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:

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

]]> http://www.briankaneonline.com/2009/10/05/but-bapu-you-must-write-something/feed/ 0 http://www.briankaneonline.com/2009/10/02/bring-lawyers-guns-and-money/ http://www.briankaneonline.com/2009/10/02/bring-lawyers-guns-and-money/#comments Fri, 02 Oct 2009 15:53:55 +0000 Brian http://www.briankaneonline.com/?p=1985

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. — The Declaration of Independence

If it isn’t clear to people by now that when Barack Obama said “Change you can believe in”, he really meant nothing of the kind. He meant “we’ll just keep on doing it the way we always have”, and most Democrats have been okay with this because the ones in power benefit from having it be their turn and the ones who aren’t powerful seem to be satisfied that he’s not George Bush and that’s all they really cared about in the first place. Which is really, really, really disgusting, when you think about it.

So what can you do? Well, the deck is so stacked against any attempt to bring change to the rotten two-party system that the consensus seems to be that the only way to effect any change is to “nut up” (as that ad for the new Woody Harrelson movie says), and settle in for the long haul of trying to bring genuine change to the Democrats, who are the lesser of the two evils. The Republican Party was transformed through the slow process of seeding people at the bottom 25-30 years ago and now those wackjobs and wingnuts have successfully turned that party into a very scary political entity indeed. This long, but well-written, post at The Seminal (which has been folded into the political site Fire Dog Lake) by Bill Egnor outlines exactly wht a long and arduous task it will be. If you don’t have a quarter-century to devote to it, it’s going to seem insurmountable.

And maybe it is insurmountable. Maybe our political system is so ossified and thoroughly corrupt that it can’t be changed through even the most diligent of grass roots activism. Maybe it’s time to “nut up” and shoot it out. It’s my distinct impression that there are quite a few people on the right preparing for this very solution. It’s becoming my opinion that the left should begin thinking the same way. If you want me to believe in “change”, then you’d better be intended to actually change something.

]]> http://www.briankaneonline.com/2009/10/02/bring-lawyers-guns-and-money/feed/ 3 http://www.briankaneonline.com/2009/03/26/buy-me-some-peanuts-and-cracker-jack-please/ http://www.briankaneonline.com/2009/03/26/buy-me-some-peanuts-and-cracker-jack-please/#comments Thu, 26 Mar 2009 18:31:35 +0000 Brian http://www.briankaneonline.com/?p=1508

Not being a follower of professional sports, I’ve heard these sort of stories for years and never known whether to believe them or not, but this Sports Illustrated article is pretty convincing: 78% of retired NFL players go broke within 2 years of leaving professional football. For NBA players, it is 60% within 5 years. According to the article, for most of them, the greatest financial loss comes from divorce — apparently all those insanely hot women who marry athletes really ARE just in it for the money. The rest of it comes mainly from bad investments made because guys who are pro athletes aren’t too great at paying attention to lots of boring math ‘n’ shit.

It’s always a little discouraging to discover that the worst stereotypes of a particular group of people — in this case, stupid, spoiled, and overpaid athletes — are really the truest ones. When I was a sophomore in college, I lived in the dorm where the football team ate after practice, and well remember them being ushered to the door of the dorm in big black limousines, often being accompanied by..ahem..professional young women, and generally being treated like superstars, even though Northwestern was the worst team in college football at that time. After all that pampering in college (and I have to imagine it is only worse at schools where the football teams are actual contenders), and all the easy money in the pros, no wonder they are clueless and ready to be taken to the cleaners.

]]> http://www.briankaneonline.com/2009/03/26/buy-me-some-peanuts-and-cracker-jack-please/feed/ 0 http://www.briankaneonline.com/2008/10/29/the-death-of-the-1980s/ http://www.briankaneonline.com/2008/10/29/the-death-of-the-1980s/#comments Wed, 29 Oct 2008 18:45:38 +0000 Brian http://www.briankaneonline.com/2008/10/29/the-death-of-the-1980s/

Sarah Palin’s single-handed takedown of the Republican Party is not the only sign that the 1980s have finally died their long-lingering death:

The indoor shopping mall was actually born in the 1950s with the opening of the Southdale Mall in the Twin Cities suburb of Edina, MN, but the mall came of age culturally and economically in the 1980s. People of my generation were the first real “mall rats” in our teenage years. Indeed, my high school cohort was even a little too old to really be “mall rats”; the mall in my hometown opened when I was already in high school and looking ahead to college, but many of my friends and classmates were the first disaffected teenage mall workers to sneer at and rudely ignore the scores of customers experiencing mall shopping for the first time.

This article from The Economist from December, 2007 talks about the death of the shopping mall in this first decade of the 21st century. Malls aren’t entirely dead yet, obviously, but there have been more and more of them closing in the last several years, and the economic downturn doesn’t look good for the retail sector as a whole. What will be interesting to see over the next couple of decades will be the repurposing of abandoned shopping malls, much the way old factories were rehabbed into housing, offices, and, yes, shopping malls in the 1980s. I wonder if malls will be turned into cheap housing for all the people who are losing their homes. One mall in our area, the Natick Mall (ooh, sorry, the Natick Collection), actually added a whole section of luxury condos attached right to the mall. They haven’t sold very well (after all, who WANTS to live in the mall?), but as times get tougher and tougher, maybe the dispossed will get them.

Via BoingBoing’s Gadgets sub-blog comes this link to an electronics industry news site that says JVC has stopped production of stand-alone VCRs. JVC was the last of the electronics manufacturers still making stand-alones, which were generally sold under a variety of nameplates. It’s still possible to by DVD/VCR combo units, but in all likelihood the end of production of the separate units will also result in the demise of the combos. We bought a combo several years ago to use expressly as a transitional product so that we could play videotapes we had for Charlotte when she was a baby, but even that usage went away in our household some time ago. I think the only videotapes we even still own are old recordings from television, like my Jeopardy! appearance in 1992 and a tape from my grandparents’ 60th wedding anniversary also in the early 1990s.

Over at RetroThing, James, the site’s author, offers some opinions about the loss of the VCR. I think he’s completely correct that it marks a significant transition in home use of video recording of television programming, and definitely not for the better. Though the VCR never entirely lived up to its promise for time-shifting and redefining how people consumed television programming, it definitely sowed seeds that are popping up from the soil now, for better AND for worse. The popularity of DVRs and the increasing ease of adding DVR technology to home PCs carries on the legacy of “rolling your own” television, but the efforts of the cable companies and content providers to lock that down may yet prevail. Plus the arrival of services like Hulu, which put control of access to the content squarely in the hands of the traditional providers, may be a boon to people who clamor for the programming, but will ultimately squelch alternative sources.

On a slighlty different track, last week the Miller Brewing Company announced that they would stop making the “alcopop” beverage Zima. Zima was actually introduced in 1993, but is unquestionably part of a wave of “alternative” alcoholic beverages that took the stage beginning in the 1980s with the sudden and huge success of wine coolers such as Bartles & Jaymes. Coming late in that initial wave, but before the more recent generation of “alcopops”, Zima was nearly universally scorned as a drink for poseurs and sissies, the sort of thing that a guy with popped collars and a Member’s Only jacket drank. How it survived all this long is a mystery; I didn’t even know they still made it.

Finally, here is a set of links about what will probably be the defining cultural transformation of the next decade: the long-overdue death of conspicuous consumption. First, a recent blog post by Rex Hammock noticing the arrival of mass media treatments of the newly-virtuous non-consumer. He seems to be implying that the meme which says “by the time the mass media cover a trend, it’s already passe” is what’s on order here, but I’m not so sure that’s true. Over at Dangerous Intersection, blogger Erich Vieth riffs on author Bill McKibben’s latest book, Deep Economy to imagine the upside to a no-growth economy. Erich also cites this Harper’s Magazine piece by Steven Stoll, which looks forward and back at consumerism. Then, to cap this all off, Michael Shermer, who also publishes Skeptic Magazine, writes in the latest Scientific American to refute the hallmark 1980s movie monologue by Michael Douglas in “Wall Street” that summed up the entire era with the phrase “Greed Is Good”

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