Some time ago I wrote about the troubles we were having with our Blockbuster Video by mail account and I thought I should update the reader with what has lead to our current situation.

We continued with Blockbuster, making all the changes in our activities suggested by the supervisor who wrote to us including micro-managing our request list so that only available videos were at the top of the list (a silly requirement as anyone who understands database processing could explain!). We gave them another couple of months to see if things would improve. They didn’t. In fact, they got worse. We sometimes actually went a full week without movies.

Okay, I’m a sucker for punishment but, ultimately, we had enough. We canceled our account and signed up with Net Flix. Wow! We got our first movies in two days. Since signing up we have had all of our new movies the second day after mailing them back, e.g. we mail the movie back on Tuesday, Net Fix acknowledges receipt and mails the new movie from our list on Wednesday, and we receive it on Thursday. It’s never been longer.

We thought this must be some kind of good service given to new accounts but, after several months of the same treatment, it seems like this is S.O.P. Additionally we have been taking advantage of their “free” (no additional cost, really) view-online movies. There are a lot of ‘em and there are some great selections. Often they are the same movies available on the movie chanels on cable.

Between fast turn-around on mailings and the available selection of online movies, we are never without something to watch. At this point we are very happy with Net Flix and recommend them to anyone.

In an article titled Stock Your Kitchen for Diabetes Health by Jeanie Lerche Davis (reviewed by Brunilda Nazario, MD) on the WebMD site the truism “Healthy cooking and snacking means having the right foods on hand” is offered. The article goes on, however, to suggest a variety of foods based on the old (and now known to be incorrect) concept that fat is bad and whole grains are the basis of good health.

Some of the foods suggested are:

* Canned beans: Garbanzo, pinto, black, red kidney, navy beans.
* Whole-grain pasta.
* Grains: Brown rice, barley, oats.
* Cereals: Fiber One, Cheerios, Rice Krispies, Kix.
* Diet, light, low-carb whole-wheat: bread, pancake mix, tortillas.
* Chocolate treats: Cocoa Via Crispy Chocolate Bar; Cocoa Via Chocolate Snack Bars; Cocoa Via Chocolate Blueberry Snack Bar.
* Water-packed tuna, chicken breast, and salmon (canned or pouch).
* Canola and extra-virgin olive oil and cooking sprays.
* Low-salt canned tomatoes, tomato soup, broth-based vegetable soups, V-8 juice, tomato juice, Diet V-8 Splash.
* Orville Redenbacher Smart Pop popcorn (snack-size bags).
* Ritz Chips crackers.
* Reduced-sugar jams, jellies, pancake syrups.

More than half the items on this list are, in my opinion, questionable at best. On the one hand Davis gallantly recommends “low carb” bred while, on the other, she offers brand name products loaded with carbs! Pancake mix and tortillas scare the proverbials out of me. And what’s wrong with soaking dried beans? Far less salt which, though not a problem for diabetics per se, is an issue for high blood pressure and heart disease that may well parallel a diabetic course.

The article goes on to include items for a well-stocked diabetic-friendly refrigerator:

* Fresh fruits: Berries, cherries, oranges, tangerines, peaches, grapefruit, grapes, kiwi, plums, watermelon, peaches, melons.
* Fresh vegetables: Spinach, broccoli, cauliflower, eggplant, cucumber, Romaine lettuce, mushrooms, radishes, snow peas, sugar snap peas, cabbage, carrots, green beans, asparagus, garlic, tomatoes, small sweet potatoes, small russet potatoes, edamame (soy beans).
* Low-fat salad dressings.
* Low-fat dairy: 1% or 2% cheese like Baby Bell or Laughing Cow; string cheese (part-skim mozzarella); fat-free sugar-free yogurt; skim or 1% milk; I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter spray; Butter Buds.
* Fresh lean protein:
o Boneless skinless chicken breast
o Turkey loin
o Ground turkey white meat
o Laura’s Lean 4% fat ground beef
o Pork tenderloin
o Beef: fillet, flank steak
o Eggs
o Salmon
o Tofu
o Meat-substitute/soy products.

This list is considerably better but grapes stand out as one of several high-sugar “natural” products diabetics may need to watch and there is an obvious bias in support of the Ancel Keys doctrine of dietary fat, especially saturated fat, is BAD! We now know that the research that supported his conclusines was, at best, flawed and, at worst, fraud. He fudged and cherry-picked his results and nearly all government, medical, and food-industry positions over the last 30 years have been based on his incorrect conclusions.

New studies, and reviews of old ones, too, are suggesting that dietary fats are not only not bad for you, they are necessary and actually assist in controlling diabetes. Atkins, you win!

As we look farther along the list in the WebMD article we see recommendations for stocking a diabetes-friendly freezer:

* Blueberries, blackberries, strawberries.
* Green Giant Select:
o Broccoli florets
o Broccoli, cauliflower and carrots
o Broccoli, carrots, and water chestnuts
o Sugar snap peas
o Whole green peas
o Spinach
* Birds Eye:
o Pepper stir fry
o Sugar snap stir fry
o Seven vegetable stir fry
o Szechwan vegetables in sesame sauce
o Winter blend vegetables and cheese sauce
* Frozen lean protein: salmon, tuna, tilapia, orange roughy; Louis Rich, Butterball or Jenni-O turkey sausage; egg substitutes.
* Ground flaxseed (sprinkle over fruit, breakfast cereal, yogurt, smoothies, sandwich spreads for extra omega-3 fatty acids).

Berries are good and so are vegetables. Raw, of course, is the better choice but having some choices in the freezer is a must for many of us. The protein list is good but why the brand names? Turkey is, after all, turkey. For those of us on a budget we might just have to settle for utility grade! And egg substitutes? Give me a break. Davis obviously hasn’t read the current literature on real eggs… not the cholesterol bumpers they were once thought to be. Perhaps her company doesn’t sell eggs!

The section Spicing Up a Diabetes-Friendly Spice Rack is interesting, if limited (by imagination or, perhaps, once again brand).

* Spice rubs for meat and seafood.
* Garlic and onion powders, not salts.
* Mrs. Dash; Mr. Dash.

So now you say “not salts” — of course you don’t want extra salt since you loaded us up with canned beans at the top of your list. If you start with raw, fresh or dried, ingredients most of us can actually use salt! And, with all the brand names here I can only lead one to ask, “Company sponsored article?”

WebMD has been considered by many as a great help in an otherwise overly regulated and overly expensive arena of medical services. This single article now makes me suspicious of any content on the stie!

Rev. Stephen B. Henry, PhD., is a website architect, researcher, writer, philosopher, and diabetic.

As the year, and the decade, is coming to a close, I look back over the last 10 years and see lots of good amidst many problems the world has faced. Life for Lora and I has not been the easiest as we started over with very little, workin our way forward in spite of our situation. Ten years later things are coming together; working out just fine.

We’re looking forward to the coming months, years, and decades together with optimism and understanding. We are offering new web stores through MSMOsites and have re-designed that site from the ground up. The web stores will interface with Main Street Mall Online.

And, you might also notice I’ve moved this blog to a new site — tied in with MSMOsites. Great things are coming!

The recent enormous growth in the phenomenon that is social networking, from public member personal information sites like Facebook and MySpace, business linking sites like ecademy and LinkedIn, content sites like Squidoo, blogs, and broadcast sites like Twitter, have made this media a hot number on marketers action lists. But has that same rapid expansion turned the whole thing into just another source of junk content?

Looking at my last 200 received tweets I see mostly blurbs from those who use it as a live diary, “just got up and made coffee — mmmmmm!”, and from those who use automated bot software to post famous quotes on the hour and half hour. In between there are the spammers who want me to sign up for yet another get-rich-quick scheme that they “really are making $thousands without doing anything!” and the social media experts flogging yet another must have tool to make the whole process even easier.

Are there any real gems in there, messages that will be useful to me or might lead me to an information source worth keeping? If there are, they seem lost in the sea of spam.

The growth of the Internet is, perhaps, the single most important factor of our time. It has affected more people in a shorter time than any other major watershed event of the modern era. It has provided the path, the vehicle, the means, for more people to reach out and touch each other, to share, to explore, to develop. But with the wonder of all this has come a price. More disinformation, more bad information, more junk content, more spam, has entered our life than ever before. Sorting through it all becomes a task in itself.

The biggest irony may be, as people strive for top position for their bit of the heap through SEO techniques like article marketing, they add their own volumes of content to the increasing noise level and, thereby, reduce their own chances of success. The resulting proverbial vicious circle is self-feeding, self-generating, constantly growing. Does it end with the Internet being overwhelmed by it’s own content? And is this blog post just another contribution to all that spam?