Susan G. Komen foundation- imbeciles or whores?

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?

Durn silly products

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.

Whatever happened to Row, Row, Row your Boat?

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 4^th 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 5^th 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 3^rd 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 5^th 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?

The boy is upright & walking, so everything must be fine.

I am just back from 9-year-old son’s yearly physical. And I am displeased. Displeased! GAH!!! Hey! Here’s an idea for how to overhaul the medical system. How about we get to pay what we think it’s worth?

We go to Group Health in Seattle. I suppose it was a radical & wonderful thing when it started but I fear they have become mired in bureaucracy. “They’ve become a machine,” my husband says.

Got there & some woman (she may have been an assistant, she may have been a nurse. I never found out, since she never saw fit to tell me) came out & called Reid to come down the hall, go into a room, & take his shoes off. While she went thru the weight height list I kept waiting for her to introduce herself or MAKE EYE CONTACT, for god’s sake but apparently common courtesies & basic manners aren’t covered in our plan.

She said Reid’s right eye wasn’t seeing well & that I would want to make an appt with optometry. “He saw someone last week,” I said. “Isn’t that on the computer? I thought that was one advantage of being in the same system.” No response. Eventually we saw the doctor. He was nice enough. But what a cursory exam.

I’m thinking about how our understanding of how our bodies & minds work is expanding constantly. And one thing we’ve figured out is that there are MANY factors to health: what we eat, how much we eat, the quality of the air we breath, our daily stress level, how much we exercise, drugs or medicines we take, allergens around us, & that’s just a bit of the list. This would have been an ideal time to ask me about what I feed my child, & does he exercise, is he sleeping well & how much does he sleep, how much tv does he watch? But these things were not discussed. Does he eat a lot of sugar? Didn’t come up. Reid splits his time between my house & his dad’s house, which is surely a factor, but they don’t know about it because they didn’t ask the most basic questions about his living situation. And they made him undress & put on one of those lame robes, which by the way was an adult size so he couldn’t even tie it on reasonably. I expected the doctor to have him stand up & turn around so his skin & posture could be observed. I think this is quite reasonable. What if I’m practicing my tattooing on Reid? What if I’m abusing him by burning little patterns into his skin with match heads? If I were that kind of parent I would surely have threatened him not to mention anything. Or what if he has some kind of weird blot that is skin cancer only I’m too clueless to ask about it?

I don’t expect them to run a cat scan or bloodwork on a child that is to all appearances bright, alert, & healthy. But a few words on what’s currently considered a healthy diet, a quick glance with trained eyes at the skin & posture of a child…these things don’t require any flavor of test, any kind of special equipment, except, of course, an active mind & some semblance of professional interest.

We left with our little sheet of paper placing Reid in his percentiles. As if I care. His next visit is recommended in 3 years. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends every 2 years at this age, but I suppose that isn’t covered on our plan.

REUSE! – How to be so hip you won’t need to wear a belt.

My "new" Cuisinart. Less than 1/2 price on craigslist.

(Did you know Seattle has a goal of zero waste? I just found that out.)

I don’t recall thrifting being cool when I was in college. Shopping in malls – actually, roosting in malls, was the thing to do. Then there started to be a change down in the scattered communities of Y folk, people in their mid-twenties who were avoiding soulless yuppie jobs. They combined a necessary frugality with a nostalgia for things before their time, & the thrifting movement began to catch on. Anyone seen the now defunct zine Thrift Score? In which the author, Al Hoff, discussed shopping strategies, great thrift finds, & how to make a look out of random junk? Hey, she got her stuff published in a book & was sent on tour.

I’m sure many of you never thrift, or do so only unintentionally, such as when you pass a fertile looking yard sale on your way to the grocery store. But I bet you DO recycle. Because it’s PC. Because, in many places, it’s the law. And finally, because it makes you feel good. I mean, really good. These days, we are absolutely haunted by all the ways we’ve screwed up the world. High food chain animals are dying, air pollution warnings are given in big cities on hot days so delicate people can lock themselves up indoors, there’s that huge Sargasso Sea of floating plastic crap in the Pacific….on & on & ON, for pity’s sake. But every time you toss a can into your recycling bin, you know you’re doing something. You drag the stuff to the curb, then turn away, lighthearted & untroubled, your face glowing with the righteousness of one who is living the morally right life. You feel so…good. So potent. So noble. Listen – get over yourself.

I spent a while online & I can tell you, you should not be getting your warm fuzzies from the fact that you recycle. A lot of cities are using programs & technology that is so young, they end up spending more on recycling than they would just land-filling the stuff. This is a problem because, despite certain Beatles songs & the damp yearnings of various poets, the world does not run on love, it runs on MONEY. Money, money, money. And if/when various locales decide they need to trim budgets, & there’s a lot of that going on these days, pretty but expensive programs like recycling may get “paused”. Think it would never happen because who would make such an un-PC decision? In 2008, the problem was so bad in NYC that Mayor Bloomberg proposed canceling certain recycling programs for 18 months until the city learned to do it with at least some semblance of cost effectiveness. (BTW, here’s a fun site – Waste Age, for professionals in the waste industry.)

Gloat. Gloat. You heard I paid $65 instead of $170, right?

So what CAN we feel good about? Recycling doesn’t save money, but it does keep us from using as much in the way of virgin resources to make new items, & it does keep trash out of landfills. Recycling does cost a lot, tho. And the process of recycling uses a lot of energy, which has to come from somewhere. Think about it. Your recycling is picked up by a truck larger than most living rooms. It uses a LOT of gas. People are paid to drive it. Recycling glass may keep companies from needing new raw materials to make more glass, but it took a lot of raw materials & energy to manufacture the machines that actually recycle the glass.

You all know the mantra – Reduce, reuse, recycle. The words appear in the order you’re supposed to do them. Use less stuff when at all possible. If you do need something reuse something. That way, the work & energy involved in making it goes further. And recycle is LAST. If you have no other choice, if you were obligated to buy something & you can’t find any reuse, then recycle.

I’m encouraging you all to reuse whenever possible. To motivate you, I’m posting pix of the fine Cuisinart I got on craigslist.com for $65. The current model of this is $170 on the Cuis site. I have found a large plenty of appliances on craigslist. People get them as wedding gifts from hopeful relations, or they go thru phases of pretty enthusiasms which fade like Polaroids in hot sun. Shopping on craigslist & at yard sales is an excellent way to reuse perfectly good items that would otherwise be just thrown out, & would cost you a lot more if you were to buy them new.

My suggestion to you – take a look at your wish list & start cruising for good used versions. MUCH better than recycling, & the severely lower price might let you have some longed for goodies a lot sooner than you’d expected.

Critical consumption – plastic forks & bamboo plates.

Eh…how to make a difference, with so many things in such a mess. My suggestion, because it’s easy enough to integrate, right now, into your daily life: think hard about the stuff you buy & use. Don’t just do what you always do automatically. Be a thoughtful consumer. I say this because plenty o’ studies have shown that in fact we do make most choices automatically. Ask yourself why you buy a certain brand of something. Are your reasons real & logical, or it is really just habit, or that you feel positive when you see the color of the box? You must make a conscious effort to think as you consume. Buy better, use less, reuse. The habits of enough individuals become the habits of groups. Make your own difference. Anytime an otherwise unglamorous action is executed while emitting the attitude that this action is both hip & cool, it becomes hip & cool to others, & that’s one way ideas spread & behaviors change. When we were in Mexico & Belize, I was so dismayed by the amount of trash, mostly in the cities. And where that stuff comes from is packaging around products that evoke American life. If you are using a computer, reading a blog, then you are probably closer to the front lines of societal change than is the non-computer user who gets his news from the Fox cable channel, his wants from commercials, & his supplies from Costco. Those kind of people are always the followers.

And as you go about your life, buying this & that, I want to caution you strongly to be ever vigilant against the “halo” effect. For instance, I was reading customer comments of biodegradable forks on Amazon & someone wrote of how she loved them & they were “even good for the planet!” Hello? What? A giant factory, truck & trains & planes & huge ocean going transports are not good for the planet. Still, isn’t that interesting that she made that comment. This is a good example of how we think we are making aware choices, then our brains get taken over by marketing & we didn’t even notice. Companies hire masterful copywriters to festoon their packages with pretty words. When you read what they have to say, listen for what they are not saying, & use their info as a starting point for a 5 minute google search. Many of these companies genuinely want to help the planet, but they are doing so because they anticipate making money in the process.

Did you know you can wash disposable plastic utensils in the dishwasher?

So true. BBQ season is here, perfect for forks you don’t mind kids losing in the yard. Sturdy plastic forks are fine for these situation, just don’t throw them away afterward. Put up a sign or spread the word that people should just lay them in the sink. Today’s plastic utensils can go thru the dishwasher with no problem. They don’t deform at all. You can use them for months or years. Really, why throw away a perfectly good fork or knife when it can be easily cleaned & sterilized time & time again?

Are biodegradable utensils so great?

You can now buy utensils made of

1. plant starch (one site lists it as “non-GMO corn starch”)
2. bamboo

You can also get plates made of

1. potatoes, vegetable starches & limestone – earthshell This company makes only plates & bowls. Upon reading their site we can see they are clearly positioning themselves as stewards of the planet & they make a very big deal of how harmless their products are. They also point out that they make everything in the US, from US materials, thus reducing the carbon footprint of having things shipped from China. Nice, but I still couldn’t find anything about where in the country they are. Ok for microwave and freezer.
2. bamboo – bambu veneerware This company has lovely bamboo plates, trays, utensils, & sporks. Everything is made of thin sheets of bamboo, which they point out is fast growing without artificial fertilizer, certified organic, renewable, & compostable. The price is good, unfortunately they are made in China. Not for microwave.
3. cassava -click here

My current takeaway on this whole thing – plastic is still better than biodegradable.

Biodegradable utensils sound nice, very PC & green. In fact, despite that they are supposed to withstand temps up to 200, many people complain that biod utensils are weak, fold up in hot soup, & you can even bite off the tines of the forks. Also, most of the current crop seems to be made in China. How earth friendly is it to ship a fork half way around the globe, then use it once before tossing it? Also, they are biodegradable only in the loosest sense. Plates are different, but the utensils are particularly tough, & can take up to 2 years to compost in a home composting system.

I’ll contiinue to use my plastic picnic ware for now. A pack of clear, attractive, & very strong forks, knives, & spoons is available for very cheap at the local Fred Meyer. I have some I’ve used & washed for over a year. They seem untouched. For my BBQ plates, I use some of the 200 plates left from our wedding. They are made by Preserve. They make dinner & dessert size plates in an extremely sturdy plastic that’s made from recycled yogurt containers, & the plates can be recycled if you ever want to get rid of them. They are strong, come in nice colors, stack very flat for easy storage, & are dishwasher safe! (I love that last part.) We have been using ours for nearly 3 years now & they are fine.