That is, until winter arrives.

Most winters, I can honestly say, I’ve been a wimp. I put the bike away and take the bus or walk to my destination. Last winter was the first time I ever rode a bicycle in the snow to get to the store. It was surprisingly easy, but I didn’t really have a bike in condition to do it on a regular basis – so I filed it away in the back of my mind.

Over the course of the summer of 2008, I collected a few bicycle frames, wheels, parts and whatever bicycle related items I could scavenge when people cleaned out their garages. I found a fairly intact department store mountain bike – I’m usually fairly picky about these because of their low-quality manufacturing and questionable design decisions. This one I saved with the intent of putting it on the heavily salted roads in Ottawa. It’s a bike that I can get to the store with, but can leave covered in slush outside without concern about how badly the water and salt are corroding the parts.

Here we are, part way into January and I’m still riding it nearly every day. I even took it out twice yesterday during the massive snow fall we had, just for kicks. I’ve discovered not only is it a great workout, it’s fun and easy! The roads are usually kept clear for the cars, so riding on those is not much different from riding in the rain. The snow, when it’s powdery presents little challenge to cut through in a low gear.

I guess people just aren’t used to the idea – I wasn’t until recently, so I guess I can’t blame them. These same people would likely go skating or skiing in the same weather however, so the name calling is a little undeserved. I think the neighbor that called me ‘brave’ was really only searching for a polite term because I’d shoveled her walkway that day.

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A paradigm shift isn’t happening overnight, either – but it’s slowly entering Western conciousness. SUVs are being dumped for a fraction of their purchase price by status climbers who realized they can’t afford to fill up the tank daily on these monstrosities any more. Some people are still driving them around, so these prices haven’t hit the pocket books of those with abundant finances yet.

A few more bicycles are on the road now. I’ve not taken the public transportation recently, but I’ll bet the busses are starting to gain new riders as well. This happened last price jump, and it wasn’t this high. It was the test run I think. Push the market value up, get people used to the idea, lower it a bit to regain consumer confidence, then slowly raise it again. It’s like sitting in a pot of water and slowly raising the temperature – eventually the water’s boiling fatally but it was done gradually enough that nobody noticed.

The solution however, is right in front of our noses – and people are starting to consider it. Walk, or ride a bicycle! It works in Europe. Too many people will hop in their cars to drive < 5km to the store for a loaf of bread. That’s easily walkable in 15 minutes, or five on a bicycle – and you’d get some exercise at the same time. I’ve done it in the rain, I’ve done it in a blizzard – I don’t own a car and never have.

However, most of us car-free bicycle riders are still being looked at as the crazy ones. That’s OK. We know you’ll come around eventually if the pricing trends continue. Think of it this way – prices for produce and consumer items will rise due to increased transportation costs – so high gas prices affect drivers twice as much as cyclists. Just some food for thought.

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For there was never yet philosopher
That could endure the toothache patiently,
However they have writ the style of gods
And made a pish at chance and sufferance.

- William Shakespeare
Much Ado About Nothing
Scene 5, Act 1

I have a cracked tooth up front that’s been that way for quite a while now. I have some benefits from work, so I sucked it up and went to the dentist. After a few regular checkups they finally decided that something really needed to be done about it.

This led to me having the first stages of a root canal last Friday, after which they stuck on a temporary filling. Naturally an infection ensued, so an anti-biotic and much ibuprofen have been prescribed. It turns out that in the digging and scrapping the dentist went a bit beyond the root – into the upper jaw.

Then, yesterday morning the dentist removed all of that, disinfected the area and stuffed it with a filling material. They then inserted a post and built up a cosmetic tooth on top of that. Not very useful, I’m assured, but it looks just like a tooth so I guess I cannot complain. Except about this massive, constant pain that I am assured will start to abate in a few more days.

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Quitting smoking is not an easy task, and smoking tobacco is not something that can just be shrugged off at a whim once started. The best course of action is to never smoke cigarettes in the first place, but for many of us it’s too late for that. The best way to overcome any challenge, I find, is to learn as much as possible first.

In order to do so, let me provide some basic background information about tobacco and nicotine. The plant tobacco is a large flowering plant, with green leaves and is part of the nightshade family. All nightshade plants such as tomatoes and cocoa also have trace amounts of nicotine in them, but tobacco has the highest naturally occurring levels and that is why it is the plant that gets used for smoking.

Nicotine is an effective and deadly natural pesticide and is part of the nightshade family’s defensive strategy. It was discovered thousands of years ago that the tobacco plant (and it’s high levels of nicotine) was capable of producing a psychoactive effect in humans and that smoking it was the easiest way to achieve these effects rapidly while controlling the intake dosage.

It takes only about seven seconds for nicotine to pass through the blood-brain barrier when smoked. Interestingly the illegal drug cocaine does the same in about 5 seconds and is made from the cocoa plant of the same family.
At this point it starts to increase the flow of adrenaline into the bloodstream. This raises blood pressure, heart rate, dopamine and glucose levels. This is the fun part that gets most kids interested in smoking it – a couple of puffs and within seconds you get a massive rush. The dopamine is integral to the body’s pleasure and reward system. The rush of adrenaline and dopamine is makes the body immediately have a happy tingly sensation (much like in other addictive stimulants.)

So far, it sounds like a pretty good deal and indeed these effects are smoking’s initial draw and has been for centuries. But, nicotine as you will remember is poisonous – because it goes straight into the central nervous system and is a very dirty drug. It causes havoc with several other brain chemicals, each contributing it’s own effects, such as reduced anxiety and improved concentration (on the positive side.) Nicotine has another wonderful property – in small rapid doses it rushes through the system and causes a high. In larger accumulated doses it begins to overload these same systems and cause a sedative affect. It’s like a Choose Your Own Adventure rolled in a little paper tube!

Since nicotine activates the dopamine reward system, it starts forming an addiction – the body starts craving the happy high. This is exactly how cocaine and heroin do their dirty work as well. Recent findings have shown that nicotine is more effective at doing this than either of those two, and is actually more addictive. Nicotine also has a very short half-life, so it’s beneficial effects wear off within hours, requiring the user to introduce more into the system to prevent the effects of withdrawal and restore the steady state of high the body adapts to receiving.

Still with me? We’re getting into the bad parts now. Combustion of the tobacco leaves creates a large variety of toxins which are invariably inhaled and absorbed into the body with the nicotine. In fact, very little of the smoke is actually nicotine at all – a 1 gram king size cigarette might release less than a milligram of it.
Due to nicotine’s high degree of toxicity – more a couple of milligrams of inhaled nicotine will have very adverse effects on the body, and 40-60mg of nicotine is lethal to an adult.

The tar and chemicals from cigarettes is what clogs the lungs and causes cancer. They constrict blood vessels, block arteries and leave the immune system in a constantly weakened state – it’ fights a whole roster of nastiness with each puff. Nicotine itself prevents the body from killing off cancerous cells and thus indirectly allows cancer to take hold where it appears.

So, what have we learned? A tiny amount of nicotine is a powerfully addictive drug, which in very low doses has several beneficial but temporary effects. Cigarettes themselves are filled entirely with toxins, but exist because they are a crude, yet effective system for delivering a safe dose of nicotine into the bloodstream.

It’s come to light that major cigarette manufacturers conducted their own independent research over 50 years ago that showed them their product was nicotine, not cigarettes, and in order to make money they needed to get as many people addicted to it as possible. They also knew that if it was readily known that their product was an addictive drug in the magnitude of cocaine and heroin and deadlier than both, the FDA would naturally outlaw it. So they buried this research, hindered and discredited anyone making these finding and outright lied to everyone for as long as they possibly could.

There is hope! If you can manage to abstain from nicotine for 48 to 72 hours it will have totally cleared your bloodstream. After the first few days the physical withdrawal symptoms lessen and your nervous system starts to re-stabilize itself to normal function. The withdrawals suck. If you’ve never experienced it – you probably cannot appreciate how bad it truly is. Your body goes into full revolt at such an abrupt change to it’s chemistry. Worse yet – any re-introduction of nicotine to the body puts it back to it’s addicted state until it’s flushed out again.

This means cold-turkey is the ONLY way to quit and now I explain my title for this article. Nicotine Replacement Therapy (as it is called) slowly lowers the level of nicotine in your bloodstream over a long period of time – in theory this is to allow the body to make the adjustment slowly. Astute readers (assuming anyone made it this far) will have noticed a paradox in this.

If the addiction state is resumed at the re-introduction of nicotine to the bloodstream, wouldn’t tapering down the daily dose just cause gradually increasing withdrawals over a greater period of time? Nicotine now takes weeks to leave the body instead of days, and each week it is forced to endure more and more withdrawals. Sounds like torture to me, and do you know what? It doesn’t work – it increases the smokers frustration and reinforces the body’s natural urge to defend itself, and the addiction that keeps it from experiencing the withdrawal discomfort.

I think the patch has to be the greatest swindle the industry has pulled, next to cigarettes themselves – increase the addiction and sell it as therapy. Heck, when you put it into proper perspective – tobacco companies sell the drug nicotine, not cigarettes – the patch, the gum and all other methods of delivering that drug to the end user is all the same to them. You’re buying their drug and it’s impossible to become free of it unless you stop taking it altogether.

Genius, pure evil genius!

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A drug which causes vivid dreams, hyperactivity and a general sense of unreality might sound appealing if it didn’t come with dry mouth, excessive sweating, general insomnia, and increased flatulence. These are just some of the effects I’ve been putting up with since I started taking Zyban a few weeks ago.

But it has this amazing saving grace that keeps me taking it as prescribed: I haven’t had a cigarette in twelve days and I don’t even want one! I look at the host of side effects and disruption to my life and compare to the alternative possibilities of continued smoking up to and including death and it no longer seems so bad.

Actually, the effects have been easier on me than the usual nicotine withdrawals. It brings to mind that I maybe should not blame this humble little pill for everything I’m going through and thank it for masking a lot of agony.

So there’s the pleasure cruise – I’m not smoking and it’s not the most agonizing experience I’ve ever gone through (I have tried quitting before on numerous occasions.)

For those of you looking to break free from this insidious and strangely legal addiction – talk to your doctor and see if Zyban might be appropriate for you. I hope to touch on it (tobacco smoking) in a bit more detail in the upcoming weeks, particularly as to why I believe people will always relapse when they try to cut back or use Nicotine Replacement “Therapy” (NRT).

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This article is linked from a post on a web-forum made by someone who lists themselves anonymously, and I’ve seen it elsewhere on other sites as well. However, as always, I digress.

Most of this article is made up of speculation, unreferenced studies and opinions stated as facts. Further research into this also finds not one solid reference to the source of apparent Soviet testing in the 1970′s. It claims to be refering to this mysterious document which nobody can find:
FORENSIC RESEARCH DOCUMENT
Prepared By: William P. Kopp
A. R. E. C. Research Operations TO61-7R10/10-77F05
RELEASE PRIORITY: CLASS I ROO1a

Furthermore it’s been flagged on at least one site as false: http://www.boycottwatch.org/misc/MicrowavedWater.htm.

Microwave ovens came out in the late 1940′s and have been in widespread use since the 1970′s – according to this document we should all be dead, ill or dying.
The article’s claim that microwaves cause foods to produce carcinogens is the only portion I found to be credible, but what they fail to indicate is that most foods, when cooked (regardless of how) can produce small levels of carcinogenic chemicals – and that the end effect of cooking at high-heat from a convection oven is actually more likely to do so than a microwave.

More digging finds that the few references that are to something in existance (such as the dangers of microwave radation on humans) are refering to something on a large scale passing the radiation directly through a person at high-wattage, and having very little to with what is boucing around inside your oven.

The article eventually goes off into the world of fantasy – refering to reduction of vital energy fields and nucleoproteins in foods. The first is spiritual speculation (hardly likely to be in a Soviet research document) and the second is refering to components of DNA.

Finally the summary at the bottom makes several bold statements not previously addressed in the article, and regardless – it’s all fiction anyways. It astounds me how much this article has spread and people post it like the truth.

*Update July 8th, 2010:* It appears the site has fleshed out the article a little more since this was posted, however it still does not address the damage caused to food by heating in other forms compared to being heated by a microwave so I still consider it unnecessary fear mongering.

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Ironically, that is also why I titled my post with it – because I’ve inadvertently gotten pink-eye. I’ve got these drops which the doctor prescribed and they’re working pretty good so far.

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Ogilvy & Mather’s – a world famous advertising agency shows just how unatainable the look of most billboard models really is in this very telling video.

The above video is hosted by youtube.com and requires the shockwave-flash plugin for your browser.

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In Fredericton schools (yes, dear readers – this is happening here, in Canada), McDonald’s has sunk to an all new low. They are teaching fitness programs to children using the Ronald McDonald corporate mascot.
What is this telling children? That McDonald’s cares, that they are a company that believes in a healthy lifestyle. If the children where not aware of McDonald’s previously, they are now.
Why is this bad? Because McDonald’s does not care, they do not believe in a healthy lifestyle. All they want is children to be aware of their brand, and in a positive light. They do this so that further down the road when these children become consumers, or influencial over consumers in their lives – they do it at McDonald’s.

The man in charge of allowing this to happen, Garth Wade, actually admits that is what McDonald’s is doing. He claims they circumvented the guest-speaker process in place. I say Mr. Wade is still to blame because he is sitting idly by and pointing fingers instead of rectifying the situation and kicking the McBrainWashing bastards out of the schools. Maybe they went through the proper channels, in which case he’s lying to us for what purpose? One can only assume it is for his own gain. Not surprising, McDonald’s refuses to respond or comment on the matter.

So, as Mr. Wade attempts to cover his ass, children in his schools are being taught to eat at McDonald’s and thus will become sick, fat and pay the price for him.

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Jung’s theories became unpopular due to accusations of anti-semitism and Nazi support leading up to the Second World War, but he actually did help the Allies fight the Nazi’s during the war. However, it’s his theories of temperaments that I have interest in, not it’s potential abuse for racial profiling – anything can be made evil with the right mindset. As always, I digress.

What I’ve been pondering as of late, is this: If we have an underlying temperament that affects our internal subconscious – then is having a temperament that is unlike the ‘norm’ or majority of society more likely to lead to depression?

For example, personally I have a rare temperament type (1% to 3% of the Western population is estimated to share it) on the MBTI scale. If my internal guide to life is different from most – isn’t this more likely to cause a greater level of mental difficulty dealing with and fitting in to the world around me?

Couple this with the theory of kindling in depression – being that the brains chemistry is changed by repeated stressors. If your internal guide throws you in a different direction from the society you’re attempting to function in – that would certainly seem to me to be a repeated stressor.

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