AverageBro NewsBits

Well, I'm back on the road again this week. The Day Job actually needs me to earn my pay (the nerve of some folks), thus I'm slummin' it in the Twin Cities yet again. So, as usual, here's a few things worth noting, but not worthy of their own post.

Oprah has a "Thyroid Problem". Yeah, right.

If you've watched Oprah over the years, you know she drops and gains weight just like Luther Vandross did (RIP). This has always been puzzling to me. After all, if you can afford to pay a professional dietitian to choose and cook every single piece of food that goes in your mouth, how the heck can you possibly gain weight? It's almost like fat professional athletes. If you play basketball 4 hours a day, everyday, how the hell can you get fat?

Turns out, Oprah has an excuse.

Oprah Winfrey is going public about the thyroid condition that slowed down her metabolism and caused her to gain 20 pounds.

Winfrey, 53, was feeling incredibly sluggish by the time her talk show wrapped up its season in May. She eventually discovered the problem: an out-of-balance thyroid.

"My body was turning on me," she says in the October issue of O, the Oprah magazine. "First hyperthyroidism, which sped up my metabolism and left me unable to sleep for days. (Most people lose weight. I didn't.)"

Winfrey, exhausted and stressed, took a month-long break in Hawaii to regain her health.

So Harpo has a thyroid problem. Yeah. Right.

She has a problem alright. A Thigh-roid problem, Wing-roid problem, and a Breast-roid problem. Heck, there's probably a Texas-Pete-roid problem too, but they ain't diagnosed that one yet.

All jokes aside, get well soon, Oprah.

Do You Know What Your Kids Are Reading?

I wouldn't know a Hobbit from a Smurf, but I found this Harry Potter related nugget pretty interesting nonetheless.

Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling served up a bombshell Friday evening during a reading at Carnegie Hall, telling a crowd of fans from throughout the United States thatDumbledore, the wise Hogwarts headmaster and mentor to Harry, is gay.

"I always saw Dumbledore as gay," Rowling said in answer to a fan's question about whether the wizard ever found love.

The crowd of about 2,000 hardcore Harry fans, who had won tickets through a nationwide drawing, exploded in screams and applause at the news.

This reminds me of the time a few years ago that I took my nephew to the library. He was staying with us over the summer, so I gave him the assignment of finding a book, any book, on black history and giving me a report when we was finished. So, we find a book on the Underground Railroad, and I figure everything's lovely.

Later, after dinner, lil' Dude is telling me about the book, and it's completely focused on some little Southern white girl who, out of the kindness of her heart, convinces her Dad to help free some of his neighbor's slaves in the middle of the night, and then helps lead these slaves to freedom in Canada. There was zero mention of Harriet Tubman. Zero mention of the actual Underground Railroad. Zero mention of the fact that slaves tried to escape all the time themselves. No, this was just another example of white guilt re-writing history in a self-congratulatory manner.

I'm not saying that whites didn't help blacks escape slavery (of course they
did), nor that they haven't helped us at other junctures in our fight for equal rights (lets not forget, Jews helped create the NAACP). Still, reducing historical oppression to the mere whims of a sympathetic child is pretty dangerous stuff. Of course, I had to explain all this to my nephew in an age-appropriate manner. Lesson learned, the next time I took him to the library, I made sure to double-check what he was picking out first.

I'm just sayin', between this example and the apparently hidden cues in these Harry Potter books, be aware of what your kids are reading. The iPod ain't the only hidden danger.

David Copperfield (Allegedly) Takes the Coochie

Okay, he hasn't been charged with anything yet, but tell me you ain't laugh just a little bit when you heard this story.

FOX News is reporting that a woman has accused magician David Copperfield of rape, shedding light on why the FBI may have raided his Las Vegas warehouse.

The woman, from Seattle, reportedly told police he raped her while she was in the Bahamas. Because the alleged incident happened overseas, and she reportedly did not alert authorities until she returned to the U.S., Seattle authorities turned the case over to the FBI.

Let me put this right out there; there is absolutely nothing funny about rape. Period.vBut still, I know the late night talk shows will have a ball with this one. The possibilities are limitless.

Dude, you are David Copperfield. You are a magician. You can make women levitate, vanish into thin air, saw them in half, and pull rabits out of strange random places. That alone should guarantee some level of interest from the opposite sex. You shouldn't have to (allegedly) take the coochie.

Let's see the smarmy Copperfield "disappear" from this one.

American's First Indian Governor

I don't know enough about this story to say how it's being received, but still, it's pretty amazing nonetheless.

Republican Rep. Bobby Jindal was elected governor of Louisiana on Saturday to become the first Indian-American to lead a U.S. state.

With most of the precincts counted, Jindal, 36, had 54 percent of the vote to win without a runoff in Louisiana's electoral system, where candidates of all parties run in a single primary.

The Oxford-educated Jindal will replace Gov. Kathleen Blanco, a Democrat who did not run again after she was widely criticized for bungled recovery efforts following Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Blanco narrowly defeated Jindal in the 2003 election.

Republican affiliation aside (not that I still wouldn't vote for him of course), I think it's pretty amazing thatJindal won. He's Indian American, not Native American (ie : with the dot, not the feather). Lets not forget, Louisiana is still the Deep South, a place seldom associated with progressive thought. In Post-9-11 America, this is a pretty noteworthy development.

I happened to see this story on CNN this morning, and I was probably more stunned with how this guy talked (like Jeff Foxworthy) than anything else.

If you're from Louisiana and care to weigh in on this one, drop a comment.

Hot Links:

Oprah Talks About Her Thyroid Condition [ABCNews]
'Harry Potter' author: Dumbledore is gay [USAToday]
Woman Accuses Copperfield of Rape [ExtraTV]
Louisiana elects Jindal, first Indian-American governor [Reuters]