Because who doesn't love snark!
Great because the Simpsons have been pretty consistent at doing a fine job making fun of all the stupid in our world. This opening was painful for me to watch, & sticks with me now. I suspect it will for some time. And maybe it’ll flash back into your head when you’re trying to decide if buying local is worth it, or if you really need that bit of plastic crap from Fred Meyer.
Today I have an excellent & worthwhile vid for you about the BP thing (Yes. click here). Yes, I know, you just want to squeeze your eyes shut, press your hands on your ears, & sit rocking in your chair while yelling, “lalalalalala!” I assure you there are no gasping creatures in this, ok? Auntie Susan would tell you if there were dying dolphins here. You really should see this, especially as the CEO of BP was on TV this morning blathering about how they’re doing everything they can. Yes, & my dog can speak fluent french, she just doesn’t feel like it right now.
Introducing the FannyCat™. Great idea or greatest idea?
Oh, is that title too harsh? Well, you be the judge. Here’s the situation: fats & meat heated to deep frying temps are chemically altered. And you know what? The more you eat of these little fried meaties, the greater your chances of getting cancer. All kinds of cancer. Let me say that again: The more deep fried meats you eat, the more likely you are to get cancer.
Which is why I am flabbergasted to the point of boggley-eyed speechlessness to read that the Susan G. Komen foundation – the ones who’ve make those damned pink ribbon loops ubiquitous – made a partnership with KFC for this month of May. KFC would put their deeeeelicious & humanely raised chicken parts in pink buckets (oh, how entirely clever!) & for each bucket sold, a generous 4 bits will be donated to the pink ribbon people. The site says, “The lids of these special pink buckets will have a call to action to get involved. Names of breast cancer survivors and those who have lost their battle with breast cancer will be listed on the sides of the bucket.”
Sooooo…..let me see if I follow this. Money is needed to cure cancer. To get the money we should eat foods that cause cancer. And if I don’t buy this food that makes me more likely to get cancer, then I’m condemning others to cancer because I’m keeping them from getting the pink bucket money, which will help them, but I’ll feel bad so….I lost it. Has the world gone crazy or am I just jacked on caffeine to the point of dementia?
There’s a great article here in which writer John Robbins makes many good points, such as, “the American Institute for Cancer Research reports that 60 to 70 percent of all cancers can be prevented with lifestyle changes. Their number one dietary recommendation is to: “Choose predominantly plant-based diets rich in a variety of vegetables and fruits, legumes and minimally processed starchy staple foods.” Does that sound like pink buckets of fried chicken?”
Indeed. Go to the KFC site & the first thing you’ll see is some animation of their much derided double down sandwich. You know, the one with chicken for the bun. Click on the pink bucket & the raucous music will cease instantly, to be replaced by plaintive piano music evocative of the hospital scene at the end of a movie. “The largest single donation ever,” says the headline. Well, that’s misleading. Tens of thousands of people must eat this chicken to make that donation exist. There is a bucket you can spin to read some very sad stories. It’s all touching, & presented so sweetly & smoothly.
Most everyone I know has a standing boycott on KFC. It’s automatic. The food is of a dreadful quality & makes you feel sick when you eat it, & their brutal handling of their chickens, documented here, is legend.
If you want to help find a cure for breast cancer, find someplace to put your money other than the Susan G. Komen people. They are asking you to ruin your health for their own ends. This is sociopathic. Or maybe you think they just haven’t put 2 & 2 together. Is that any better? They are supposed to be a foundation of cancer researchers. What’s worse- that they’re using you or that they’re stupid? Either way, is that the best place to put your hard earned bucks?
QFC seems to be having trouble with smoking on their new patio. How many signs can you spot?
How do you know you’re adequately sensitized to pathetic marketing? Laughter. Involuntary, slightly hysterical laughter, right there in the store. I’ve been having a lot of those moments lately. I’d like to say it’s due to the Cambodia trip. Go to a third world country for a while & you come back here thinking you may never buy anything again. Really. We have so much here. And I don’t mean that in a good way. We have so much crap. All this talk about the economy & we need people to have jobs so they can spend money….I’ll tell you – that model won’t stand. We need to buy LESS stuff, not more. It’s absolutely schizophrenic to talk about all the trash the US generates, lean on people to recycle, while the rest of the economy depends on their continued consumption of unneeded, shrink-wrapped junk. That’s like chastising people for being fat, then pressuring them to buy more food. Anyone can see that doesn’t make sense. (Oh wait, we do that.)
I’ve seen so many loser products lately. Raise your consciousness, you know? See these items. Notice them. You can do something more proactive than not buy them. You can go up to the nearest store employee & ask, “Why are you even selling this? What a dumb product. Does this make sense in the big picture?”
Ok. Ready for the silly?
Pre. Sliced. Apples. What else is there to say.
2 layers of plastic!
Look. They come in little single sizes for your lunch. Slimy slices.
You know Mexican coke is in the maintstream when you see an endcap display at Bartell's.
Why are we so polite to crazy christians? Really. I don’t get this AT ALL. Maybe that’ll be my strategy with animal control. “MY religion REQUIRES my dog to be off a leash. Ticket me & I’ll see you in court.” Why not. Religion seems to be the perfect shield for any heinous activity you care to partake of.
Case in point: Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham, that author of a thousand articles in the Reader’s Digests of our childhoods, had, HAD, been invited to do some prayer-related thing at the Pentagon for the nat’l day of prayer.
Regrettably for him, all his courting of of the press did come back to bite him when someone was able to prove he’d said that Islam is “a very evil & wicked religion.” (Read one of many articles on this situation here.) I recently made a comment on facebook, in regard to certain sites saying children are deformed for god’s glory, that if christians’ numbers were smaller, they’d be called a cult. As it is, they’re called christians. One of my religious friends sent me a rather prickly response, & may I say here I admire her success in winning the struggle to avoid just calling me names, but to actually make points. And her point was, not all christians are like that. Fair enough, I said. I didn’t say ALL christians.
But damn! It’s tempting. Because Graham has always offered himself up as the leader of vast numbers of the most reasonable & compassionate christians in the US, just your everyday christians raising kids & living their lives. You know – GOOD people. So why is he making such a sweeping statement about the evils of Islam? Did he forget that his god has a plan, or that he, Graham, is required to practice humility? What does he have to gain from this? Franklin Graham isn’t some spittle spewing sky pilot living at the end of a dirt road, subsisting off chickens the locals give him in return for hurling his burning words at their enemies. He is a man who was raised from birth in the public eye, WELL schooled in how to work the public, how to garner attention without actually crossing a line into less profitable territory. So either he’s losing his grip, or he knows something – he knows he can garner money, publicity, followers. Which he probably wants desperately. He’s already an older man, & he’s spent his life eclipsed by his father.
But back to the main point. Why are we so polite to crazy christians? What if he would have said, Judaism is an evil & wicked religion. How do you think that would have gone over? Oh my god he would’ve have REVILED! Absolutely eviscerated in the press & by every politician.
We are too acclimated to religion. We need to look out with fresh eyes & recognize when things, people, actions, do need to be held up for examination, the way you’d just barely pinch the tail of a dried rat & dangle it in front of you, & looked at with horrified & appalled eyes. And when elected representatives in DC actually speak out in support of a man who condemns an entire religion, especially when that man is not in any way wise or good or clever, then we have to pay attention. Because this is a wrong thing.
Tomorrow I hit what I’m saying is my halfway point. And I’m feeling really bitter. Why do these moods come with my birthdays? Unfair, really.
The afternoon finally turned sunny. It is a watered down squishy yellow light. I put on my raggedy 7 year old fleece cape suitable for dog saliva, stuck some politically correct biodegradable AND compostable dog waste bags in my back pocket, slung Tippy’s leash around my neck, & headed up the hill. There were only a couple of dogs at the park when we got there. I made Tippy heel to cross the street then said, “OK!” & she was off. She tore up the side of the hill & screeched to a halt to stand quiveringly erect in full sniff mode with another dog. A couple of other owners showed up & formed a loose chatty group. And the story was – animal control was there last night. Someone saw someone else get a ticket. We let our dogs go on playing, of course, but ancient instincts came quickly back to us all, & we stood in a very loose oval arrayed on the hill, facing out. All looking out for the threat to our tribe.
Hours have passed. It’s night now. I’m still steamed. Here’s what bothers me: What is the point of this, really? In an ideal world, laws exist for a worthwhile reason. Beyond making money, I mean. Hassling the most responsible & proactive segment of the dog owning population simply because they are easy marks seems to be begging for ill will & a plenitude of foul deprecations. How long will it be until they run up against someone who wants to go to court, define exactly what it is the leash law is FOR. And how enforcing it so selectively & aggressively against well behaved dogs in any way helps our society.
I’ll be honest. THis whole “nat’l day of prayer” thing…I never knew it was happening until all the recent furor over its slow impending death. So I looked it up.
Turns out various colonial presidents have observed a day of prayer as the climate & situation required, reaching out to their (voting) public for certain noteworthy events like the forming of the nation & the end of a war. Lincoln did an interesting twist, calling if a day for “national prayer & humiliation.” James Madison & Thomas Jefferson were both con on the federally endorsed prayer plan. Jefferson was particularly outspoken, pointing out that…“Fasting and prayer are religious exercises; the enjoining them an act of discipline. Every religious society has a right to determine for itself the time for these exercises, and the objects proper for them, according to their own particular tenets; and right can never be safer than in their hands, where the Constitution has deposited it.” I have heard evangelicals lament, oh! the tragedy & horror it is - that this great country is being torn away from the path set by the founding followers, right there under god’s wing. Gee, they never seem to mention this Jefferson quote. Perhaps this has something to do with why the Texas school book bunch is trying to remove Jefferson from history.
After that it was low key, until the cold war. Then in all the heightened emotion of the time, it finally became a bill in 1952, (Harry Truman), when the idea of the nation uniting in prayer was more an IN YOUR FACE, YOU DAMNED COMMIES! moment than a genuine show of real humility. Actually, that kind of makes it the opposite of humility, doesn’t it? Showing off like that. Anyway, each pres got to pick his own day. In 1982, a National Prayer Committee formed to pick a recurring day. In 1988, after 6 brutal & grueling years of reflection & prayer, they finally decided that the NDP would be on the first Thursday of May. After that, everything puttered along as could be predicted by even the most uninformed political observer. Clinton & Obama did nothing special, Reagan & both Bush’s had special events. (Tho Dubya did have to teleport back from the 7th circle of hell where he was doing some makeup coursework for his degree in screwing over the world.)
And now a judge has ruled that the statute establishing the National Day of Prayer was unconstitutional as it is “an inherently religious exercise that serves no secular function”. To which I say…finally! While the Bush bloodline has been living the sheltered lives of lords waited upon by quivering vassals, the world out here has changed. More people are practicing critical thinking. Christian theology, never strong, is bleeding from a number of wounds, self-inflicted by the Darwin equivalent of the dumbest fish in the pond.
Of all the ways the world is falling apart, at least I can be proud of this judge, this thinking human who used simple logic & applied the law, the founding fathers’ penned constitution those evangies love so much – to put this one example of religion back where it should be contained – in the private lives of its followers.
(BTW….if you get reading & think, “this is crazy, she’s just picking on a company that’s helping us all to live, you should know that SIX European countries have banned Monsanto GMO corn. SIX. Yet our govt still lets us eat it here. You gotta wonder about priorities.)
“So the facts are as follows: We eat corn and corn derivatives that have been genetically modified, which has been banned for being unsafe in other countries — the FDA has not done independent testing on the health effects of at least three types of corn that we are eating, and have instead taken Monsanto’s word for the fact that they are safe. Monsanto resisted releasing their data to independent researchers — environmental groups had to sue to get it. Once it was released and analyzed by one group of scientists, they wrote a dense study in a non-peer reviewed journal and found statistically significant amounts of organ failure in the rats in Monsanto’s own study. Consumers often have no way of knowing clearly if they are eating genetically modified food.”
What a wonderful time we live in. I swear, humans are the total opposite of the hive mind. The more of them get together, the stupider they become. Give us a big, fecund globe & we breed like flies, gnawing thru everything in our path like a cloud of schizophrenic locusts. Then we use technology to squash predators, weather, & sickness, so nature can no longer level our numbers. Finally, when we need a way to feed all those people, we twank the genes of corn at the genetic level, a new achievement for the science of humans, & the result is – die anyway of toxins our bodies never evolved to handle.
I can hear nature now…she’s laughing a silky, knowing, sardonic snicker.
The other day I was having a conversation with someone about conspiracy theories, & how the problem is, there is a continuum, & on that line, some conspiracies are totally believable & very likely to be true, others are just crazy, but there’s this vast area in the middle that could be true. Many humans in power seem to be motivated by ego, greed, avarice. We are all so jaded because every day, we hear of yet more instances in which some person or persons goes after what they want no matter who it hurts. The wall street & banking crash would be an easy example here. Knowing that people can be utterly callous & malevolently apathetic pigs, how can you look at any nefarious plan & call it too extreme to be considered?
This Monsanto organ failure from corn thing is a classic example of the disconnect we’ve all somehow worked into our realities. If I invited you over for dinner & fed you something that was a little bit poisoned, how would you respond? Would you call the cops? Would you go on facebook & everywhere & tell people I’m insane & not to eat my food? Would you get treated & send me a medical bill? Or would you say, eh, what are you gonna do…can that really be true?….she wouldn’t do that…sure I’m a little tired but I feel mostly fine….
The idea that a seed company with worldwide reach could create a food-like substance designed to turn maximum possible profits while keeping people just fed enough is too huge to grasp. It’s unreal. You think, how could that happen? Surely if that were true the government would step in. Here’s a thought – I think they already have. Let’s think about it. The problem is, as with so many of our current ills, everything is so intertwined. If you get rid of GMO corn, crop yields will go way down, which means less high fructose corn syrup & feed for industrial meat lots. That’s certainly healthier, but then how will the cash poor lower classes get their calories? Right now they get most of them thru corn syrup. And how will the farmers get by if they grow less corn? They only make it now because of govt subsidies. The govt, out govt (they tell us) knows full well that corn syrup causes health problems. Yet instead of sitting on Monsanto – this GMO corn organ failure thing is only one of their many sins – the govt gives farmers subsidies to grow the stuff! Then they all go to washington & dick around about how to fix the health care crisis. This is so broke, I don’t even know where to start to fix it.
I eat meat, not a lot but some. This latest news has made me realize that all, not just most, of the meat I eat from now on will need to be organically grown. The why? Industrially raised livestock are fed corn. Hm. Do you think that’s GMO corn? You betcha. And as we’ve learned from eating big fish, toxins get concentrated as you go up the food chain. I don’t really want a concentrated load of Monsanto goodness when I eat a hamburger.
Here’s a good article about avoiding GMO food. And here’s a page where you can get a non-GMO shopping guide. Remember that even organic food can include GMO ingredients. It only has to be 95% organic to get the label. So check for 100% organic or quiz the company.
Recently, as I was driving my son to school, we discussed the schedule for the rest of the week & he mentioned their music class would be having a sing-along that day. “You don’t like those much, do you?” I asked. “No.” “Yeah, the songs are so weird!” I said. Then he said, “I can’t imagine what would drive someone to write songs so stupid!” I laughed, OH, how I laughed. My boy for sure. Well, it’s true what he says.
I’ve been to my share of school concerts &, yes, the songs are very stupid. I can’t really describe the genre, except that it is too involved with historical or political or nutritional storytelling to show proper respect to the power of rhyme. Also, & maybe this is just this specific teacher, but there is a LOT in the way of hand motions. If they sing about a wave, they have to move their hands in a wave. If they sing about a bunny, they have to hop. If the bunny eats a carrot, they have to all lean to the same side at the same time, hold up one hand, & pantomime eating a carrot. All things in moderation is not applied here. Given the attention span of your average grade school kid combined with the mathematical reality that the more kids there are who are supposed to do the same thing at one time, the less likely they are to achieve it, plus the sketchy singing skills of most kids these age even when they’re not having to remember to hop, results in a full 2 hours of rather spastic twitchings & flailings reminiscent of drunken hula dancers. It’s distressing to watch.
I still recall, far too vividly, Reid’s first school concert. The cafeteria was overfull, & we ended up standing by the wall about 2/3 of the way back, just under a speaker. Yes, a speaker. The kindergartners trooped up on stage, giggling & being shy. And they began to sing. Hypothetically. Their mouths were moving. Know what I heard? I heard a professional children’s choir, accompanied by several well-played instruments. A. Professional. Children’s. Choir. At high volume.
Call me old fashioned but I would have walked away from that school greatly more satisfied if I’d seen various breathy waifs bleating off key to some ineptly played piano music. They’re kids. With the rare exception of some young prodigies, we’re not there expecting to hear actual good singing. That is not the point. The point is to give the kids some stage time & make them feel their efforts are worth something. If I were a kid who had to spend 3 periods a week learning lame songs, then get up onstage & have my squawky but willing childish voice drowned out by a recording of kids who spend their spare time ironing their audition suits for the new production of Little Orphan Annie, I’d leave there pretty dammed demoralized. Even a little kid can ask, what’s the point? And adults can not only ask what the point is, they can go home & write about it to other parents & to the school.
My son’s school markets itself as “arts rich.” That’s lovely & I like the sound if it. The problem is I’m not sure how impressed I really am with the art portion. I know in one grade, won’t say which one here, another parent witnessed a teacher lining up all the portrait drawings & adding perspective & other small nuances. Gee, no wonder our kids’ drawings were so impressive on open house night! Reid, now a 4th grader, was eligible to start the band this year. I nixed it. He has taken a few fiddle lessons on his own & practices randomly. The 5th grade class I saw perform 2 years ago played a violin piece. It had 3 notes. THREE. This after 2 solid years of study. Reid can play 2 scales well, & he learned that in about a month. That would be 15 notes. I know it must be hard to teach violin to kids, but I don’t see how 2 years of showing up to learn 3 notes is ever going to inspire one of those “they gave me a chance when all I had was my crippled mom, half a dog, & slept in a dumpster & now I’m the young Yo-yo Ma” stories.
I’ll tell you something – overall, I have a really hard time judging how good my son’s school is. The problem is my perspective doesn’t allow that level of nuance. There was just one school where I grew up. We had the pedophile lesbian grade school gym teacher, the minister/guidance counselor, the 3rd grade teacher who made us sing hymns each morning yet beat kids in class, the cliché home-ec teacher married to the shop teacher. On the bus & the playground, you were on your own. Our bus driver was a 300 lb. male farmer version of Helen Keller in worn jeans, a Red Man cap, & a crewcut. His awareness, such as it was, was forward. Utterly. Once you passed his impassive wide back in stretched & faded cotton, you entered Lord of the Flies wrapped in Bluebird yellow. In my son’s classroom, they have magic markers in all the colors of the rainbow. I mean…they must have at least 10 colors in there! And they’re allowed to have water bottles at their desks!!! My god. Once I found out they heated the building in winter, I was sold. So when I fall into conversation with another parent & they ask how I like Adams, I say, I’m not as pleased as I’d like to be, but it’s hard for me to say. I don’t have anything to compare it to.
I will say, now that we’re in the 5th year at this school, I do feel absolutely justified griping about the music program. Because Adams is supposed to an arts rich school. If would be different if they were positioning themselves as a math school, but music is of the arts, yet I don’t see them doing it at all well. Do you know, at the last concert, the teacher went on about how someone had made a donation, allowing them to add another instrument to their studies. And then each kid picked up a tube which they whacked against the other hand to make a tone. In a pattern, you see, with the rest of the notes. And I’m thinking, if they’re going to call this an instrument, why not just collect empty bottles, fill them with varying amounts of water, & make a jug band? Same thing. Each kid would have 1 or 2 notes, & heck, you can get all the materials from your neighbors’ garbage cans on recycling night. Take that, pathetic school budget!
I don’t have any bright ideas here. I suspect that when I go to these concerts, I’m not seeing the full range of kids. I bet that a fair number of kids get more focused training in the form of private lessons. That’s the case with Reid. So the cream has already been skimmed off, leaving the kids who don’t have the time/talent/attention/discipline/opportunity to do more than whack a tube. But shouldn’t our schools be giving truly worthwhile experiences to all the kids?
He just wanted to do what every out-of-touch, selfish, lusty billionaire possessed of the overfed goose liver pate version of an ego has done for all of human history – boink quantities of beautiful women while gallivanting all over the world to his various disgustingly ostentatious & heavily guarded mansions. But now we know that sex with him can be wild & crazy, we hear stories that he is a tightwad to rival Hetty Green, asking restaurants to comp him his meals because he is…Tiger Woods. We have been alerted to his obscene earnings. This was never secret but no one had any particular interest. We now know about his kids, his parents, his early TV appearances, his life as a child golf prodigy, his beautiful wife, his many homes, what he drives, his investments. (Dubai. What a fool.) And just up are pix of the house his wife is buying on some island off the coast of Sweden. Am I the better for knowing these things? No. My life has no intersection whatsoever with Tiger Woods’. I think golf is surpassed in boringness only by picking fuzzballs off wool sweaters. And I don’t care a flick about Tiger Woods as a person. He is good looking enough but not my type so I’m not feeling crushy, he doesn’t seem to possess any irresistible charisma, he is not styling himself as a leader in any charity or cause I’ve heard of. He’s simply not on my radar. For all that, I now know so much about him. It’s not like I’m trying, he’s on every front page. There’s something wrong when, without trying, I know this much about a person who will never have any effect whatsoever on my life, & who I will never meet.
I feel sort of bad for him because he’s one of the new victims of this growing culture of zero privacy, & the thing about it is – why should we care? Does it make us lose respect for Tiger? Really? How much was respect of Tiger Woods really a part of any of our lives 2 weeks ago? Be honest – if you ran into him at the coffee shop tomorrow, you’d be just as fawning & oogling as anyone, I mean, if that’s your bent. You would act exactly as you would have a month ago before any of these demeaning antics were made public.
The irony, to me, is that nothing he’s done is new. FDR walked with leg braces because he had polio as a child. We know that now, but at the time, very few people had any idea. Why? Because the media all agreed it would be undignified to show him shuffling to the podium. Also it would weaken him in the eyes of his public. It just wasn’t done. By the time Reagan came along, we were seeing cross sections of his prostate on the evening news. And JFK! People at the time thought of him as a young man coming into his best years, blessed with a beautiful & demure wife, a large & supportive family, charming & well bred children, & deep American values. In fact he had tunnels going into the White House to so he could writhe with his mistresses without inconveniencing the gate guards.
I’m not interested in whether Tiger Woods has done right or wrong. He’s not a politician, not a dr, not in a position of public trust. He is living lavishly but not with my money. He’s been a pillar of restraint compared to some celebrities. Heck, Ghengas Khan was a wealthy & powerful man & he slept with quantities of women as his right. I read one study saying some 8% of men in a certain part of Asia share his genes. Tiger was unfaithful which is considered improper in our current times, but hasn’t our country always loosened this standard for celebrities? So why do we need to hear every little detail of this marital train wreck? His wealth & fame have made it so he probably can’t walk 2 steps without some fan or paparazzi hounding him. He’s probably done pretty much what most of us would to if we were convinced by a doting public that we were brilliant, & had enough money to indulge our pleasures. But for Tiger Woods, the walls came down at the confluence of 2 ideas, one a couple of decades old & one rather new – that if it can be found out, we have a right to hear about it; & that every bit of info, good & bad, might as well go out to the networked world ASAP.
We have reached a point of cultural TMI. For all 4 of you who haven’t heard yet, TMI stands for “too much information.” Usually it’s used in the context of too much intimate information, or intimate and gross. Like more details than you really need on some sex act gone wrong. People will exclaim, “TMI! I didn’t need to hear that!” And this is what we have in the case of Tiger Woods. The wonders of the Internet strain toward a nadir, & we, the distracted public, plug into incredible technology to ensure we go forth to our days with the vital knowledge that some golfer guy is well endowed. Job well done.
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