It was my full intention to get completely away from health advice and return to safer and more interesting topics, like the weather. I was going to encourage our Parisian correspondent, Soleil, to throw another log on the fire and enjoy the northern European snow storm that’s otherwise snarling life in the Old World. Give us a report if you have a chance; there are plenty of people here from the upper tier of the U.S. who can, by now, give you lots of tips for coping.

Yes, I was going to talk about the weather, but there was other big news yesterday. I’m not going to concern us with exact numbers, because they’re all over the internet, but scientists yesterday released results of CT scans they’d performed on about 150 mummies from different parts of the world, all of whom lived several thousand years ago. The big news was, they found plaque in the arteries of a significant number of the mummies, about what you’d expect to find in a like sample of modern humans. This is getting a lot of attention, because it has become accepted that heart disease is a disease of modern civilization. Didn’t I predict, just yesterday morning, there’d be big news in the area of nutrition and health!? Well, the big news might be, diet doesn’t have anything to do with it! Anyway, that’s one possibility, but don’t count on it. Seriously, I’m not sure what conclusions can be drawn from a small sample of neolithic carcasses. The list of possible confounding variables (Those who care will know what I’m talking about!) has got to be through the roof. Still, it’s fun! Let the mummy jokes begin.