Archive For The “Lesley” Category

Margins of Error

By | July 14, 2011

Shannon from Fierce Fatties tweeted a link at me earlier this week, to a report from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) about the obesity scourge.  The RWJF, in case you’re unfamiliar with it, is a massive “philanthropic” organization specializing in public health. The organization’s titular founder is, yes, the guy who also brought us […]

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Real Quick: Still more punishment for fat children

By | July 13, 2011

Two researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health have made a controversial recommendation in an opinion piece in the Journal of the American Medical Association. They suggest that state laws governing child abuse be employed to remove “extremely” fat children from their parents’ custody, and that these children be placed in foster care. This […]

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Weekend update.

By | July 10, 2011

Hey kids! I hope every last one of you is having a marvelous weekend. I have been spending the lion’s share of my free time the past few weeks working on the first round of edits to my upcoming but as-yet-untitled book, which I must now dutifully remind you will be published by The Feminist […]

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Real Quick: Weight loss is easy, if you marry your diet.

By | July 7, 2011

Time has published an article about a marvelous new study out of Penn State on how the behaviors necessary to lose weight differ from those needed to keep said weight from returning. They’re not the same! Penn State knows, because they did a telephone survey. Let’s have some fun with definitions, shall we? First, the […]

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Short Cuts: Nothing is as it seems edition

By | June 30, 2011

First, let’s talk about me. Over on xoJane, I’ve written about dudes’ urge to take pictures of their junk, and a really annoying Yoplait commercial (talk about redundancy!), and storing stuff in my bra, and my ongoing sadness over the loss of Huge, and the disgusting misogynist and homophobic rant from a Southwest pilot. Also, […]

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Probe away! Mining for queerness in Mass Effect 1 & 2

By | June 26, 2011

[Note: This is a long, long, long post that delves deeply into gender and sexuality as presented in the Mass Effect video games, derived from the stuff I cut out of my prior post on playing Shepard as a woman of color. I think I can safely say I am pretty much done writing about […]

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Real Quick: The Sun wants your n00dz!

By | June 24, 2011

Ladies, gentlemen, readers and friends of all genders, gather round, as The Sun wants to tell us a story. It all started when former UK pop star Claire Richards gained some weight, and decided to commemorate her unhappiness with her body by… posing nude in a magazine. Claire told Closer magazine about her yo-yo weight: […]

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Shepard ain’t white: Playing with race and gender in Mass Effect

By | June 21, 2011

Back when I used to play the MMOs, the game characters I created always tended to look the same — pale-skinned, vibrant-haired, brightly-hued eyes. I am not sure why; I assume it was aspirational. However, when EverQuest 2 rolled around, I went a different way and impulsively created a heavy-set female-identifying character who was also […]

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Confession: On not using That Word.

By | June 14, 2011

In the seventh grade, I had a friend named Janine* who uttered the word “retarded” approximately every thirty seconds while she was awake. Kids at that age are terrible people — at least I was terrible and everyone I knew was terrible — and so Janine was really no worse than the rest of us, […]

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Real Quick: Disappearing Dawn French

By | June 13, 2011

The Daily Mail is all up in Dawn French’s business. Let’s put our surprised faces on now. Evidently French recently turned up at the Glamour Magazine Woman of the Year awards looking decidedly…. different. Gone was the heavy double chin beneath her heart-shaped face. Instead, her cheekbones were in evidence. Her hair had been freshly […]

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