…But I Am Going To Tell You Anyway

In New York State, as of April 21, 2008, all chain restaurants have to list the caloric value of everything on their menu. (via) So 1 donut = 17% of your total recommended caloric intake for the whole fucking day. If that isn’t the most depressint thing I’ve read in a long time, I don’t know what is. Well, except the infographic on that Gothamist story, which will make you burst into tears, I guarantee.

In somewhat related news, did you know that Burger King has a “gold card”? Oh, yes, they do! THe only good thing that I can say about this is that Burger King apparently only gives them to celebrities and that there are only about a dozen of them who actually have one, including Jay Leno, Robert Downey Jr. (in an attempt to win him back after his story about how a disgusting BK burger scared him off drugs forever), and Hugh Laurie, who wheedled his way into getting one by complaining about it to a gossip mag. Still…a fucking GOLD CARD?!?!?!

Demonstrating that they learned ABSOLUTELY NOTHING from the “Terror Alert Color Code System”, the TSA has rolled out this approach to making sure your airport security experience is as frustrating and infuriating as possible. You can basically choose between being strip-searched and anally probed as a “Black Diamond Traveler” so that you can get to your overpriced, undersized airplane seat 30 seconds faster, standing in line with every dumbfuck who can’t understand why they won’t let them take their machete on the plane AND has a 3.5 ounce bottle of shampoo in their carry-on bag, OR waiting forever with the packs of screeching babies and overwhelmed parents who bring everything in their house to the airport.

Also, now the TSA has decided that if you refuse to show identification, they will not let you on the plane. But…if you tell them you merely forgot your identification, you can get on. Whoa! That ought to confuse the bejeebus out of those danged terrorists! I feel safer already!

I’m sorry, but wouldn’t it be much simpler to just close every airport in the United States and put us all out of this misery once and for all?

And here’s a way to make sure that you alienate all those hip young Internet-addicted people you’re dying to turn into paying customers: NBC has decided that their online streaming coverage of the summer Olympics will only work with Windows Vista. That’s the 2008 equivalent of releasing your hot new movie exclusively in BetaMax. So much for all those people with their too-hot-to-handle portable gadgets ponying up the bucks for your premium service, NBC. Well done!

One of the highlights of our Montreal vacation trip a couple of weekends ago was visiting the Biosphere. Okay, to be totally honest about it, the actual science exhibit part of the Biosphere is a bit on the lackluster side. Not for lack of trying, but because every exhibit was something we’d seen somewhere else. The reason I liked it was because it was an opportunity to get up close and personal with the giant geodesic dome that has been a fixture of the Montreal skyline since the 1967 World’s Fair. The dome was the centerpiece of the U.S. Pavilion during Expo 67 and became the iconic symbol of the fair. Over the years, though, the dome was simply left abandoned and its exterior covering eventually had to be taken off, leaving just the steel gridwork and the building inside. In the early 1990, the Canadian government rehabbed the building and Biosphere was born, but the dome was left open to the air, which is how it remains today.

The dome was the brainchild of R. Buckminster Fuller. Fuller was a philosopher, dreamer, visionary, designer, and sometimes hare-brained schemer who spent his life dedicated to the notion that life could be better for everyone if everyone embraced change and technology. In addition to designing the geodesic dome, he also designed the famed Dymaxion House, which was his vision of the “house of the future” (a very opposite vision of Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Usonian” house design of the same period), the Dymaxion Car, and designs for vast floating megacities.

Later, after his death, materials scientists would honor him by naming the nanostructure of a particular carbon molecule buckminterfullerene because its shaped resembled the geodesic dome. The entire family of these carbon molecules is now called “fullerenes”. And buckminsterfullerene is more popularly known as “Bucky Balls”. Many of the advances of nanotechnology have been made possible through the applied usage of bucky balls. Fuller’s principle of “tensegrity” (the force of objects pushing and pulling at each other simultaneously), which makes the geodesic dome possible, is also used in other applications, such as this new prosthetic foot design.

This week’s New Yorker has a feature story by Elizabeth Kolbert entitled “Dymaxion Man” about Fuller, his work and ideas, and a new exhibit at the Whitney Museum of Art in New York City about Fuller that opens this week and runs until mid-September. I’m hoping that maybe Bridget and I can get down to New York in August while Charlotte is at her grandparents’ house to see this exhibit.

ZORBs are giant inflated balls that you climb into and then roll around in like oversized hamsters on a holiday.

They were invented by the above-linked company in New Zealand and were first used there as a tourist attraction, but over the past couple of years have been turning up all over the world as a way to help separate tourists from their money. The first time I ever saw one was on an episode of “The Amazing Race” a couple of years ago when the race took the contestants to New Zealand; it looks like it could be fun, or it could be a good way to hurt yourself.

Well, guess what.

Last week, a reported from my hometown newspaper, the Lewiston Sun-Journal, climbed into a Zorb at the little ski area in my town, Lost Valley. Lost Valley is small potatoes compared to the big corporate ski resorts in Maine, and, like a lot of small independent ski areas, they spend a lot of time looking for ways to keep people coming once ski season is over. They were all set to roll out (pardon the pun) the Zorb as a new attraction to go along with their paintball course. The reporter would write some puff piece to help promote the new attraction, talking about her experience inside one. And then she promptly broke her back.

She was able to get up, walk away, and drive back to the office, but apparently her injuries were a lot worse than she originally thought. And now, instead of that puff piece to bring in all the locals, Lost Valley has a great big story in the paper about the accident , and instead of opening the ride to the public to make money, they’ve got to do a complete safety evaluation AND pray that the bad PR doesn’t mean they wasted all that money on a giant hamster ball no one in their right mind would get inside.

On the other hand, I hear paintball is fun.

(PLEASE NOTE: The language in this video is VERY NSFW)

The other day, I suggested that perhaps in response to the continued Republican campaign tactics of lies and smears, we ought to remind people about John McCain’s loving pet name for his wife, Cindy.

Looks like someone took me up on it.