Lifestyle & Culture
« Older Entries | Newer Entries »Living In America: It’s In Tents Lately
[ 2 Comments ]Posted on August 27, 2009 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Thursday, August 27th, 2009My righteous indignation is back, and it’s badder than ever.
We were worried about that whole Econopocalypse thing for a while, but not anymore. For starters, Timothy Geithner said in June that the economy’s okay, and Ben Bernanke still says so this month. So why are several of my most intelligent, hardworking friends unemployed? And why are Americans living in tents? In spite of rather shocking numbers on unemployment, homelessness, and poverty assembled by The Centre for Research on Globalization, the popular media in this country continues to do a fantastic job of making things seem fine. Even the global headquarters for weepy liberal extremism otherwise known as the Huffington Post plays down the “Tent City” phenomena, claiming accuracy in reporting because they asked their readers to share stories about about tent cities in their towns across America, forgetting that the only people that actually read Huffington Post are liberal elitist media types living in gated communities, or people that got Rickolled into it. I had misplaced my righteous indignation briefly, but all of this is bringing it back. Especially when you consider the fact that all the legislators in DC battling to ultimately deny us healthcare already have theirs, and WE pay for 75% of it. This all creates an amusing and perhaps comforting paradox: If you’re jobless, homeless, and have no insurance, you can’t call in sick and stay home for a day, and even if you could, you’d never get well, so you could never return to work anyway.
Why Shopping Feels Good
[ Comments Off ]Posted on August 21, 2009 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Friday, August 21st, 2009Unless of course you’re some kind of shopping addicted, Oniomaniacal mess.
| You Have A Problem, And This Little Box Is The Solution |
The Pew Internet & American life project says that about 30% of you are here for no real reason, so I’m here to give your Internet time some purpose. You know that nice feeling you get when you’ve decided you can afford something for yourself, you take a little time comparison shopping, and finally make the purchase? Isn’t it fun to take the item home, and if it’s clothing – try it on again – without the tags, or if it’s a new gizmo, mutter profanities about the bubble pack and maybe draw blood opening it, but then get down to playing with your new toy? It’s really a good feeling isn’t it? It can actually be very calming and gratifying. Well, it may just be the dopamine talking, but who cares? It feels good. And thanks to the wonders of the Internet, you don’t even need to move from exactly where you are right now to get this wonderful set of feelings. That little search tool below? It lets you explore all sorts of products, without leaving this page, and when you see something you like, just click on it, give the invisible Amazon Elves some magic numbers, and within a few days, voila! It’s delivered right to your door. Of course, before you engage in this kind of behavior Read the rest of this entry »
How Green Are You?
[ 2 Comments ]Posted on August 20, 2009 by admin in Clean & Green, Lifestyle & Culture
Thursday, August 20th, 2009Take Some Simple Quizzes To Find Out
 This Guy Still Wins My Green Living Award |
I have a confession to make. This week I threw away two tuna cans, an egg carton, and a fruit juice bottle. In the trash. Not the recycle bin. The trash. I wouldn’t be confessing my sins like this, except I live in a small, allegedly progressive college town full of liberal elitist tree huggers and hippy co-op types. When I walked down the street this week, I carried a silent shame, convinced that they all somehow knew what I had done. Then I suddenly remembered that the liberal elitist treehuggers all drove BMW’s when they went to dinner at restaurants where they wasted half the meals, and if they did ask for a take out box, it was styrofoam, and they forgot and left it on the table ’cause they didn’t drink enough unfairly-traded coffee or evil Fiji water after getting drunk on wine that’s destroying the planet. So I felt better, but remained curious. Just how green am I really? Well, because of my poverty-inspired market-to-table and mass-transit oriented lifestyle, pretty darn green; just check out that crazy score below. So how green are you? Take some quizzes and find out. After reviewing about a dozen annoying Flash-based quizzes like this British Council How Green Are You quiz that seemed geared more toward making the publishers feel green about themselves, I found two that seemed to actually help you assess how green you are. The Low Impact Living Index (my results are below, a 23, thank you very much) asks some smart questions, and gives some fairly useful answers at the end. The Airhead Calculator was a little less detailed, but I discovered that I emitted 849 pounds of air pollution last month. Hmm. I had no idea I was so, um, emissive. So how green are you? Read the rest of this entry »
Growing Up In England Must Be Creepy
[ 2 Comments ]Posted on August 14, 2009 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Friday, August 14th, 2009Which is why you should Always Keep Ahold of Nurse, For Fear of Finding Something Worse
The Girl Who Didnt Dress Bright |
The unpleasant treatment of children in Dickensian tales is almost understandable; the stories were written in times that were, well, Dickensian. But what is it about British culture that warrants morbid PSA’s with dead children, and inspires entire Pink Floyd double albums
Poor Taste In Friends May Inhibit Pervasiveness Of Cannibalism
[ Comments Off ]Posted on August 9, 2009 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Sunday, August 9th, 2009Wherein my girlfriend and I decide who we’re having for dinner.
This piece reads much better if Toto Coelos’ “I Eat Cannibals” is playing. Lyrics below for further pleasure. |
We often say odd things when we’re in love. For instance, in a completely unoriginal moment the other day, I said to my girlfriend: “I could just eat you alive“. Which got me wondering. Could I? Like most of us, when I have a question about romance, I seek the counsel of friends. I don’t know any cannibals though, so I of course headed over to the How Cannibalism Works page at HowStuffWorks.com. This wasn’t very helpful. They started off with a piece about Armin Meiwes, the German cannibal who enticed his victims with charming online dialog like this, and then moved on to things like How The Donner Party Worked. Wanting something a little more guide-like and factual, I tried Wikipedia. Although it was interesting to learn that stories of cannibalism – like so many things that white people say about other social groups – have been historically rather exagerrated to suit some personal needs, at this point I became distracted by the story of Issei Sagawa, Celebrity Cannibal, who was freed four years after being incarcerated for his cannibalistic murder, and moved on to become quite the celebrity in Japan. Sound strange? What do you expect from a country that has an established method for dealing with train groping, a pervasive fascination with tentacle sex, and an entire industry devoted to providing alibis? Anyway, by this time I’d lost my appetite for more information on the topic, but if you’re hungry for more yourself, this rather lengthy LRB review of An Intellectual History of Cannibalism