Via The Underwire:
UK Food retailer Tesco is going to spend $10 million on testing of foods at Oxford University in order to develop a carbon labeling system, letting their customers know exactly what kind of “carbon footprint” their cereal and steaks leave on the environment.
It seems to me that putting “Carbon Footprint” labels on foods is just another waste of energy. It would require more paper, more ink, more physical printing (which adds to the carbon footprint!), and would require a lot of changes to current labels. Not to mention the inherent consumer education issues. It is very popular to be passionate about the environment, especially the Global Warming issue and humanity’s role in it. However, does that mean that a lot of day-to-day consumers are going to understand these labels if and when they are implemented? Not likely.
How many people read and understand current labels? Do you know what Riboflavin is? How many diabetics use the exchange list information accurately?
Incidentally, for a quick reference on all the food you eat, I recommend NutritionData.com. They break things down much more in depth than the food labels can. (Incidentally, I bet the carbon footprint of running their servers for ANYONE to access this information is much smaller than the printing, applying, and shipping of all the individual labels, not to mention all the other work needed to get said labels to the consumers!) Take one of my favorite foods: Liverwurst (hush, it’s not gross!). Nutritiondata tells me how filling it is versus how nutritious it is. It will tell me exactly what vitamins and minerals are in the average serving. I can search for substitutions for liverwurst based on my needs, like weight loss, optimum health or weight gain. Granted, not all the data options are FDA approved, but the FDA also allows a certain amount of wasps’ heads in your fig newtons, too. Go ahead, scroll down and read it, I’ll wait. Yeah, don’t read the rest of that.
Still I think the poster that Underwire writer Sonia Zjawinski cited, from the NY Farm Bureau, really does sum things up the best.
Reposted here for your convenience:
Clocking in at 11 minutes, this alternate take of the title track from the rerelease of Televison’s 1977 album Marquee Moon is a sweeping soundscape of what translates to near pure bliss for this listener.
“Eleven minutes?!” one may be inclined to exclaim, “Why that’s much longer than 3! and far longer than the limited attention span which may even permit 5 minutes of one song!” Yes it’s true. Still I urge you, gentle readers, to set aside the urge for mere bite-size culture bits take this time to absorb the crash of the drums, the sinuous progression of the guitar, the underlying call of the bass, the lyrical journey.
Next comes “Marquee Moon,” a nine minute encapsulation of the group sound; a great Lloyd chord opening, looping riffs out of left field by Verlaine, and a funky, rocking bass and drum part that lead into the song. It then builds and builds, and Verlaine begins to solo up into the upper neck of the guitar. More than a few times you wonder if even he knows where it’s all going. It finally resolves into a Stones-like chord burst (actually not unlike a good Dead jam number), then settles into a lyrical, atmospheric section. Smith and Ficca then lead us back into a reprise of the main melody.
Had a very lucid-feeling dream in which I was able to speak to my recently deceased father. The reason I claim lucidty is because I physically felt the struggle to stay asleep upon realizing that I was dreaming. It was near a pool. I only spoke with him briefly. Told him it was pretty lame that this was the only way we could talk, etc. It was a natural conversation, and I wouldn’t share the details even if I remembered every last one.
Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. Section 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was established to allow for Federal enforcement of equal-rights voting within the individual States. This was renewed for 25 years by Congress and signed by President Bush last year, well in advance of the 2007 expiry date.
“The prohibition of voting rights discrimination on the basis of race, color, or previous condition of slavery was first codified by the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1870. Soon after the failure of Reconstruction, southern states found other means besides those enumerated in the Fifteenth Amendment to deny the vote to blacks, through violence, intimidation, via Jim Crow laws that included literacy tests, poll taxes, and also grandfather clauses that permitted otherwise disqualified voters whose grandfathers voted (thus allowing some white illiterates to vote), all with the aim and effect of re-imposing racially motivated restrictions on the voting process that prevented blacks from having political and economic power.”
Even though we live in some dark and troubled times of suspect legislation and shadowy government actions, the looming threat of equal-rights voting being allowed to expire is one monster-under-the-bed we can truly see as the pile of stuff (and nonsense) that it truly is.
Stay sharp, and stay educated, because knowledge is power.
And for clarification on that point compare the previous post with the video below. Draw your on conclusions, of course. I will say how remarkable the difference is. From raw, unbridled, dischordant and unmindful to operatic, orchestrated, precise and controlled.
I went to bed rather early because I got up early and was a lot more active than normal.
At first I dreamt I was in a field and the stars over my head shone with a brilliance I have never seen before (not even in NM and the stars there were intense). At some point it became a stadium-like concert hall with a peculiar pattern of open roof. I sat down in a chair and continued to relax and look at the stars. I was there for a little while when I saw people coming in and sitting down. Then I realized that someone was setting up the stage area below. I thought to myself that since I was already here and no one stopped me before that I may as well stick around. At some point during all of this, I had company on either side of me, my father and a mystery person. As it turns out, the people setting up on stage were The Flaming Lips. They started to play (and it really was familiar songs, I was stunned almost in-dream by the accuracy) and it was really great but I got a little nervous because I didn’t know if I was allowed to be here or not. I turned around and looked, and there was a familiar looking young man. I asked if we’d gone to school together and he said yes. That was pretty much the end of that conversation. There were some fancy effects, one of which went wrong.
It had to do with a pattern of lasers over the crowd that would present the optical illusion represented above, and then had another image overlaid on that. (Looked sort of like J.R. “Bob” Dobbs if I recall correctly.) Of course to do all that, they needed smoke in the air. However, they couldn’t figure out how to keep the smoke from rising too quickly to the top and out of the open dome. I looked upward and saw that they attempted to “close” the dome but there was no fully closed setting and even still the ceiling was very high, causing the smoke to drift well out of laser range. I peeked through holes at the stars and longed for the way it was before. Though I was grateful to be sitting with my dad and grateful to be seeing the band perform. The nervousness of being discovered for my ignorant seat theft and the pang of longing for the peace field I had started out in were pretty overwhelming. I had gotten caught for my apparent trespass (despite having been there first) and was frantically trying to come up with some way to redeem myself. I stammered a suggestion to the large man towering above me that if they had linen sheets, lots of them, they could use it to create a canopy to blow the smoke under and contain it. I fled from the building, on a determined mission to find linen sheets. The open country had gone from field to urban while I wasn’t looking and there were a variety of stores, most of which were closed. I started out moving along by car but for some reason decided that was not the most efficient way to manage so I left the car in some parking lot and ran.
I wasn’t able to find linen sheets, so many places were closed and I returned to admit my defeat after the concert, despite the fact that I could have just run as my gut tried to tell me to. I lose the thread of the dream there. I may have woken up.
Later on, I dreamt of a video game. I believe it was called “Purple Valve: The Assisted Suicide Game”. Not sure why they called it that, other than it was remarkably easy to die. Player 1 was on a moving platform that was going down with a few other figures, but the idea was you needed to leap of and get power ups and hop from small block to small block to get the rest of the way down. After falling to my doom over and over again, I finally figured out how to grab power ups that made the fall less fatal, and finished level one. Some of those symbols made no sense. I don’t know why grabbing the baseball and then the baseball glove made an angel come and wing me part of the way down. Perhaps a manifestation of Saint Duh, the patron saint of obvious pattern recognition?
As level two began the whole dream pulled away from that. I was faced with something that was like a low budget cross between Transformers and John Carpenter’s Price of Darkness. There were these “symbiote” creatures created of wire that looked remarkably like CAT5. They informed us of their superiority and started taking people over one at a time. They did so by jabbing one of these wires down the throats of human victims. There was a lot of cautious reasoning with these monsters, trying to perhaps trick them into admitting a weakness while trying to establish the worth of the human race. This dream gets a bit hazy but I suspect that the humans did not survive. Incidentally I think Alec Baldwin was in that dream, portraying some manner of general.
And I wonder why I wake up tired.
This gorgeous display of sand art drawings, created and destroyed from one moment to the next is truly captivating.
It’s so wonderous to see the images almost seem to come alive from the shadowy hands which gently sift, place, and sweep away sand from atop the lighted podium.
Nine minutes may seem like a long time in this attention-span depraved landscape of internet one-shots, but I assure you this is fascinating to the absolute last gesture.
This has undoubtedly already done the rounds in and about the video sites and the blogosphere, since it was from the 2003 SICAF, but it really does get more interesting every time I see it. Does anyone happen to know what the music playing in the background is for this performance?
This has to be one of the least intelligent surgical developments I have heard in quite a long time. It’s just another item in a long line of things subtly encouraging people to assume that sex has nothing to do with personal happiness and everything to do with how one’s sexuality will be judged by others. Barring any actual deformities, such as those caused by functionally limiting accidents or birth defects, I can see absolutely no reason for this procedure. Anyone who encourages this be performed on healthy women is - to say the least - very disappointingly short-sighted.
As a part of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, sex ranks directly with food, sleep, and breathing as one of the most important needs for a human being. I myself am in agreement with that sentiment.
Esteem? That which would make one desire a purely cosmetic change in the first place is a much smaller piece of the pyramid. Rightfully so, as the interactivity one elects to have with other humans is as optional as this “designer vagina” surgery. I can’t really picture a scenario in which the likeness of my pubic area to that of one seen in a magazine or film would really be that important. Even for those in the habit of posing for said magazine photographs, there is indeed photoshop and other such techniques which would prevent the necessity of voluntary genital mutilation.
Ladies, the next time you start to feel insecure about the appearace of your genitalia, just remember: “Who really has any business giving a shit besides me?”
Some kids play in the sandbox. We play in the.... litterbox??? The RKNet staff is pleased that you decided to stop by. Currently this is a 1 author project, with periodic guest posts. Contact giania [at symbol] gmail.com if you'd like to play here to.
