Stumbled across this Daily Mail article about running shoes a while back. It claims that every year, 65 to 80 per cent of all runners suffer an injury -- regardless of fitness level or experience. It quotes Dr. Daniel Lieberman, professor of biological anthropology at Harvard University: "Until 1972, when the modern athletic shoe was invented, people ran in very thin-soled shoes, had strong feet and had a much lower incidence of knee injuries."

Lieberman believes that modern running shoes make people more likely to be injured; therefore they exercise less, and are more likely to suffer from heart disease and other maladies. The modern running shoe was essentially invented by Nike, so in addition to the growing problem of sweatshop labor conditions, I have to ask: can we lay the obesity epidemic partly at Nike's feet?

According to the Daily Mail,

In a paper for the British Journal Of Sports Medicine last year, Dr Craig Richards, a researcher at the University of Newcastle in Australia, revealed there are no evidence-based studies that demonstrate running shoes make you less prone to injury. Not one.

It was an astonishing revelation that had been hidden for over 35 years. Dr Richards was so stunned that a $20 billion industry seemed to be based on nothing but empty promises and wishful thinking that he issued the following challenge: "Is any running-shoe company prepared to claim that wearing their distance running shoes will decrease your risk of suffering musculoskeletal running injuries? Is any shoe manufacturer prepared to claim that wearing their running shoes will improve your distance running performance? If you are prepared to make these claims, where is your peer-reviewed data to back it up?"

Dr Richards waited and even tried contacting the major shoe companies for their data. In response, he got silence.

For the past few weeks I've shelved my New Balance cross-trainers and been doing my Wednesday morning run in flat-bottomed Chuck Taylor style sneakers. (Since Converse is now owned by Nike, I recommend alternative shoes made by responsible companies with good labor practices, such as No Sweat and Ethletic.) The first few times I could feel my calves and ankles working harder, but I've noticed that my knees and hips are less sore after a run in the simple sneakers than they were getting with the cross trainers.

Zelda's Inferno exercise: write about leaving

The first concert my parents took me to, at Merriweather Post Pavilion, was John Denver. The second, or maybe the third, was Peter, Paul and Mary. So the song "Leaving on a Jet Plane" found its way into my consciousness early. I find myself humming it whenever I'm about to take a plane trip. "I'm leaving on jet plane, I don't know when I'll be back again." Except that I do know, I've always got a round trip ticket, I'm just going for a few days, a week or two -- the longest so far was three months.

LOL. Save the Nag Champa!

All over India, there is a crisis of epic proportions. The poor and defenseless Nag Champa are being hunted and killed to create the oils for incense and candles. The wonderful musky odor of the Nag Champa has been a favorite of many spiritual leaders, new movement organizations, and young people all over the world. Little did anyone know until recently that the only way to produce the sent of Nag Champa is to capture and remove the sent gland from these poor little creatures? The Nag Champa has one natural enemy - the human. Please help me to stop this barbaric act against such a peaceful little animal. There are only 2000 Nag Champa left in the wild today

(And the origin of this gag seems to be local head shop. Now I've got to stop in there the next time I feel the need for a tie-dye t-shirt...)

(Speaking of Nag Champa...a few years back our good friend Cathy D. accidentally left a grocery bag with apples and a box of Nag Champa in her car for a few days. Just a hint of the incense infused itself into the apples. Delicious!)

The last remnant of CompuServe, the first major commercial online service, has been shut down by its current owner, AOL.

I was never a user -- I started on BBSes (back in the glory dayes of FidoNet), then became a USENET addict around 1990 when I got access as a student at the U of MD. (And then right around the time I finished grad school there was this new thing called the "World Wide Web" starting up...) But CompuServe had an important place in the history of networking, and technophiles should pause a moment in memorium.

I have no interest in seeing the new Transformers movie, but this made me laugh out loud:

Since the days of Un Chien Andalou and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, filmmakers have reached beyond meaning. But with this summer's biggest, loudest movie, Michael Bay takes us all the way inside Caligari's cabinet. And once you enter, you can never emerge again. I saw this movie two days ago, and I'm still living inside it. Things are exploding wherever I look, household appliances are trying to kill me, and bizarre racial stereotypes are shouting at me.

Transformers: ROTF has mostly gotten pretty hideous reviews, but that's because people don't understand that this isn't a movie, in the conventional sense. It's an assault on the senses, a barrage of crazy imagery. Imagine that you went back in time to the late 1960s and found Terry Gilliam, fresh from doing his weird low-fi collage/animations for Monty Python. You proceeded to inject Gilliam with so many steroids his penis shrank to the size of a hair follicle, and you smushed a dozen tabs of LSD under his tongue. And then you gave him the GDP of a few sub-Saharan countries. Gilliam might have made a movie not unlike this one.

Just in case you thought you were caught up in the patriotic fervor around July 4th and thought you lived in a free country, this will bring you back to reality: Robert Zicari and his wife, Janet Romano, have been each sentenced to one year and one day in prison on federal charges of conspiracy to distribute "obscene" material through the mail and over the Internet.

Yes, the government of the land of the free and the home of the brave is so scared that somebody might look at dirty pictures, that they are forcing people into cages at gunpoint over the issue. As U.S. Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan said, "These prison sentences affirm the need to continue to protect the public from obscene, lewd, lascivious or filthy material, the production of which degrades all of us." I was quite worried that next time I went to the Royal Farms store the porn was going to jump off the shelf and attack me and leave me "degraded", but I feel safer now knowing that the federal government is going to protect me from filthy material.

Juxtaposing the fact that you can get locked up for selling naughty pictures with the fact that no one has been brought up on charges for the torture of detainees in Gitmo, is left as an exercise for the depressed reader.

Thought for the day: when dealing with philosophy or spirituality, you have to keep your operational levels straight. It is true, as every spiritual teacher will confirm, that on the deepest level you and I are the same, we are one; but if I go into a bank and say that I'm you, we call that identity theft.

There's a famous Zen story:

Hogen, a Chinese Zen teacher, lived alone in a small temple in the country. One day four traveling monks appeared and asked if they might make a fire in his yard to warm themselves.

While they were building the fire, Hogen heard them arguing about subjectivity and objectivity. He joined them and said: "There is a big stone. Do you consider it to be inside or outside your mind?"

One of the monks replied: "From the Buddhist viewpoint everything is an objectification of mind, so I would say that the stone is inside my mind."

"Your head must feel very heavy," observed Hogen, "if you are carrying around a stone like that in your mind."

(Do you suppose a proper Zen answer would have been to go pick up the stone, bring it over, drop it on Hogen's foot, and then ask him if the stone was inside or outside of mind?)

See where teaching kids to trust Officer Friendly ends up? Maryland Transit Administration police officer Donald Brown has been charged with kidnapping and raping a 15-year-old girl who asked him for help after she got lost on the light rail.

Zelda's Inferno exercise: write about the mystic sense

one time I danced all night around a huge bonfire in the driving rain, screaming to the skies, a roar of pain and defiance, emptying out

one time I lay on my back in the snow with a head full of strange chemicals and the sky reached down and touched me with love

one time I stood on a commuter train near Tokyo and knew, just knew, that every person in that car was "just like this", a Tathagata, a lamp onto his or her self, a subject, an experience

From the Yin Chih Wen, or The Tract of the Quiet Way:

Hsieh Wen-Ching says: "The reason why a man has thousands of troubles is because he clings to the idea of self: therefore, he schemes and contrives in ten thousand different ways. He alone wants to be rich, he alone wants to be honored, he alone wants to be easy, he alone wants to be happy, he alone wants to enjoy life, he alone wants to be blessed with longevity; and to others' poverty, misery, danger, or suffering, he is altogether indifferent. It is for this reason that the life-will of others is disregarded and Heaven's Reason neglected. Only be cured of the disease of egotism, and your heart will be broadened even to the vastness of infinite space, so that wealth, honor, happiness, comfort, health, longevity could all be enjoyed with others. And, then, the will to live will have its way, everything will have its natural longings satisfied, and Heaven's Reason will be displayed in an untold exuberance.