Short Takes: News From All Over: September 30, 2004

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Body Building: An Old Hotel Now Attracts Therapists and Bodyworkers
By Elizabeth Zimmer, The Village Voice
The St. Denis Hotel, on 11th street and Broadway was built in 1853, when the West Village neighborhood surrounding Grace Church was once a fancy shopping district. Ulysses S. Grant used it as headquarters after the Civil War, and Alexander Graham Bell gave the first New York demonstration of the telephone there, in 1877. But now, the hotel has gone residential, and holistic. Increasingly, the building has become home to offices for designers, small publishers, nutritionists, homeopaths, smoking cessation counselors, and, overwhelmingly, psychotherapists and bodyworkers, happy to fill the single-room spaces with massage tables, stability balls, and the more complex paraphernalia of the contemporary health and fitness industry. -- Elizabeth Dwoskin
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0438/mindbodyspirit.php

McDonalds Breaks Its Promise to Get Rid of Transfats
By Staff, transfreeamerica.org
In September 2002, McDonalds's President Mike Roberts announced that his company would be switching to frying with less partially hydrogenated shortening by February 2003. Called Transfats by the TransfreeAmerica campaign, these artificial fats are unnecessary in the food supply and promote heart disease. The company's chief nutritionist told ABC News that the new oil was a 'win-win for our consumers, a better nutrition profile with the same great taste.' Well, February 2003 has come and gone, but it looks like Transfats are here to stay. Sign an online letter to get these unnecessary and unhealthy fats out of the diet of so many Americans. -- Elizabeth Dwoskin
http://www.transfreeamerica.org/

The Quest for the Universal Song
By David Soldier and Nina Mankin, Diacenter
Remember Komar & Melamid's project to render the world's most wanted painting by averaging the preferences of its viewers a priori to the creation of the piece? If it works for the visual arts, it should almost certainly work for music as well, right? Enter the quest for the most universally appealing song. In Spring 1996, approximately 500 visitors to Diacenter's website took the survey to write music and lyrics for the Most Wanted and Most Unwanted songs. The results? The most wanted song is something like a pop song of today, short, not too loud, and a male and female vocalist singing R&B or rock type lyrics about love. The most unpopular song is 25 minutes long, veers wildly between loud and quiet sections, between fast and slow tempos, and features timbres of extremely high and low pitch. Ironically, the only item to be equally favored and disfavored by audience members was 'intellectual stimulation.' -- Elizabeth Dwoskin
http://www.diacenter.org/km/musiccd.html

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