My Antiquated Notions

Meet my father, the über-literal engineer. The following conversation took place when my mother discovered him plopped on the couch, gnawing his way through an entire pound of See’s candies:

My mom, arms akimbo: “Stanley! Are you kidding me? You’re eating all the chocolates? You’re gonna gain five pounds!”

My dad, looking up at her over the top of his reading glasses: “That’s a physiological impossibility.”

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My father has a theory about dieting. It’s tough to refute. The definition of “calorie,” he notes, is the energy it takes to raise the temperature of a gram of water a single degree.

So when you drink a glass of water at 98 degrees, nothing happens. You drink the water, it passes through your body, no energy is exchanged.

But if you were to drink a tub of ice water, he theorizes, your body would have to expend all sorts of energy raising the temperature of the water to 98 degrees before it passed through your digestive system.

So the easiest way to lose weight, my dad argues, is to guzzle cold stuff.

My husband, listening to this discourse, summarized as follows: “So lukewarm German beer makes you fat, but a cold Budweiser is a freebie?”

Sometimes it’s a real geek fest around here.

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Today’s soundtrack sung by Thomas Dolby: She Blinded Me With Science. Dance!

PS. We’ll be back to blogging after the holiday. Digging out the passports and tripping off to Canada for the next few days. Would blowing things up on the fourth just confuse the locals?