Ideal body image

Finally, two too many people are on my friendslist compaining about other people's attempts to help weight loss made me think of this. Many people are overweight and need to do something about it, this is unarguable and not what I want to discuss.

But there's also the strange thing that the ideal image seems to be way too thin. It used to be the case that fat was seen as beautiful, because it meant you were rich and had enough to eat, whereas poor people weren't and didn't[1].

Will we experience a resurgence of this? Certainly probably the richest people tend to do office work and not have spare time, which isn't a recipe for staying in shape. On the other hand, I can think of a few reasons for the status quo:

* Maybe success correlates with self-control correlates with body image
* It's an overreaction to people being overweight. So much effort is put into losing weight people forget the goal is a healthy weight, and try to continue to lose weight afterwards.
* It's just self-perpetuating. Standards of beauty get reinforced because everyone tries to live up to them, so it takes a long time for anything else to take hold
* Maybe it's a complete myth. Maybe no-one actually does like looking at skeletally thin people at all, but fashion magazines are just print them anyway because they're really stupid or in a modern art rotting cow way .

[1] Or so I've always heard. I haven't looked for a historical cite to confirm that.

Greenenders, The Mutant Bicycles: the latest in the véloceraptor[1] cycle

Imagine this post with pictures of me, pictures of lusers, and pictures of bikes overlayed with pseudolatin captions and bright arrows, a la the start of Wile E. Coyotee and Roadrunner cartoons.

I have graduated from a complete novice who doesn't know what a computer is to someone who stores all their files on the desktop[2] -- I have wedded my two broken bikes, suffusing myself with Mbtwness

Much better than walking consists of:

* The cheaper frame
* The front wheel which was on it (though I can't remember if that was the original, I've swapped them a couple of times, finding a wheel not on a bike easier to change/fix inner tubes on.
* The (derailleur) back wheel from the other bike
* The spare, unused, chain

So, it doesn't have gears, well not more than one, but is ridable to a bike shop which is a major gain.

Remaining lying in my shed are:

* The better frame
* A sturmey-archer back wheel, with the hub worn so it doesn't take a new chain
* A derailleur

[1] Being a pun on mutant, as in monster, as in veloceraptor, and vélo, bike. OK, I know that's a stretch, since (a) they're etymologically related anyway (b) veloceraptor doesn't really make any sense there and (c) the new bike isn't *very* fast, but I'm sure you all see where I was going with it.
[2] Someone who is annoying in that they ignore how their tool is supposed to work, but respected in that they did work out what they wanted to do and force their world into compliance, which would be being a hacker if it was just a bit more obscure problem than "saving a file and opening it again"