Most Excellent and Thrifty Movie

I watched a very cool Chinese film (obviously).
The Piano In A Factory.


It's about a couple who are divorcing.  The wife has hooked up with someone who makes more money and moved away, while the husband is staying in the same defunct industrial town making little cash.  He believes that his daughter will choose to live with the parent who can give her a piano.  Hijinks ensue.  There is, obviously, a theme about money and it's place in our lives.
To add to the fun, lots of Russian music.  Quite humorous really.

Since this DVD is from Film Movement (which someday someone will get me a subscription to....) it comes with a short film.  Noeud Cravat  (Necktie) about what we give up to climb the corporate ladder and whether it's worth it.  The cartoon is French, but there is no dialog so it doesn't matter.

Sugary Drinks Are Apparently Evil

As my friends from college know, I was once a serious diet coke addict.  I even drank the off brands...shasta, whatever was on sale at Fareway.   I'm not proud, but if I needed to pull an all nighter to get a paper done, or because I worked midnight to 8am that one semester and then taught french from 8-8:30 (note the very very short transit time between jobs...yikes), and then had class all day with once a week an evening seminar that was supposed to end at 10pm but often ran until 11, the buses only running until 10:20pm...and the walk to my job being about an hour.

Anyway, drank lots of crappy sweetened carbonated beverages with known toxins like saccharine, aspartame, etc in them.  I've stopped partly because of the costs.  Even off-brand pop costs more than tapwater or tea (especially if one reuses the tea bags).

It looks like this has also helped my mental health.   Sweetened beverages are linked with depression.
http://shine.yahoo.com/healthy-living/sweet-sodas-soft-drinks-may-raise-risk-depression-183000091.html

So, in addition to the direct cost of the pop, the disposal costs whether recycling or trashing the bottles/cans, and the expected healthcare costs of getting diabetes from sugar or cancer from aspartame, now we have to add in the costs of mental health care.  WTF?

I do have the occasional sweetened beverage now, but it's almost always a stevia gingerale or an all natural gingerale and I rarely exceed 3 servings in a week.   I don't know if I'm less depressed, but according to science, I have less chance of being depressed.


Now for a rant on the stupidity of some of our medical research conclusions in this country:
http://www.cnn.com/2013/01/02/health/overweight-mortality/index.html

Read the title of this:

Being overweight linked to lower risk of mortality

According to this, being fat means you might not die.  Uh.  Yeah.  You're gonna die.  We're all going to die.  Get over it.   Fat or thin, young or old, at some point you're going to die.  This sort of asinine research conclusion is common in the US.  I wonder if the rest of the world thinks they too can avoid death.