouldn't a show about sex, in Manhattan, want to be totally risqué? I mean, the episode about threesomes--that could have been kind of hot, it could have been a little dirty, it could have been heartbreaking and also totally fascinating. Except in the end, ha ha, Charlotte's man only wanted to screw around with another woman! There goes that relationship, ha ha! And it's an easy punch line that just makes me really irritated.

Maybe I'm asking too much from a throwaway HBO show. No, I know I am. Maybe I am knee-jerk reacting against all the crazy hype and the howling. I do that sometimes. Maybe I'm the wrong demographic--it could be that I don't understand these women because I am not the right age--and frankly, I can't tell if I am too old or too young. Sometimes, I feel too old, because these ladies are doing retarded teenager things like stalking the boy they like at church, tee hee, or giving in to his creepy manipulations to have a threesome, or getting mad that someone they dumped found someone else so they call him and make him come running back.