The winners and the losers

• Loser: The latest report from a division of the Centers for Disease Control shows unmistakably that, as a nation, Americans are getting taller and fatter. The average adult male today weighs almost 25 pounds more than an adult male in the early 1960s, and the average adult woman weighs about 24 pounds more. We're also about an inch taller, on average.

The answer to all this is simple, Americans simply need to focus more on whatever it is they're doing to get taller.

• Winner: Utah's governor and attorney general have decided to take the issue of high-level nuclear waste storage to the U.S. Supreme Court. Specifically, they're challenging a lower-court ruling that said states like Utah don't have any say in whether they turn into dumping grounds for the stuff. The federal government gets to decide.

We hope the court, with its 5-4 majority typically favoring state's rights, will once and for all put an end to the threat of a nuclear waste repository in the Skull Valley west of Salt Lake City.

• Loser: The ABC television network has decided to drop the Miss America pageant, leaving the annual beauty show (does anyone really buy its claim to being a "scholarship pageant"?) without a television home. We would consider this, along with the show's sinking ratings, a winner, but people may not be abandoning it because they feel it objectifies women. Rather, we suspect they are abandoning it for more blatant forms of objectification available on other programs. Frankly, Miss America seems rather tame and quaint compared to much that is on television these days, and that is the real loser.