Shopping is Ultra-Creepy

If you have been shopping in a retail store lately you have experienced the super-creepy disingenuous greeting ceremony. When I went looking for a new television I was "greeted" by three people before I made it to the Tee Vee section and the whole experience skeeved me out. An untidy metalhead, a latin gal with bigger rings and nails than I had ever seen and an afro'd tuff who snuck off to text someone in an abandoned aisle. All offered to help me. When I found the Tee Vee I wanted they were out of stock. I asked to buy the floor model and two of them went off to axe a manager or something and I seized my chance to ex-scape.

My next attempt was at another big box chain and I tried a different tactic. When the greeter accosted me kindly - I accosted him kindly right back. I already knew what I was looking for so I insisted he lead me to my desired item, which he did in broad, trepidatious steps. Since I was already being led by a greeter the others grazed off to the sides, texting on their sidekicks and watching for management. We found it on the shelf and I pointed at it and told him to carry it to the check out for me, which he would not do, but whatever.

Since that time a Staple's has opened near my house, which is kind of cool for me since I used to love the old zines and would spend hours in a Kinko's with zine pals copying and stapling. The static smell of copiers and white out is a nostalgic joy from my youth,  but there is no joy to be found in Staple's. They take this greeting ceremony to another dimension because they offer to help, knowing full well they cannot help you, and when you say "Yes, help me find _____" they have to look for a senior staffer. At the check out they give you a minor address about their commitment to you and offer, Hare-Krishna-Uninterruptible-Style, a magical card that takes something off something or something. The speech sputters off near the end since no one who does not have the card, wants the card. Just for good measure the shoplifter alarm goes off and you feel nice and uncomfortable and forget to check the receipt since they are focused on the speech and not the petty "cash transaction" stuff.

Consumer confidence is at an all time low. Lower than last year and the year before. With Christmas upon us there is not much signaling a great rebound in the retail sector. Polyester pique golf shirts and khaki pants, loyalty cards, creepy greeters and that guy who looks at your receipt on the way out the door - the whole experience is an invasion of personal boundaries and wicked skeezy. Shopping has always been escapism for the American people, we like to go where people we don't know are - and look at things we can't afford. Its exciting to be in front of a wall of televisions twenty feet high with noise and lights. Its fun.

Or rather, it was fun. Now its all creepy uncle and those who know how just buy online.

Moral: Get your GED, take some night classes, stop smoking weed and pay that child support. make something of yourself man, you don't want to work at Staple's...

Bike Thief

We have all had bikes stolen, its just a fact of life. Urban entities accept bike theft with a hardened, passing sigh and start the long walk home, leaving just a twisted, razed lock behind as warning to the other cyclists. I lost one about a year ago and I swore "If I ever find the guy who stole my bike... I am going to kill him. Kill him ... and eat him."

Here is an elegant solution to the bike theft problem, an exploding lock! Just as banks insert exploding ink packs into bags of cash, the lock would spray a marking ink all over the culprit and bike when cut, notifying authorities or anyone else that this is a bike thief/stolen bike. You probably wouldn't get your bike back, but at least it would be a pain in the ass for the thief, which is really all you can do. After all, It isn't a matter of - how can I keep my bike from being stolen, its HOW LONG can I keep my bike from being stolen.

the Pen

OK, back to minimalism. The disposable pen is one of those everyday things we take totally for granted and give no thought whatsoever to a low arc toss into the wastebin. Recently the BIC company announced the sale of their 100 billionth disposable pen. First introduced after the final days of WWII, the early pens replaced fountain tips which were very messy. The appeal of the disposable pen became universal and the entire world quickly adopted it as the new standard in writing instrument, no more ink bottles or spills to clean up, just a simple plastic tube with an ink barrel that no one gave a shit about and threw away when no longer useful. This success inspired BIC - and many other company's, to reconsider the needs of daily life and quickly produced disposable razors and lighters, setting off a "disposable revolution" of sorts.

100 billion pens. Every single one destined to be thrown into the trash.

I went looking for a refillable pen after this announcement and I have to admit, I had a hard time finding an alternative. Ball point pens are hardy creatures, reliable and dependable with few faults. I got quality ballpoints and reloaded them with new ink barrels, but admittedly after three or so refills I just dropped them in a drawer. I decided to go for the old school fountain pen because they have a quality that inspires good penmanship. There were a lot of options I found, but these pens are more for symbolism, given as gifts to bankers and the like who would use it to authorize a big money deal - not for daily use. I found a good many prohibitively expensive pens and few modestly priced calligraphy type pens, but they both had the same disposable ink cartridge that held a limited reservoir of ink.

In the end I went with a pen that I found kicking around the house. Years ago I picked up a set of drafting pens from somewhere and they turned out to be the perfect pen. Large ink reservoir that can be easily refilled from a bottle and since it was designed for production work they are easy to clean and maintain. I am still apprehensive about throwing it heedlessly into a backpack, but for daily use it has totally replaced ballpoint pens in my life. Frankly, with computers there is little use for pens, so why even bother with disposables?

Moral: If its made to be thrown away, how much can it be worth?

I'm Poor

I recently caught myself doing something that I hate other people for doing. It hard to explain, but basically I was pretending like I was rich. This is a consequence of a credit based society, we all like to pretend that we have a lot more money than we actually do. This is everywhere I go, Gucci bags on the bus, Dolce Gabbana shades in line at the social security office. I succumbed in the form of a fancy stereo that, admittedly I got off the craigslist, but to hear me talk about it you'd think it was built to my exacting specifications by eastern european watchmakers. A stereo had somehow magically lifted me out of my station and made it so that I could talk with my social betters as peers - as equals, at least on matters of media playback. I found myself scoffing at those who would accept a tinny treble or blown out bass. That was when the mailman brought the bills and grounded me.

America is a class based society, but there is nothing shameful about being poor. In my opinion the only really shameful thing is living beyond your means and you don't have to be poor for that. Noted idiot Sean Combs was recently in the news because he was forced to ground his personal jet and fly on a commercial aircraft. Funny that he never thought to "Plane-pool" with other strapped celebrities. As for the rest of us, we get used to being a little colder and a little sicker for a little longer. We get good at waiting for things. Disappointment becomes parenthetical and has the breadth of a breath. While Wall Street booms, we flip burgers and sweep up for minimum wage. Now that its tanked, our circumstances are very much the same. 

So why the front? Why break the bank on a Chanel handbag and have no money it? Why pull the Benz up to the Drive thru and order off the dollar menu? These are rhetorical device, we all know why. Its the aspiration for a better life, the outward sign of the inward wish. No person of means will respect anyone because they have on the same coat. Burberry's famously killed their patterned ballcap when local louts started wearing them. This kind of retaliation against class trespassing isn't limited to the rich, I still would not feel comfortable wearing an old school rap "Africa Necklace." Time bears out all trends and rights itself, which is one of the reasons I try to choose minimalism.

As for pretending to be rich, well I will try a little harder to represent myself as I am. Instead of a fancy logo on my shirt I might just print my credit score.

Wall Street is DEAD

I am surprised that anyone is surprised that our entire financial infrastructure has been destroyed. For the last five years we have all been operating on CREDIT. The average american carries something like $5,000 in debt annually. Now I ask you - If the people don't have any money - what are we going to put in the bank?

cancer

I have a visceral reaction to bogus cures for legitimate diseases and so does the the Federal Trade Commission. They have decided that enough is enough when it comes to the proclamations that "Miracle Water CURES Cancer!" and have begun enforcing trade rules that require you put up or shut up. Action will be taken against eleven companies who sell products or systems that claim to cure cancer. That's right, CURE CANCER.

What kind of an idiot believes that vibrations in water or an ancient chinese herb can really cure them and who cares, fuck them, right? Well, to you I say don't be a cynical dick. Being diagnosed with cancer and having an experienced doctor provide tests that affirm the fact that you have cancer and then he says that as far as empirical science is concerned there are few options to treat cancer and no known cure, well that would drive me over the deep end. I would be willing to believe that a patchouli hippy or a failed sociopathic dentist had discovered something  that "the man" didn't want you to know about. I can see me megadosing vitamins, drinking my own urine or downing inedible herbs by the fistful. Add to that - no insurance - then the whole scenario makes even more sense. Its not morons who fall for this bullshit, its normal desperate people who just don't know any better.

As for these companies, draw your own conclusion. Anyone who claims to cure cancer - knowing that they can't cure cancer - and takes your money is either deluded (best case) or a total fucking slime. I imagine that they start out as "compliments" to treatment. Ancient Chinese herbs and magic water are little more than food and drink as far as efficacy is concerned but if the salad and cold drink make you feel better, what is the harm? The fact that it doesn't actually DO anything is overlooked and before you know it you drop the chemotherapy, which isn't as good as the salad, and go whole ass for the fake shit. The result is real death, financial ruin and the disgrace of having fallen for a scam.

I say Hooray for the FTC. Its about time that the focus fell on these leeches to our sick. We will never be rid of the carnival barkers hawking snake oil, be they clicks on a sponsored google ad or a yuppie dojo downtown where therapeutic rocks (?) on the spine ... cure ... something...

Moving Day

Today is the unofficial holiday in any University town, September 1, known as "Moving Day." Jittery parents deliver excited students to their dormitories or first apartments and leave them unsupervised for the rest of their lives. In Boston there is an influx of nearly 100,000 new residents annually, whole neighborhoods will pack up on the 31st and be replaced on the 1st. There are traffic snarls when Uhaul trucks are driven into overpasses, there are fights over parking spots and frequently you will see someone moving out at the same time as someone moves in. This is the result of SCUMMY FILTHY REALTORS and SLIMY DOUCHE BAG LANDLORDS, who exploit the lack of housing for students to double rents and pack apartments with too many people. This september 1st cycle is maintained by them artificially because why work all year when you can half ass everything once?

For the weeks leading up to the first there is an avalanche of garbage on the city streets. Sofas, shelves, desks, furniture of all sorts. For the scavengers of garbage this is the ideal time to find nearly new or at least not quite ruined items by the curb. I admit that I have found bikes never ridden because of flat tires and books, even Compact Disks have started popping up, but I no longer cede the urge to carry this stuff home. I live on the third floor now.

I guess the point is, its an awful shame. Most of us that don't move make ourselves scarce this weekend, part to save our lumbar regions from needy contemporaries, part because its just an awful sight to behold. No mass evacuation gives anyone a good feeling, unless you are a GREASY SLUMLORD packing 5 kids into a three bedroom apartment.

Bigfoot

When I was a wee thing only knee high to a grasshopper I believed all sorts of things, like when a tooth fell out a mysterious entity would put money under my pillow. I later learned that it was actually my mother doing some bedtime sleight of hand rather than allowing a stranger into her child's bedroom to take his tooth from under his pillow. This took the edge of losing teeth. Sadly, I would go on to lose far more teeth than the alloted "baby tooth" sum and there was no money under the pillow for those, but that is another story.

Recently Bigfoot has died, both literally and figuratively. Two lads from Georgia found his sad carcass in the woods then dragged the several hundred kilogram creature for several stinky hours back home to stuff the well over six foot creature into a freezer where it has stayed for several months. At least that is what they told the Tee Vee people. Turns out all they did was fill a wookie costume with roadkill and the whole joke just got out of hand. An overzealous "bigfoot hunter" who was himself notorious for scamming the true believers, called a press conference and used it to promote his website. 

I am surprised anyone was taken in by this photo. The intestines are located behind several thick layers of yeti fur, skin and fat, but here they are just sitting on the top with no cavity opening apparent. Another give away was the tongue. Rodents eat the eyes, the tongue and usually will core out the anus of a dead animal because those are the soft parts of the body. No tough skin to get through. The eyes, apparently eaten, but the tongue left alone, just dangling there. Lastly, the surest way to know if you are dealing with a hoax? They call a press conference. Not that Georgia doesn't have some fine universities or biologists or even a morgue that specializes in the proper storage and inspection of a body... Let's keep it in a freezer instead and call Fox News.

I didn't believe it, but I wanted it to be true. Lights in the sky were gods once, then briefly they were zeppelin's finally settling into the crafts of little green men. I no longer believe in the little green men or the gods, now I have to add bigfoot to that list. It felt good to know a huge peaceful man/ape cousin was out there living in the spaces between. High on the mountain or in the deepest darkest wood slipping by unnoticed. Sure, the evidence was poor, grainy video or unfocused kodaks, all of which amounting to nothing but it was fun to believe.

Now Bigfoot is dead. Killed by two hicks with a fucked up sense humor and too much time on their hands. Our culture has sustained yet another blow to its collective imagination so that a con man can get a few more hits to his website. It sold a lot of papers, but at what cost? What will we dream about now?

Rest in Peace Sasquatch, we hardly knew ye...

Pizza Shears

To me, this is pretty goddamn funny. Not that any pair of scissors wouldn't work to cut a pizza, or that you might ever find yourself with an uncut pizza. There ought to be an enormous tax for kitchen junk that is used once and then stowed for an eternity in the back of the bottom shelf.

Veggie Burger

Sadly, I cannot let this one go. Tonight I ate at Woody's. Its a pizza place/draft beer joint that uses wood fire for their ovens. The flavor is not as strong as other pizzas cooked in wood ovens, you probably wouldn't know about this extra step were it not plastered all over everything in the place. Not the best pizza in the world, but not at all bad. The location isn't on the main drag, so it isn't noisy or overcrowded, its just right.

Why does this merit attention? Feeling experimental, I also ordered a veggie burger. Any vegetarian worth his salt knows to stay away from the veggie burgers, especially in restaurants. They are either the disappointing store bought hockey pucks or they are a horror show of creativity by an over ambitious chef. I knew better than to order it even when I ordered it, the menu said it was made on site from fresh ingredients and like a fool, I fell for it. The thing arrived and I knew right away that it was bad without taking a single bite. It was grey. Like - a brain. It looked like a brain. It wasn't cooked on a grill or fried in a pan, it was through and through grey. When you put "burger" at the end of anything a customer has a certain expectation that either flavor, texture, or at the very least appearance will be of a "burger", so when it arrived open faced and by all observation uncooked it was clear that I had ordered badly. Imagine a patty of grey mashed potatoes, tepid, and falling off a bun with sliced cucumbers - CUCUMBERS! Not even pickles. Just a squirt of some 1,000 island dressing.

I took a bite. Without pause I slide the whole presentation as far away from me as possible. Some things you know are beyond rationalizing and I knew without so much as a flinty spark of neural effort that I wasn't going to eat this contemptuous thing. Fortunately I am in the habit of ordering way too much food and had a whole pizza that I planned to take home. Eating out is a gamble. When I used to travel I coined the term "beat for breakfast" which is drug buying slang, paying for one thing and getting a fake version or much smaller quantity than requested. Whenever eating out, particularly breakfast when cooks are hung over or sleepy, someone always gets a fucked up meal. You can send it back, but you send it back to the same person who fucked it up to begin with. The future holds only dissatisfaction.  Better to diversify in case of a disaster. 

The waitress saw the plate on the edge of the table and after a few passes it was clear that I was not happy with it. She did the usual "How is everything" check. Calmly and definitively I said:

"That is the most disgusting thing I have ever eaten."

A very good waitress was she, bantering "Tell me how you really feel..." and the item came off my check. I love the waitresses and I wondered if I was the first one to order this item and send it back or if I was the first one honest enough to articulate that it was disgusting (a la emperor's new veggie burger). I didn't see how it could have been prepared in a way that would make it appetizing and it is a permanent menu item...

Anyhow, Woody's does everything else right, just never order a veggie burger.

Animal Hospital Print Movie

Stop motion indie rock action

Die Autodialer!

I was born an evil person, and so being, peace with the dark side can come in handy. Recently I moved and was issued a new telephone number. The young lady who had my number before me, as I quickly discovered, owed money to people who only had one phone number to contact her. What followed was a series of predictable calls from all manner of collection agents. My machine was instantly full of misdirected calls to a Maria Ga-something, urging her to get in touch with some greasy guy who was prepared to ruin her credit forever, et cetera. 

This was a minor annoyance, since an autodialer left a prerecorded message, which I simply deleted. It wasn't until the real people started calling that things got really... interesting. The first call that I got was from "Patrick" who was very polite at first. He wanted desperately to speak with Maria because her credit rating was in imminent danger of being spoiled like so much milk left on the counter while you go off to work. I replied that he was mistaken, I lived alone and knew no one by that name, that I had inherited her phone number and all her angry creditors. He agreed that was quite a pickle for us both, but could I supply her whereabouts - since that real world scenario was too plausible and therefore too fantastic to believe. The conversation went downhill from there. I have made several bad career choices in my life and needless to say, I know the very thing to say at the right time in just the right way to make someone very, very upset. Its an art form that surprises even me sometimes. To my dismay, my request to "take me off their list" went unheeded. 

The phone rang many more times after that and I had similar conversations with many staff members, I even employed the rare drastic measure of dialing *57 and filing a police report after a young lady called me three times in one night. She blamed the autodialer for constantly connecting us, and this having been said I had an idea.

Asterisk, as it is known, is a powerful PBX system that is free to run on any beige box computer. Its memory and processor needs are so few it literally runs on garbage computers that people throw away. I planned to configure the PBX with a whitelist of friends that would ring through, a greylist of unknown numbers that could leave a message and a blacklist of  1-877 numbers that were the hallmark of these collection agents. The blacklist calls would be answered and patiently wait for a human voice at which time it would play any number of incredibly loud, incredibly unpleasant MP3's from my collection of terrifyingly awful music.

No, I never did it. I did set up asterisk, but I never unleashed its awful purpose because, why? True that I was dubious about how legal such a thing was, but really, what would I possibly gain from this? Did I really want to set up a computer to run continuously as an answering machine so that I could deafen someone with a shitty job who had the wrong number? Vengeance is a fine subject for cinema, but in real life it is utterly impractical. I was ashamed of my conduct and embarrassed that I had actually exhausted my technical skill and creative energy realizing this ridiculous plan, when all along there was an alternative.

I submit this tawdry tale for a reason. We are approaching an election, and as you all know, the phone banks will be working overtime to solicit funds, motivate the enlightened or just poll inanely. If you are like me and enjoy privacy I recommend this solution from lifehacker. Simply put, record the "number out of service" tone before your message. a human will leave a message, but an automated system will report your number out of service. Had I done this from the beginning the autodialers at the collection agency would never had pierced my fortress of solitude. I can vouch for this elegantly simple solution, I did it and it works.

Moral: Why be a bigger asshole than is necessary?

RepRap

This is a Reprap. Its a 3D printer under construction by the open source community. Printer jets lay down a polycarbonate goo in layers from digital templates, meaning that it can print out 3 dimensional plastic shapes. 3D printers are not new, they are employed largely for prototyping or making casts for large scale production and cost a great deal of money. This device, however, can be built for less then a thousand dollars using off the shelf components and the plans are available for free download from their website. The prototypes are in use refining and printing the components of the reprap itself, so in its own modest way the device is in use creating itself. 

The possibilities of this device are enormous. The ability to make things without need for factories or shipping would greatly improve the quality of human life globally. It would have the same effect that inkjet printers had on displacing the photographic lab industry. Plans for anything could be downloaded from the internet and printed as is required. Not everyone will have one in their homes, but there will probably be one available for public use at a local hardware store. Since it makes many things from one recyclable plastic the supply chain would be streamlined instantly. Inventors, educators and artists are the most immediate beneficiaries that come to mind, but medical devices like hearing aid housings or eyeglass frames could be made cheaply where they are badly needed.

Moral: open source is awesome.

Movie

Tonight I saw the Counterfeiters. Best movie so far this year. If you get the chance, go see it. 

R.I.P. Rude Girl

Loyal friend and international punk rock icon Rudy "Rudegirl" Kitty has passed on to the next thing. Even though she went #1 on my jacket and scratched up all my records, she was rockin' and I loved her. It'd been a while since she slept on my head or pestered me to watch her eat frisky's, proud kitty that she was, she lived an exemplary life and I will always remember her fondly. Rest in Peace Rudegirl.

Better Fridge

Buying a refrigerator was no easy task. There were options and features like ice makers, shelves that contained spills and slid out for easy access to the hard to reach places. Like any choice that requires a fair amount of thinking I reverted to the old stand by solution "Which one comes in black?" and I was on my merry way. There were very few that touted real energy savings. Some had the energy star stickers with their ambiguous yellow savings formula, informing you how many pennies you would save a month compared to an older and unidentified model, but none were very ambitious about saving energy on the only really important appliance in the home. Well, lucky for us, someone has thought of it. Still not in production, but the fridge of the future will likely look like this. 

Naked Lunch

Naked Lunch was probably the last movie I thought I'd find on the new HULU.com. Admittedly it was a pretty terrible movie that actually made me dislike the book, which I had previously loved. Nothing could give me nightmares like Burroughs, truly the Sith Lord of the beat poets. 

Also available on HULU is Timerider, a movie co-written and scored by Mike Nesmith. I am actually surprised there hasn't been a remake of this one considering how heavily it depends on gadgets and technofabulous ca-ca to entertain. If you haven't seen it and don't care to, its Fred Ward accidentally riding a fancy motorcycle into the wild west era of history. Hijinks ensue.

I was excited about Hulu.com. Finally I could watch streaming movies legally and not the "videotaped in the theater then supercompressed for download" crap that gets, uh, sold in chinatown... but what I found instead was a lot of one star movies that sucked when they came out in the 80's and sucked again when they were on Cinemax and continued to suck in the video store. Don't get me wrong, I still watched them.

State of the....

I have been doing this minimalist act for a few years now and I have to say, its working pretty well. The most immediate benefit of hardly ever buying anything is all the savings. You are doing alright if you are not in crushing debt these days and every night that I come home and there is no repo men, constables or big guys with lead pipes at my door is a victory. The news is full of bad tidings for the American poor, as if for the first time in all of history it sucks to be poor. There have been boom times and recessions and despite what the rest of the world was doing I was barely getting by. Finally I figured out that a little forethought, some critical examination and resisting the reptilian urge to buy shiny things has saved me a few $$$$ over the last few years.

Fiscal health isn't the only benefit, now my house is clean. Not just clean, but the kind of clean that when I come home I can't remember it being this clean when I left. Everything is where it is supposed to be or else its just gone. I don't lose tools or pieces of paper in piles, there isn't hardly enough stuff to make a pile. Keeping with rigid new policy, that if an object isn't used once a year it has to be removed from my possession, I have sent many old hobbies on to the thrift store. Occasionally I regret this personal rule when I go looking for an item of former interest, but it passes. Another related benefit is being organized. I am a trustee for my condominium and neighbors are amazed that I have obscure records so readily at hand and sad that I literally threaten them if they suggest "borrowing" anything. 

Cleaner and wealthier I anticipated but one benefit I had not planned for was - more time. Having fewer clothes to launder and put away and fewer possessions that require parts and maintenance has freed up a surplus of time to read, spend with family or otherwise pursue leisure arts. I feel bad for my contemporaries who burden to keep up failing automobiles or struggle to maintain appearances. 

Let's be clear, minimalism isn't what I thought it would be when I first started doing it. I had this belief that I would live this pure way and set up hard rules for conduct that did not allow much room for bargaining; for example, no colors and no patterns are allowed. I did this because color forces mood whereas shades are interpreted only as depth. Crazy stuff, but that was what I needed. Discipline. Perspective, it turned out, was the very essence of minimalism. A minor shift in perspective made me inspect seams in garments and put back items that were overly processed or had too much packaging. I began to question life cycles, recyclability and even asked a bewildered clerk about phantom power consumption (she thought I was making it up). 

So what have been the drawbacks to minimalism? Well, so far its just me. I haven't converted a single person away from the work and consume lifestyle, there is no national movement, no peer group to take guidance from. There is the parallel green movement but they lack introspection and guidance too and frankly, they are kind of pussies. I just don't see them studying life in prison, blind people or the tragically poor to find out how to conserve resources and live better. Mostly they are gullible consumers who will buy a prius instead of ride a bike or environmentally friendly unbleached paper napkins instead of using a rag. Its a pretty lonely path. There are times I have to consciously stop myself from ridiculing consumers who are caught up in thinking about a handbag that will magically bestow class or a chocolate bar that is "good for you." Its for the best really, that I don't have an opposing opinion to tempt me away from my new belief system.

In the end I will just say, the longer I do this the easier it will become. A lot of progress has been made already and the failing dollar, resources that require full scale invasions to harvest (OIL) and an uncertain global future will only make it easier.

Haha, You Suck...

I love a good buzzkill and nothing follows the world's largest beef recall like this. That's right, turns out that phony baloney fake meats, organic milk and tomatoes are manufactured by the corporate machine. The sell was great, a few dollars more for better quality and more nurturing farm practice - maybe even a little boost for mother earth? Well, you just keep believing that. I have to admit, I got rooked. That organic cow milk was pretty good and I didn't mind the extra buck for ultra-pasteurized milk, since a half gallon usually goes bad before I finish it. Believing that it was anything but milk, and that it might be harvested in a way more expensive than it needed to be for boutique purposes, well that is how naive I am.

Beef Recall

Recently the Humane Society caught a beef processing plant in California sneaking downed cattle, which are cows too sick to even stand, into the food supply. Caught on secret video, workers sprayed sick and dying cows with firehoses, rammed them with forklifts and dragged them into processing facilities. The video is particularly disturbing and it prompted the largest beef recall in history, four times larger than the previous largest recall. The reason for the prohibition on downed cattle should be obvious. Cows that get sick in these high density lots and slaughterhouses usually have E. Coli or Mad Cow disease the very last thing you want to do is cut them open. The recall affects beef that goes back 2 years, the meat was served in school lunches and elderly aid programs, so most of it has already been eaten. If you were trying not to catch mad cow disease... too late.

Moral: Vegetarian. 

People are Smart

That's right. People are smart. We are smarter now than we have ever been in all of human history and don't let anyone tell you different. What has compelled this statement? Well, I'll tell you. Susan Jacoby, author, has been making the rounds and she is shilling her new book in all the usual places where people like to be told they are smarter than everyone else. She cites prime time reality shows and religious fundamentalist groups as sources for the theory that people - as a whole - are getting "more ignorant." This is not the first time I have heard this assessment of society and its not the first time I have declared it as nothing more than self serving bullshit. 

People are not getting dumber. Just because they do not make time in their days to read or use big words or know the obscure histories of obscure nations - that does not necessarily make a person dumb. I have succeeded in giving the impression of intelligence by merely controlling conversation. By only talking about the things I know most about people think I  am a genius. You will never catch me going on national television so that Jeff Foxworthy can ask me questions from a third grade lesson book.

Its true that there is a total lack of critical analysis in daily life and we tend to accept blindly some very foolish things, but in defense of a society, we have to absorb so much more information than before. The complexity of our society is exploding exponentially - daily. I never heard of stem cells before 2002, so how am I supposed to have an opinion about the moral implications of using embryos to rebuild Christopher Reeves spine? If NPR tells me they are good, I follow, were I a religious man and the preacher said they were bad, I'd probably follow him because who has time to figure this stuff out?

She cites "good old days" arguments for a more advanced and enlightened society. How preceding generations were more studious, reading classics and writing actual letters with grammar. FDR would tell people to get maps and follow along "picture pages" style while he did his fireside chat. People don't have maps anymore, we have Google Earth now. We can see the bombed out holes in the Afghan countryside in realtime via satellite, of course I'm not going to get a fucking map and look this shit up. Way back then they had party lines for the phone - meaning you shared the phone line with the whole neighborhood, your only source of information was a hulking radio that ran on vacuum tubes, no one is going to tell me that this should be the model for our ideal future society.

People are smart. Smart and only getting smarter. To say that one of the most advanced countries in the world is populated by idiots is a bold statement designed for no other reason than to irritate people and sell books. For all Susan Jacoby's big brains - I would bet her VCR is still blinking 12:00.

Witchcraft

I like to pretend that I live in a twentieth century modern sort of world, like in the scifi movies I saw as a kid. We have robots vacuuming the floor and all the knowledge of human history at our fingertips, but every now and then something happens that forces us to say "What the fuck?". I had a what the fuck moment today when I read this article about a woman on trial for witchcraft in Saudi Arabia. That's right, witchcraft. She was imprisoned in 2005 by the religious police. She was beaten and forced to sign a confession she could not read with a thumbprint because she could not write, because a man accused her of making him .... impotent. 

Being a Massachusetts native, I am particularly sensitive to the subject of capitol punishment for witchcraft. We had an incident back in 1692 that we have never been able to live down. Regrettably, Salem has become a theme park dedicated to witchcraft, choosing to emphasize the supernatural angle instead of the gross perversion of justice/wrongful capitol punishment aspect of the event. I guess tourists are more interested in spooky witches than frightened illiterate farmers killing their neighbors for no reason.

From now on, whenever I hear anything about Saudi Arabia I am going to think about it as being very much like Massachusetts in 1692. There is something very unsettling about someone being PUT TO DEATH because a man can't get an erection. To be clear - this went to COURT, in front of a JUDGE, and they made this decision.

The Metric System

One of my new year resolutions was the complete adoption of the metric system. In a global economy, there is absolutely no good reason to keep using the outmoded, and frankly very confusing, imperial system. Inches, pounds and gallons, what the hell kind of units are these? And how many combine to make a mile or a ton? The math involved in maintaining this inelegant system is overly complex, particularly when a better system is available in every country except for three. You want to know why no other country is interested in buying products from the United States? Because you have to buy a whole new set of tools to go along with it! I find it personally amusing to hear motorheads chatting up their engines using units of elizabethan measurement, but as a practical matter, its long past time to give it up and join the rest of the world.

Moral: Get with the fucking program America.

Soap

I am not even going to pretend like I even care what it says on the side of this bottle. Something about we are all one and all is love, but what is really important is what is inside. Dr. Bronner's magic 18 in 1 minty fresh soap is the choice for minimalists everywhere. There is nothing more refreshing after a funky August day than a shower with Dr Bronner's all love soap.
Apparently you can use it for 18 different kinds of cleaning, from dishes to floors to brushing your teeth, but I recommend external use only. I have used it to clean the floor (that one time I cleaned the floor) and it worked pretty well for the laundry when I was out of laundry soap, so I can vouch for 3 of the 18 alternate uses.
The irony that one of the greatest soaps ever made was invented by - and for - Hippies, is not lost on me. I honor that history and buy mine at the nearby food co-op. Pick up a bottle, if for no other reason than you need something to read while your low flow toilet is clogged.

Disorder

So you throw shit at it? Oh I am totally getting this thing.

Thanks Yanko

Republicans

I have never had much affection for republicans, so I don't bother watching their coverage. I catch snippets of it here and there and the content is lacking, Mostly focus grouped platitudes and staged cleverness that are so embarrassingly asinine that they may as well have been rapped.

The last few years have not been kind to the republican party. Despite having control of our entire government and free reign on the budget process they have made it clear that they plain, old fashion suck. Everything that makes a republican a republican has been proven wrong. Gun control is hard to argue against in the wake of school shootings, Free trade took a beating after NAFTA was roundly proven to do more harm then good and then propose CAFTA which is the same greasy stuff. Don't get me started on "family values" and "fiscal responsibility".

The only trick they have left is immigration, but this was always a minor issue to them. They don't even have a consensus that I can tell, except that its bad. Some want high fences. Others say that, yeah fences are OK, but leave a hole for workers to get through because Americans won't clean a grease trap (for the record, I have cleaned a grease trap). This argument over immigration has something civil-war-y about it, should we oppress people to get low cost labor? I have an inkling that the argument for slavery was something like "There are some jobs that confederates just won't do."

I really thought they were washed up. H.W. was no reagan and Dole was no H.W. and Bush Jr. is no Dole and this crop of hopefuls leaves a lot to be desired. Yet they endure. Someone somewhere is watching this stuff and saying "That's my guy." The only reason I can think that people vote for them? I think they feel sorry for them. Like when a kid shows you a magic trick and you pretend you don't know how it works and act all surprised when they show you your card - even though it isn't really your card - you just want them to feel good. They spend all this money and make the effort to be your friend - what are you going to do? Tell them there's no Santa?

Moral: Barack Hussein Obama

Boxes

This is a Snap-N-Store box. I got some from Staple's when I was trying to get organized last year. I never really got organized, but my mess is confined to the cool little cubes instead of running the rest of the house. The only appeal that they have over similar boxes or even plain old cardboard boxes is the snaps. They look Ramones-y and kind of tough, you know, tough for a box. Like the actual Ramones, they aren't really tough at all but they are adequate for my needs and the punk appeal will keep me from putting them in the basement.

Bleach

This year for New Year's I am giving up bleach. Don't get me wrong, bleach is a powerful cleaning agent that has removed many an embarrassing personal stain and I love it, but I can no longer justify using it. I looked it up on the household database (because reading the label was too hard) and found that it was only 5% sodium hypochlorite (active ingredient) and 95% water. I have seen what that 5% has done to my foulest of foul clothes, even further diluted within the full load of a washing machine and decided that it is too powerful a chemical to pour nonchalantly into the drain, even only a capful at a time. It'd be better to dress in dark clothing.

As for the household cleaning function, I have heard of alternatives like baking soda, lemon, vinegar, and elbow grease, but I have personally never had much success with any of these - particularly not with the elbow grease. I'll do some experiments and see what actually works.

Moral: Wear dark colors

Jenny Holzer

I must beg for an indulgence. This link will take you to the Mass Moca live webstream of Jenny Holzer's exhibit. During my formative years I took a bold solo bus trip to New York City. Unsure of what I would encounter there I was eyes wide and alert to every detail. If I was unprepared for anything it was the sheer size of that sprawling city, I could almost hear the bedrock groaning underneath the weight of so many buildings. As the bus made its final go round and was easing through traffic towards the Port Authority bus depot, I noticed that intermittent marquees had these cryptic statements on them. I had accidentally stumbled upon Jenny Holzer's truism exhibit. The experience was as intended, to catch unwitting travelers off guard and make them say "What the fuck?" and I was hooked. Contemporary art is not an easy thing to appreciate and if there was a first for me it was Jenny Holzer. It was the first time I saw it and said "I don't care what anyone says, this is art."