Bullshit, bullshit. My husband was treated for Hodgkins at Johns Hopkins when we had the good fortune to be students at Hopkins (not the medical school). He was one of the first patients to be cured by a regimen of radiation and chemotherapy. It was a miserable business. He had his spleen out, dye injected between his toes, and all sorts of elaborate painful procedures--many filmed for the edification of medical students. He has a scar from midchest to groin. But he's alive and well, and has no regrets.

I have no sympathy at all for the Hausers. A 13 year old kid isn't mature enough to decide on treatment and his parents, because of their flakey "beliefs" are condemning him to death at an early age. There is no reason whatsoever to tolerate their whacked out New Age flakery when a kid's life is at stake.

I did some computer consulting for a priest on the local marriage tribunal who had had a stroke in his 40s largely, I believe, because the work flipped him out. He described one case where the husband petitioning for annulment gave his reason for wanting to jettison his wife: "Because she is ugly." The marriage tribunal told him to go to hell, but the priest did have a stroke.

Of course in the secular courts this is perfectly ok. And when it comes to cohabitation without the benefits of matrimony no one worries if a guy ditches his partner when her breasts or butt start to sag.

The Catholic Church has got it right on this but of course Mel Gibson is no Catholic. It will be interesting to see if he commits to a life a celibacy.

Pardon me for the pun that was just waiting to happen: DE GUSTIBUS. Food just doesn't interest me.

Lots of people aren't interested in the things that I find fascinating: Byzantine history, fancy needlework and logic puzzles concerning the doctrine of the Trinity. But I don't see articles in _Salon_ or elsewhere deploring the fact that so many people just aren't interested in these things. And I'm not surrounded by friends and colleagues congratulating themselves on their interest in such stuff or deploring the fact that hoi poloi don't care what Photios had to say about the Filioque Clause, don't have a clue about how to turn the heel of a sock and wear mass-produced, machine knits instead of making their own sweaters.

Left to my own devices I'd live on bread, cheese and fruit. And wine. When I'm on my own I do. But, hello, I've spent most of my adult life married with children. My family won't put up with the kind of diet I prefer and I am committed to doing proper family meals at the dinner table at least 6 days a week. So I can either spend my time on weekends and after work soaking beans, doing elaborate things to tofu to make it edible and planning ways to turn vegetarian fare into "complete proteins" or I can do what I do: the tri-partate division of the plate--meat, potato and canned veg, or frozen meals, which they like just fine.

Now I'm pretty privileged: as an academic I have a decent income and my work time is more flexible than most people's. But I can't/won't spend my non-work time messing with food. And if I can't/won't how can the average woman with a 9-to-5 job, earning less than half of what I make do it? Spend your leisure time baking bread, planning meals and, on weekends, cooking and freezing? Get that lovely meal on the table at 5:30 after 8 hours behind the Walmart check-stand?

I can understand being into food as a hobby. I can see how it might be interesting in the way that stamp-collecting or assembling ships in bottles or any of a variety of preoccupations that don't interest me might be. But I find the moralism and snobbery that attaches to food offensive.

This ethical diet isn't cheap when you figure in the costs of time spent in planning and preparation and the mental energy it takes just to THINK about food. I don't have the time, energy or interest to invest in dealing with food shopping, meal planning and cooking and, frankly, I have no more interest in eating than in excreting.

So why does the subject of food bring out nastiness?

Because food, and more broadly, health has become the focus of all the moralism and puritanism that used to be focused on sex. Because saying, as I just did, that I have no more interest in eating than I do in excreting elicits the same horror and disgust from right-thinking high prestige people that you might have once have gotten by saying you enjoyed buggering sheep. Because those right-thinking high prestige people smugly boast about being "healthy" and condemn low prestige people for being "unhealthy." Of course what they really object to is that these "unhealthy" people are fat and aesthetically displeasing--but you can't say that.

I don't care about food--or health. Why SHOULD I? Where does the moral imperative that these self-righteous, puritanical yuppies attach to food and health come from? Non-work time and mental energy are finite resources and I'd rather spend them on reading, writing, playing the piano, learning foreign languages, knitting, doing home improvement projects and any of a number of other things than dealing with food or thinking about my body. Food and health are about the most boring topics I can imagine, and people who care about them are moralistic bores.