Wednesday morning roundup

Those who selectively read Tom Friedman know he's at his best (most knowledgeable and nuanced) on the Middle East.

Nearly half of Americans apparently live under a rock.

Che's Irish side.

Something to quantify and substantiate your hatred of Pepco, and something to feed it.

If you get a chance, do catch The History of Invulnerability before Sunday.

Now that Anderson Cooper has officially come out in terms of sexuality, he might focus on setting a good example to help others recover from the scourge of picky eating.


Slate yawns at the iPhone.

Hilary Price captures my relationship with dandelions.

Christine Frietchen feels great after her vegan marathon:

I’d always been so jealous of people who said they just cut soda from their diet and dropped 20 pounds. I wished for a similar quick fix in my own diet. (I didn’t drink soda, so that wasn’t an option.) But it dawned on me one day as I sprinkled Cheddar over my veggie tacos that hardly a meal passed that didn’t include some type of cheese. I would sprinkle Cheddar on a salad, melt mozzarella on pizza, spread cream cheese on a bagel. Turns out I’d been using cheese as a condiment. I gave myself a three-week trial: no cheese, no milk, no butter, no yogurt.

It didn’t even take three weeks for my nagging heartburn to disappear, and the needle on the scale began to creep lower. I was also having a running “honeymoon.” To my disbelief, I started running faster, down to a personal best of 7:40 a mile from 10-minute miles nine years ago.

It's funny--in an article I linked to yesterday, one guy talks about how dietary restrictions can infringe on one's social life, but it doesn't have to be that way. All it takes is a little awareness and flexibility. Here's Frietchen's take: "I screen restaurants before accepting invitations. But these are all minor issues — they’re nothing compared with how good I feel." I find that I don't generally have to screen restaurants--the people I go out with are happy to defer to the people with dietary restrictions when picking a place to eat. To be sure, there are plenty of restaurants in the DC area that have nothing for vegans, and in some cases, vegetarians, but they're the ones that lose out, especially because they lose out on entire groups of people.