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Worst. Drink. EVAR.

By Brian Filed in Food Tagged with , , , May 25th, 2010 @ 11:03 am

So this list of 20 “Harmful Drinks in America” has been popping up here and there since I first saw it last week. The list is based mainly on the sugar content of the drinks (with calorie count as the second most important factor), and they illustrate each bullet item with an equivalent (in sugar) snack food as well as suggest a “better” alternative for each. The drink they rate as #1 is this milkshake from Cold Stone Creamery, which tops out at over 2000 calories, 153 grams of sugar and 131 grams of fat. The calorie content alone is about what an adult man should consume in an entire day’s worth of meals, and the fat is TRIPLE the daily suggested amount. That much sugar is the equivalent of over 30 teaspoonsful of sugar, or about half a cup.

Unbelievable.

And yet somehow they missed this drink, which, while lacking in sugar, is certainly waaay too popular with people in Washington:

But You Still Have To Sit Through A Crap Movie

By Brian Filed in Links, Media Tagged with , , , , May 19th, 2010 @ 11:17 am

Revisiting old BKO posts has been a source of all sorts of good material this week…here’s a post from March 2008 about an Australian entertainment company called Village Roadshow that was making plans to build a bunch of super-premium movie theaters in various locations around the United States. A $35-dollar ticket would include luxury seats, valet parking, and table service.

Well, here’s a first-hand account of what that experience is like from True/Slant blogger Piet Levy posted back in November 2009. On the plus side, the ticket price has dropped to $25, and the plush reclining seats do look awfully comfy. Levy says the food is somewhat inconsistent and pricey, although $18 for a lobster roll is about what you’d pay in any restaurant that isn’t in Maine (and even some that are) and the price of ordinary movie snacks at the multiplex these days isn’t that far behind. He gave it a B+ overall, but it sounds like he enjoyed it quite a bit.

The initial plan, as I posted in ’08, was to build 50 of these around the country, but so far there are only six: one in Pasadena, California, two in the Chicago area, two in Texas (Austin and a Dallas suburb), and one in Redmond, Washington (no doubt where all those millionaire Microsofties go to the movies).

How NOT To Be A Millionaire, Part 2

By Brian Filed in Links Tagged with , , November 11th, 2009 @ 12:17 pm

The latest “victim” of the bad economy appears to be actor Nicholas Cage, but before you start feeling too sorry for him, this story from The Daily Beast might make you feel a little less sympathy. And don’t miss the slideshow featuring a few of his mansions, fancy cars, and other “necessities”.

At least he wasn’t hoarding stockpiles of swine flu vaccines like these criminals.

If you want me, I’ll be out sharpening my guillotine. Eventually someone’s going to need to use it.

A Brief Lesson In Wealth

By Brian Filed in Links, News Tagged with , , , , October 26th, 2009 @ 11:36 am

geico money pile

How To Be Rich: A group of wealthy Germans led by a doctor named Dieter Lehmkuhl have put together a proposal to the German government to increase the taxes on the rich to help increase government revenues. Why would anyone want to ask the government for HIGHER taxes? Because, the group says, the rich have more money than they can possibly ever spend. They estimate the German government could increase tax revenue by 100 billion Euros annually by raising taxes, and that if the did this for TWO YEARS, they could erase their budget crisis. This BBC article has a great pull-quote from the petition:

“The path out of the crisis must be paved with massive investment in ecology, education and social justice,” they say in the petition.

Those who had “made a fortune through inheritance, hard work, hard-working, successful entrepreneurship, or investment” should contribute by paying more to alleviate the crisis.

How NOT To Be Rich: Yesterday’s Boston Globe had this immensely sad and appalling article about former Boston Celtics star Antoine Walker, who has pissed away his $110 million fortune on gambling, cars, and buying bling-bling for himself and his hangers-on and is presently facing trial for writing bad checks to several casinos to pay for hundreds of thousands of dollars in gambling debts.

This being America, most people see absolutely nothing wrong with what Walker did with his money, and look at the Germans as if they were crazy. We really, really need to turn the world right-side-up again, kids.

Feed The World

By Brian Filed in Links Tagged with , , , October 19th, 2009 @ 11:39 am

Sarah Silverman has figured it out…all we need to do is sell the Vatican!

poverty ur doing it rong

While we’re at it, we also should be taking every last penny of the $21 billion bonus pool that Goldman Sachs has stolen and spend it all on clothing and housing and feeding as many people as possible in THIS country.

It’s Only A Recession If You’re Poor

By Brian Filed in Links, News Tagged with , , October 13th, 2009 @ 11:01 am

Some shining examples of the utter cluelessness and total contempt for humanity that propel the engines of capitalism:

The 2009 baseball season has entered its last phase, and by now we have all heard about the exorbitant luxury section at the new Yankee Stadium, but this feature piece on ESPN.com really drives the point home: it’s not that the rich can’t AFFORD $2500 seats, they don’t want to be SEEN sitting in them. (thanks to MetaFilter for this link)

Similarly, Rolling Stone columnist Matt Taibbi has a hell of a paragraph about the new Cowboys Stadium, as quoted by Professor E. Wayne Ross on his blog (because the RS piece itself is not online yet):

Dallas’ opening home game against the Giants, in which their hideously commercialized mall palace known as the new Cowboys Stadium was unveiled to the world, was a genuinely terrifying broadcast event of a kind not seen since the premiere of Triumph of the Will. This was like a debutante ball for America’s new idiot fascism. Still, there was something weirdly compelling about seeing 100,000 Texans cheering historical footnote George W. Bush as they christened what promises to be about 490 years of municipal sales-tax payments, all so that Jerry Jones can see a 160-foot wide image of his own surgery-tightened face on the world’s biggest HDTV. At the home opener, ticket-holders got to see Tony Romo throw three interceptions against the backdrop of multiple corporate billboards lining the field. Then there was the specter of 100,000 people watching a giant taxpayer-funded TV while sitting at the live event. If this is the future, could America be any more fucked?

This morning’s New York Times lays out the latest brainstorm from Disney now that their management has been completely assimilated by the Borg…revitalized by Apple: they bought back their dying mall retail stores and are going to spend $1 million per store to turn them into “interactive theme parks”. Killer pull-quote:

“The world does not need another place to sell Disney merchandise — this only works if it’s an experience.” — Jim Fielding, president of Disney Stores Worldwide.

Meanwhile, in Louisville KY, 10,000 unemployed workers recently showed up to apply for 90 job openings at a General Electric factory, and in Detroit over 65,000 people have applied for a federal aid program that will only be able to give the aid to 3,500 (again, thanks to various posters at MetaFilter for the links).

It’s too bad Barack Obama isn’t an actual Socialist, because then maybe he’d be doing something about this instead of looking the other way while he collects his Nobel Peace Prize.

But Bapu, You Must Write SOMETHING

By Brian Filed in Links Tagged with , , , October 5th, 2009 @ 1:38 pm

gandhi pen

Reporter: What do you think of Western civilization?
Gandhi: I think it would be a very good idea.

From the Department of “U R Doin’ It Rong”, Mumbai Branch:

Luxury pen maker Mont Blanc has designed a limited-edition pen featuring the likeness of Mohandas K. Gandhi in rhodium on the nib, a saffron-colored opal on the clip, and an engraving of Gandhi’s signature on the barrel, all for the low, low price of $25,000. Mont Blanc has made a donation to the Gandhi Foundation, but is otherwise not donating proceeds from sales to any charity. Realizing that the $25,000 price tag puts this pen out of the reach of all but the richest collectors, Mont Blanc has issued a much more reasonably-priced ballpoint pen that will only set you back about $3500

Sidebar: Here is a piece by George Orwell about Gandhi written around the time of the Partition, shortly before Gandhi’s death, in 1949. During his lifetime, Gandhi was not as globally revered and publicly sanctified as he would become after his assassination, especially in Britain. That air of British suspicion that Gandhi was just another scheming wog pervades the essay, even as Orwell tries to distance himself from such suspicions (without much success, I’d say).

Western adoption of Gandhi as a saint-like personage came in steps, especially as 1960s counterculture looked for non-Western role models to shake up centuries of Great White Men, culminating in the 1980 film by Richard Attenborough that gave American audiences the boiled-down idiot version they needed to grasp his significance (provided they could sit through the whole movie). Reading a piece written by a contemporary, especially someone who would come to earn his own political significance after his own death, is a good way to strip away some of the perhaps-unearned deification. Buying a $25,000 pen is not.

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