I've been very busy lately.
I just sat down and thought to myself . o O ( hey, I can use this time to research vacuum cleaners a bit more! ) and then proceed to open up our time-tracking app to track my time. I even got as far as trying to decide if this was billable or not before I realized I wasn't working.
I can't decide what's more pathetic: that, or the fact that I am spending my leisure time researching vacuum cleaners.
Well, this makes me feel good. Amanda and I had some just roast chicken for dinner tonight and it was just sliiightly undercooked, but hey, what's the worry, right?
Well, now of course I see that the USDA has announced that chicken salmonella rates are up nearly 80 percent.
That's a lot of percents.
Nashville metblogs officially launched today. I signed up to write for it a while back, and I'm joined by Jackson, and Busy Mom, among others. It's been up for a week, but we were supposed to keep it on the downlow until the official launch. I had a hard time writing without a captive audience -- I need to know someone is immediately going to read what I write. Instant gratification, and all that. I'm such a whore.
Anyways, check it out.
I think I am probably going to write some sort of post that gives a whirlwind tour of a more modern conception of racism that seems to be really poorly understood, given the recent debate.
In the meantime, here are some amusing contributions to the debate. First up is BIll Hobbs:
If you didn't say D, Chris, then you're an idiot.
So, which is it? Are you a bigot or just an idiot?
Then there's Nathan Moore:
If Bob is a racist, Chris is an idiot. But at least he feels good about himself.
Good to see that the art of debate is alive and well.
Who would have thought so much would go into buying a vacuum cleaner? Once upon a time, if you wanted a vacuum cleaner, you went to the vacuum cleaner store (I'm assuming), and made one Tim the Toolman Taylor-esque decision: how much power can I afford.
Not anymore. HEPA? Cyclonic? HEPA *and* cyclonic? Bagged or bagless? Upright or canister? I felt like I was buying a car, except it was more complicated.
Well, I haven't gotten one yet, because we perused through Wal-Mart, Sears and Lowes and couldn't find what I decided would be best: a bagless canister cyclonic with a HEPA filter. Phew. I think I'll probably just wind up buying online, if I can even afford it.
We went to Big Lots to check out their selection, and they had a $300 Dyson. Too rich for my blood. However, I did get this:
That's right. It's a talking Donald Rumsfeld doll. Best $5 I ever spent. I also got a George Bush (the elder) doll, but he wasn't as photogenic, because I didn't take him out of the box yet. So the day wasn't entirely a bust.
There's evil afoot in this world, ladies and gentlemen. An unholy trinity of forces that wield such power we can never hope to compete. Am I talking about the legislative, judicial, and executive branches? the three stooges?
No, I refer to the triumvirate of evil: sugar, alcohol and caffeine.
The three things I am convinced are making the majority of Americans completely miserable -- either separately, or more commonly, by working together. (I base this opinion of course on my own anecdotal experience. It's, like, totally scientific.)
I've done a pretty good job of giving sugar and most refined carbs the boot from my diet. Booze is another matter (ahem).
But caffeine. Whoo boy. I've "quit" drinking caffeine so many times I've got it down to a fine art (hint: Goody's powder contains caffeine, acetominophen and aspirin. It comes in powder form for easy dosage modulation, and the painkillers take the edge off the withdrawal headache.)
Lately, my caffeine addiction has really gotten out of hand -- I was going through 1/2 to a whole pot of coffee a day, plus easily 5-6 diet cokes a day at the office. Yeah, I have a problem. I was pretty much resigned to my fate -- that I just wasn't able to function in this society without being a hopeless caffeine junkie. Lately, however, my urticaria has been particularly bad, preventing me from working out as diligently (okay, at all) as I normally aspire to. In my neverending search for relief from the urticaria, I am constantly finding Some New Thing to blame it on, and then proceeding to post-hoc rationalize all the confluences I overlooked in the past. This year, it's caffeine. I started drinking caffeine around the time the urticaria started (when I was around 15/16 -- drinking a bottle of Coke at school every morning). I found some interesting articles that show that a correlation between urticaria and caffeine has been observed in others. So who knows.
Not to mention that caffeine just plain makes me feel like crap. Sure, a good caffeine buzz is great for productivity, but once you get really hooked, you wind up like Krusty the Clown, free-basing moon rocks. "All this does is get me to normal." Meanwhile, I sleep like crap; I wake up feeling drugged, and I'm a walking zombie until I get my dose.
So, here I am, yet again, trying to kick the vile drug. I spent last week scaling down my intake, and today is my first caffeine-free day. My head hurts.
Parke Wilde has a good post on the difficulties of measuring the effectiveness of various food/hunger programs, some of which is interesting but a bit over my head. Apparently Parke witnessed the proposal of a $41 million, 17-year project to research the impact of the food stamp program, and was struck by how they took the mind-blowing price-tag in stride. His conclusion:
There may have been two reasons they liked the report. First, everybody praised the report for laying out the research issues clearly and honestly.
Second, the report may have served a rhetorical purpose in FNS' dealings with OMB. By publishing the report on the FNS website, they are saying to OMB: "You want a study of the impact of food stamps? Here you go. Let us spend $41 million chasing this one down, and we'll give you the answer in 17 years. Then, if the results are unfavorable, we can start discussing program cuts at that time."
It's a good rhetorical strategy, especially considering the hostility of the Bush administration to social programs, which frequently uses studies like these as fodder for funding cuts. Their strategy is transparent, but successful nonetheless: 1) cut funding to social programs, 2) subsequently declare the program's now-crippled operation as "ineffective", and 3) use this ineffectiveness as justification for further cuts. Wash, rinse, repeat. The $41-mil price tag serves both as a necessary reminder of the difficulty in isolating the effects of one program like this from the innumerable other variables, and also as a giant middle-finger to any attempt to use a less-scientific study to rubber-stamp funding cuts.
Parke also disgresses a bit with this, which is worth reading:
When I first read the favorable rating of the Food Stamp Program on OMB's predecessor to the "Expect More" website a couple years ago, it occurred to me that the political folks in OMB may have been too cowardly to state the obvious: the current food assistance programs are not sufficient to halt the increase of hunger in America. Far from justifying program cuts to the popular Food Stamp Program, the confession of failure implied by an OMB rating of "results not demonstrated" might have convinced the American political establishment to strengthen these programs.
Or worse (from the administration's perspective), if food stamps were declared officially ineffective, somebody might eventually have asked whether any program that merely distributes food benefits would suffice to stop the rise of hunger in an economic and political environment where increasing wealth for the few and deteriorating welfare for the many are accepted with complacency. Maybe hunger simply follows hopelessness as naturally in real life as it does in the dictionary.
I took my time replying to some of Bob Krumm's posts, because I wanted to be sure what I said was measured and civil, and so that I could decide specifically what I wanted to say. Bob's post here has appalled me. He tells the story of encountering two men of "obvious Middle Eastern descent", which of course doesn't really mean anything, so we're left to assume what he means here is "brown". They asked him where Al Gore's house was. Bob, assuming they were terrorists, gave them wrong directions, and proceeded to run home and call the police to report their license plate. As justification, he provides:
Destroyer's new album, Destroyer's Rubies is out. We've actually been listening to it for the past week or so because Merge Records has been streaming it on their website via Flash since it came out (which is a genius move, by the way). We just downloaded it from eMusic, though, and so I've been giving it a more thorough listen. I like it a lot. The eMusic reviewer says it's Destroyer's best album. I'm not willing to go that far, but it's pretty good. For best album, I'm sticking with Streethawk, but give me a week or so. I'm starting to be swayed while listening to it for this review even now.
[http://www.place.org/~cwage/sounds/Destroyer-Priests_Knees.mp3] Destroyer - Priest's Knees
It's a little more .. I don't know, "traditional" than Your Blues was, which will please those that are big fans of his more straightforward, poppy type stuff. Personally I really liked the feel of Your Blues quite a bit (a brief review here). But where Your Blues felt like somewhat of a departure and a little bit more of an experiment, this album is more solid and refined.
[http://www.place.org/~cwage/sounds/Destroyer_Watercolours_Into_the_Ocean.mp3] Destroyer - Watercolours Into the Ocean
[http://www.place.org/~cwage/sounds/Destroyer-European_Oils.mp3] Destroyer - European Oils
This may be my imagination, but this album feels a little better produced and recorded, too. Your Blues and a few of his other albums sorta had that "recorded in my living room" sound to them. That's not to say they were recorded poorly, but this album definitely sounds like it got the Nice Studio Treatment. The piano on European Oils is gorgeous, which contrasts nicely with an intense, chaotic fuzz guitar solo that sortof catches you off-guard in an otherwise mellow song.
Priest's Knees is probably the poppiest song, with an instantly catchy hook. I was walking around singing "And I was just another west-coast maximalist, exploring the blues, ignoring the news from the front.." before we even downloaded the album.
Dan Bejar is shaping up to be one of my favorite artists, and this album is representative of him at the top of his game. Go forth and listen.
I've had these headphones for over ten years now, and they still sound as good as they did the day I got them. They are hands down the best headphones I've ever heard.
I see that I'm not alone in this opinion.