Two wonderful singers, one wonderful song. What’s not to like?
Mano Singham
Just another Freethought Blogs site
Most of us take some steps to look our best selves, especially if we are going out in public. Usually those are limited to how we dress and some minimal efforts at grooming. But as with so many things, there are those who take this to an extreme, leading to a phenomenon known as ‘looksmaxxing’, one of the recent trends that have had the suffix ‘maxxing’ added to it to give the cachet of sounding cool and hip.
Perhaps the most viral example of maxxing is looksmaxxing, a cultural phenomenon that originated in the incel (a.k.a. involuntary celibate) community, encouraging boys and young men to take intense, often dangerous, measures to enhance their physical appearance. That includes undergoing intrusive surgeries, using steroids to bulk up, or using a hammer to smash your facial bones in hopes of accentuating one’s jawline. Looksmaxxing promises one sole goal: that by being exceedingly and unattainably hot, men can achieve the utmost confidence, social clout and sexual success.
The article goes on to describe other forms of maxxing, all involving taking some ordinary activity to the extreme, including food, with things like protein and fiber being targeted for maxxing.
On TikTok and Instagram, the protein hysteria reached a fever pitch. Influencers showed off their high-protein diets filled with protein powders, eggs, egg whites, cottage cheese, poultry and red meat. Some also pushed for eating more high-protein snacks, ranging from meat sticks and cold cuts to homemade chicken chips made from seasoned, ground meat. Everyone was hellbent on maxing out on the macro.
…That’s all to say that our food was never intended to be maxxed. Certain nutrients and so-called superfoods were never meant to be heavily prioritized at the expense of other beneficial ingredients. Regardless of how severe the spectrum is, maxxing implies that more is always better. It’s in the name. But that’s not what healthy eating is all about. Per the World Health Organization, a healthy diet is made up of four basic principles: adequacy, balance, moderation and diversity. Maxxing, for the most part, fails to satisfy three of those principles — adequacy, balance and diversity.
It also raises the question of how much food maxxing is necessary in the future to undo the damage of previous maxxing trends. First, it’s protein. Then, fiber, which many U.S. adults aren’t eating enough of already. What’s next? Carb-maxxing to compensate for the lack of carbohydrates in our diets? Or perhaps, raw greens-maxxing?
As the age-old adage goes, “too much of a good thing is a bad thing.” It feels especially pertinent in a new era of maxx eating.
It seems to me that people are disregarding the health of their future selves by emphasizing short-term gains and ignoring the possibility of serious long-term damage to their bodies. We will not know the real consequences of such actions until these people age and by then it may be too late to repair any damage. We can place some of the blame on so-called influencers who boast that they have become successful by doing all these things and selling products that they claim they used to achieve that look, whether that is true or not.
During the filming of a new action film, lead actors Jonathan Majors and JC Kilcoyne tumbled backwards through a glass window after one of them was ‘shot’.
The incident was captured on video obtained by Deadline, which is embedded below. Multiple sources confirm to Deadline that the accident occurred after the window was replaced with an unsecured sheet of tempered glass to be purposefully shattered in a later stunt that did not involve any actors.
Since the tempered glass was only sitting loosely in the window, both the actors and the sheet of glass fell about six feet to the ground. Kilcoyne required stitches “all over his hands” after the incident, sources with knowledge of the incident say.
This trope of someone getting shot and falling backwards and breaking through a glass window is a cliche beloved of action film directors. As I have written before, a bullet does not have enough momentum to do more that cause a human to move back more than an inch or so, let alone be flung back and break through a window. In this case, a single bullet did that to two people.
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I usually post my blog comments policy at the beginning of the month for the benefit of new readers. Rather than posting the whole thing again, here is a link to the last time I posted it.
I enjoy reading the comments and it has become more pleasurable now. One of the things that used to annoy me were those commenters who seemed to feel the need to show themselves to be clever at the expense of others, usually by making needlessly sarcastic and denigrating comments.
It is also the case that long time commenters get the know each other and sometimes they will use that knowledge to snipe at another commenter based on their history, just to score a debating point even though it had nothing to do with the current post. It is somewhat like people in long-term relationships who know each other well and will dredge up past statements to try and ‘win’ an argument.
Thankfully, that is not happening anymore.
When I was around 13 years of age, our neighbors had five children, three of whom were close in age to me. They would invite me to play card games at their place and we played for money. It was not high stakes in any absolute sense but it was for me since all I had was just the little pocket money that my parents gave me. So I did have thrill (if you want to call it that) of fearing a real loss. It was exciting to gamble and I was quickly getting drawn in and looked forward to playing after school. But I would end up losing consistently. After a while, while I could not prove it, I became convinced that the siblings were cheating by colluding against me. They were Indians and would sometimes speak and sing in Hindi, a language that is not spoken in Sri Lanka and that I did not know, and I think that they were communicating with each other. Anyway, I got tired of losing in an unfair game and stopped playing with them after a while. It was my first taste of how the gambling system is usually rigged against you and I lost my taste for it and never got attracted to it again.
Gambling in sports in the US has an ugly history with players accused of adjusting their play in order to make money by getting particular results. This led to federal laws that banned it and for the longest time it was restricted to just in-person gambling in the state of Nevada, primarily Las Vegas. Professional sports leagues vigorously opposed any attempts to legalize it nationwide, arguing that it would lead to the death of sports due to suspicions of cheating. But in 2018, the US Supreme Court overturned the federal ban, saying that the constitution did not allow for this federal power and that it was up to the states to decide whether they wanted to allow gambling or not, and then it was off to the races, as states vied to attract gamblers.
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Two days ago, I linked to the amusing 12-minute short film Jane Austen’s Period Drama that was nominated for this year’s Oscar but did not win.
When it comes to the arts in any form, I am definitely low-brow. High art leaves me mystified and this was confirmed yet again when I later watched the co-winner of this year’s short film category called Two People Exchanging Saliva. From the beginning I was aware that I was in the Ocean of Deep Metaphor and that I was hopelessly out of my depth. As I watched it, trying to figure out the message, I thought to myself “There is a message here but I am so not getting it”. I was utterly baffled.
Watch for yourself.
After the film, I looked it up and even after reading about what the underlying message was, I still did not get it. I am that bad.
I wonder what the term is that signifies the opposite of avante garde when referring to the arts, because that is the label that would definitely would fit me.
In the UK, Nigel Farage is under fire for having made Cameo videos that featured him making controversial statements.
The Guardian’s unearthing of Farage’s videos has raised questions about his relationship with the far right and who he is willing to take money from. Farage charged £155 for one video he made in 2025 for a man he was told had received a 16-month sentence for his involvement in a far-right riot. Despite knowing that the man had been convicted over his role in the disorder, the Reform leader recorded a supportive message for him, telling the man “I’m with you”.
…Farage was paid £141 for another video in which he promoted an event by a Canadian neo-Nazi group, which used the clip in propaganda alongside fascist salutes and antisemitic imagery. Farage called the event “the best thing that ever happened”. The video was removed from Cameo’s website after the Guardian’s story.
As a result of the revelations, his account says that he no longer is accepting any offers.
Cameo is a site that enables you to pay for celebrities to make personalized videos where they say things that you want them to say, if they are willing to do so. The usual requests are as gifts to friends to wish them on their birthdays or anniversaries or similar things. But clearly some are pushing other agendas.
I can understand why minor celebrities might sign up to do them, since it provides some easy money as a side hustle. If there are suckers out there willing to pay for people to utter some words, there will be those who are willing to oblige. What I can’t understand is the appeal for the buyer of the message and the intended recipient. Would the person you are seeking to impress really be flattered by getting a personalized message from some has-been B or C lister who was paid to give it and has absolutely no idea who you are and does not give a damn about you?
I can sort of understand if you knew the celebrity personally and they recorded the video as a favor to you. Then the recipient may be impressed that you knew them well-enough that they would do this for you. So this would be of benefit to you,
But otherwise it seems really tacky to me.
I guess I just don’t understand the thrill that some people feel when a sort-of celebrity mentions their name, even if they had to be paid to do so.
I will periodically repost my comments policy for those who recently started visiting this site.
As long time readers know, I used to moderate the comments with a very light hand, assuming that mature adults would know how to behave in a public space. It took outright hate speech targeting marginalized groups to cause me to ban people, and that happened very rarely. But I got increasingly irritated by the tedious and hostile exchanges among a few commenters that tended to fill up the comment thread with repeated posts about petty or off-topic issues. We sometimes had absurdly repetitive exchanges seemingly based on the childish belief that having the last word means that you have won the argument or with increasingly angry posts sprinkled with puerile justifications like “They started it!”
So here is one rule: No one will be able to make more than three comments in response to any blog post. Violation of that rule will result in banning.
But I also want to address a couple of deeper concerns for which a solution cannot be quantified but will require me to exercise my judgment.
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This prolific singer-songwriter, who was behind so many hit songs of my adolescence, many written for other artists, has died.
Here is one of my favorites Happy Birthday, Sweet Sixteen.
His songs were usually cheerful and upbeat, reflecting a more innocent time in pop culture. Sadly, in the post-Jeffrey Epstein era, this song about teenage love now has creepy connotations.
But I thought that it might momentarily take people’s minds off today’s truly depressing news that Trump and Netanyahu have launched a war with Iran with who knows what consequences.