In my recent post on the Academy of the Sierras, I promised an exposé on the fattiness of restaurant food. Here's what I meant:

The problem with restaurants for the person watching their weight is twofold. First, the portions are far too large. Yes, all portions - I'm not just talking about inhuman feed baggeries like The Cheesecake Factory here. Second, a lot of the food is a lot fattier and more caloric than one would expect, given what it looks like. For the average chubby eater who wants to eat something tasty and relatively restrained (that is, they refuse to be corraled by the designated 'low fat' options), restaurants are therefore terrifying obstacle courses. You don't believe me? Well, how about the Chicken Tarragon and Field Greens Sandwich at Au Bon Pain, a nationally growing chain of supposedly artisanal "bakeries". Sounds relatively healthy right - chicken breast, herbs, and greenery? And it should be. But in reality, as you'll see if you click here, the sandwich has an astounding 800 calories and 42 grams of fat. That, you should know, is 240 calories and 12 grams of fat more than a Big Mac, almost twice as many calories and more than twice the fat of a Quarter Pounder with Cheese, and even beats a Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese. This is serious stuff.

The real question, however, is how they managed to make a relatively innocuous sandwich that outrageously fatty. So I set out to make my own the other day, using FoodTV's calorie and fat counter as a guide.

I started by grilling a chicken breast on my cast iron grill, setting off the smoke alarm, and using 141 calories and 3 Grams of fat - I shouldn't even count that much, because Au Bon Pain clearly uses less chicken, but let's go with it. The quarter tablespoon of extra virgin olive oil I brushed on the chicken was more than enough to make it crisp and juicy, and brought me up another 50 calories and 4 grams of fat, rounding up. A quarter of ABP's large foccacia gets me another 2.25 grams of fat and 185 calories. That brings me to a running total of 376 calories and 9.25 grams of fat. The tarragon and the field greens are essentially calorie-less, but let's throw another 50 on for good measure, and we're still at a mere 426. There isn't any cheese in the sandwich (I asked) so all that leaves is mayonnaise. For my sandwich to equal ABP's in fat and calories, I would have to add an astonishing 3 tablespoons of Hellman's (100 calories/11g of fat per tb), way more than I've ever put on a sandwich, and way more than ABP adds. If you added a little mustard and one full tablespoon of mayo instead, you'd still be at about 20 grams of fat, and under 600 calories for a clearly larger sandwich. So how does ABP do it? I haven't the slightest idea.

But what I do know is that that one sandwich contains more than half the fat and a substantial portion of the calories someone should eat in a day. Now, I'm not a calorie counter, usually. Cheeses, cream, great swathes of pork with back fat - I eat them all. But that's because when I cook at home I know exactly how much and what I'm eating, and I have no reason to eat the entire plate if I know I've had enough. But at a restaurant, uninhibited by the need to keep some for tomorrow, encouraged by the sign of roasted chicken and field greens, I'll eat that entire pitifully unsatisfying sandwich, over and over again. And then wonder why the pounds keep coming on and on. In any case, the above is why I don't often go to restaurants, and haven't since I discovered how I personally ought to eat 7 years ago. I don't claim that I've got all the answers - but when people wonder where our obesity problem is coming from, this is at least one source.

I've had some very interesting responses to my passing inquiry over the weekend about the ability of states to divide into other states. One reader points me out to the snopes site, which discusses, inter alia, Article IV section 3:

New states may be admitted by the Congress into this union; but no new states shall be formed or erected within the jurisdiction of any other state; nor any state be formed by the junction of two or more states, or parts of states, without the consent of the legislatures of the states concerned as well as of the Congress.

Should the semicolon be understood as separating two distinct commands - as appears to be the case with the first semicolon of Article IV, Section 3, separating the grant of power to Congress to admit new States from the (two separate?) limitations on the power of Congress to admit States in the special case (cases?) of States formed by junction or separation, out of existing States? If so, even formal, legal-fiction consent does not matter: The limitation on admission of States carved from the "jurisdiction" of an existing State is a flat prohibition, not a description of circumstances for which consent is required; the consent proviso only applies to new States created by the junction of two or more existing States, or parts thereof, and thus cannot save poor West Virginia (and probably cannot save Kentucky, Maine, and possibly Vermont, either) from unconstitutionality. Indeed, even if the semicolon is merely an overgrown comma, and not a hard clause-break, the same conclusion might follow under the grammatical convention that a qualifying phrase (usually) modifies only the immediately preceding antecedent phrase. Both grammar rules and punctuation marks thus appear to conspire against the constitutionality of West Virginia.

This is perhaps not (quite) as crazy as it seems, if one considers the Philadelphia Convention's obsession with the rule of equal state representation in the Senate and the care the Framers took to build anti-circumvention rules into the Constitution to preserve this crucial compromise. If big States could somehow convince Congress to assent, couldn't they deal themselves more senators simply by dividing up into smaller States? (Imagine Utah today, divided into four, multiplying conservative Republican senators!)

But is Article IV, Section 3 really a reflection of such constitutional paranoia? And could Utah and Nevada not conspire to circumvent such an anticircumvention rule anyway, simply by conjoining pieces of their States to each other? For that matter, couldn't Pennsylvania lend an acre or two to West Virginia, in order to circumvent such a strict formal requirement? Or is the fact that an anti-circumvention rule is not conspiracy-proof of little probative value?

More centrally: Can the meaning of the Constitution, and the number of stars properly on the United States Flag, actually turn on whether a semicolon should be read more like a comma or a period, under late-eighteenth-century rules of style and syntax? Did the Framers intend such an outcome (and does their intent matter)? Could the Committee of Style have smuggled such a change into the text? If so, does its success count, or not?

Gabe Mendel discusses Senator Harry Reid's attacks on Justice Thomas, and tries to puzzle out why Senator Reid is differentiating so strongly between Justices Thomas and Scalia. He suggests age.

I have another suggestion; Justice Thomas is known for his skepticism toward stare decisis in constitutional cases, where Justice Scalia has expressed more willingness to abide by decisions he thinks are wrong so long as they produce "workable" standards. Could Reid be laying the groundwork for saying that Bush's next nominee can be as conservative as he likes so long as he adduces sufficient worship for the principle of adhering to certain Warren Court innovations?

Gabe Mendel has created a too-cool list of every book he owns (via Anthony Rickey I see he did this using something called Book Collector-- what do you get for the friend who reads everything?). I'm very tempted to follow suit, but too many of my books currently live in an Indiana closet-- maybe if my archival side emerges when I home for Christmas.

Meanwhile, Amber Taylor has begun keeping a list of all of the books she's read since starting college. Co-blogger Amy has a list that starts in 2004; on the advice of Jim Leitzel I started one that lists all books that I read since starting at Chicago. [N.B. Amy and I have a wager going about who will read more books this calendar year-- between a distracted summer and frantic fall I am six books behind, and likely to stay there. I mention this only because we have agreed to put our lists to a blog-vote in the event there is a dispute about whether all the books really "count".]

Some people criticize such list-keeping, perhaps because it distracts from the actual task of reading, perhaps because it rewards reading new tripe over re-reading old loves, perhaps because it hardly matters if one has read a book if one has forgotten about it. These are fair complaints.

Personally, I find such listkeeping invaluable both because it helps to track my life-- Oh, yes, I was reading Ada when I was in Pittsburgh debating whether to . . . etc. Also, such a list makes it easier to respond for requests to recommend recent favorite reads off-the-cuff. Finally, it means that I feel slightly less of a twinge of guilt for whiling away hours reading a book that could have spent some other way-- it is bizarre, I know, to feel satisfaction from simply listing something, but there is comfort in a catalog.

Even on a weekend, too many things sprung up to blog about, and I know I won't get to them all. Here are a few passing thoughts:

Gary Becker and Richard Posner, uber-geniuses both, will blog tomorrow. [UPDATE: They're here .] Has a blog ever been so widely heralded? I think not.

Amber Taylor, Matthew Yglesias, Phoebe Maltz have further thoughts on Natalie Portman, and we collectively wonder what has whipped Jonathan Last into such a froth. [My previous post is here; UPDATE: Ross Douthat, who started it all, has more.]

Yglesias also mentions Jacob Levy's "secret sin" theory of politics-- that people push hardest to regulate that which they themselves are tempted to do. When I was taking my driver's license written exam, I was particularly baffled by the question about whether it was legal to turn your blinkers on and throw the car into reverse on the interstate when you've missed your exist. It had never even occurred to me, though I've thought of it many times since. On the bus today, I watched a car on the interstate do precisely that.

Miss Manners has a column championing the handkerchief. On that score she is only a week behind Crescat.
Adam Gitlin speculates on the pros and cons of a Texas secession (mostly pros, he concludes). Meanwhile, talking Con Law late one night this weekend, I started wondering-- some dim portions of my memory of high school recollects that Texas reserves the power to break up into four states and send four separate delegations to the Senate. This proviso isn't written into my handy pocket Constitution so it must consist of either federal law or state constitution/law. So: If the Republicans could win the house, presidency, and a super-majority of the senate, is there anything that would stop them from passing federal/state law agreeing to break, say, Utah, up into 4,444 states each of which would be entitled to send their own Senators (and one representative apiece) for an equal vote? Obviously there are some mega-norms that block off this tactic (and many other tactics), and a good thing, too. But any Constitutional text that limits this gambit?

I find that I rather enjoy composing posts like this, with one paragraph per topic. Will this spell the beginning of a new blogging style?