Rerouting the Flood - On Obsidian Wings, Edward speculates about how behavior would change if people had to pay by the message for e-mail. Bill Gates and others have suggested that "we" start "buying" e-mail "stamps" as a possible remedy for the problem of spam.

Now, the cynic immediately doubts that Bill Gates and said cynic constitute a meaningful "we," that Gates' proposal can be translated to mean that "they" should start "selling" e-mail "stamps" that Bill Gates has in mind, being more of a "they" than a "we," and that somewhere down the road he's wanting the government to make us buy "stamps" for e-mail, and that this is pretty classic rent-seeking behavior on Bill Gates' part.

But leave that aside. Edward talks about what the model change would mean for the behavior of ordinary e-mail users. But what would it mean for spam? I think it would mean several things, by which I mean, three. Or so.

1) It's always cheaper to buy in bulk. That's true of meatspace postage today. Volume purchasers will get better rates than the rest of us. In other words, e-mail will cost money, but it will cost less for spammers.

2) Edward says people will write longer e-mails and eschew short ones. True. But people will also move quickie traffic to instant message channels like AIM, MSN Messenger and IRC.

3) Spammers will figure out how to bother you through your instant message client.

4) Bill Gates will suggest that "we" should "buy" virtual stamps for instant messages.

5) And so on. Down the line spammers are beaming Cialis come-ons directly into our frontal lobes and Bill Gates is suggesting that "we" should "buy" virtual stamps for our thoughts.

6) At that point the Cialis people aim lower.

Okay, that's sort of more than three. But I thought it would be three.

Demon Balls - Linking to this cool, time-wasting web game should up my "disappointed search engine user" traffic. (Via Gamer's Nook.)

You Can't Be Too Careful - The Modulator has a whole bunch of identity theft protection tips.

From the Department of Slippery Slopes - Here we go again:

The caffeine controversy

The wake-me-up stimulant is a fact of life for most people, but caffeine abuse is something Gov. Johanns wants Nebraskans to think about

That's from the Grand Island Independent. No doubt the class action lawsuits will come just as soon as the relevant lawyers and attorneys-general calculate that they've extracted all the wealth from America's food industry than can profitably be stolen.

Mike Johanns is a Republican, for those of you keeping score at home. (Also via the Agitator.)

It's a GOOD Thing - Get your "Free Martha" t-shirts right here. (Via the Agitator.) I want one of the "No Justice No Quiche" bumper stickers. Why? Michael McMenamin explained months ago.

From the Department of Entirely Too Cool - "Cell phone software creates bogus backgrounds":

SoundCover, developed by a Romania phone software company called Simeda, can add artificial traffic and road works to a call at the press of a button. It can mimic a thunderstorm, the dentists drill or even a circus during a call.

Different backgrounds can also be assigned to different phone numbers so that they automatically kick in when a certain person calls. The software can even create the sound of another phone ringing to provide a handy excuse for cutting short a call

Via Amygdala.

Who Are You Going to Believe, Me or Your Lying Eyes - Matthew Yglesias links to a Virginia Postrel graph plotting income per worker over time for four regions of the country, and writes that it shows "that income growth has proceeded way faster in the post-New Deal era than in did in the era of laissez faire." That seems quite a stretch. The graph plots too few data points to say anything about income within twenty-year periods. Particularly, we have no data showing what happened to incomes across the 1932 divide up to the ramping up of war production in 1940. We see large income growth from 1940-60, and smaller growth between 1960-80.This is consistent with the idea that US incomes went up partly because the rest of the world's advanced industrial infrastructure was in ruins after World War II, then gradually came back. Matt is of course too smart to imagine that correlation equals causation, and so am I. The chart proves that US incomes went up a lot, and that the rate of increase jumped around the beginning of WWII. And that's about it. Frankly, the picture doesn't even really show the "convergence of incomes across regions" that both Matt and Virginia maintain it does, unless you're talking convergence on a percentage basis rather than in terms of absolute dollars.

Under the Eye of the State - Go read Radley Balko on traffic intersection cameras. Now, I tell you!

Some Travel Required - The Jacksonville Sun-Sentinel has a story about marine families worried that "Haiti looms for Marines just returning from Iraq." In fact, no returning marines have been tapped for Haiti duty yet, but the article usefully explains some of the things the Corps does to try to help families cope with the stresses of deployment.

Print-on--De-Oops! - Dirk Deppey e-mails that a major patent case has gone against Amazon, Ingram and Lighning Source for their print-on-demand book sales. (Verdict here.) A jury found all three companies guilty of willfully infringing on a 1995 patent held by On Demand Machine Corporation. That "willfully" opens the company up to possible extra damages the Judge could add to the jury's 15 million.

I haven't had a chance to read the verdict - hey, you try working in accounting AND blogging heavily the first week of the month - so I can't tell if this is one of those real patent violations or one of those wacky patent violations. You know, "I think it would be really cool to sell books on demand. You'd have, like, a computer here and a database server there and a binding machine next to the client station and you'd clear the customer's credit card via secure internet connection to the merchant and then, hey! out pops their book! Cool, huh? That's my patent, so pay me if you do that."

My impression is there are too many such patent cases in software and e-commerce, but like I said, I don't know that this is one. Maybe Dave Intermittent, Esq. will look into the matter and favor us with am expert opinion. Or maybe your Talking Dog, if he can take time out from preparing for the next Ice Age.

AP reports that Ingram et al say they will appeal. The article certainly makes it sound like Harvey Ross's patent was more substantial than "wouldn't it be cool if."

Actual Journalism Watch - Knight-Ridder reporters Strobel, Landay and Walcott examine the evidence for operational ties between Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden and conclude

The Bush administration's assertion that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had ties to al Qaeda -- one of the administration's central arguments for a preemptive war -- appears to have been based on even less solid intelligence than the administration's claims that Iraq had hidden stocks of chemical and biological weapons.

Most intriguing:

Vice President Dick Cheney told National Public Radio in January that there was ''overwhelming evidence'' of a relationship between Hussein and al Qaeda. Among the evidence he cited was Iraq's harboring of Abdul Rahman Yasin, a suspect in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

Cheney didn't mention that Iraq had offered to turn over Yasin to the FBI in 1998, in return for a U.S. statement acknowledging that Iraq had no role in that attack. The Clinton administration refused the offer, because it was unwilling to reward Iraq for returning a fugitive.

Most damning:

Administration officials reported that Farouk Hijazi, a top Iraqi intelligence officer, had met with bin Laden in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in 1998 and offered him safe haven in Iraq.

They left out the rest of the story, however. Bin Laden said he would consider the offer, U.S. intelligence officials said. But according to a report later made available to the CIA, the al Qaeda leader told an aide afterward that he had no intention of accepting Saddam's offer because ``if we go there, it would be his agenda, not ours.''

There's a whiff of "not for lack of trying" about this latter incident, as reported. But it probably amounts to less "trying" than Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and other countries.

And there's this last:

Iraqi defectors alleged that Saddam's regime was helping to train Iraqi and non-Iraqi Arab terrorists at a site called Salman Pak, south of Baghdad. The allegation made it into a September 2002 white paper that the White House issued. The U.S. military has found no evidence of such a facility.

Since the war, I'd been frustrated by the lack of anything about what was found at Salman Pak outside of oddly-sourced items in the Republican press.

A Fanboy's General-Interest Notes - Alan David Doane has been snagging interviews with comics creators whose work is actually of general interest, and producing great interviews. For instance, he recently got coherent, concise and tragically informative answers from the controversial Dave Sim of Cerebus fame - probably the first Sim exchange in years where you learn less what Sim hates than what he loves. This morning he has a lengthy "5 Questions" with Alan Moore, and last month another five questions with cartoonist Paul Hornschemeier, whose Mother, Come Home is, so far, the graphic novel of the year.

Caligula's Horse Moves On Up - Various loyal readers confirm that Warren Harding was the other 20th Century President who got elected to the office out of a current Senate seat. (Thanks, Steve Casburn.) Doug Muir adds

Before Harding... mmm... Benjamin Harrison.

There haven't been too many, no. Four, maybe five. Governors and generals are much more common routes.

Note that before about 1900, an intelligent Senator might not /want/ to be President. You could wield more power and have more fun in the Senate. Even as late as the 1920s, Harding regretted taking the job... he'd had himself a gay old time in the Senate, and he found the Presidency a sweathouse of tough decisions and unnerving public scrutiny.

And from Patrick Nielsen Hayden:

Two incumbent senators have been elected President, both in the 20th Century: John F. Kennedy and Warren G. Harding. Of those, fully fifty percent occupied, at the time of their election, the post of junior senator from Massachusetts.

Former Senators who later became President: James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren, John Tyler, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Benjamin Harrison, Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon.

Of those, one-third ascended to the Presidency on the death of their predecessor.

Of _those_, fully one-half were Vice Presidents named Johnson who became President following an assassination. This is why a little-known clause of the 25th Amendment, ratified in 1967, specifically forbids the nomination for Vice-President of any more people named Johnson.

Also, Lincoln had a secretary named Kennedy. Oh, wait, you'd heard.

Lincoln had a secretary named Kennedy? What a coincidence!

UPDATE: Full and frank exchanges of views ensued between Patrick Nielsen Hayden and Doug Muir. Patrick:

You've closed out your "blockquote" statement two paragraphs early in your quotation from my letter, so that it looks like my last two paragraphs are by you.

Doug Muir is wrong about Benjamin Harrison, who was defeated for re-election to the Senate before being elected President in 1888. I'm pretty sure Harding and Kennedy are the entire list of incumbent Senators elected President.

Doug:

Patrick is right and I'm wrong. Kennedy and Harding were the only sitting Senators to become President. Benjamin Harrison left the Senate a few months before taking the nomination, so he's out.

Twelve nonsitting former Senators vs. just two who were still in office
suggests some sort of pattern. OTOH, with a sample size of just 45,
it's still very possible to have noise in the system.

...Kerry is looking down the barrel of a $200 million campaign, running
uphill against a not-that-unpopular incumbent. Putting personal biases
aside, I know which way I'm betting.

Whichever way it goes, here at this site I plan to stick up for the same core principles as ever, chief among them that you never use a colon immediately after a verb. I think I read that somewhere.

Quick I Told You So - Another modern election, another cycle with no brokered convention. Interesting variation on the logic in my "no brokered conventions" item from early November: I talked entirely about the interests of the party apparat. But in this primary cycle it seems like it was Democratic voters themselves who intentionally cohered around a nominee as quickly as possible.

Congrats to Senator Kerry. Now let's see. Last sitting Senator to win the Presidency: John Kennedy in 1960. And before that? Um. Not Eisenhower, Truman, FDR or Wilson. Not Teddy. Coolidge or Harding? Coolidge was a governor, wasn't he? Do you have to go clear back to the 19th Century to find one?

Now There's a Pisser - Interesting e-mail from Rich Puchalsky. Excerpt:

I think that the larger question involved is not "Will liberals agree that Clinton lied about Iraq as well as Bush?" (sure, I think that most will agree to that, although the magnitude and consequences of the lie differ) but "Are liberals really isolationists?" Looking at American history, I think that there is a tendency for the party out of power to be isolationist. This seems natural; one of the big uses of the Presidential bully pulpit is to sweep the country off to some exciting war, and the party out of power naturally objects and then starts to justify its objection in theoretical terms, which are promptly jettisoned as soon as they are back in power. In that sense, I don't think it much matters what liberals say about Iraq intervention now, in terms of its being a guide to later liberal behavior.

In keeping with that, I would question whether libertarians are really
isolationist. Aren't they the ultimate out-of-power party, and thus subject
to the urgings I've mentioned above? I wonder whether, if libertarians did
arrive at a position of political power, we might see wars over trade policy
and the like.

This last speculation is, as they say, bravura. And given the attitude toward the current war of those libertarian types who seem to identify with the Bush Administration, seemingly inclined to think of it as, in important ways, theirs, not one I feel comfortable dismissing out of hand.

Son, How'd You Get This Way - Ivan Eland notes that Haitian history - and US involvement in same - goes back farther than this month or even the Clinton Administration.

And similarly, if we dig below the latest happenings in Haiti, we find much more than first meets the eye. Much of Haiti's current problem lies in weak civil institutions and no rule of law. Unfortunately, U.S. government policy toward Haiti has contributed heavily to that state of affairs. Throughout the 20th century, the U.S. military intervened repeatedly in Haiti. From 1915 to 1934, the U.S. Marines even occupied the country. During that time, they dissolved Haiti's parliament, instituted martial law and created the thuggish Haitian army. That army - containing senior officers on the CIA's payroll - overthrew a democratically-elected Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1991. The remnants of it, with U.S. help, have just done it again.

Ah, but this time we're going to do it right. Maybe. I believe that's what the last Administration said. Perhaps the succession of Presidents from Wilson to FDR figured we were "doing it right" during the long occupation. Perhaps that's what the next US government to intervene in Haiti will say too. More Eland:

No workable solution can be imposed from the outside on Haitians, least of all by a superpower that helped destroy Haitian civil society in the first place. Haitians have to learn to solve their own problems, instead of always looking to the United States to send troops to bring temporary peace. Racing in with military forces to quell disorder merely rewards those local forces perennially initiating violence to draw in the United States. Paradoxically, if the United States declared that it would not interfere in Haitian society in any way under any circumstances, more Haitian lives would probably be saved in the long-term and the country would likely be better off. That is, removing the reward for violence would likely lessen its occurrence.

I realize that must sound naive and even cruel. But the record is the record: our meddling in Haiti has done only fitful good against lasting bad. And Eland's thesis that our interventionism essentially infantilizes other countries seems more solidly grounded than belief in our potential for successful stewardship.

Finally, yes, it all comes back to this blog's obsession with Iraq. The Good News reports linked below are Caesar. The news from Haiti is the jester whispering memento mori in his ear.

Hold That Thought - David Adesnik has a useful item gathering the latest round of Good News from Iraq articles. I haven't had a chance to dig into them yet, but I look forward to it. Once I'm done with closing February at the office, I'll set to closing February in Iraq using the Saban Center documents and the CPA website.

If you start without me, remember the usual things to watch out for - "Real Soon Now" claims where the real good news is what hasn't happened yet. There appears, at first blush, to be some of that in the material Adesnik cites - much talk about the amount of money Iraqi oil could bring in this year, confident predictions about how much power the Ministry of Electricity will generate and so on. Also, keep an eye on Low Bar Syndrome, typically something approaching "prewar levels" which reflected the infrastructure degradation of a dozen years of sanctions. However, as loyal Unqualified Offerings readers learned last month, the power situation did start trending upward in February, and as far as low bars, you gotta start somewhere. (It does occasion a certain deja vu when you hear that the reconstruction is rapidly approaching the same benchmark again and again over the course of a year.)

The best news, wonderful news, is that US military fatalities dropped to 20 last month, which is the lowest level since the war began. As with November's record figure, the question is whether it will prove to be atrend or an outlier. I suspect the former because the impression I get is that the US has been increasingly keeping our troops out of harm's way. The massive rotation of forces this spring may scramble things up a bit, though.

Mail Call - Behind on e-mail again, but this letter stood out:

Having drifted away, in frustration and disgust, from the NRO crowd, I went in search of something other than stale bromides and mere emotional appeal when addressing the subject of OIF, which I gradually but finally concluded is Kosovo Plus (that is, another arbitrary, non-defense-related endeavor, but with considerable casualties).

Never would I have predicted - especially after 9-11 - that the Bush administration would out-Albright the previous administration in its unwise and even cavalier use of the armed forces, but here we are - and indeed they have. My husband is an Army officer who sacrificed considerable time and energy to Clinton's Balkan follies (three Thanksgivings, Christmases, and New Years - that's how I tally it.) Now he has chosen to put in his time, this Spring, in Afghanistan rather than in Iraq, figuring the former is, with regard to relatively clear and objective aims, worth the risk and work involved, whereas the latter simply is not. He is extremely fortunate in having a choice.

I've now read quite a bit on the Iraq war and the developments leading up to it and am beginning to see what happened and why, and, more personally, how I came to be suckered into supporting a type of endeavor that I had come to associate almost exclusively with the insupportable, out-of-focus, defense policy drift of a Democratic presidency. What was it that Will Rodgers said about the difference between the two parties?

Here's looking forward to the safe return of my correspondent's husband from his new tour of duty. And I appreciate his sticking out his commitment to the military at such cost to his family. As I said at the beginning of the Iraq invasion last march, if this had been an actual emergency, these are the people we'd want between us and trouble. Godspeed.

Batting Cleanup - Those long roundups get away from one. See Why also addresses the Ackerman article. The item is long and substantial. This excerpt is short:

I would also like to rise to Henley's challenge and say, for the record that Clinton's Iraq policy was perfectly good . . . to poop on!

Abu Aardvark weighs in too He forgives me for the whole "Why aren't people linking to this" maneuver, which I appreciate. That item came out wrong anyway, since much of my motivation was simply to learn what liberal bloggers would make of the piece. And now I know.

Love Them They Are Liberals - So my violation of Blogger Etiquette Rule No. 3, "Don't act like everybody else has to blog about what interests you," regarding the Mother Jones article about Clinton-era Iraq policy occasioned a number of noteworthy responses. (Rule Number One? "Don't e-mail to say that you'll link to me if I'll link to you." Contrary to Monty Python, there is a Rule Number Two, but we won't go into it now.)

For those keeping score at home, Rafe Colburn's citation actually predated my article. I apologize for not counting him before - he's a blogger and a liberal, but I don't really think of him as a liberal blogger, probably because I am a stupid git. Nell Lancaster tells me The War in Context also cited it, and a Google site search seems to back her up, but the site's archiving system is obscure enough that I couldn't read the actual article.

The bloggers who were kind enough to respond to the article at my, ahem, request wrote some very interesting stuff. The Talking Dog connects the long Iraq enmeshment with our recurring Haiti follies and allows that perhaps I'm not altogether wrong that "we'd just be better off with minimal intervention abroad." Why?

In the "government of laws, and not of men", the foreign policy arena seems a tad too dependent on the men.

I read the Poor Man's excellent disquisition on the topic in this context. PM quite rightly quotes my own precept back to me about not simply accepting the word of defectors, and argues that the Hussein Kamel report is all MoJones author Seth Ackerman really has to hang his case on. Of the problems I have with PM's article, one is specific to Iraq, while the other is more general. As to the former, PM allows that the Clinton Administration engaged in a certain amount of . . . shading as regards its Iraq policy, but that the comparative virtue of the Clinton Administration:

Isn't it just like what Bush did, when he lied to get us into a war? Sure is, except for that "get us into a war" bit at the end.

This seems to require defining a policy that entails 14,000 bombing sorties a year for a decade and multiple coup attempts, plus a sanctions regime that lasted so long as it did only at US insistence, as the Poor Man himself notes, all with the declared aim of overthrowing the current (despicable) government, as somehow Not War. I submit that this distinction is 1) mistaken; and 2) practically a definition of what we sour exremists call the neo-imperialist mindset.

The general issue gets back to what the Talking Dog said. The Poor Man acknowledges forthrightly that

I think we'd all agree that lying is a wicked and naughty thing to do. Trouble is, that doesn't necessarily mean it's not a good idea. For example: if we have already captured, or killed, or believe we've killed, Osama bin Laden - as I believe we have - it is both wicked and naughty to lie about it, but it's also, I think, the right thing to do. Because, sadly, there's just no way of always telling the truth to the American people while simultaneously keeping our enemies in the dark about what we do and do not know.

Now I must get all theoretical and libertarian on you folks. I largely agree with what the Poor Man says here: foreign policy and international conflict will frequently require dishonesty to retain any prospect of operational success. But official dishonesty is anathema to democratic governance and open societies. That's a big reason why a representative democracy should minimize the amount of foreign policy and international conflict it has. For the thousandth time, this is quite different from saying that a representative democracy's society should minimize interaction with the rest of the world. People should travel and businesses should trade. Immigrants and visitors should enrich our shores. But the government should tread lightly abroad. By the nature of the endeavor, we can't know everything it's doing, but what it does is done in our name.

Dave at Backwords suspects the Clinton Administration's slipperiness with the sanctions regime and inspections was motivated by Saddam's dire human rights record and possible attempt to assassinate the first President Bush. He may be right. This is essentially what the Bush White House's supporters have argued about the policy of Clinton's successor. I reject both cases of the argument: first because I care more about how the United States is governed than how Iraq is governed; second because in both the Clinton and Bush cases, our policy of human rights war actually amounts to "We decide."

Lean Left, commenting on Ackerman, writes

Second, our intelligence apparatus is pretty much useless, because there is nothing to keep unscrupulous Presidents from cherry picking the results. Whats worse, there is nothing to keep Presidents who believe they are doing the right thing (as Clinton's team and the neo-cons probably sincerely did. No one risks the kind of blowback those two groups did without believing they are taking the right steps. That doesn't make their deceptions any less dangerous or their actions any less incorrect, however.) from seeing what they want to see.

Odd thought: Along about 1994, I decided, like Daniel Patrick Moynihan, that it was time to sunset the CIA. The Cold War was over, and anyway, history seemed to show that the Agency was often wrong, and on those occasions when it was right, nobody listened. Leave military intelligence to the armed services and political intelligence to the State Department.

Now imagine I got my way. On September 12, 2001, Congress and the media are screaming for my head. Jim Henley brought yesterday's atrocity on! He blinded the United States to foreign threats when he disbanded the CIA! Yesterday's terrible events could never have happened if we still had a genuine intelligence service in this country.

Avedon Carol offers what can only be called the counter-intuitive take:

We did want to talk about that stuff in the '90s, but no one seemed to be interested. I mean, what with the murder of Vince Foster, and the blow-jobs, and all the really important stuff they had to talk about, yeah?

This argument is strongest if one concedes that Clinton-haters like me were correct that many of WJC's interventions abroad were driven by domestic political concerns. I would welcome Avedon's company in that view.

Last but never least, Matthew Yglesias usefully complicates the question of exactly what the Clinton Administration knew at the time before concluding

If you let Bush be the bar, the bar is very low, and Clinton can clear it. Nevertheless, we see once again that the Clinton foreign policy was, with a few exceptions, not very good.

Matt makes an even more important point about Why It Matters:

Bill Clinton's not going to be president again, so this didn't strike me as crucially significant at first, but of course members of his team are likely to return to office, so it is significant after all, and should be looked into more to determine who is culpable for what.

I can think of one former Clinton Administration official in particular that this applies to.

I thank all the bloggers who humored me on this matter, including Kevin Drum, with whom I had an enjoyable exchange of e-mails.

Free Comic Book Month - For nothin' but postage and handling, cartoonist Scott Mills will mail you a copy of his minicomic, Cells. I reviewed this favorably back in October. Now, for hardly any money at all, you can see if I was right to admire it. We're talking one dollar here - a third of what I was glad to pay.

Via Comics Worth Reading.

A Fanboy's Snickering Acknowledgement - Look who's comics-blogging.

Weekly Fitness Blog Item - This was the week to finally start to suck less. The DC area's nearly-annual False Spring arrived - temps were in the high forties when the week began and hit 68 today. To celebrate, I began to come out of my winter hibernation, and just, the scales assure me, in time. Did two miles walking Monday at lunch, three miles yesterday morning and closer to five today, and lifted weights Friday night for the first time in two months. Meanwhile, today's scale reading was 168, my highest weight since July - proof positive that you can gain weight back very quickly if you let yourself go.

Given the degree to which my muscles have atrophied since Thanksgiving, the weight gain probably represents a good 10 pounds of fat. Atrophy: I lost between 10 and 20 pounds in lifting capacity for every exercise I did Friday. And my waist has hit 34" again.

On The Other Hand: this week's exercise felt really good. Even the thigh pain from the dumbbell squats is like a reassuring friend. I'm giving myself two months to get back to where I was, and I think I can make it. They Say that once you've trained muscles they bounce back pretty quickly after a layoff. We'll find out.

Nutrition supplement tip of the week: I finally stumbled on a way to make protein shakes as tasty as the Myoplex mixes I enjoyed but cheaper: Get a canister of unflavored protein powder, of the 25g per scoop kind. Pour two cups of skim milk into a blender, and add a scoop of powder. Regular skim milk is like 8g of protein per cup. For twice the price you can get "low carb" milk, which has 12g. Add a scoop of protein powder and you have 25g plus either 16 or 24 more grams of protein from the milk, depending on version.

NOW, to thicken it. Jello makes a sugar-free, fat-free Instant Pudding mix for 85 cents a 1.4-ounce box. Add the whole box to a pint (two cups) of skim milk and you have pudding. ADD HALF THE BOX to your milk-protein mixture and blend on high for thirty seconds and you have - a thick shake! I believe you can add less than half the box and get good results too, but I haven't tried it yet. I like to add a little vanilla extract too. Cost per shake:

Protein scoop - about $0.60
Milk - $0.40 (skim) - $0.80 (low carb)
Pudding mix - $0.30-0.40

Final Cost - $1.30-1.80.

That's not bad for something you can actually drink. Now that I'm lifting weights again, I'll be consuming these in place of some other meals.

So what the heck happened, anyway? Answer: in addition to going off exercise, I've been eating like a pig. I basically flipped my ratio of "free days" to careful days. Also, I got into fiber counting and stopped counting much else, including portions. Fiber is important, but you can gain weight while eating plenty of it.

What I did to prep for my marathon this week: the aforementioned exercises; started reading one of the books your Talking Dog sent me. It's a twenty-six week program for first-time marathoners, but it requires up to ten weeks of "pre-training" too - I'll need all of them. That puts me just about on track for one of the autumn races.

More next week. I may finally get around to discussing Doctor Atkins too.