Start with that most basic item, the blue jean. SimpleBe has an excellent selection of jeans from size 14 and up at great prices.

It’s hard enough to find decent items in the right sizes, and double difficult to find them at decent prices, so you have to move fast when you see them.

You know how to make things hard on a blogger, don’t you?

Last week, I whalloped you all with this deathless image:

… and you assaulted me right back with six deliciously deranged responses featuring leisure and fashion.

You hit me on my weakest possible sides with geek references galore. You made me cackle multiple times.

Frankly, this one made me waffle more than an IHoP. And while they may not be the ultimate winners, I would like to give special love to Jade Wombat for this delicious combo plate of sci-fi and kidlit:

The Santa robot aliens, after their defeat in London by Dr. Who, invaded America where they were confronted by Dr. Pooh.

… and to our own, our very, very own Gemdiva for this classic movie reference:

Now listen up, I’m hot, cranky and I hate undercover work, so make yourselves comfortable. We are NOT leaving this field until I find out which one of you usual suspects is Kaiser Soze.

In the end, though, there can be but one.

This time, and even though it’s kind of long to be a caption, it’s TeleriB for causing a huge mess on my monitor screen with this gloriously crazed response:

“And when I say ‘Sacks up!” I mean sacks up NOW! Not ‘in just a second,’ not when you feellike it! IS THAT CLEAR, SANTA JOHNSON?”

“Sergeant Bear, yes, Sergeant Bear!”

“Good! Now pick that sack UP and let’s get jolly! We will be adding five additional rooftop sprints this afternoon to help Santa Johnson remember his sack. Santas! Move out!”

Congratulations, Jade Wombat, Gemdiva, and most of all TeleriB! And thanks to everyone who played.

On my first entry I wrote:

The great thing about being the biggest gal in the room is that you can be the BIGGEST gal in the room: the fiercest, the most fabulous, the most confident. With a big attitude you can work looks that would overwhelm our slender sisters and make drag queens want to pull your hair from sheer glam envy.

Now as Manolo for the Big Girl, along with the rest of the Manolosphere, prepares to hang up our heels and close shop forever, I stand by that statement.

When I got the news on Friday, I was too jetlagged to say anything but “well, it was a good run.”

And it was, but it was also something else.

It was the chance to be the voice I wish I’d had when I was but a young fatling, trying to eke out an ounce of self-confidence, and a drop of glamor in an unfriendly world.

I thank you for that. I thank you for every comment (well, almost every comment) every email, every linkback and “you’ve gotta read this” message.

Most of all I thank you for the community. MftBG wasn’t a pretty blog, it didn’t fit nicely into any one category. I was never interested in being part of some fat blog clique or kowtowing to advertisers, but you stuck with me, with one of the smartest, funniest comments sections I’ve had the pleasure to read.

So what to do now?

Well, I don’t know about the rest of the gang, but I’m going to keep working on my book, enjoying life in Mexico and because old habits die hard, writing at my new blog, After Plumcake.

It won’t be the same as the big girl blog, there comes a time when even I have run out of things to say about pretty shoes and being fat, but it will have some of the same flavor, plus a broader range of topics, possibly shirtless footballers and if the past two days are any indication, way more f-bombs.

I hope you’ll join me there.

This is Wilbur Olin Atwater. He was a pioneer in human nutrition, back in the day. He was also one of the major causes of the Great Malnutrition Scare of 1907-21.

You see, Atwater was one of the first people to try to figure out how much of what nutrients people need to function. And like many who are among the first to quantify something… he got a lot of stuff wrong. The amount of protein he decided the average person needs is today known to lead to kidney failure, just as a f”rinstance.

And between his miscalculations, misinterpretation of both his data and poorly gathered information, racially skewed height and weight charts, along with a great big ol’ dollop of cultural aesthetic preferences and prejudice over evidence, the Great Malnutrition Scare of 1907 – 21 began.

In 1907 a variety of economic and food distribution issues I’m not going into for a blog entry I hope to keep reasonably brief resulted in widespread food shortages. People took to the streets to protest for potatoes. No, seriously, I mean that literally.

And about this time, the first major study comparing what people actually ate to Atwater’s ideal for what they ought to be eating was published. People were horrified to discover how few people ate the way Atwater said they ought to in order to be healthy.

To perfect the storm, a New York reporter named Robert Chapin asked chemist Frank Underhill to calculate the amount of money a poor family would have to spend per day to have a nutritionally adequate diet. Underhill used Atwater’s figures and came up with the startling news that a poor family would have to spend $0.22 a day per adult male. Compared to wages, there was no way a poor family could feed itself adequately at that expensive rate.

Chapin used the figures Underhill gave him to argue for wage reform so that poor laborers could have the money they needed to feed themselves reasonably. But other writers latched onto the same figures to argue that the United States was in the midst of a malnutrition epidemic. By 1911, the Underhill figures were used in a study that claimed that despite the fact that higher paid steelworkers appeared healthy enough, didn’t have ailments associated with poverty, and seemed to have plenty of food on their tables… nearly all were malnourished.

In short, when the figures did not fit the facts, people assumed the facts were wrong.

Something, clearly, had to be done. There was much ballyhooing and wringing of hands. And then came the clarion cry of ‘won’t somebody think of the children?’ in all its glory.

Remember those height and weight charts I mentioned earlier? Yes, those were hastily compiled using mostly native-born children of Anglo-centric origin attending private schools their parents had to be relatively wealthy to send them to  in order to determine the ‘correct’ height and weight of an average healthy child.

In short order by comparing inner city New York immigrant children to this standard, it was quickly determined that thousands upon thousands of them were seriously malnourished.

Massaging the figures by removing age from the calculations didn’t help much. It did reduce the overall rate of ‘malnutriton’ but suddenly showed that a high percentage of tall but thin native-born Anglo-based children were the worst nourished of the lot. And then a study of students at two private prep schools indicated there was a higher rate of malnourishment there than at an East Side inner city public school.

Clearly height and weight couldn’t be the whole story. Could it?

In 1915 a new standard emerged for determining which children were and were not malnourished: the Dumferline Scale. This one included not only height and weight, but eyesight, breathing, muscularity, mental alertness and rosiness of complexion into account. Can you see a couple big problems with this list already?

Once the data for each child was taken, they were divided into four categories:

1) excellent

2) adequate

3) needs attention and supervision

4) requires immediate hospitalization

Not only were many of the criteria for determining nutritional health woefully skewed to an Anglo-centric scale, they were also poorly defined. The choice of what category to place a particular child in, too, was vague and open to broad interpretation. Under pressure to identify more cases of malnutrition, doctors and nurses often played it safe by putting children they considered on the cusp into the more dire category available.

Despite all these obvious deficiencies, the Dumferline Scale was adopted by New York City’s Health Department in December 1915. Other large cities quickly followed suit.

The results were sadly predictable. Malnutrition rates skyrocketed. In fact, they more than doubled nearly overnight.

Clearly the epidemic was too severe and too widespread to be handled by individual – and often expensive – nutrition clinics. No, this would have to be handled in the school lunch programs nutritionists and reformers all over the country had been clamoring for. With well over 800,000 New York schoolchildren identified as ‘below the normal standard’ of nutrition – nearly a quarter million of whom were significantly malnourished (aka: category three), clearly this was a necessary step.

Of course, these programs were still controversial and claims of malnutrition which ranged dramatically depending on which expert was consulted didn’t help get the idea across. School lunch would have to wait until it became more economically attractive and less controversial in the 1920′s.

So parents who believed the hype and feared for their children’s health because of their short stature, tendency to be thin, or lack of ‘rosy’ cheeks – and who could afford to do so – sent their children to nutrition clinics and listened to quack ‘experts’ in the subject. For instance, Dr. William R.P. Emerson who worked solely off the height/weight charts and championed a method called ‘measured feeding’ combined with assuring little girls they would never be beautiful and boys they would never be athletic if they didn’t gain weight. He further recommended automatic removal of tonsils and adenoids, as well as prescribing that ‘underweight’ children attend school only half time and avoid all outside activities… particularly music.

In short, the Great Malnutrition Scare mostly caused a lot of panic and hand-wringing. It caused a lot of frightened parents to try anything they half heard or read to get their children healthy. It encouraged the ‘clean your plate at all costs’ mentality that has screwed up so many relationships with food since. It poured public monies down a rabbit hole with no public payoff in improved nutritional standards, better understanding of the causes, consequences, or cures of malnutrition, or even programs to help feed those at risk. All of those programs came long after the initial panic died down and because of other fears.

Is anyone here seeing some scary parallels?

I know I am.

It’s time once again to play Twistie’s Sunday Caption Madness. You all know how this works. I post a picture that’s lying awake nights longing desperately for a funny caption or seven. You provide said captions via the comments function. Next week I declare a winner and we all break into a merry chorus of  the Yes, We Have No Bananas Blues.

This week’s image comes from the depths of the Where’s Salvador Dali When You Need Him File, and it looks a little like this:

Ready… set… snark!

Thanksgiving is over. All that’s left over are, well, a few leftovers. And, if we’re lucky, some good memories. Mr. Twistie and I wound up having a different holiday than we’d expected. The friend we were planning to visit came down with a nasty bronchial sludge she didn’t care to share, so we stayed home and made a few adjustments. We watched old movies, I made a delicious dinner, we ate until we were happily sated, he played a little guitar, and we finished our day playing with Jake the cat.

All in all, it was a good day. The memories are, indeed, happy.

The day after Thanksgiving I have a ritual. When I get up, I have coffee and pumpkin pie for breakfast… and then I don’t go shopping. When I worked retail I quickly learned that Black Friday and Christmas Eve are typically the angriest shopping days of the year and so I avoid buying anything more emotionally charged than a bottle of milk on those two days. Okay, we did break down and get Jake some crunchies, but we went to a grocery store that wasn’t in a mall.

Today I will most likely do my traditional change of holiday seasons activity:

I’ll watch The Nightmare Before Christmas. It never fails to get me into the right mood for the next few weeks.

How about all of you? How do you make the transition from Thanksgiving to the Christmas/Hanukkah/Solstice/Kwanzaa/et al season? Do you have a tradition at all? I’d love to hear what you do.

But then I was like this:

On behalf of Twistie, The Manolo and a murderous Ann Sheridan, I’d like to wish all my American compatriots a happy and strife-free Thanksgiving!

I have always been a big proponent of youthful excess. I wore tasteful, elegant evening gowns to all my teenage soirees and now I regret it. Why? Because now that’s all I can wear, at least without suffering some unwanted social repercussions.

It is with fondness –and full admission I might wear this for my quince-themed birthday party next year– that I present to you the latest object for Whisky Tango Foxtrot.

You all remember the rules, right? Give me a situation, the kookier the better, where this would be an appropriate outfit. To make things a bit more challenging, this time we’ll rule out references to quinceañeras, Cyndi Lauper and Gay Pride Parades.

Hit me with your best shot! Fire away-ay-ay.

Modernista Architecture: further proof that peyote is a hell of a drug

It is not, however, home to many big girls. Do they not exist? Are they simply not allowed out of doors? I’m not sure.

I’d like to report on the elegance of Spanish gorditas, but the handful I’ve seen so far seem to suffer the same fate as many of their American sisters: cheap clothes, especially the ubiquitous cheap graphic top with tackazoid metallic screen prints. Sigh.

I suspect it’s a question of supply. Their access to stylish plus-size clothing must be even more limited than in the US.

Sure there’s Marina Rinaldi, but I popped into their store on the Passeig de Gràcia, Barcelona’s equivalent to Rodeo Drive, and although the clothes were beautifully made, they do err on the side of elegantly mumsy with disheartening frequency.

That being said, I have noticed a certain out-and-about uniform here in the heart of Catalunya.

Scarves. Always.
From the sweet young things trundling to language class to the stopped-counting-after-Franco doyennes walking their blue-rinsed terriers along the Carrer d’Aragó, long but tidy woven scarves abound. The older women tend to wear them neatly knotted in a cravat while the younger set goes for a more casual double wrap drape around the neck.

Fit is Everything
In the US there seems to be two fits: painted on or falling off. Most of us do our best to navigate the middle ground, but ours is often a tale of woe, with a top clinging like a needy ex one day only to be stretched out beyond recognition after the first wash. Although skinny jeans are still the pants of choice, they’re merely close-fitted, not denim deathgrips. Tops can be loose or skim without clinging and sleeves end where sleeves ought to end, not a foot south of the wrist.

Modesty
I’ve got to say, this one threw me a little. Even outside their fashion institute, the cuts and colors were surprisingly conservative, much more along the lines of DC than New York or, God Forbid, LA.

Cleavage was virtually non-existent even on warm days and when it made an appearance, it was incidental, not integral to the look. As for speculum length minis, I’ve only seen two: both worn by drunk British girls. Which isn’t to say there weren’t short skirts, but they were paired with matching opaque tights –usually black for both– and loose fitting tops.

Neutrals
Another surprise, and I suspect a seasonal one. Barcelona embraces a very Donna Karan color palette with grays from heather to charcoal, soft browns from fawn to dark chocolate, muted pinks and blues and every possible permutation of beige. It might not sound exciting, but it looks fantastic. Bolder colors –if hunter green and rust are bold– come from the omnipresent scarves. The makeup is muted too, and women, especially women of a certain age, looked the world better for it.

What to wear in Barcelona to fit in with the locals:

• A loose but not sloppy thin sweater or knit top over a slimmer knit or button down shirt in complimentary neutrals. Lightweight moto-cut twill jacket if it’s chilly at night.
• Long woven scarf in an interesting color or pattern
• Dark slim-cut denim or twill pants either paired with boots or ballet flats. Precariously high heels look out of place for day, though I’ve seen a pair or two at night.
• Hair is either long and slightly unkempt or chic bordering on New Wave and accessories are about what you’d see in the states with big bags abounding, although there’s little to no 80′s or 90′s hipster irony, thanks be to God.