Rating:
I’m usually not into horror novels or movies, but Stephen King is one exception. His books are just so readable, with a conversational style that’s effortless to absorb, that almost anything he writes is a pleasure to read. I’ve also found that many of his books aren’t really horror, at least the way I think of horror, as in the gore and shock-value of horror movies. They have a spookiness about them, a feeling that there’s *something* out there we’d rather not look at, but that’s often combined with a good mystery or science fiction type of story that’s good in its own right.

That’s certainly the case with From a Buick 8, where much of the creepiness comes from the unknown and unknowable. When an old Buick Roadmaster—or a sort of model of one—is abandoned at a rural Pennsylvania gas station, a group of state troopers take charge of it and do their best to contain the dangers it represents. Over many years, they gradually discover that the Buick is some sort of a conduit to and from another place, drawing in and spewing out things that may not actually be evil but which sure feel like it.

A nice touch is that the story is told to the son of one of the state troopers who originally discovered the car, and several of the troopers take turns telling the story, offering different perspectives. There’s no one hero, and in fact nothing really heroic happens, which is one of the main points of the book: In real life, problems that come along aren’t always fought and defeated like they are in the movies. Sometimes they’re simply contained or dealt with, and life goes on as best it can. Not exactly a climactic concept to base a plot on, but it works well here.

Despite what I said earlier, there are a couple of unpleasantly gory scenes reminiscent of more typical horror novels of King’s like Carrie, so don’t read this book if you’re very sensitive to that sort of thing.

Rating:

I only recently discovered Leonard’s books, after reading quite a few by other authors in the same genre (what I think of as “tough guys who do what needs to be done without whining about it”), like Mickey Spillane, Ian Fleming, John Sandford, and Ed McBain. Leonard seems to tend toward the “edgier” end of the spectrum, with plenty of truly unsavory bad guys and heroes with plenty of flaws themselves. The world of these books is a seedy place, where very few people put anything else ahead of their own immediate gratification.

This book, and its protagonist,named Stick, are better than most. Stick, recently released after serving seven years on an armed robbery charge, has enough doubts to make him seem more real than the unreasonably confident James Bond types. He seems to want to go straight, but honestly isn’t sure how that’s done. (His first impulse, when trying to figure out how to go visit his little girl, is to steal a car.) He ends up (mostly) doing the right thing because the bad guys are so stupid and offensive, not because that’s how he plans it. It’s a good mix that makes him a likable character and more memorable than most in the genre, who are easily forgotten when one puts the book down.

The other characters are also well-drawn and easy to keep track of–something that’s important in pulp novels a reader can devour in a long afternoon. Chucky, Moke, Barry, and Nestor are all complete individuals; sometimes a bit over the top (or a lot in Chucky’s case), but always interesting. The women are fairly one-dimensional, which is typical in these books that are clearly written for men.

This is my first review, so I may decide on a different scoring system eventually, but for now I’m giving this one 3.5 out of 5 points. That’s pretty good for this kind of book: an adventure/thriller that’s only trying to be a fun, engaging read, and not trying to make any big points or do a ton of character development. I’d recommend it to anyone who likes the authors I mentioned above; but if you think Bond movies are macho and violent, take a pass on this one.

(Whatever scale I use, I’ll use it all. This won’t be like the Olympics, where even the guy who falls down gets a 9.3 on a 10-point scale. Whenever possible, I’ll include a link to buy the book, which will pay me a few cents if you use it, so feel free to do so!)

When I first discovered low-carb eating a few years ago and found that I could lose weight and improve my health without eating less or going hungry, I started telling people, “Calories are irrelevant!” I didn’t really believe it, though. The research I was reading, and my own experience, showed that calories weren’t as important as the amount of carbohydrate in the food, but I assumed calories still mattered somehow under the surface. I declared their irrelevance as a conversation starter, as a way to get people to question their assumptions, but I never fully meant it.

After all, we all know that every calorie we consume has to be burned in exercise or stored as fat, right? Has any other assumption been so firmly accepted as fact in modern society? It affects most of the meals we eat; how our food is processed, packaged, and marketed; and how we look at others. The fat guy eating a triple cheeseburger is surely a slob and a glutton; the one who orders a baked potato is conscientious and reliable.

As I’ve learned more about human biology, however, especially fat metabolism, I’ve started to realize I was more on target than I knew. The fat cells are not open cubbyholes on a wall, where extra fat molecules can be tossed and then retrieved later. A fat cell is more like a room with a whole bunch of doors that exit onto the hallway that is the blood stream. Each of these doors has a different type of lock, and the keys that open them are hormones and enzymes. The doors are also very small, and have funny shapes, so even when the right key comes along and opens them, only certain things can get in or out. The doors also only allow traffic to pass in one direction, and which direction is determined by which key is used to open them.

Now to back up a little bit. Fat is stored and transported through the blood stream as a triglyceride. You’ve probably heard of these evil little buggers in relation to cholesterol. A triglyceride is made up of three fatty acid chains attached to a glycerol molecule. This big structure can’t get through the doors of the fat cell, so it has to be broken down into its parts—fatty acids and a glycerol—so the parts can be transferred inside. Once inside, they are put back together for storage. To get them back out—to “burn” fat—they have to be broken down again, passed through the doors, and put back together.

There are several different hormones that act askeys for these doors. The biggest is insulin, which opens the door of fat cells to allow incoming transfers only. When the insulin level in the blood is high, it tells the fat cells to reach out and grab triglycerides, break them apart, pull them through the doors, and put them back together inside. Without insulin to trigger this action, the doors stay closed and fat can’t be stored, which is why Type I diabetics can waste away no matter how much they eat.

Everything in the body has a balancing counterpart, and insulin has several: glucagon, adrenaline, growth hormone, and others. These open the fat cell doors in the opposite direction, outgoing. When these hormones outnumber insulin in the blood, the fat cells start breaking down triglycerides, pushing them through the doors, and putting them back together in the blood stream, where they can be transported to the muscles or organs which use them for fuel.

Notice that none of this has anything to do with how many calories are being eaten. If insulin is dominant, the exit doors on the fat cells will be closed, even if the person is starving. If insulin is low and glucagon is high, the entrance doors will stay locked, no matter how much fat is floating around in the blood looking for a place to go. This is why we all know some people who can eat like horses and not gain weight, and other people who seem to always be dieting and only getting fatter. It’s not that the skinny glutton is secretly bulimic or skipping meals in private, or that the fat guy is secretly stuffing himself or needs to exercise more. It’s because their hormones are telling their fat cells to do different things: in the skinny person, to keep the entrance doors closed; and in the fat person, to cast them wide open.

So, how do we use this? How do we lower our insulin level and raise the level of counterregulatory hormones? The simplest, fastest way is to reduce the amount of carbohydrate we eat. Insulin is created in direct response to carbohydrate, because aside from controlling fat metabolism, it also controls the amount of glucose in the blood stream. Excess sugar in the blood stream is toxic, so keeping glucose levels normal is far more important to the body than whether we gain a pound or two. Eat more carbohydrates, produce more insulin, kick open more entrance doors to the fat cells. Eat fewer carbs, less insulin is needed, the entrance doors on the fat cells stay closed.

Okay, so now we’re on a low-carb diet, keeping insulin at a healthy, stable level. So how can we increase the levels of the counterregulatory hormones, to start kicking the exit doors on the fat cells open? This happens automatically to some extent, which is why people who cut back on sugars and starches (which everyone knew was the way to lose weight until the 1960s) almost always lose weight. Some glucagon is always being produced, but in the high-carbohydrate eater, it’s overwhelmed by the flood of insulin. Getting rid of the insulin surge gives the counter hormones a chance to work.

The production of counters like adrenaline and growth hormone is suppressed by high levels of insulin, so these typically rise when insulin falls. There is some evidence that heavy exercise promotes the secretion of growth hormone, so that may help as well, and may help explain why exercise is enough to spur weight loss in some people. If one’s hormone balance is just barely leaning toward the insulin side, some running or weight lifting could tip that balance back the other way. For people in whom insulin is flooding the system, however, even extreme amounts of exercise may have no effect if insulin levels are not brought down by carbohydrate restriction.

That’s the system in a nutshell—greatly simplified, I admit. It explains why some people struggle with obesity while others gobble their way to thinness; and it shows us what to do about it. I’ve been low-carbing on-and-off for several years now, and one thing I can say for sure about it: It works every time I do it. Unfortunately, I’ve only stuck with it for a few stretches, so I’m not as lean and mean at this point as I could be. I’m back to it now though, so I’ll be writing more about my progress in the future.

References:

• Good Calories, Bad Calories, by Gary Taubes
• The Protein Power Lifeplan, by Drs. Mike and Mary Dan Eades

Well, here I go again.  I’ve tried blogging several times before, in different places.  First I set one up on my own web site, then I went to LiveJournal, then to Yahoo 360, then to Myspace, then to my own site again with Wordpress.  Recently, I wanted to switch to Blosxom, because it’s made of Perl and very lightweight; but it’s also very much a work in progress, and I have a hard enough time getting the writing done without the distraction of making the software work first.  So I’m sticking with Wordpress, at least for now, even though it’s written in PHP, language of the damned.

Every time I start blogging again, I do it with the best of intentions.  In places like Usenet and web forums where there’s already a conversation going, I write tons of stuff in response to things other people write.  In 2007, on Usenet alone, I posted 688 articles containing about 110,000 words.  Yet, when I sit down at a blank page and tell myself it’s time to write, my mind completely locks up.  When I consider a big writing project like a book, it seems as impossible as flying to the moon.

So here’s the plan: From now on, or until I get good at this and make it a habit, I’m not going to write anything more than a quick sentence anywhere else unless I’ve posted it here first.  That might make for some seemingly out-of-context posts when I’m stepping into a conversation that’s been going on for a while, but I’ll try to quote enough to keep things making sense.  Then once I’ve written something here, I may post it at the site or newsgroup that got me started, with a link back to here.

I’m also going to start posting reviews of any books I read or shows I watch.  That alone should make sure I post something most days.

If that doesn’t get me going, I don’t know what will.  Writing comes easy to me once I get started, and I think I’m decent at it—at grammar and spelling, at least.  It seems like a waste to be scattering all that effort around the web where I have no way to preserve it, when I could have it all in one place like this—and maybe even get some good out of it someday.

Topics that are likely to show up, based on the forums I’ve been writing in, include: food, low-carbing, traditional conservatism (not the neo-kind), gardening and small farming, conservation and stewardship of nature (not environmentalism), local issues in the Quincy/Barry/Hannibal area, TV and movies, games and puzzles, books, sustainable building methods like strawbale homes, Latin (the language, not the ethnicity), demographics and sociology, and who knows what else.  That should be enough to keep me busy, right?