Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, May 24, 1993 TAG: 9305240253
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MONTY S. LEITCH
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Dear Ms. Cellany: Numerous studies have reported links between high- fat diets and life-threatening conditions, such as heart disease, high blood pressure and diabetes. How can consumers take these studies seriously and change their eating habits? - Signed, I.Q., Meadows of Dan, Va.
Dear I.: Ms. Cellany finds this a fascinating question. How, indeed! - she'd like to add emphatically.
Why, just the other day Ms. Cellany was noticing in the check-out line of her favorite supermarket (which shall remain nameless, in order that Ms. Cellany not fall prey to that bane of journalists everywhere - free advertising! - but which she feels she safely can say lies along Roanoke Road in Christiansburg), just the other day Ms. Cellany was noticing that a consumer's age can often be judged by said consumer's grocery cart's contents.
Pray, let Ms. Cellany explain. The pusher of a grocery cart laden with frozen pizza, potato chips, peanut butter and "Sugar Pops" will most certainly be younger than the pusher of a grocery cart laden with apples, low-fat yogurt, reduced-calorie margarine and Tide.
On why this should be, Ms. Cellany can only speculate. But she feels certain that the reasons, once determined,will address directly I.Q.'s concerns.
Dear Ms. Cellany: Harper's May Index notes that the hip measurement of a size 8 dress sold in the United States last year was 38 inches, while the hip measurement of a size 8 dress sold 60 years ago was 33 1/2 inches. How can this alteration be explained? Signed: I. Questioner, Paint Bank, Va.
Dear I.: Ms. Cellany can't help wondering - might you, I. Questioner of Paint Bank, be a distant cousin to one I.Q. of Meadows of Dan? Such a small world we live in!
Now to your question, which fascinates Ms. Cellany. Oh, how she would love to have ever worn a size 8 dress in her life!
It is astonishing, is it not, how much has changed in 60 years. Why, in 1933 "Who's Afraid of the Big, Bad Wolf" was among our most popular songs. Ms. Cellany suspects that fear of the "big, bad wolf" referred to in this song was in some manner connected to the slender hips of the day. But this, of course, cannot be proven.
Dear Ms. Cellany: What ever happened to the concept of Zero Population Growth? Signed: I.Q. II, Poplar Hill, Va.
Dear I.Q. II: Ms. Cellany is fascinated, over and over again, by the miracle of birth!
Just the other day she read - in this, her very own newspaper! - of a birth that truly astounds. A woman in North Carolina used a turkey baster to . . . well, to cause her pregnancy in an unconventional manner with the, um, well (to put it delicately) with the help of her brother-in-law. Thus, miraculously, presenting her sister, nine months later, with both son and nephew in one blue-blanketed package!
Here, Ms. Cellany, finds, the truth of the phrase "mothers of invention!"
(Ms. Cellany wonders, by the way, might you have distant relatives in Meadows of Dan and Paint Bank?)
Monty S. Leitch is a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist.
by CNB