It’s the weekend, it’s the summer, it’s all about food and drink and what it does to us. Some good, some not so.

  • The world’s favorite 101-year-old marathoner Fauja Singh will carry the Olympic torch next weekend. If you thought nothing could be sweeter than watching that (still-unrecognized-by-Guinness-but-nevertheless) world record-holder stride through the streets of his adopted hometown, think again. United Sikhs, a charitable organization, is planning to distribute free vegetarian rolls to several thousand Fauja-natics as they cheer the torch, and the aged runner and, one assumes, the excellent food. The serving of free meals is a 500-year-old Sikh tradition, according to Parvinder Kaur, who is overseeing the project.
  • Health news: heavy snoring doubles your risk of rheumatoid arthritis, according to researchers in Taiwan. Drinking three glasses of wine during a week halves your risk of rheumatoid arthritis, according research conducted at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute. What this suggests is pretty obvious, snorers.
  • Other health and/or wine news: It looks like a couple glasses of wine a day could protect women from osteoporosis. Reports on a U.S. study indicate that “the bones of women used to having one or two drinks a day several times a week grew weaker once they stopped for two weeks.” Stopping your evening tipple doesn’t necessarily condemn you to brittle bone disease, though. The research showed that “less than a day after they resumed their normal regular drinking” bone density measures returned to previous levels.
  • Finally, do you like to compare yourself to other people in other lands? Sure, except when it comes to your weight, because you know you’re almost certainly going to be fatter than your peers in any other country, except maybe Tonga. (Which, by the way, is an awesome country, filled with warm and funny people.) In case you still want to compare yourself, check out this new BBC calculator, which will calculate your Body Mass Index (BMI) and tell you how you stack up against folks around the world. Because you already know you’re fatter than the rest of the world, you don’t have much interest in this, but maybe you should try to pay attention. “Researchers see global weight gain as a bigger threat to mankind than population growth. As well as the health implications, experts are also concerned about the environmental impact.” Already, the world’s adult human population has a combined weight of 287 million tons. “Increasing obesity could have the same impact on global resources as an extra billion people, they believe.”

The above reference to Tonga brought to mind the Cook Islands, another splendid Polynesian country. The photo shows a sunset on the island of Aitutaki, with low cumulus and stratocumulus and high cirrostratus clouds, by Mr. Bullitt, via Wikimedia Commons.