As a child of the late '70s and early '80s, I can't deny a soft spot in my heart for the "two Coreys": Feldman and Haim. So it was a genuine shock for me when I learned Wednesday of Corey Haim's death at age 38, presumably from an overdose of prescription drugs.

But as with Heath Ledger, Brittany Murphy, and Michael Jackson, we'll remember Haim not for his sad, untimely death, but for his public persona, and the characters he played in movies like Lucas, The Lost Boys, and License to Drive. Let's take a look at Haim at age 15 in Lucas, just two years before the actor said he tried pot for the first time, on the set of The Lost Boys. Before long, he was on cocaine, then crack, and then meds. Hard to believe watching this gem from 1986.

Cyclists of the world, rejoice! After years of asking, petitioning, and finger crossing, Google Maps has added a bicycling map option.

Later this afternoon, at the 10th Annual Bike Summit in Washington, D.C., the folks at Google Maps will announce the finer points of the new program, as well as the 150 cities in which it will first be made available. Though a few cities have had independently-produced interactive cycling map access for awhile now (my hometown of Portland, OR being one) the Google Bicycling Maps is further reaching and offers more handy features than its predecessors.

For instance, similarly to the driving and walking directions on Google Maps, once you type in your starting point and your desired destination, the service selects a route and provide estimated cycling times. Bicycling Maps gives you several options for your route, even steers you away from freeways and busy streets and toward bike lanes. Not only that, the program even helps you avoid hills -- great news if you're a complete incline-a-phobe like me. (Of course, if you aren't, you can always program your route to include hills. I wouldn't recommend it though.)

We can assume the hope for this new Google Maps function is not only that already active cyclists will find it useful, but that it will encourage more people to hang up the car keys and grab that bike helmet. I have to admit that if it helps me avoid those hills as promised, I might have to start traveling on two wheels instead of four. What do you think?

[Image: Gadgetwise Blog -- NY Times]

While at the gym yesterday, I noticed a news headline on one of the televisions exclaim that women who drink alcohol gain less weight than those of us who don't. Say what? I practically fell off the treadmill (a machine I was on in part to burn calories from drinking alcohol over the weekend) in surprise. As a woman, this goes against just about everything I've ever been told about drinking, that I should watch my alcohol intake unless I want to put on pounds (something men are rarely told, but that's for a different blog post). Could it be true?

A new study from Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital tells us that yes, it could be. The results (gathered over 13 years from a sample of nearly 20,000 women) show that the risk of becoming overweight or obese decreases as alcohol consumption increases, even when factors such as smoking, fruit and vegetable consumption, and physical activity are taken into account. The full results of the study can be found in the latest Archives of Internal Medicine.

Now this may be good news for those of us who like to drink on occasion, but there's no reason to go hitting the bottle just yet. "It won't change recommendations for my patients, I can say that for certain," Scott Kahan, M.D., the co-director of the George Washington University Weight Management Program, in Washington, D.C. told CNN. "If you don't drink, there's no reason to start."

But, he adds, "I think [the study] suggests that there's no need to quit or avoid alcohol if it's something you enjoy."

CBS News had a similar message for their Early Show viewers yesterday:

OK, so I won't be investing in a new wine cellar anytime soon, and I probably shouldn't cancel that gym membership. Still, in an era where we're told more often than not that the foods and drinks we enjoy are slowly killing us, it's nice to get some good news. Now, pass the wine please.

Tobacco is big business. We all know that. But in the U.S. laws have gotten pretty strict in governing how tobacco companies are allowed to market their products, particularly when it comes to children. Back when I was growing up, in the 1980s, Joe Camel was the ubiquitous face of Camel cigarettes. New laws forced Camel to get rid of the cartoon camel, with his fast cars and sexy girlfriends, because he was putting too "friendly" a face on smoking, too likely to appeal to kids.

And that was more than a decade ago (Joe Camel was put to rest in 1997). Flash-forward to 2010. In the Yunnan province in China, school children are issued uniforms plastered with ads, including one for Marlboro. In a country that already has 350 million smokers -- 50 million more people than the entire U.S. population -- what kind of future does this brand of marketing portend for Chinese youth?

Smoking may be in decline worldwide, but shouldn't countries with enormous smoking populations be far more vigilant in maintaining that trend? Instead, it seems that China, for one, is merely bucking it. Twenty years from now, these children will be paying the price.

[Image: weallpaytheprice.com]

On March 2nd, the EPA declared New York City's Gowanus Canal a Superfund site. Getting on the fast-track for federal funds to clean up Brownstone Brooklyn's most polluted waterway is a good thing for local residents, right? The answer depends on whom you ask.

The Christian Science Monitor notes EPA administrator Lisa Jackson's "public commitment to environmental justice" as fueling an ongoing push to get long-delayed potential Superfund cleanups moving forward. The Gowanus Superfund designation comes in response to a request from the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (NYSDEC) for the EPA to approve it.

The New York Post says Brooklyn community groups and several locally elected officials support the designation, which will guarantee the remediation of more than a century and a half of industrial pollution in the two-mile-long waterway that cuts north-south through the middle of some of the borough's trendiest neighborhoods. It will be a ten-year cleanup effort that may cost up to half a billion dollars, and the EPA will expect a healthy financial participation in the effort from New York City taxpayers.

That's not sitting well with NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who opposed the NYSDEC request. That's because the Bloomberg administration has been independently touting its own remediation plan which it says would be faster, as well as courting private developers to produce big-ticket canal-side residential projects. At least two of those developers have been promoting a grassroots effort to force NYSDEC to rescind its request to EPA.

Prior to the designation, critics siding with the mayor's office warned that the Superfund label would scare away developers and virtually make certain that nothing economically useful would be built anywhere near the Gowanus Canal for many years to come. As the Post notes, that's exactly what came to pass: Private developers have now announced the cancellation of their Gowanus Canal projects. The city will still go ahead with its own, public "Gowanus Green" subsidized-housing project next to the canal, but it's not surprising since public housing has existed next to the canal for decades, anyway.

No one can argue that a waterway where heavy pollutants are measured in parts per hundred instead of parts per million isn't ripe for environmental remediation--and fast. But equity is a bit hard to figure out when you've got local, state, and national governments battling one another for the right to be responsible for the cleanup. Which is fundamentally better, a slow but guaranteed federal cleanup that might dampen a major city's ability to redevelop a central area at an economically critical time? Or a faster municipal cleanup that might allow local residents to more quickly reap the benefit of an improved property tax base--as long as the cleanup didn't end up derailed by political infighting?

There's no clear answer, though New York City's experience will now become a test case of the first option. Major American cities with potential Superfund sites should be paying critical attention to how this plays out in New York to help determine the best course of action to improve environmental justice in their own backyards.

The Gowanus Canal used to be in my backyard, too. During my eight years as a Brooklynite, I lived half a mile from the Canal. I used to love the late-night, distance-dampened sounds of barge horns honking and drawbridges clanking shut, and the occasionally caffeinated smell from the canal-side coffee-roasting factory that used to waft over my neighborhood. I was warned at an early age never to dip a toe in the murky water, though. If the Superfund designation has the economically dampening effect local critics fear, another generation of New York City children may grow up hearing the same warning.

[Image: Edward Sudentas]