i am a pretentious hack.

       i'm not dead!

Saturday, July 29, 2006

delicious anticipation

i went to see wordplay today, and i enjoyed it quite a bit, being nerdy and enthralled with others who are nerdy. if you like crossword puzzles, i recommend it. if you don't, odds are it'll bore you. i can't see the point in saying any more about it than that. but i do want to make sure you all know about the new michel gondry film i saw a trailer for while waiting for wordplay: the science of sleep. it looks beautiful and odd and incredibly sweet, and like exactly the sort of perfect-in-its-imperfection love story that i'm about due for. i very much liked my results on the dream quiz the site offers, too; they made me sound entirely like the girl i've been so busy trying to be, and that's always life-affirming. the movie opens in the states in september, i believe on the 15th, and i am SOOOO excited. go check it out and let me know what you think. or don't, it's your weekend. i just wanted to tell someone about it. happiness is a good thing to share.

p.s. as i'm in a happiness-sharing mood. . . i got the key to my new apartment this morning and am even more excited about moving into it now than i was when i signed my lease. the kitchen has wood paneling and brick face, and a chandelier made out of the wheel of either a wagon or a ship. i hadn't absorbed any of this on my initial trips through, and i'm thoroughly twitterpated.

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Friday, July 28, 2006

my chemical un-romance

since part of my job now is to collate news briefs related to the subject matter in the journals i work on, i get to spend the first two hours of every morning sipping my coffee and edumacating meself re whatever's on the wire, stretching contentedly in the rhombus of sunlight that beams down throught the skylight. oh, i am a happy little girl these days, my honeys—but not so happy that i forget to get angry about the bad news, and you know there's no one i'd rather rant to than you. today i would like to shake my tiny fist about groceries, and don't change the channel yet, because it's really more important than you think it is right now.

we all know that it's important to pay attention to what we eat for the sake of our own health, but it's easy to forget that your food choices have an impact that extends far beyond your personal experience, and it seems that without a fairly extensive amount of research even the best intentions can be thwarted by what food retailers probably can't tell you and food manufacturers would rather not. i was surprised that my (now much-loved) nemesis, zp, didn't comment on steven shapin's new yorker article on the organic-food boom, since she's such a farm-stand junkie and seems to appreciate a higher than average degree of awareness in that realm. perhaps she'll grace us with a perspective now (*HINT*). i enjoyed it, even though it didn't tell me much i didn't already know and some of shapin's points were things i've mentioned here myself (albeit in a far more petulant tone). i'll always buy organic when i can for the chemical-fertilizer-sparing effect alone, but i don't kid myself about it being the solution to any significant global problems. i do feel good about being vegan, because industrial farming is dreadful for all things great and small, but i understand that the lifestyle is very much not for everyone. the cost alone is prohibitive, and if you don't take the time to teach yourself how to balance things appropriately, it can be more than a little harmful. but it was the right choice for me, and i don't need anyone else to make it as long as they're taking the time to make some kind of well-reasoned decision about why they choose the foods they choose. if your own health isn't important enough then i suppose it's unlikely that you'll be moved by the pathophysiologies of others, but if you disagree (and there are some saintly beings who are honestly more concerned about the rest of the world than about themselves), i, like shapin, would like to recommend michael pollan's the omnivore’s dilemma, which, while at times on the preachy side, has a heart that is very much in the right place, and i would also like to ask you to read this article on how an artificial flavoring is likely doing a lot of irreversible damage to a lot of people. go ahead, take as much time as you need; i'll wait.




welcome back. i missed you.

diacetyl is naturally occurring in a number of foods and is a common additive in many, many processed foods, used to impart a buttery flavor. it isn't more harmful to ingest than any other unpronounceable item in a list of ingredients, but chronic inhalation exposure appears to be pretty gosh-darned dangerous. the massive quantities of the chemical used in the manufacturing of superbuttery foods like microwave popcorn naturally lead to the worst harm being done to employees dealing with those foods, some of whom have airways so badly scarred that they're on lung-transplant lists. it's just something to think about; if you try not to buy from companies that take advantage of pennies-a-day overseas labor and check to make sure your coffee is fairly traded, you might want to scan the side of your snack food's packaging for this substance. of course, you might also want to write a letter to your favorite popcorn manufacturer and ask it to please, please inititate some safer exposure regulations for workers handling diacetyl, and maybe one to OSHA asking that they dedicate a few more resources to establishing exactly how long-term exposure to diacetyl affects human health, seeing as how that's more or less their job. it might also be a good idea to ponder the full ramifications of this spooky statement, found in the news article referenced above:

we don't know if diacetyl is the agent (causing lung disease). when you get into the world of flavorings, there are so many flavorings it's difficult to determine which chemicals are the causative agent.

gives you the chills, a bit, doesn't it? it's an admission of guilt (i.e., they know that something they're using is dangerous) being used to deflect attention from the thing they are guilty of. curious. meanwhile, i'll keep, you know, shaking my tiny fist and rinsing out the cups and not knowing what the hell to do about anything.

thanks for putting up with all that.

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Thursday, July 27, 2006

cheers and jeers

hooray for approximately 70 percent of chicago's city council!

the city council brushed aside warnings from wal-mart stores inc. to approve an ordinance that makes chicago the biggest city in the nation to require big-box retailers to pay a "living wage."

the ordinance, which passed 35-14 wednesday after three hours of impassioned debate, requires mega-retailers to pay wages of at least $10 an hour plus $3 in fringe benefits by mid-2010. It would only apply to companies with more than $1 billion in annual sales and stores of at least 90,000 square feet.

"it's trying to get the largest companies in america to pay decent wages," alderman toni preckwinkle said.


the proposed wage is $3.50/hr more than the minimum wage in illinois and $4.85/hr more than the federal minimum wage, and is, in my opinion, absolutely just, considering wal-mart has an annual profit margin of over $10 billion and top executives earning close to $30 million a year. it's a very sneaky game that store is playing; by keeping its workers so painfully impoverished, it ensures their inability to afford to shop anywhere but wal-mart, thus increasing its profit margins, and so on and so forth in one of the most evil corporate circles in existence today. bad, bad folks, who, despite their sponsored-documentary efforts to convince the american public otherwise, are so far from being on the side of their workers they've more or less circled back up behind them, from which point they can more easily kick them in their benefit-deprived asses:

wal-mart spokesman john bisio said earlier that if the measure passed, "we'd redirect our focus on our suburban strategy and see how we could better serve our city of chicago residents from suburban chicagoland."


in english please, mr. bitchio?

"um, we ain't payin' you suckers shit."

well, that's just rude. and it's shameful that opponents to the wage mandate are probably right in saying it will hurt employment rates in the city rather than improve the lives of those already employed by the company, since wal-mart knows it can set up a ring of stores along the city's borders at which it can carry on in its current unscrupulous fashion, probably without losing a penny in revenue. but if all of illinois were to demand a wage increase from megastores, they'd have to cave, right? there's no way they'd lose an entire state's worth of sales. and once one state had done it, others would work up the courage to join in, until we were living in a coast-to-coast utopian mecca of minimum-wage fairness. don't back down, chicago! stand up and start that wave! i'll be right behind you waving my giant pom poms, which were not purchased from a chain store of any sort.


source

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Monday, July 24, 2006

to be or not to be . . . i, um, i don't understand the question.

stem cell research is controversial, and there are plenty of valid reasons for why this should be the case. even your humble narrator, who as a rule passes instant, unapologetic, and highly opinionated judgment upon everything that comes before her, can not keep from shifting from one foot to the other about this issue. i feel very strongly, oh so incredibly strongly, that disease happens for a reason and population control and equilibrium are essential in all populations, and scientifically speaking it's detrimental to the species in question and the entire ecosystem for every member of a given population to survive all obstacles, particularly the genetic ones that more or less incapacitate individuals. but i feel so strongly about it precisely because i believe life on this planet is such an astounding, intricate miracle, and all of it needs to be treated as such. i get stuck in this debate, every time, because i want to save everything, including the people, but saving all the people makes it impossible to save all the everything . . .

i can't say that any living thing doesn't deserve the best possible shot. our president seems, to some extent, to disagree.

now, i am not about to initiate another exhausting round of fisticuffs over whether or not an embryo is a person, and please don't you, either, because that's not what i, or most people who are in favor of stem cell research, are arguing about, and it never should be. here are the only two points regarding the right-to-life aspect of this subject that should ever come into play:

1. people with genetic diseases, neurological conditions, and paralyzing injuries who could be aided by stem cell therapies are, by definition, people, and therefore have at least as many rights as amorphous clumps of cells.

2. the cells that scientists are hoping to utilize would come from fertility-clinic stores that would otherwise be disposed of as medical waste.

let's look at that second point again. ready? *scrollscrollscroll*

2. the cells that scientists are hoping to utilize would come from fertility-clinic stores that would otherwise be disposed of as medical waste.

these embryos aren't being fertilized or harvested specifically for research; nobody wants that and nobody would condone that. they aren't being stolen from loving parents, as the donors would be required to consent to the embryos' use in research of any sort. there's no subterfuge or sinister activity, and however lovely bushy's angelic army of snowflakes is, even he would have to admit that there's no way every spare embryo in every clinic in the country is ever going to be adopted. these cells are being held in storage, and then they're being incinerated. that's their entire destiny. if you can't stand the idea of that, rally against fertilization technology; that's the field that's helping create life only to destroy it. well, that and factory farming, but that's a rant for a different day. my thought on this fine summer afternoon is that allowing the embryos to be donated as research lines would provide their five-day lives with some sort of grander purpose, which, really, is what we're all hoping for.

sam brownback, r-ks, says "we do not need to treat humans as raw material." and that's a fine statement, it really is. commendable, even, maybe, in certain contexts. but no one's pushing soylent green. in this context, it sounds like, "your life is not worth more than this not-quite life. in fact, your life is expendable, whereas this one must not be wasted." to the people desperate for some way to help a suffering loved one, and to me, it sounds insanely hateful. these "lives" were begun in hope, but they'll end without having meant anything, unless a lot of stubborn people change their fundamentalist minds and decide to focus on helping some people who actually have a chance of being helped.

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boo, pretentious theater critic! hooray, beer!

wait, what . . . oh, gosh, i'm sorry. here, let me try that again:

*mmherm* hooray, modern poetry!

yes. much better. now, allow me to explain.

i was quite proud of myself when i read the word "crepuscular" in john lahr's review of brian friel's faith healer (the new yorker, may 15, 2006, p. 80) and thought immediately, and correctly, of wallace stevens, whose work i devoured in high school and college but haven't glanced at since. the pride stemmed not only from my brain's charming, if somewhat rain-man-y, eagerness to match a word with the first place i saw it, in this case stevens's "the comedian as the letter c," but also its ability to focus on any one word in lahr's rococo prose, so ornate it's practically gilded and reeking of trumpet lilies. for a moment i was grateful to lahr for bringing stevens to mind, as i do adore him but frequently forget it, and then i was annoyed with him for using so magnificent a word as "crepuscular" to describe something like a low-lit stage set. a rather out-of-place adjective, is what i thought to myself. i read on to the next paragraph, where lahr describes ralph fiennes as "gaunt and thin," and decided i was filing him firmly under h for hack. and then i got to the second-to-last paragraph and decided that was far too good for him. here are the last two sentences of that paragraph:

this gleeful stuff is matched by a first-rate cast of players, especially danny burstein, who turns the transparently gay latin lover adolpho into a whirlwind of bogus macho concupiscence. he ricochets around the stage, with the silver streak in his black pompadour ruffling like a bantam rooster's comb.


"the emperor of ice cream": "call the roller of big cigars, / the muscular one, and bid him whip / in kitchen cups concupiscent curds." this one i'd know anywhere, as it's the first wallace stevens poem i ever read and was the spark that ignited the raging blaze of my (to date) undying love. i read it on a family vacation in maine when i was thirteen; it was the introduction to a chapter in stephen king's salem's lot. i have read it over and over and over since then (unlike salem's lot, which presumably played its full role that first time around) and could recite it from memory to any one of you with both hands tied behind my back. i read "bantam in pine-woods" in an undergraduate poetry course and have not forgotten it, or the entirety of "the man on the dump," which i memorized for a performance-art class and which doesn't really pertain to this conversation except in making me slightly more believable as an expert witness when i make my assertion that john lahr is a despicable fraud, which i shall do without further delay:

john lahr is a despicable fraud. and wallace stevens would never have been his scrabble buddy. i repeat: boo!

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Thursday, July 20, 2006

words, words, words . . . words.

phrase least deserving of mass mailing:



thanks, urban outfitters! i thought they were picnics at which no one was allowed to eat anything but tuna sandwiches, and since i don't need to attend any more of those, i'd never have opened the e-mail without your clarification. you're the best. really. the best.

phrase that i can not look at or think about without becoming at least a teensy bit nauseated: tooth pulp. uggggghhhhhh.

new favorite word: widdershins! wonderful, wonderful widdershins! adjective or adverb, meaning in a left-handed, wrong, or contrary (counterclockwise) direction. can you use the word in a sentence, juniper? why, yes i can!

"my wee pet circles widdershins around the room, like a small and black and restless moon."

somehow the word has acquired some wiccan relevance, but i don't know anything about that. if you do, you can tell me. i like learning and whatnot. especially about widdershins.

funniest intro to a television commercial: "too many players hit balls without purpose." i'm not even going to tell you what they're selling, i'm just going to let you bask in its delicate, irridescent beauty.

phrase most likely to appear on the cover of the next book i buy for my roommate: fast lives: women who use crack cocaine. there's nothing funny about drug abuse or addiction and the ease with which it ruins lives, but come on; have you ever seen a more groan-worthy title? maybe they could make it a series. fast lives: women who downhill ski. fast lives: men who drive on the autobahn. fast lives: cheetahs.

fast post: and it's gone.

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Sunday, July 09, 2006

science is neat!

if there's any credo i live by, it's that when nature speaks, we'd best listen. recently, my ear to the ground has picked up some vibrations affirming the infinite genius of biology and the impossibility of its ever being bettered by our interference. my love for self-directed ecology is a bittersweet one, in that i don't know anyone (personally) who is as moved by it as i am and thus am frequently driven to wring my hands and cry out over the desperate future of my favorite little planet, but knowing things is always good. so.

first up are two recent studies, one of which was published in the june 14 issue of the scandinavian journal of immunology, suggesting that feral rats living in sewers and basements and dumpsters and the like have far healthier immune systems than rats raised in sterile laboratory environments. an antiseptic-obsessed west says, "what?" and seth borenstein replies:

the studies give more weight to a 17-year-old theory that the sanitized western world may be partly to blame for soaring rates of human allergy and asthma cases and some autoimmune diseases, such as type I diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis. the theory, called the "hygiene hypothesis," figures that people's immune systems aren't being challenged by disease and dirt early in life, so the body's natural defenses overreact to small irritants such as pollen.

"your immune system is like the person who lives in the perfect house and has all the food they want, you're going to start worrying about little things like someone stepping on your flowers," [co-author dr. william] parker said.


y'all are crazy, with your antibacterial soaps and bleach pens and prescriptions for every sniffle and sneeze and cough! you're friggin' crazy! i played in the mud and ate sand and kept bugs as pets and let my dog eat off my fork, i use public transportation almost exclusively, i can't remember the last time i washed my bathroom sink, and let's not even talk about the things i've been exposed to working in a veterinary hospital . . . and yet i have not been sick in, i don't even know, longer than i can remember. when i was about nineteen or twenty i developed sudden and profound pollen allergies, but when i quit smoking, about six years later, they disappeared. i am superwoman, wild rat of the urban bipedal environment, and my immune system says you can take a dump on the porch for all it cares—it ain't budging.

now, that was a little silly*, but this hygiene hypothesis is common sense from an immunology perspective. your body learns through experience, and early, consistent experience is the best kind. like any other performer, it perfects its act with practice. it also learns how to choose its battles this way. let's equate your young, germ-naïve body with a small-town, upper-middle-class, dreamily oblivious girl who grew up in a neighborhood where nobody locked their doors or followed in the car when the kids went door to door selling candy bars and cookies. when this girl graduates from school and gets her first apartment in the big city, there's a good chance that she'll be a little nervous in the beginning and will maybe blind some poor guy with pepper spray when he tries to ask her if she knows where the closest atm is. the police will recognize her address, her name, and possibly her voice from all the panicked late-night calls they'll get about strange noises in the hall and people shouting outside and car alarms going off three blocks away. her chronic hypervigilance will be a huge pain in the ass, much like your hay fever. now, if she had had a little more exposure to the real world, maybe read a newspaper once in a while, she'd have been better able to discriminate between real threats and perceived ones. and so it goes with your body; the tamest antigen is terrifying if your mother always scoured the countertops with virucide. this sort of overpurification is, of course, unwise on a grander scale, as the viruses learn through experience too, people. never doubt it; they're wily.

up next is my favorite, favorite example of the mastery of nature's big-picture thought process: there is now evidence that being the younger brother of several older brothers increases your likelihood of being gay, and that it's most likely the result of a prenatal effect, since according to the study the results only held for brothers of the same mother, not step- or half-brothers. the more older brothers you have, the more the odds are in favor of your someday having a crush on one of their friends, and the less chance there is of your going out and impregnating some female yourself. yay! yay genetics! you can tell when us crazy humans need to please, for the love of all that is right and good, stop reproducing, even when we seem incapable of figuring it out. now, it's a minimal increase compared to the rate of homosexuality overall (three percent to five percent, roughly), but every little bit counts, right? whatever it takes to slow down the explosive growth of the human population is fine by me, at least until we can manage to adequately care for all of the people who are already here.

so, in conclusion: your body is cool. especially if you're matt damon. but even if you aren't, give your cells a round of applause for being so clever and forward-thinking, and remember to give them their time at the microphone, because they've got all kinds of advice to impart, microscopic sages that they are. itsy bitsy yodas, each and every one. and if that doesn't make you drink two liters of water a day, i don't know what will.





* silly, yes, but entirely honest. i also kiss my tiny cat's perfect, miniscule toes on a daily basis. take that, toxoplasmosis; you got no game. nothin'.

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Sunday, July 02, 2006

i knew it!

just as i've always hoped:

You scored as Disappear. Your death will be by disappearing, probably a camping trip gone wrong or an evening hike you never returned from. Always remember that one guy who was hiking alone and got in a rock slide. He could have died, but he cut his own hand off to save himself. Don't end up like him (or worse, dead).

Disappear

93%

Bomb

73%

Natural Causes

67%

Suicide

67%

Accident

40%

Stabbed

33%

Gunshot

33%

Disease

33%

Eaten

27%

Posion

27%

Cut Throat

13%

Suffocated

7%

Drowning

0%

How Will You Die??
created with QuizFarm.com

don't you tell me what to do, quizfarm, it's my life, and if i want it to end mysteriously in a deep wood or at the bottom of the grand canyon, then, by golly, that's how it'll end. it's better than posion, anyway.

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that's glib, david remnick; you're being glib.

here's a quote from a june 9, 2006, interview that aired on book-tv sometime around 1:00 AM this morning, spoken by my glib hero/antagonist in reference to the new yorker's (apparently) eagerly polled readers:

"ninety-nine percent of the people say they read the cartoons first, and the other one percent are lying."

this makes me think that when remnick was a reader rather than employee of said periodical, he thumbed through from cover to cover and read all the cartoons first himself, and that's fine, absolutely fine. maybe he still approaches it that way, and that, too, would be fine. but it would also mean he should give me his god-damned job, because i open the magazine and read every page, in numerical order (gladwell pieces excepted), because i'm in it for the stories. if the magazine stopped running the cartoons all together, i would continue to read it in that same manner, because i am in love with that stupid stapled mess of blow-ins and snooty ads and condescending fonts and brilliant ideas and crystalline prose and political sincerity and all the things i dream of dedicating my day after day after day to.

but i know, really i do, that i am in love with it because remnick and the people around him make it a thing i can love. so however eager i am to despise him for making smarmily charming jokes about work i want to do so badly that it has, on occasion, kept me awake at night, especially when i remember that he's only about 46 and by the time he steps down i'll be old and defeated and maybe no longer willing to stand with one hand on william shawn's typewriter until the other applicants have collapsed from exhaustion and dehydration,

i can't quite manage it. it's my job, i'm sure of it. it's my job, and he has it, and i'm pretty sure that that means i never will, and it's terrible to be as certain about the future you need to arrive in as you are about the impossibility of your ever actually arriving in it. it's my job.

but he's doing it exceptionally well. if ninety-nine percent of the people demand cartoons, you must give them cartoons, no? but the one percent are still the people, and you should take us at our word. our zealous, crazy-eyed word.

and then you should give us our jobs.

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