Hey, this week we’re out on schedule with our week’s collection of miscellaneous bits and pieces. Don’t tell us there’s no such thing as progress. Or discipline. Or time on our hands.

  • Years ago, we read a reference to the preposterous number of calories chocked into a single serving of pecan pie. The author called it “nine-mile pie” because that’s how many miles you’d need to run to burn off the calories. (Or of course you could just let it ride, and by letting it ride, we mean you would do nothing, and the sweet pecan goodness would adhere to your hips and gut until the next time you got food poisoning or flu or were trapped in a cabin during a blizzard.) The point is, we never forgot the caloric significance of pecan pie. Equating food with the amount of exercise needed to balance is sticks with you (like the pie itself). This was demonstrated again in a recent study in a low-income Baltimore neighborhood. On the soda coolers of four convenience stores, researchers posted signs explaining that a person would need to jog for 50 minutes to burn off the calories in a single can of soda. Sales fell by 50 percent, while sales showed no effect from signs that listed the calorie count of the soda. Apparently people are thrown by the sequence of soda=calories=exercise, but they can get the connection if you make it shorter, as in soda=jogging. The study has special relevance today: new federal health care legislation mandates that restaurants and vending machines label food and drink with their calorie counts. And so now we know it won’t matter.
  •  On a related matter, who says it would take 50 minutes? If a 250-calorie soda takes 50 minutes to jog away, that means you only lose 300 calories an hour. Our activity calculator says a 150-pound person would job off 476 calories an hour. Even a 100-pound person would burn more than 300. So, once again, trust but verify.
  •  In a bit of cornball “service” journalism, a group of Forbes staffers parlayed their mainstream media jobs into some great outdoor swag by promising to use it during a slumber party/sleep out on the roof of what we’re guessing is Forbes World HQ. Dorky pictures are here, and not worth your time, except that we’re pretty sure these photos were taken while a larger group of more passionate people were camped out not far away on Wall Street. The contrast is stark, especially when we see the Forbes folks drinking champagne and eating off a while linen tablecloth.
  • Oddly, Forbes also has a pretty interesting piece by Jon Bruner, in which he reviews outdoor gear, including solar chargers and GPS receivers. He also gives a nod to made-in-America products from Cascade, SureFire, and Western Mountaineering. He notes that Point6 recently moved its sock manufacturing from China to the United States.

Photo of seafood soup (shrimp and squid) at a family restaurant in Jakarta, Indonesia by Sakurai Midori, via Wikimedia Commons.