I'm having a nice time with beer these days. I never liked it, never drank it, until I started a midlfe passage involving tennis at age 41. After a sweaty round robin, we went for Chinese food and Tsing Tao's all around. Perfect! Refreshing! Magnesium-richer than most quenchers. Beer became the hot weather libation of choice after tennis, bearing in mind that hot weather is relatively nonexistent here in San Francisco where I live. So I indulged quite infrequently, and I was virtually never in the mood for a "brewski" otherwise.

Enter: The Genotype Diet by Peter D'Adamo...What?? Beer as a "weight loss superfood" for the GT6/Nomad? Indeed.

I haven't sampled many brands. Tsing Tao with Chinese food, Sapporo with Japanese (love that bitterness with sushi rolls), Heineken or Becks as the standard default order, as I don't know where else to go. If y'all have faves and picks, share 'em here; if you can clearly articulate your reasons, I just may sample some of these.

If I have trouble with weight, it's not because of beer. It's more the bread/starch problem we B's have. The Nomad/weight loss phenomenon is real for this Nomad. I can vouch for it, having been on a beer-jag lately and dropped some pounds.

Mountain wind, whirling snow
crushed forebears deep below
before the grassy highway gave
itself to history.
Massive heights and continents
together we traverse
trading ties between tribes,
caravans, centuries.

Eastward first then thundering
gusts of horsefire wild beyond
our ancient roots and north,
we sailing forth upon gray waves
Or weaving tentside tales with
dung-fed heated hosting between
dunes, and dunes are oceans endless
bending back to dance with moons.

Ancestral shepherds
not bucolic, flocks a feast for
blood beasts when once we stray
daydreaming milky celestial
distances. Clouds commute across,
sometimes shielding stars from
sight of scouts plotting
path and pasture.

The rains and oh the rains
we welcome changes, leafy
camel thorns, their tired humps
to fatten higher hauling; Leaving
villages and cities sprout
about, we wend the wild
uncharted ways of vastness,
visions and Beyond.

Dr. D'Adamo states that the GT-6/Nomad is particularly "sensitive" to changes in barometric pressure. I confess I haven't understood what he means. But when I consider my tremendous zest for wind and fog, and penchant for weather others consider lugubrious (cf. my 7/20/06 blog: "Lugubreity"), I think I get it. "Sensitive" in a positive way! Boredom with long stretches of unchanging blue California skies. Give me a thunderstorm, by gum!

Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, the temperature is almost always between 50 and 70 degrees Fahrenheit. We have no snow, almost no thundershowers, very low humidity -- in short, few of what most consider "extremes". But within the spectrum we do experience, there are marvellous phenomena.

The first and my favorite is Fog. Great billowing clouds of it blasting eastward from the Pacific. To suffer a July or August 3-day heatwave (read: Temperature over 75F) is to look westward, scanning the low skies, the Bay surface, for a hint of that blessed sheet of downy whiteness sure to blanket the city with its chill. Talk about a pressure change!

The second is: Post-Rain: The dark slate-skyed backdrop to an afternoon sun-bathed ivory cityscape, when all is clear, sharp, and brisk: Perfect for rainbow watching: The Major Kind that arches over the entire city, sometimes double- or even triple- or (I kid you not) quadruple-arched. Another pressure change.

Sometimes we get hail, and sometimes a quake, but within our narrow temperature parameters, it's generally fog and rain that punctuate barometric shifts. Hence we learn to "be sensitive to" those shifts, and by "we", maybe I mean we Nomads! Most people aren't as soul-bound to the phenomena as I am, but I have met quite a few who fell under the spell of them while visiting and decided to relocate here.

The indigenous bloodtype maps show something I've often wondered about: The strange surge in the incidence of B bloodtype in Scotland, as opposed to England, Ireland and Scandinavia. Scots will confirm the greyness and drear of their homeland's climate, but also the thrill of the pounding surf on rocky crags, and the bracing gusty gales across the heath, and you wonder: Why the Nomad taste for such barometric drama? And why the little B outpost in Scotland?

And here's another conundrum for you: Dr. D'Adamo says that multiple sclerosis is more prevalent among those of bloodtype B. Anyone studying that disease locationally has been puzzled about the veritable MS hotbed in the Faeroe Islands (62N, 6-8E) way north of Scotland, north even of the Shetlands.

It may now be apposite for me to have a look at the barometric/weather patterns of the Eurasian steppe, Caucasus and Carpathians, whence My People migrated to America, and where B is customarily found.

B in Scotland?
MS in the Faeroes?
This B and the moody heath?
Melancholy weather, shrouded in mystery: And you thought this was just a diet.

On a radio news-magazine program last night I heard someone described as a "Red-Meat Republican" and I wondered whence this term. Does it refer to "red" as the state-color on an elections-return map? Or are "hard core" Republican party animals considered red meat eaters, while staunch Democrat partisans are vegetarians? (I doubt there are Blue-Meat Democrats!)

It'd be interesting to know whether political party affiliation is at all bloodtype-determined, as well as whether Republicans eat more red meat and Democrats more tofu than their opponents. It's a valid line of enquiry insofar as healthy A's lean toward vegetarianism and healthy O's toward higher red meat consumption. The US population is about 43/43 O and A, with the remaining votes, one could assume, up for grabs on the part of the B and AB minority.

If the beef and shellfish industries should come under fire, will healthy Democrat O's cross the aisle?

Dr. D'Adamo writes of his own need to take carpentry breaks during work days, to enjoy using different parts of his brain so as not to get bogged down in any one activity. He says he thinks A's might particularly need to do this.

As a B, I'd say that also suits me, depending upon the type of work it is. If I'm doing scholarly work, researching and writing, I like huge, uninterrupted blocks of time: Days on end, if possible! But if I'm working with clients and the public, I prefer 3- to 5-hour sessions at most. This introvert can do professional extraversion to beat the band, but wearies of it. I come on like gangbusters and win the sales prizes; I also do sensitive therapeutic work with postpartum women. These types of performance require much quiet contemplation -- call it Carpentry -- intervening. I have enjoyed a bit of movement, as in travel, between clients and am acquainted with many B free-lancers, part-timers and home-workers: Ideal constructs for those with nomadic genes. We touch base with societies and are excellent merchants at the trade fairs, but most of the time we're watching our flocks graze or talking to ourselves on horseback.

The A camp definitely harbors its share of introverts. Perhaps their need to shift gears within the daily cycle, however, is based upon something other than the intro/extravert dialectic; and more on the need to exercise creativity, to -- as Dr. D'Adamo says -- make like Churchill and paint watercolors in wartime. (I think Churchill amidst so much horrible destruction needed not only to zone-out but to create lovely things that spoke of peace.)

O's can burn out by running on all cylinders and driving themselves mercilessly; it's a pattern they assume when young, and it can transform what should have been quiet artistic moments into pressured commissions and high-powered obligations. I know many, many creative O's who savored their creative processes in youth, but who were hard-driving producers, out of habit, by the time they were in their 30's and 40's, having forgotten the former serenity. Their careers can become all about fame and endorsements, and they can lose the Magic. O downtime should include channeled physical workouts. This keeps O on an even, calm keel for the rest of the day; he's worked up his daily sweat already: Now he can let up. Many O extraverts don't acknowledge the possibility for healthy introversion at all, finding fault with less impressive credentials and lighter cv's.

As for the AB's, when we treat of harboring opposites, we're preaching to the choir. With both A and B alleles/antigens, PLUS the O-like catecholamine responses, AB is a little of everything, and it's got to be challenging to be a young AB looking for a niche, a self-definition, an integrated personality.

I find that young people (those under 35/40 or so) struggle with self-acceptance and skills-apportionment more than oldsters, who've figured out how to strike workable balances between their many facets and proclivities. Bloodtype principles can certainly give adolescents and young adults a head-start in self-understanding within a body/mind-affirming paradigm.