A college degree was the equivalent of a high school diploma in the Fifties? If only.
My father was born in 1924 in a tiny fishing village — an island in the Chesapeake Bay, actually, remote and isolated from mainland life — and there were maybe 12 graduating seniors in 1942. But Pop was not among them. He quit high school at the age of 16 because he simply could not get a passing grade in English. He served in WWII (survived the entire Battle of the Bulge) and earned a two-year business degree on the GI Bill. But he was so sensitive about what he considered to be his poor grammar, Mom did all of his writing assignments. Pop was good at math, just couldn’t write worth a darn. Or so he thought. He was a cost accountant for most of his working days and always felt inferior to the college grads who were paid more and promoted more often.
So I took it on faith that Pop was a dullard when it came to writing.
My parents went through a horrible divorce in ’72, and went their separate ways. I received a one letter from him when I was a college sophomore, read it, and promptly forgot about it. Pop died in ’76, still a relatively young man.
Then, one day when my wife and I were preparing for a move (this must have been around 1984), I found the letter he had written. And re-read it. And I wondered, who was this man? It was a very well-written letter, in his own bold cursive writing style. By this time, I had been reading National Review for almost twenty years, and had thoroughly digested the writings of William Buckley, Hugh Kenner, James Burnham, Joe Sobran, and the rest of that talented bullpen. I could not kid myself: this was not the writing of a poor writer. This is the writing a thoughtful, sensitive man whose anguish at the mistakes he had made was palpable. It was easily better than typical college-student writing, and technically more correct than my own from a grammatical perspective.
Let me repeat: this was from a high-school dropout.
It seems to me that many of us paid thousands of dollars for a college degree and for the most part received a license to feel entitled.
Oh, and kids, before you head off to college, buy my book. It's worth more than all of your English classes combined, plus it's likely to get banned in your high school.
☼ ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼ Informational AccuracyEverything you'd expect in thirty minutes with Dr. Jack Kruse, or Leptin Man as we call him in these parts. Ah what the heck, it's my blog. Can we put up that slide Jeeves? Thanks. OK. What you won't get is what's billed. Leptin circadian cycles account for a couple minutes at most of the talk, and although Croxton promises us that Jack "shares how he lost 133 pounds in a single year by correcting the 'biological mismatches' that were once prevalent in his life" there's nothing about the Leptin Reset that comes out of Jack's mouth in this talk. Aside from using the words like evolutionary a few times, and exclaiming that paleo fixes all (no grains, limited dairy), this wasn't really a paleo "talk". The only unifying theme was that there was no unifying theme. Oh ... and leptin!
It is fair to say that of all the paleo/LC folks with whom I have disagreements with on the substance of their message, Mark Sisson is probably the most enjoyable personality to listen to. If you know nothing about paleo/primal, this is a good overview of the basics. If you're familiar with Primal Blueprint at all, there's nothing new here. The interview is more notable for what it is missing -- any major emphasis on excessive carbohydrate consumption (no carbohydrate curve), minimal mentions of insulin and no mention of fat being locked away. Not too many overt factual errors or misrepresentations of the science. Most of all this interview and other recent ones demonstrate Mark's ability to adjust his marketing pitch to the tune of what's going on out there. His transition has been so smooth as to be almost unnoticeable. The hot thing these days is the "fat burning metabolism", and Mark's a master at capitalizing on that.
So this post will be rather short, and I plan to expand on the data we have regarding fat tissue development in infancy, puberty and other periods of childhood in subsequent installments. It would appear that the number of fat cells we are born with is determined somewhat later in gestation. At right is the progression of the formation of mature adipocytes. From this article: 
