Food, Glorious Food, by Elayne Riggs
For the last week of job searches and interviews, I’ve not been very immersed in pop culture, unless one counts giggling at some Craigslist classifieds. I’ve kept up my blog reading, I’ve played computer games, I’ve suffered the first couple of plothole-ridden episodes of the Terminator TV series for a few minutes each, I’m up to Oz book #16, I’m through most of my DCU comics from November/December, the usual consumption. And it occurred to me — consumption. There’s a huge foodie contingent out there, which more and more resembles other pop culture fandom, so why not pontificate about food this week? After all, everybody eats. Even Stephen Colbert has been known to down the grits and lo mein on his show, and who can forget the immortal Eddie Izzard "<a href=”
or Death" routine?
As a woman of some girth and experience, I have a love-hate relationship with food. I unapologetically love food itself, the pleasure it gives me to eat a satisfying and delicious meal, even to prepare one. But I hate the way corporations and people (most of whom don’t even know me) take it upon themselves to lecture me about my food intake, particularly when I’ve never sought their advice, based solely on my outward appearance. I despise our current Culture of Deprivation, which in reality consists of mixed messages since we’re also encouraged to decadently indulge at the same time. I despair that "moderation" seems to be such a dirty word in our world of extremes.
I grew up with the relatively moderate Four Food Groups chart (grains, fruits & vegs, meat and dairy). This predated the modern Food Pyramid, which presumes to advise people not only on how to vary their diets but on the proportions the USDA deems appropriate. Of course I implicitly trust a government agency among whose tasks it is to inspect meat and yet there’s all this e-coli and mad cow and goodness knows what else. And hey, the current acting Secretary of Agriculture is the ex-president of the Corn Refiners Association, so I guess we’ll all be hearing scads about how bad high-fructose corn syrup is for us, being probably the highest contributing factor in the decline of culinary health in this country. So you can see where I maintain a healthy skepticism toward changing food standards (like changing weight standards, beauty standards, etc.). People aren’t charts, and what works well for one doesn’t necessarily succeed for another.
Today in 1947, the the body of Elizabeth Short was found in Leimert Park, Los Angeles. Perhaps unpleasant to admit, the savagely disfigured corpse of the girl, better known as the "Black Dahlia," did indeed provide inspiration for the latest Hollywood storytellers, video game artists and even credible contemporary writers. Joyce Carole Oates used Short as a character in her novel, Blonde and the late John Gregory Dunne and his wife Joan Didion used the murder in their screenplay for the film, True Confessions.
Even a full-scale bombing can’t keep a good Smurf down. Last seen in <a href=”
My Magic 8-Ball says "ALL SIGNS SAY YES". 
China’s Communist ruling party plans to start off the Lunar New Year holiday by distributing comics depicting graft and various other forms of corruption in an effort to reduce crime in one of the nation’s most troubled provinces. 
And the Screen Writers Guild lurches into a tenth week and if there’s any end in sight, I haven’t heard about it.
Today in 1863, the very first Sunday comic artist was born.
In today’s brand new, full color 
