The Herald has a story today talking about the new proposed Public Health Bill and its plan to ban the advertising of “unhealthy” food on television in yet another effort to combat obesity.

What a lot of crap.

For starters, the focus (as usual) appears to be on children, and I don’t think I’ve ever met a kid who goes shopping for his or her own food. That’s right - once again someone is calling for a ban of something to benefit children, and once again the actual responsibility lies with parents.

I had written a long rant about sports nutrition and that teaching people about it would help to encourage better habits; but let’s forget that. I’d rather summerise by saying that we should stop banning everything and start encouraging some self responsibility FFS.

(Or, have I got it wrong… maybe Wii Fit is the real answer?)

Gameplanet’s editor Daniel Cheer spoke to Tim Neale, presenter for “The Wire” on 95bFM today, in regards to Grand Theft Auto IV and censorship issues. Tim also interviewed Gordon Copeland, an independent Member of Parliament, who is calling for the game to be banned outright.

Copeland’s poor arguments for his cause will likely be enjoyed by gamers, as he advises multiple times that the game has “no redeeming features” and suggests that it is a simulator for learning how to kill in a similar way that a simulator trains astronauts to go into space.

Interestingly he doesn’t call for any other R18 material to be banned, despite his claims that children getting their hands on the game are his primary concern and there is certainly a lot of material out there which is inappropriate for children. Oh, and he also calls the game “Grand Auto Theft Number 4″ at one point.

You can listen to both interviews over at Gameplanet.

I can’t remember the last time I opened a phone book… and yet the things still get delivered to me, no questions asked. I’m not even in the damn thing.

In this modern world where a large percentage of the population has an Internet connection, is it about time we started “opting in” to phone books?

The Herald has a story today saying that the Public Health Association wants the Government to make fruits and vegetables GST-free.

I’ve often questioned why it is so much cheaper for me to buy processed sugar/fat snacks than it is to buy vegetables, so I think this is a great idea. The question no doubt will be weather or not the government will recoup its costs down the track… with the theory being that a healthier population will need less healthcare.

I suspect that in reality the change would primarily make the goods cheaper for existing consumers rather than causing a massive market shift - a little over $2 off a $20 purchase isn’t exactly the deal of the century, and packaged snacks are still likely to be cheaper - but it would be a positive step and I’d like to see it happen.

Dylan has an interesting post on his blog today about the “keep it simple, stupid” concept and how his team is applying it to the new happysheep newsletter, which debuted in inboxes everywhere earlier today.

Now, I’ve always been a strong supporter of using text e-mail over HTML in my daily e-mails - despite the fact that more and more of the Internet population seem to disagree with me - but we’ve been sending very graphical HTML Gameplanet Store Newsletters for years and it’s very much a habit that, so far, we haven’t tried to break.

With that said, one of the things on our list for our new site is a newsletter renovation. I think that we should take a leaf out of happysheep’s book and simplify so that the newsletters are 1) easier to write; 2) easier to read; 3) hopefully less likely to be filtered as spam and 4) easier to prepare.

Another thing we need to redo is the structure of our actual mailing lists. At the moment, if you’ve bought a PC Game, you will receive PC Game e-mails. That’s more or less how you subscribe to the list. What I’d like to do is give site users more options so that they can manage what they do and don’t receive without manually asking us to subscribe them, and without having to purchase anything first.

I’d love to hear thoughts on this…