Les Bonnes Choses

A few years back, I wrote this blog entry (the previous incarnation of this blog).

Four years have passed, but some things have not changed: it's still the Canadian thanksgiving long weekend, so there's food. Even more than usual, because there will be multiple birthday celebrations and Make's wedding is tomorrow. They have cake at those, right? So, the 5 day forecast looks something like cake, cake, cake, cake and leftovers (probably including leftover cake).

I think I gained 5 pounds just writing that. That's alot of sugar, which we know to be bad for you. Like cigarettes, right? That reminds me of a funny thing I saw yesterday on the Chicago television station. There was a commercial where a woman is walking down the soft drink aisle of the grocery store, complaining that the government is proposing slapping a tax on soft drinks, sports drinks, et cetera -- basically the sorts of beverages that list high fructose corn syrup second only to water on the list of ingredients. And, according to the copy that the woman was reading, "government shouldn't be telling Americans what they should be putting in their grocery carts" (the commercial also implied it was just a money grab, so I'm getting mixed messages). Now, you can take it as a given that I disagree with their position. But what struck me as funny was that the very next commercial was for a website that moms can go to for parenting advice -- including, I would assume, advice about how to raise healthy children.

So, just to be clear, Americans have no problem with any random idiot telling them how to run their lives, so long as that idiot is not an elected official. So my question is, are Americans hypocrites, or is the electoral system set up to elect a sample of the population that is more idiotic than the national average?