'Getting Real About the High Price of Cheap Food.' See also: 'As Waistlines Widen, Brains Shrink.' Both via MeFi (come for the steak, stay for the flamewar).

Congratulations, Vermonters! You have the nation's healthiest habits.

Monday night links.

* After a brief flirtation with "top five" status, Brüno is back to being a box-office disappointment.

* Top ten comics cities. #2: Chris Ware's Chicago. Via MetaFilter.

* xkcd tackles the frighteningly addictive power of TV Tropes.

* SF by the numbers. Via Boing Boing.

* Why are we so fat?

* Also in the New Yorker: profiles of Al Franken and Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa, last seen ratifying nature's right to exist.

* And allow me to offer my heartiest gerrycanavan.blogspot.com welcome to North Carolina's newest resident.

Some links for Sunday.

* Robin Sloan has a filtered #iranelection Twitter feed with most of the repetition and chaos stripped away. Via Boing Boing.

* Salinger and kids today: “Oh, we all hated Holden in my class. We just wanted to tell him, ‘Shut up and take your Prozac.’ ” Via MeFi.

* Another ruins of the modern world roundup. This one has some repetition but also a few I hadn't seen before.

* Advantage: chubbiness. People who are a little overweight at age 40 live six to seven years longer than very thin people, whose average life expectancy was shorter by some five years than that of obese people, the study found.

The swine flu outbreak in Mexico has everybody talking about pandemic and 1918. Schools and public events have been shut down in Mexico City, where 20 have died from the outbreak. The victims are mostly otherwise healthy people between 25 and 45, an atypical result likely caused by a phenomenon known as "cytokine storm."

Here's an aspect of the story the American media, unsurprisingly, isn't touching: the outbreak has been linked to factory-style pork production.

Everybody is trying to figure out how to slide Howard Dean into HHS without Rahm Emmanuel noticing. Here's Tom Harkin.

Upon seeing the top 15 "green brands", my first response was "There's no such thing as a green brand." But that's not true—there really are companies with superior products and decent practices, it's just that consumers have no ready access to reliable information about them. And the high social importance of ecology in recent years has actually made matters worse, not better, with the greenwashing that is increasingly common across all industries only further muddying the waters.

Apple, for instance, and despite its many other virtues, may be greener than it used to be but it's still not especially green. But it feels green, so it makes the list.

This is a failure of the culture, and really a failure of our government—in both cases by design. Simple labels work; they worked in Britain for nutrition, and they could work here, not only with regard to health but along any number of ecological and social-justice vectors as well.

It may be that consumers would still make bad choices even if they were well-informed, but the evidence from Britain suggests otherwise. I think you'd see a significant shift in consumption practices almost immediately.

Advantage: hippies—vegetarians live longer.

Are humans designed/evolved to eat everything and at risk of malnutrition as vegetarians? Or is vegetarianism the healthy and ethical choice? The most impressive data arises from a study of 1904 vegetarians over 21 years by the German Cancer Research Center (Deutsche Krebsforschungszentrum). The study's shocking results: vegetarian men reduced their risk of early death by 50%! Women vegetarians benefit from a 30% reduction in mortality.

30% of female vegetarians will never die.

There's such a thing as being too sexy: Prince reportedly going under the knife for hip replacement surgery at the age of only 49.

I'm actually still catching up from the weekend, so that "return to full strength" I mentioned will probably have to wait until later this afternoon or Tuesday morning. Still, I have been saving up some links:

* Be warned: delicious Coca-Cola will destroy your kidneys.

* Via Pandagon, Pittsburgh man Tasered in his own home while sleeping on his own couch.

Police Chief Henry Wiehagen said the officers would not comment, but he disputed Hicks' version of events.

Hicks wasn't asleep, Wiehagen said, he was on the couch prone. The officers could not be certain he was unarmed and Hicks "didn't respond to their reasonable commands," he said.

"These policemen are very cautious and I don't blame them for being cautious," Wiehagen said, noting officers in his department have been shot at.

* Via blucarbnpinwheel, Jonathan Lethem interviews Paul Auster. Two of my favorite writers in one place is very nice.

* Mini-Obama Endorsement Watch: Toni Morrison, who famously proclaimed in 1998 that Bill Clinton was "our first black president. Blacker than any actual person who could ever be elected in our children's lifetime," endorses Barack Obama.

* And at Paleo-Future, how experts think we'll live in 2000 A.D. Other experts have a different opinion.

Reaction Jackson Tuesday:

* Steve says my picture of the Mona Lisa puts him in mind of this YouTube video of five hundred years of female portraits in 2 minutes.

*Shankar links in the comments to David Cross's Open Letter to Larry the Cable Guy.

* Everyone in the world is talking about the creation mususem.

* Warning: soft drinks are seriously bad for you. I'm two months dry (de-fizzed?) and I'm starting to not miss the delicious taste... all that much. The first time I stopped drinking soda I went nine months before I relapsed, and I've bounced six-months-on, six-months-off since then—but this time I want to stay off the stuff for good.