Salty, Bitter, and Sour

Best movies of the last 10 years

2011-09-23T15:44:00.001-07:00

About Schmidt (2002)
Adaptation (2002)
City of God (2002)
Gangs of New York (2002)
All the Real Girls (2003)
The Fog of War (2003)
Lost in Translation (2003)
Mystic River (2003)
Oldboy (2003)
Kill Bill (2003-4)
Million Dollar Baby (2004)
The Motorcycle Diaries (2004)
Sideways (2004)
Team America: World Police (2004)
Brokeback Mountain (2005)
Crash (2005)
Good Night and Good Luck (2005)
Jarhead (2005)
Lord of War (2005)
Sin City (2005)
The Squid and the Whale (2005)
Syriana (2005)
Borat (2006)
The Departed (2006)
Half Nelson (2006)
Paris, Je T’aime (2006)
The Diving Bell and The Butterfly (2007)
The King of Kong (2007)
Michael Clayton (2007)
No Country for Old Men (2007)
Superbad (2007)
Ratatouille (2007)
The Savages (2007)
There Will Be Blood (2007)
The Dark Knight (2008)
Doubt (2008)
Hunger (2008)
Man on Wire (2008)
Medicine for Melancholy (2008)
Milk (2008)
Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008)
(500) Days of Summer (2009)
The Hurt Locker (2009)
Inglourious Basterds (2009)
The Vicious Kind (2009)
Blue Valentine (2010)
Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010)
Winter’s Bone (2010)
Drive (2011)
The Tree of Life (2011)

Conversation about pet insurance

2010-08-11T14:01:00.000-07:00

Friend 1: You're playing with fire if you don't have pet insurance.

Me: When my dog Dignan was under my sole care, I carried an alternative version of pet insurance that was totally free.

It was the belief that he could either tough out his expensive injuries or risk being put to sleep.

It's called the "What Our Parents, Grandparents, and All Other Ancestors Did For Doggy Health Care" Plan.

[fast forward a couple months and topic of pet insurance comes up again]

Friend 2: After spending as much time as I have with my girlfriend and her her dog, I remember what dog ownership is like. I take back my statement about thinking Kendall's method of insurance was funny. I want to buy insurance for this dog already.

Me: It's not supposed to be funny.

Dignan has cost me (and now my sister) nothing but food and a couple shots since I got him almost four years ago. I love him dearly but am also aware that dogs are much better adapted to living with discomfort and pain. If something happened to him that made him uncomfortable, I would wait for the problem to clear up on its own. If it got worse, I would probably bite the bullet and take him to the vet. If it was an overly expensive problem to fix, I would have to weigh the costs v. the benefits of getting him fixed.

Basically, I wouldn't spend much money on making the dog merely less uncomfortable, nor would I spend a lot of money on extending the dog's life when a dog doesn't live very long to begin with. It may sound callous, but it seems ridiculous to me to spend a lot of money on a non-human. Call me an asshole, but I'd rather put the dog to sleep, be really, really sad for a few days and then just get a new dog, which is actually a really fun thing to do, than be milked monthly by an insurance company or dump money down the never-ending hole known as a dog with health problems.

Friend 3: You have no soul.

Friend 4: You have no soul for real.

Me: If I had no soul, I wouldn't be sad about doing it. Knowing when it's time to let go of your dog doesn't mean you loved it any less. To me, pet insurance is another example of the wussification of America, or perhaps more accurately an example of America's crippling fear of death.

I guess I'm just more comfortable with death and with a dog's place in the food chain. People these days seem to think that dogs are actual family members or something and that if they spend enough money on their dogs, they'll live forever. No matter how much money you spend on your dog, he or she will not live longer than 10 or maybe 15 years. If it makes you feel better to spend thousands on insurance and deductibles over the years to cover reconstructive surgery and physical therapy and whatever else, go for it. But don't attack me because I'm comfortable with getting a couple extra opportunities over the course of my lifetime to pick out new puppies that will not spend their lives in traction, casts, and those dumb neck cones.

Friend 4: I get what your saying, Kendall, but regardless, I'm willing to spend 20 bucks a month to potentially save me from one of those decisions.

Me: Even if you completely reject my argument that we have gone too far in humanizing our pets, why pay an insurance company who will charge you a deductible and potentially 10 to 20 percent of the costs and most likely do everything in their power to reject your claim? I would probably go ballistic the first time I heard the words "policy limit" or "pre-existing condition" at the vet's office. Why not put $20 per month in an interest-bearing account and then use that to pay for the dog's vet bills if and when they come up?

*****

Check out this article on how pet names are becoming more human.

My overly simplistic solution for solving unemployment and public health

2010-07-30T09:30:00.001-07:00

30 Hour Work Weeks. Everyone works 3/4 time.

Instead of hiring six employees to work 240 hours per week, an employer could hire eight employees to work 240 hours per week. All those extra jobs will put a huge dent in unemployment.

Those eight employees have the equivalent of an extra day off and 30 extra minutes per day to exercise, cook dinner and spend time with family and friends, thereby making our society healthier and happier.

Boom.

Edit: Forgot to mention that productivity generally rises as hours decrease.

I knew I wasn't the first one to think of this, but here's an article discussing it much more eloquently.

Am I wrong or was this guy a flaming douchebag?

2010-07-29T09:48:00.000-07:00

So I was meeting Rachel at a corner in San Francisco the other evening and my phone died mid-conversation just as she was telling me how far away she was and how soon she would get there. This was in Hayes Valley, which is a pretty affluent and low-crime area.

I needed to call Rachel to confirm where she was to see if she needed a ride, so I asked the first person I saw walking on my side of the sidewalk if I could borrow a phone for 30 seconds because I was meeting someone and my phone had died mid-call. He looked to be in about his late 20s, was moderately chubby, dressed somewhat hipsterish, and had a Blackberry in his hand which he had clearly just finished using.

Our friend looked at me for a second and kind of threw back his head and said in what to me was an extremely whiny voice, "MAN.....are you serious?" Basically he implied that I had just asked for a piece of his liver, or definitely one of his kidneys.

Let me preface this by saying that I have let somebody on the street borrow my phone probably a dozen times. I normally have plenty of minutes, but even if I didn't, I consider it a matter of common courtesy to help somebody out when it costs me very little.

So anyway, taken aback because I thought I had made an imminently reasonable request, I simply said, "Well, yeah, but I guess you really don't have to if you don't want to."

He looked at me again, all huffy-puffy, an extremely put-out expression on his face, dropped the phone in his pocket, and said, "No, sorry. I really have to be someplace." Mind you, I was walking in the same direction as him, had my dead phone in my hand, and looked respectable because I had just come from work.

I was walking side-by-side with him for a while and he wouldn't even look in my direction to see the stunned look on my face. After a few seconds, I stopped and said, "Well, thanks. Thanks a lot, buddy. you really helped me out."

He acted like I hadn't said anything and didn't even flinch, so I yelled, "You know what? That was really shitty." Again no response, which served the dual purpose of pissing me off more and assuring me this guy was a giant pussy, so I added a final. "Yeah, that's right! Don't turn around! Thanks a lot for helping your fellow man! Dick!!"

I think it would have been pretty funny if he did turn around and try to fight me because that would have been an epic throwdown, the Ali-Frasier of chubby sissy-hipster slap fights, the pillow fight of the week as it were. But he didn't, so I guess I came out on top (if "coming out on top" means I had a crappy, dead cell phone in my hand and had just lowered myself to name-calling and half-threatening a weakling who was probably scared of my patchy beard and proto-mullet.

At this point, the interaction is merely an amusing anecdote and not really worthy of a blog post, but the next guy I asked who actually did let me borrow his iPhone told me one of the only reasons he let me borrow his phone was that he turned down the last guy who asked him to borrow his phone and the guy straight-up punched him in the face. Granted, he also said the reason he said refused the previous guy was because the guy had come off like an, in his words, asshole* when he asked to borrow it, but it still got me thinking.

What the hell is the big deal with lending someone a phone? Isn't that the most basic of common courtesies? Am I reaching when I say this is further proof that civility in this society is all but completed evaporated?

As usual, I will overreact and use this completely isolated incident to generalize about a whole group of people . What I'm going to take away from this is that the Me Generation has pretty much run amok in San Francisco, turning a charming destination for outlaws and immigrants into a yuppie wasteland.

Yep, I'm convinced. This would never happen in Oakland.

-30-

*Which was proof he didn't witness my altercation with the chubby hipster.

A few messages regarding The Riot That Wasn't

2010-07-09T09:01:00.000-07:00

Holy shit. "The Riot" was as badly over-hyped as "The Decision."

1. To the protesters: Excellent job. You managed to keep your cool when the media, outside residents, and those who seek violent confrontation did everything in their power to turn the situation as ugly as possible.

2. To the police: Excellent job, which is something I never thought I would say. You said all the right things going into the day and you followed through on your promises. You allowed the passionate residents to say their piece and express their First Amendment rights. When things started to turn ugly when a bunch of the same shit-starters came in from out of town, you immediately responded and kept the city safe without escalating it.

3. To the media and especially KRON: God, you fucking suck. What ended up being less violent and disorderly than a sports championship celebration has been turned by you into the second coming of Rodney King.

You wanted there to be a riot so bad before the day even started. You kept adding fuel to the fire with your questions throughout the day. You started reporting there was a riot even when there wasn't one.

The one exception I saw was Yobie Benjamin, blogger for The Chronicle. He kept his cool and managed to keep everything in perspective. You can read his live blog from last night here.

Epilogue: Yes, there was violence and arrests but try to look at the good side. The cops exercised maximum restraint and 99% of the actual protesters were peaceful. There were maybe a dozen crazies in a group of 1,500 or so. Most arrested did so within principles of passive resistance - quiet yet defiant. Damage was minimal considering what could have been. I sympathize with the victims of vandalism.
If one asks me what I think? The protest was largely peaceful and was a legitimate exercise of the First Amendment. The cops performed very well under very difficult circumstances and the Oakland community was commendable.

No, it was not perfect but it is a picture of America today... divided and imperfect but still able to rise to tomorrow's challenges.

4. To the anarchists or trouble-makers or whoever come in from out of town to try to escalate this situation: Fuck you and your whole ethos. There are people trying to live down here. We're not your pawns in your little suburban angst game. You may want the world to look like a Cormac McCarthy novel but we don't.

5. To the residents and workers of Oakland who freaked the fuck out and started fleeing the city and preparing for World War III: You are stupid, fear mongers and thinly veiled racists. I know you think any time minorities gather en masse that violence, mayhem and white lynching are a foregone conclusion, but your thoughts and actions just contributed to an atmosphere of panic.

As someone far more eloquent than I wrote on twitter:

the dehumanization of oakland's citizens that assumes they will riot is the same dehumanization that leads cops to shoot them in the back.

6. To anyone--including a friend of mine--who endorsed or called for rioting, especially those who don't live in Oakland: What the hell is wrong with you? There are people living and working here. Why would you ever endorse or wish for our city and residents to be harmed?

7. To the family of Oscar Grant: You got jobbed. Should have been 2nd Degree Murder.

The World Cup stole my ability to blog

2010-07-08T10:08:00.000-07:00

But since I'm in a feisty mood and there's a certain NBA star who needs to be called out, here are some rants and raves about tonight's impending disaster (replete with lots of dirty words). My apologies to Adrian Wojnarowski of Yahoo Sports* for "borrowing" some of his insights.

A. Lebron really has dropped in my book. For him, this period of free agency has been his defining moment. He, and I think more so than the media, has been playing up the hype leading up to this summer for years. Nobody in the media forced him to don New York hats and make little hints and innuendos. Nobody forced him to have an hour special. Kobe definitely could have handled this situation the same way as Lebron, but he chose to quietly renegotiate a monster deal and go ahead and win a title. I never, ever in a million years thought I would say this, but at this moment, I would actually say I prefer Kobe, who has traditionally been one of my most hated basketball players, to Lebron.

B. Just because Lebron isn't in front of the cameras discussing free agency doesn't mean his publicity team and agent and entourage aren't doing stuff behind the scenes to encourage this feeding frenzy. You can't throw chum in the water and then be surprised when the sharks show up. How many times does it have to be said that none of the other monster free agents refer to themselves as the King and do specials? Lebron controls his camp. Period. You'd have to be crazy to think he hasn't had a hand in this. Getting others to do your bidding while you look innocent is what having power is all about.

Anyway, taking Lebron's silence under the best of circumstances, here are some things he has done that are still shitty.

1. Agreeing to this ridiculous hour-long special. No other star is doing this. As Stan Van Gundy said, it takes 15 seconds to say where you're going, not a produced special.

2. If he does sign with the Cavs, he could have done so long ago and spared us all this agonizing orgy of idiocy. If he doesn't resign, he's having this ridiculous espn love fest to rub it in the face of the city who loves him.

3. He had his camp leak the news of Wade and Bosh to the media, so today would be all about him.

4. Referred on his OWN Web site to this ridiculous TV program as "The Decision." Unless I missed something and he's the reincarnation of Harry fucking Truman about to incinerate a couple major cities, I think he's overestimating and over-hyping this moment.

C. Trying to hide his ego under a cloak of charity is despicable and insulting to our collective intelligence. The guy is a hundred-millionaire. He could donate the same amount directly to the Boys and Girls Clubs whenever he wanted and not even notice it missing from his enormous pile of gold bars. He could have held a press conference, donated the money ... See Moreand told the Worldwide Leader to go fuck themselves. His personal appearance money is pennies compared to the ad revenue espn will generate and I haven't heard espn say they're giving the money to charity. Instead, he would rather have his ego erotically stroked for 60 minutes by the suits at the MTV of Sports. In an era where it's always about the money even when it's not about the money, this is either about the money or about the ego. Take your pick.

Thought on Lew Perkins and the KU ticket scandal

2010-06-03T09:52:00.000-07:00

1. I'm always really, really pissed off when tickets are distributed straight to scalpers*. It completely undermines the system because the whole idea of printing tickets with a value on them is to set their price. All tickets should be sold directly to the fans at face value, with a limited number being set aside some for players' families and other big friends of the department. Zero should be distributed to known scalpers. The athletic department's job is to make money but also to put fans in the seats and give them a good experience. Giving them to the Pump Brothers or anyone else who resells them is ripping off your fans. Period.

2. As for Lew's culpability, an AD should have some idea of where the tickets are going if he's making true fans pay out the ass for them in the form of donations. Maybe not Lew, but somebody Lew employs, should know who's sitting in the best seats and if he doesn't know who they are, he should know how they got their tickets. Maybe that was Rodney Jones, which would be the ultimate betrayal, but as somebody said previously. If big donors, or even medium donors, aren't getting good seats, that is something that should be looked into. I don't know if Lew should get fired for this because it's a decision outside my level of knowledge and expertise, but I think he should be giving the exact same length of rope as other employees fired by him.

3. The exercise equipment is probably not a big deal and he has already paid fair rental value, but I also think anyone who deals with NCAA compliance and ethical rules would absolutely know it's wrong to accept a gift like that. How can he negotiate the morass of ridiculous NCAA regulations and think it's totally fine to accept a high value gift for free?

4. I think one of the major problems we have here is that the Athletic Director has too many responsibilities. They're managing the athletics side which deals with hiring/firing coaches, addressing issues with players like fights and grades, NCAA compliance and making other decisions that affect players and fans. Then there are the business decisions like raising revenue and building new facilities. I honestly think they could be two different jobs just like with professional sports where you have both a general manager and a president of operations or whatever they call it. Maybe they already do divide the labor, and if they do, it should be more apparent to the fans and media who's in charge of what so we know whose head to call for (if
one needs calling for).

*This is especially true with TicketMaster and tickets for concerts. I know a person in the ticket industry who has kenfirmed to me that tickets that never go on sale to the public and are set aside for the secondary market aka scalpers.

Food Democracy Now

2010-05-21T09:06:00.000-07:00

Tell the DOJ to stand up for farmers today. End the fear and intimidation in rural America!

Dear Kendall,

Today family farmers face some of their toughest times since the Great Depression. In the last 48 hours we drove more than 900 miles across the country to be here in Normal, Alabama because we believe it's important to stand up for farmers in the face of unfair contracts and corporate abuse.

Right now, the Department of Justice and USDA are holding their second listening session on anti-competition issues in the food industry. Today Secretary Tom Vilsack and Attorney General Eric Holder are listening to farmers talk about the abuses in the poultry industry that are forcing family farmers deeply into debt and out of business.

Unfortunately, because of how the poultry industry works, there’s a lot that they won’t hear. Despite widespread reports of price manipulation and corporate intimidation, the Department of Justice has had a hard time finding any poultry farmers willing to testify publicly about these abuses.

In the past few days we’ve heard directly from chicken growers who were warned by the company that they contract with that if they even show up at this hearing they will face retaliation, possibly losing their contracts. There’s no place in America for these types of threats to our nation’s farmers.

Click here to stand up for family farmers across the country who bear the brunt of agribusiness’s corporate abuses in the Heartland. Tell Attorney General Holder and Secretary Vilsack it’s time to put an end to this type of corruption.

Farmers are afraid to come forward because they know if they do they face the possibility of losing their jobs, their houses and their farms. This happens all the time in rural America. Last year America got a taste of what the chicken industry is all about when poultry grower Carole Morison, who starred in Food Inc., spoke out against the industry. After 23 years her company cut her contract! And the only way she could hold onto her farm was because both she and her husband had two off-farm jobs.

For decades, poultry growers have complained about the unfair contracts, price manipulation and loss of income due to corporate intimidation. Without competition, family farmers have no choice but to submit to company demands, however unreasonable.

Farmers no longer own the chickens, but raise them on contract, regularly going into debt more than $1 million to build highly specialized buildings, with only one or two companies to sell to under contract in their area. As a result, farmers have no competitive markets to sell to and companies like Tyson and Perdue dictate the terms of the contract, including costly modifications to their structures. Oftentimes these are demands that farmers are simply unable to sustain.

In these “take it or leave it” contracts, farmers live in constant fear of having their contracts canceled if they fail to comply with the demands of companies such as Tyson.

Now, as the Department of Justice is finally ready to investigate this deplorable situation, the Big Chicken companies have put the word out that they will retaliate if any grower testifies. On the way down to Alabama we spoke with one grower who actually said that farmers are afraid to even show up at the public hearing, lest they become “made an example of”.

This type of fear and intimidation has no place in America.

Here at Food Democracy Now! we believe that farmers should not have to live in fear of having their contracts pulled out from under them, forced into continuous debt and should be paid a fair wage for their labor.

Tell the Administration to stand up for family farmers like Carol Morison as they bravely share their stories and fight for justice. It’s time to Fight Big Food!

Thank you for participating in food democracy!

Dave, Lisa and The Food Democracy Now Team

We need to keep the pressure on! Please donate to Food Democracy Now today – whether it’s $5 or $50. We rely on folks like you to keep us going. Thank you!

You're not allergic, just picky.

2010-05-12T10:20:00.000-07:00

30% of people think they have food allergies. Only 8 percent actually do.

Full body scanners at KCI

2010-05-11T13:47:00.000-07:00

http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2010/mar/05/kansas-city-international-airport-test-full-body-s/

My parents just informed me that full body scanners are now in use at the Kansas City airport. I predictably blew a gasket while they basically implied it was just another small price to pay to fly safer.

I really think they are over-the-top and a pretty sever invasion of privacy. The idea that some TSA fuckwad can look at my girlfriend or mother or sister naked is disturbing, to say the least. I would rather take my chances with metal detectors and than have to think about some random asshole from Raytown making regular deposits into his Spank Bank in the name of national security.

I really think we're not too far off from having to strip down completely naked behind a curtain, check our clothes and those pesky navigation disrupters (cell phones and iPods) with security and put on a TSA-issued robe for the flight. Then again, we'd only be one karate expert terrorist attacking a flight attendant away from having our hands and feet restrained throughout the flight.

I can't wait for the not-too-distant future where I'm paying $1,000 to sit naked and tied up in a cramped space for three hours, and no, I'm not talking about my plans to hang out with Charlie Sheen and Hugh Grant this Saturday night.

At this point, I don't think too many people would even object to the robe scenario. Anything for safety, right?

Learning to accept consequences

2010-05-07T10:27:00.001-07:00

I just wanted to give everyone an update on the current state of my digestive track, as I went out for Szechuan hot pot for the first time last night. But first allow me to set the scene for you...

Picture me on the edge of a cheap, wooden chair in a small, brightly lit restaurant in Oakland's Chinatown. A few minutes after the waiter has finished asking the standard Are-you-sures, he sets down a junky, old burner with such an old connector to the gas can that it seems like it could explode at any minute. He soon brings out a huge bowl and sets it on the burner. Like a grunt on recon, I probe cautiously at first, picking out familiar pieces of beef, shrimp and mussels from a boiling cauldron of spicy broth. I like what I taste, so I start fumbling with the chopsticks more rapidly as I stop discriminating and start pulling out pig intestines, liver, and other unmentionables.

The heat begins at my lips as the numbing effect of the infamous peppercorns takes hold and doesn't stop until the heat of the chilis have warmed by whole throat and stomach. The sweat begins as beads on my forehead but quickly advances to a full-on flop sweat. My hair is naturally thin so as the sweat bonds my hairs together, you can clearly see my pink scalp. The spiciness is becoming hard to handle and I'm breathing so heavily that I'm almost grunting. The occasionally moan of pleasure dueling with pain emits from a deep-down place in my body I can't even control.

With each bite, my shirt is getting flecked with stains of red chili oil as the toxic substance drips through my beard and down my chin. My mouth is so numb from the peppercorns that I basically have a speech impediment, but I'm wide-eyed and rambling nonstop at Rachel because the pain has released so many endorphins that I'm practically delirious. She is saying almost nothing because she is starving and didn't really want to go this restaurant anyway and the food is too incendiary for her to eat. She tries in vain to mask her contempt for me, but who can blame her?

Eventually my belly is so full that I can eat no more and waive the white flag. The table and napkins are ruined. The aftermath must look like some deranged savage cut the throat of his own horse and scooped out the entrails with his bare hands. The restaurant is cash only, so I borrow some money from Rachel, throw down the cash on the table, and stumble out into the night, still drunk on heat.

Flash forward to today: My stomach is bubbling and gurgling like a volcano getting ready to erupt. I sit in my cubicle like a prisoner on death row who has exhausted his appeals, resigned to my fate and waiting for my inevitable date with destiny in what I hope will be my sanctuary: the least frequented restroom in the office.

Happy Cinco de Mayo

2010-05-05T17:11:00.000-07:00

Mexicans seem to care for this holiday about as much as Jews care for Hanukkah, but I thought I'd say a few words in honor of this pseudo-holiday.

1. I love our neighbors South of the Border. I have said numerous times that they will come to be as beloved to Americans as the Irish, but with better food.

2. Is the Arizona immigration racist and evil as written? I haven't read it and I doubt many have, but I would imagine a law like that would depend on how it's enforced. If brown people are getting pulled over for no reason and asked for their visas, then yes, it's a bad law. But what if it becomes clear from talking to a person in another circumstance that his immigration status is rather dubious?

- Beldar, you still haven't given me your social security number.
- My social security number... I--....I am sorry. I keep forgetting.
- I need that number. I got state payroll forms. You do have a number?
- Of course. I am a citizen.
- All right. Give me the numbers.
-0...
2..5...
6...
X... point...3...
0...B...
8...7...

In that case, it would be pretty clear that the person in question is an illegal alien. Believe it or not, you can sometimes figure out that someone has immigrated illegally without pulling them over for no reason other than to check their papers. I would imagine it sometimes just comes up in other contexts.

If the Arizona law is then directing law enforcement officials not to ignore the immigration status, is that a bad thing? Aren't the lawmakers just wanting the existing law to be enforced, sort of like how doctors are required by law to report parents to Social Services if there's evidence of child abuse? I personally don't really care for mandatory reporting because I think it takes away discretion and common sense, but that doesn't mean it's an evil or bad law.

Again, this very well might be a terrible law and I think immigrants (legal or illegal) from the South make this country a better place*. Just about every single immigrant I've ever met, I have wanted him or her living in this country a hell of a lot more than the average white trash American citizen I see yelling at and spanking his kid at theme marks or holding up grammatically incorrect signs at Tea Parties calling Obama a Nazi.

I think the most glaring failing of the law, from what I know, is that there is no exception for victims or witnesses of crimes. If this law discourages immigrants from coming forward in these situations, it should be obliterated from the books now and without question (or amended). But right now, I'm just wondering if the national reaction to Arizona's frustration over immigration policy is a little knee jerk at this point.

*Do illegal immigrants make this country a better place? Probably. Do they deserve to not be deported....probably not.

Surprise!

2010-05-04T09:54:00.000-07:00

Genetically modified crops are creating new super weeds that are resistant to herbicides.

And in other news....

Our overreaction to skin cancer that led to a total aversion of the sun has led to Vitamin D deficiencies and a surprising return of rickets. Prepare to be surprised again when a sudden uptick in Vitamin D over-consumption leads to some equally worse problem.

Senators oppose Know Your Farmer Program

2010-05-03T16:36:00.000-07:00

Pat Roberts, from my home state of Kansas, believes that small farmers are rich hobbyists and not worthy of our support. He would rather we continue to give billions to the large conventional corporations that are making us fatter by the minute.

I wrote Senator Roberts to tell him how much his letter upset me.

Democrats fail at setting the agenda again

2010-04-28T10:31:00.000-07:00

I read this great editorial in the New York Times by David Brooks about the Big Government War waging right now in which he said one of the biggest failings of the Democratic Party is that they're more concerned with winning arguments than deciding what they arguments will be. Or maybe more that the Democrats don't understand what the public perception will be of their agenda. For instance, the debate about health care was not really about health care itself but more about big government v. small government. We all have seen how well that worked out for them.

So my question is this: If the Democrats had sought to reform the food system, which I believe would have helped treat one of the real causes of the health care crisis, would we still be having the Big Government debate? Food reform probably would have required a reworking of the Farm Bill, which amounts to billions of dollars in spending by the Federal Government. In that case, Democrats would actually be taking on misguided government spending rather than increasing it. I'm guessing we would have heard from Palinites that elitist Democrats were declaring war on farmers, but would the Democratic party be in the free fall it is in now if they had picked a different agenda?

Bonus question: Would the backlash have been better or worse if Obama had tried to reduce government spending by scaling back the military and the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Looks like "organic" might be the next dirty word

2010-04-27T11:16:00.000-07:00

Is "organic" now a politically charged term? Will it be as repellent to left-leaning politicians as the word "liberal"?

This Washington Post story on the White House garden has me convinced. Michelle Obama and White House aides have said they use only natural fertilizers and pesticides in the garden but that the garden was not organic. Hmmm.... I thought that was what organic meant.

The story goes on to say that the White House would not disclose what made the garden not organic. That makes me think it is organic, but they just don't want to call it that because it would associate themselves with people who care about what they eat, liberals, intellectuals, and other undesirables the radical right Palinites have labeled as "elitist" and "snobbish."

I understand that the term might mean very little to we consumers who are looking for the best, freshest products, but why would you not want to say your garden is organic if it is organic? And if it isn't organic and you use some commerical fertilizer or something, why wouldn't you just come out and say what it is?

New hipster slur

2010-04-23T09:02:00.000-07:00

The results of the Gawker poll are in and "fauxhemian" is your new hipster slur.

That my favorite, "ironoclast," didn't even make the final vote is all the proof I need to know that the majority of the voters were, in fact, hipsters themselves.

Having children

2010-04-22T14:03:00.001-07:00

So I was recently around one of Rachel's co-workers who was talking about how she was debating whether to sign her daughter up for a soccer league. Her daughter was already involved in ballet and swimming and some other activity, so she was concerned that it might be too much.*

As you can imagine, this conversation wasn't really my cup of tea. Of course my input wasn't requested but anyone who knows me knows that won't stop me from butting into a conversation I know nothing about. The only thing I could think of was to ask whether kids just ride around their bikes after school any more.

"Oh no," she almost whispered. "You just can't do that anymore."

"Of course," I said, not picking up on the non-joke, "just think of what could happen."

Completely, dead-seriously she said, "I mean, these days you have to worry about getting abducted."

I quickly changed the topic, or allowed the topic to change, I don't remember which, because I knew I was about five seconds away from either having or inducing a nuclear meltdown**.

First of all, I grew up in the Golden Age of Serial Killers. Gasey, Dahmer, and Bundy all had their heydays in the late 1980s and early 1990s. All of those boxy white vans made for abducting people came out around the same time . It seemed like every single day there was a news story about a child murder.

Yet my friends and I were out every afternoon totally unsupervised. I had to tell my mom where I was, but that consisted of telling her I was going to play soccer or football or just out riding my bike and playing in the creek. There was no adults around and nobody seemed to care.

We were told over and over to not talk to or accept rides from strangers. Somehow it worked. Not one of my friends, or friends of friends or friend of friends of friends was ever abducted. Now I'm sure a few of them were molested, but that was probably by a family member or priest or otherwise trusted adult.

The point is that children get abducted or molested regardless of whether we want them to or how much we shelter them. Even children who are kept in their homes can be stolen directly from the home. Remember Polly Klaas?

Did Polly Klaas get abducted because she wasn't sheltered enough or because she rode her bike after school? No. Polly Klaas was murdered because bad shit happens and you can't do much about it more than you can prevent a car accident.

You can teach your children to avoid strangers and be smart, just as you can teach them to look both ways before they cross the street. But if we're teaching them to be so scared of the world that they can't leave their own backyards, then we shouldn't be surprised when they turn out to be helpless, corpulent, and otherwise as useful as tits on a bull.

What a depressing worldview to have when you won't even let your children go outside. I wouldn't even bring a child into this world if I thought letting him outside would just lead to child murder. Now if there's an active serial killer operating in your town, it might be a good idea to keep little Timmy locked up until they find the guy or the abductions slow down. But to just assume there's one in every neighborhood is pretty twisted.

To paraphrase the great Gus McCrae, Life is short. Shorter for some than others. But it's not how you die that's important. It's how you live.

*Great conversation by the way. Meanwhile, I was talking to her gay co-worker about going to concerts and eating good food. If that's not an argument for waiting to have kids or to have none at all, I don't know what is.

**Just remembered this isn't entirely true. I pointed out this recent incest/murder case and suggested that maybe if kids were out riding their bicycles more, they would at least be safe from getting molested by their fathers.

What it's like to know someone who went to K-State

2010-04-21T13:57:00.000-07:00

http://www.xtranormal.com/profile/2412875/

In Germany, it's a crime to be an asshole.

2010-04-16T08:40:00.000-07:00

To me, making it a crime to deny the Holocaust is giving way too much credence to idiocy. Why make a martyr of a scumbag like British Bishop Richard Williamson? As the famous First Amendment absolutist saying goes, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." In America, some of our strongest First Amendment protections have come at the expense of defending the Ku Klux Klan and Larry Flynt.

The real question is why the Catholic Church hasn't told this guy to shut his trap or defrocked his ass. With all their PR troubles, I'm surprised they're letting a creep run around making about the most inflammatory statements you can make.

In other news, free speech is also under attack in Bishop Williamson's home country. Yes, those rascally Brits are at it again. This time they're threatening to use censorship and surveillance in the form of the Digital Economy Act.

In case you didn't know, this Parliamentary act will regulate copyright law and give economic protections to those who need it most: huge corporations, of course. And if you believe their press releases, the mega media conglomerates are living hand-to-mouth these days because of piracy. So if we don't do something to help them--namely, set up a police state to monitor the Internet--our whole society will crumble. In fact, they're suffering so badly, they poured millions of dollars into lobbying for Britain's Digital Patriot Act.

According to this article, we can look forward to future extreme and Draconian measures here in the good ol' U. S. of A.

In the US, the MPAA and RIAA (American equivalents of the MPA and the BPI) just submitted comments to the American Intellectual Property Czar, Victoria Espinel, laying out their proposal for IP enforcement. They want us all to install spyware on our computers that deletes material that it identifies as infringing. They want our networks censored by national firewalls (U2's Bono also called for this in a New York Times editorial, averring that if the Chinese could control dissident information with censorware, our own governments could deploy similar technology to keep infringement at bay). They want border-searches of laptops, personal media players and thumb-drives.
They want poor countries bullied into diverting GDP from humanitarian causes to enforcing copyright. And they want their domestic copyright enforcement handled, free of charge, by the Department of Homeland Security.
Elements of this agenda are also on display (or rather, in hiding) in the secret Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a treaty being drafted between a member's club of rich nations. They've turned their back on the United Nations to negotiate in private, without having to contend with journalists or public interest groups. By their own admission, they intend to impose this treaty on poor countries as a condition of ongoing trade, and in the US, the Obama administration has announced its intention to pass ACTA without Congressional debate.

Look forward to lots of hot rhetoric comparing media consumers to people who steal cocaine (see the comments of the article if you don't believe me). Because, you know, only a criminal would think the Fourth Amendment is a good idea.

We'll see what happens, but if that IP Czar tries to tell us that unless we have something to hide, we all have to install spyware for copyright protection, then I'm going to feel kinda bad for calling all those Tea Partiers paranoid lunatics.

Tell me why non-endangered whales shouldn't be harvested.

2010-04-09T11:08:00.000-07:00

I saw an online Greenpeace petition that wanted me to tell Obama to oppose any relaxation on a ban of commercial whaling and it got me thinking.

I don't know much about the international ban on whaling but I've always heard it was because whales were hunted to the point of extinction. Overfishing of whales was one of those short-sighted practices of centuries past before the idea of environmental stewardship had really taken hold. Without getting into the history of whaling, which has been happening for millennia, and the specific numbers of whale populations, if you assume for a minute that whale populations have rebounded enough to safely allow some limited harvesting, would you have a problem with it?

I think a lot of people would say "No whaling under any circumstances." If that's your stance, I want to know why. Aside from being a mammal, what makes a whale different from a sardine or a tuna?

If you're vegetarian or vegan and don't think we should be eating animals at all, that's fine. I disagree, but that's fine. I'm not really concerned with you, though. I want to know what would make a omnivore be opposed to whaling.

I would imagine you could make the sentience argument for cetaceans, but that's getting dangerously close to speciesism. I just don't think we know enough about animals to assume that a whale or dolphin has sentience but that a pig or chicken or cow or oyster does not.

I have to admit that there's something troubling about eating and killing animals that I have paid just to try to get a glimpse of and that might be more intelligent than we are, but my brain tells me I shouldn't let my emotions get in the way of an ethical decision. Do we really want our dietary decisions made for us based on someone deciding that an animal is sufficiently intelligent.

I also probably wouldn't make whale or dolphin a regular part of my diet based on mercury consumption alone, but I'm having trouble finding any reason that limited whaling should be banned if the population numbers have truly rebounded. Tell me why I'm wrong.

You don't eat meat but you do eat fish?!

2010-04-01T10:34:00.000-07:00

With rising mercury levels, species like blue fin tuna disappearing, and the horrendous impact of farmed fish, how can anyone look at me with a straight face and tell me they don't eat meat but then concede that they do eat fish?

Which team would you rather be based upon the past 12 years?

2010-03-30T11:14:00.000-07:00

Team 1:

1 National Title
Made tournament every year (Average seed: 4.8)
Overall record: 309-109 (73.9 winning percentage)
5 Double-digit loss seasons
5 Conference Titles
Taking out worst season (7th place), finished as low as 6th in conference
5 Players on current NBA rosters
Less time spent as #1 overall ranked team in nation

Team 2:

1 National Title
Made Tournament Every Year (Average Seed: 3.2)
Overall Record of 338-82 (80.5 winning percentage)
2 Double-digit loss seasons
8 Conference Titles
Taking out worst season (5th place), finished as low as 2nd in conference
9 players on current NBA rosters
More time spent as #1 overall ranked team in nation

OK, now what if I told you that Team #1 went to the Final Four 6 times the past 12 years and Team #2 went 3 times? Would that change your opinion? I guess it depends on how much you buy into conventional wisdom.

If it isn't obvious by now, Team #1 is Michigan State and Team #2 is Kansas.

Tom Izzo clearly has a better tournament record in terms of wins and losses than Bill Self/Roy Williams, but his success has produced the same number of titles, though he has a chance this weekend to add another.

Over the course of the next week, you will a constant refrain: 6 Final Fours in 12 years is an astounding feat and Tom Izzo is the greatest coach in the game. Both of which are arguably true but both need to be qualified.

Six Final Fours is an astounding feat considering how hard it is to string together wins in the tournament while avoiding bad games and bad luck. And Tom Izzo is great at winning games...to a point*. The question is what value do Final Fours really have. Fans enjoy the experience, potential recruits will see the game on TV, and the universities get to pat themselves on the back and add another few stitches to the Final Four banner. For some schools like George Mason, it might be the greatest athletic accomplishment that the school ever achieves.

But if you went to a Final Four, did you really win anything? Michigan State has also had to endure four (and a possible 5th) crushing defeat. Yes, they can look back at their seasons and be proud for a season well played, but why couldn't a team that lost in the Elite Eight be as proud--or even more proud--if they had an as good or better regular season? Why is the tournament success the only success that matters these days? Why is a Final Four so much better than an Elite 8 or Sweet 16 but reaching the championship game and losing is rarely regarded as much better than reaching the Final Four?

The tournament is important but it's not the end-all, be-all of a season. If Michigan State loses on Saturday or Monday, I will have no problem saying that their season wasn't any more successful than Kansas's, Kentucky's or Syracuse's. Many will say that Final Fours are great for recruiting. If that's true, then I hope Michigan State will use this second consecutive Final Four and sixth in 12 years to recruit some better players than they have in the past.

And, yes, I'm biased and bitter as hell.

*It's sort of like how you heard all year how Syracuse was SOOOO hard to match up to because of their zone. Yes, the zone is good but if it was such a weapon as the media makes it out to be, they never would have lost a game.

Food Democracy Now

2010-03-01T15:58:00.001-08:00

Take a stand for organics, tell the USDA to reject Monsanto's GMO alfalfa

Dear Kendall,

Everything you thought you knew about organics is about to change. If the USDA and Monsanto get their way, organic integrity is about to go the way of the dinosaur.

Once again, the organic industry is under assault. This time the USDA is determined to let Monsanto ride roughshod over common sense environmental rules that would protect organic farmers from having their crops contaminated by Monsanto’s genetically modified seeds.

Tell Secretary Vilsack that Monsanto’s GMO alfalfa cannot be allowed to undermine the organic industry. Comments are due by close of business on Wednesday, March 3rd. So please ACT TODAY:

http://fdn.actionkit.com/go/111?akid=88.1117.RDBLzV&t=6

During the Bush administration, Monsanto illegally won USDA approval for its GMO alfalfa by convincing USDA regulators to bypass a mandatory environmental review.¹ In 2007, a court reversed this decision, ordering the USDA to complete the legally required environmental impact statement (EIS).

Shockingly, the Obama Administration’s recent review would approve Monsanto’s GMO alfalfa.

The draft USDA EIS was issued in December 2009 and is poised to allow Monsanto’s GMO alfalfa on the market, despite the fact that the USDA admits that these seeds will contaminate organic feed that organic dairy farmers rely on to produce organic milk.²

According to the CEO of the largest farmer-owned organic dairy coop in the U.S., GMO alfalfa “threatens the very fabric of the organic industry.”³ We can’t allow this to happen.

Despite massive public outcry in the past, the USDA's environmental review went so far as to say that U.S. organic consumers don’t care about GMO contamination.

Tell Secretary Vilsack that you care about organic contamination and that you want him to stand up for the organic industry and organic consumers.

http://fdn.actionkit.com/go/111?akid=88.1117.RDBLzV&t=8

Thanks for all you do,

Dave, Lisa and the Food Democracy Now! Team

Help support our work: If you'd like to see Food Democracy Now!'s grassroots work continue, please consider donating what you can, whether it's $5 or $50. Every bit helps!. We appreciate your support!

Sources:

1. Farmers Sue USDA Over Modified Alfalfa Crop, The New Standard, March 3, 2006
http://fdn.actionkit.com/go/108?akid=88.1117.RDBLzV&t=11

2. Roundup Ready® Alfalfa Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) website
http://fdn.actionkit.com/go/109?akid=88.1117.RDBLzV&t=13

3. USDA stance on GM alfalfa threatens “fabric of organic industry”, The Organic & Non-GMO Report, February, 2010
http://fdn.actionkit.com/go/110?akid=88.1117.RDBLzV&t=15

Ryan Bingham

2010-02-08T14:57:00.000-08:00

If anyone out there still checks this blog

2010-02-01T15:09:00.000-08:00

I have written a couple posts on this new music site geared towards bands.

Go, Kansas City, go!

2010-01-12T15:15:00.000-08:00

That's right folks, Kansas City is one of 18 cities to be included on the USA Bid Committee's bid to FIFA to bring the 2018 or 2022 World Cup to American soil! Help us celebrate by continuing to invite your friends and family to sign the online petition atwww.goUSAbid.com/kc.

What people who don't drink or eat meat do on a weekend

2010-01-10T19:48:00.001-08:00

I'm adding meatlessness for my fourth annual month of no alcohol. I'm only slightly more irascible than usual, but the weekend was still somehow undepressing, bordering on fun. For those who aren't accustomed to being painfully clear-headed, here are some things you can do with your time:

-Watch "Terminator 2," which is infinitely better than "Avatar."

-Disregard the nosy know-it-all who tells you foraging wild mushrooms in state parks is illegal but then throw them away because they are rotting and of the false variety of chanterelle

-Make mozzarella cheese with whole milk, citric acid, and rennet

-Take advantage of Proposition 215 and read David Sedaris

-Use sourdough starter to make pancakes and pizza crust

-Watch your team lose to a under-matched and depleted Tennessee team

-Infuse liquor to drink when you decide to not be sober anymore

-Liberate some lemons from your neighbor's tree and preserve them

-Get up and walk out of a Bikram Yoga class because you're about to pass out

-Clean out your pipes (not a euphemism)

An overlooked potentially keystone species is disapprearing

2009-12-16T09:42:00.001-08:00

Great op-ed in the New York Times today.

Do you take fish oil capsules? Lots of people do but I doubt many--if any at all--know what type of fish go into the capsules. The NYT article focuses on identifying the species and provides a lot of information on its importation to the Atlantic Ocean ecosystem.

What the piece doesn't tell you is the ultimate cause of the decline, which is of course our broken food system. The Nutritional-Industrial Complex grinds up the fish for corn-fed animals and our beloved pets, a practice that is depleting this fish, which is the food for most of the fish we like to it. Big Ag long ago abandoned grass-fed meat, which is usually two times or more higher in omega 3 content than grain-fed beef, so people now want to take fish oil supplements to get more Omega 3's. You're also seeing processed food on the shelves that has been enhanced with Omega 3's, which I'm sure probably comes from this "trash" fish as well. I'm sure fish oil plays a small part compared to what's ground up for animal feed, but our desire for Omega 3 fatty acids, caused by abandoning grass-fed animals is now taking a toll on the oceans.

“WHAT’S the deal with fish oil?”

by Stephen Savage

If you are someone who catches and eats a lot of fish, as I am, you get adept at answering questions about which fish are safe, which are sustainable and which should be avoided altogether. But when this fish oil question arrived in my inbox recently, I was stumped. I knew that concerns about overfishing had prompted many consumers to choose supplements as a guilt-free way of getting their omega-3 fatty acids, which studies show lower triglycerides and the risk of heart attack. But I had never looked into the fish behind the oil and whether it was fit, morally or environmentally speaking, to be consumed.
The deal with fish oil, I found out, is that a considerable portion of it comes from a creature upon which the entire Atlantic coastal ecosystem relies, a big-headed, smelly, foot-long member of the herring family called menhaden, which a recent book identifies in its title as “The Most Important Fish in the Sea.”
The book’s author, H. Bruce Franklin, compares menhaden to the passenger pigeon and related to me recently how his research uncovered that populations were once so large that “the vanguard of the fish’s annual migration would reach Cape Cod while the rearguard was still in Maine.” Menhaden filter-feed nearly exclusively on algae, the most abundant forage in the world, and are prolifically good at converting that algae into omega-3 fatty acids and other important proteins and oils. They also form the basis of the Atlantic Coast’s marine food chain.
Nearly every fish a fish eater likes to eat eats menhaden. Bluefin tuna, striped bass, redfish and bluefish are just a few of the diners at the menhaden buffet. All of these fish are high in omega-3 fatty acids but are unable themselves to synthesize them. The omega-3s they have come from menhaden.
But menhaden are entering the final losing phases of a century-and-a-half fight for survival that began when humans started turning huge schools into fertilizer and lamp oil. Once petroleum-based oils replaced menhaden oil in lamps, trillions of menhaden were ground into feed for hogs, chickens and pets. Today, hundreds of billions of pounds of them are converted into lipstick, salmon feed, paint, “buttery spread,” salad dressing and, yes, some of those omega-3 supplements you have been forcing on your children. All of these products can be made with more environmentally benign substitutes, but menhaden are still used in great (though declining) numbers because they can be caught and processed cheaply.
For the last decade, one company, Omega Protein of Houston, has been catching 90 percent of the nation’s menhaden. The perniciousness of menhaden removals has been widely enough recognized that 13 of the 15 Atlantic states have banned Omega Protein’s boats from their waters. But the company’s toehold in North Carolina and Virginia (where it has its largest processing plant), and its continued right to fish in federal waters, means a half-billion menhaden are still taken from the ecosystem every year.
For fish guys like me, this egregious privatization of what is essentially a public resource is shocking. But even if you are not interested in fish, there is an important reason for concern about menhaden’s decline.
Quite simply, menhaden keep the water clean. The muddy brown color of the Long Island Sound and the growing dead zones in the Chesapeake Bay are the direct result of inadequate water filtration — a job that was once carried out by menhaden. An adult menhaden can rid four to six gallons of water of algae in a minute. Imagine then the water-cleaning capacity of the half-billion menhaden we “reduce” into oil every year.
So what is the seeker of omega-3 supplements to do? Bruce Franklin points out that there are 75 commercial products — including fish-oil pills made from fish discards — that don’t contribute directly to the depletion of a fishery. Flax oil also fits the bill and uses no fish at all.
But I’ve come to realize that, as with many issues surrounding fish, more powerful fulcrums than consumer choice need to be put in motion to fix things. President Obama and the Congressional leadership have repeatedly stressed their commitment to wresting the wealth of the nation from the hands of a few. A demonstration of this commitment would be to ban the fishing of menhaden in federal waters. The Virginia Legislature could enact a similar moratorium in the Chesapeake Bay (the largest menhaden nursery in the world).
The menhaden is a small fish that in its multitudes plays such a big role in our economy and environment that its fate shouldn’t be effectively controlled by a single company and its bottles of fish oil supplements. If our government is serious about standing up for the little guy, it should start by giving a little, but crucial, fish a fair deal.

Why I never take out of town guests for seafood

2009-12-11T12:12:00.000-08:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/11/dining/11sffish.html

In Birthplace of Local Food, Fish Imports Take Over the Menu
Josh Haner/The New York Times

Paul Johnson has worked at the Monterey Fish Market in San Francisco for 30 years and has witnessed a dramatic downward shift in the local supply of seafood.

By KATHERINE ELLISON
Published: December 11, 2009

Tadich Grill, San Francisco’s oldest seafood restaurant, now serves farmed salmon flown in from Scotland. Sam’s Grill & Seafood, which also dates to the Gold Rush, features shrimp from the Gulf of Mexico and Alaskan halibut.

The San Francisco region is where the locavore movement got its name. And decades before restaurants like Chez Panisse in Berkeley were recommending their local leeks, the establishments near San Francisco’s wharves took pride in their fresh, local sand dabs and petrale.

These days, fish flown in from around the world is more likely to be on offer. The change began gradually, but has recently sped up. Data from the Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission, a federal advisory group, reveal the cumulative effect: a 71 percent drop in commercial fishing revenue along the north-central California coast since 1990.

The effects are everywhere, seen in the number of idle fishermen or those who have left the profession altogether — membership in the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations is down by two-thirds in 15 years — and the fish markets filled with Vietnamese catfish and Mexican spiny lobster.

Fish from local bays has been “one of the last local foods to go,” said Jessica Prentice, a Berkeley chef known for coining the word “locavore.” She added: “Seafood was one of the few things, well into the industrial age, that people associated with place. If you’re on a particular coast, or bay, or lake, you typically want to eat the seafood that’s fresh and local.” These days in the Bay Area, that means Dungeness crab in the winter and precious little else.

With beloved local petrale scarce for the past three months, Andrew Carvalho, the head chef at Sam’s, has had to make do with sea bream from Greece.

Not long ago, said Larry Collins, a San Francisco hook-and-line fisherman, “we fished salmon in the summertime, crab in the wintertime and rock cod whenever we needed to make the mortgage. Now we fish crab in the wintertime and scramble in the summertime.”

San Francisco’s situation is part of a national phenomenon. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported last year that more than three-fourths of the fish Americans eat comes from other countries, mostly China. Yet the trend has special resonance around San Francisco. Robert E. Ross, executive director of the California Fisheries and Seafood Institute, a trade group, estimated that Bay Area residents eat, on average, about double the amount of fish consumed annually by most other Americans.

Many diners recall when local seafood — salmon, red snapper, abalone — was abundant. “I think about it all the time,” said Paul Johnson, the chief executive of the Monterey Fish Market, which supplies up to five million pounds of fish a year to 150 regional restaurants, including Chez Panisse and the Googleplex in Mountain View.

“In the fall when crab season comes around, and the boilers are steaming and all the guys are coming around with the fresh crabs, it just makes you sad to realize that this is the last major fishery we have left,” he said.

The decline and fall of California’s fisheries is an intricate tale. Eighteenth-century Pacific Coast explorers described a paradise teeming with life. “No country is more abundant in fish and game of every description,” said the French naval officer Jean-François de Galaup, who mapped the Pacific Coast in 1786. Two centuries of robust harvests followed, with occasional off-years.

Now off-years are the norm. Still, the drop in local harvests doesn’t precisely reflect the decline of fish in the sea. The confluence of expanding global markets and more assertive local controls has produced dramatic change. One fishery after another petered out in the wild, and regulators curtailed fishing to preserve species. As with other environmental problems, every person with a stake in the Bay Area’s seafood decline has a villain of choice.

Salmon fishermen tend to blame the decline on inland water users, like farms and developers, who, they say, diverted water needed for spawning new generations of fish. Scientists suggest that a warming ocean has put the fishes’ food supply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Others blame mismanagement. Similar finger-pointing is evident around other wounded fisheries.

Wild abalone was one of the first local seafoods to vanish, after state officials closed depleted fisheries in 1996. In 2002, trawling for rockfish — the bottom-dweller often called “red snapper” and used in the spicy stew cioppino — was barred on much of the Pacific Coast. In the past two years, fishing bans multiplied as salmon and herring grew scarce.

In all cases, the regulators responded to evidence of sharp declines in local species. But many local fishermen, who have sustained staggering economic losses, feel the actions of state and federal officials have been excessive.

“In California, we have the least exploited fisheries in the world, but the toughest regulations,” complained Zeke Grader, executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations. At the Monterey Fish Market, Mr. Johnson’s 30-year career has spanned the most dramatic downward shift in local supply. When he began, he said, he was importing only about 30 percent of his fish from outside of California. Now, he said, the figure is closer to 80 percent.

While industry insiders are all too aware of the change in Bay Area menus, diners may have been slow to grasp it. “People still don’t get it,” said George Leonard, a marine biologist at the Santa Cruz office of the Ocean Conservancy, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit organization.

“Restaurants will go to great lengths to make it seem like the fish is local,” he said. “They’ll advertise the ‘fresh catch of the day,’ and half the time, it’s farmed fish from halfway around the world.”

The illusion of fresh local fish became harder to maintain after a 2005 law obliged vendors to label wares by country of origin. This has combined with the trend to advertise the pedigree of foods, like the “Bolinas black cod” at Chez Panisse.

CleanFish, a San Francisco-based supplier of “sustainable seafood,” boasts its wild and “sustainably farmed” fish, like the “Carolina Mahi-Mahi” and the Loch Duarte salmon featured at Tadich Grill. Yet its use of air-shipped and farmed fish rankles some environmentalists. “When you put fresh fish in an airplane,” Mr. Leonard said, “all bets are off,”

The Monterey Bay Aquarium includes all farmed fish on its “red list” of fish to be avoided, citing concerns like the discharge of waste and parasites from farms. The founder of CleanFish, Tim O’Shea, said this ignored differences among the farmers.

A few chefs, including Alice Waters of Chez Panisse, vigorously advocate serving local seafood whenever possible — “We collected our own mussels from a legal zone recently. Divine!” Ms. Waters recounted in an e-mail message. Still, she occasionally resorts to “sustainable” shrimp from New Orleans.

While the globalization of fish may seem unstoppable, some dream of San Francisco seafood’s resurgence. Mr. Johnson of the Monterey Fish Market foresaw encouraging trends over the next few years, if federal strictures help rebuild rockfish populations.

Recently, environmental advocates took heart in the state’s decision in August to protect 155 square miles of ocean, permanently banning professional fishing in reserves covering 11 percent of California coastal waters.

The decision, to take effect early next year, has prompted complaints from struggling fishermen, yet it is meant to preserve habitat crucial in rebuilding species like rockfish and abalone.

“We can no longer treat the ocean and its fish and wildlife as an all-you-can eat buffet,” said Kaitilin Gaffney, the Pacific ecosystem program director for the Ocean Conservancy. “But the ocean is pretty resilient. If we allow nature to restore herself, she will.”

2009-12-04T15:15:00.001-08:00

"I just wanted to say that I'm a hipster, and I'm here tonight to stand up for the rights of other hipsters. I mean uh, all our lives we've been laughed at and made to feel inferior. And tonight, those bastards, they trashed our house. Why? Cause we're self-absorbed? Cause we look different? Well, we're not. I'm a hipster, and uh, I'm pretty proud of it."

"Hi, Kendall. I'm a hipster too. I just found that out tonight. We have news for the beautiful people. There's a lot more of us then there are of you. I know there's alumni here tonight. When you went to Adams you might've been called a scenester, or a douchebag, or a snob. Any of you that have ever felt stepped on, left out, picked on, put down, whether you think you're a hipster or not, why don't you just come down here and join us. Okay? Come on."

"Just join us 'cause, uh, no-one's gonna really be free until hipster persecution ends."

The most interesting person I've heard about in a while

2009-11-10T09:56:00.001-08:00

The pharmaceutical companies call him a pirate with no respect for the law because he sells HIV medicine at a discount in Africa.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yusuf_Hamied

I found out about him from this NPR story about how we might need to start importing his drugs to deal with the flu vaccine shortage.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120254536

But just remember, people, the key word in "swine flu" is "flu." If you're a non-immuno-compromised adult, it really is OK to get the flu every once in a while.

I'm always ahead of the trends

2009-11-09T14:27:00.001-08:00

I've been a filthy bastard for years, but here is a great article from a year ago. I'd like to think it contains some info the soap companies don't want you to see.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/21/style/21iht-web-0221-shampoo.10274688.html

Our national eating disorder's latest manifestation

2009-11-05T11:18:00.000-08:00

Attack of the killer oysters!

http://www.nola.com/dining/index.ssf/2009/10/louisiana_blasts_fda_plan_to_l.html

Louisiana blasts new FDA rule requiring oysters to be sterilized to prevent rare bacterial illness
By Chris Kirkham, The Times-Picayune
October 28, 2009, 6:51AM

Oysters are a staple at Drago's restaurant in Metairie.
At the small warehouse tucked away in the back side of the French Quarter, the shuckers at P&J Oyster Co. have arrived before daybreak for 133 years.

Their in-shell and shucked oysters have been on the menus of generations of restaurateurs, from oysters on the halfshell at Acme Oyster House and Casemento’s to the seafood gumbo at Dickie Brennan’s Steakhouse.

In less than two years, the tradition could become obsolete for seven months out of the year, based on newly announced oyster guidelines from the Food and Drug Administration.

In an effort to reduce cases of a rare, but potentially fatal, bacterial illness contracted from raw oysters, the FDA announced new rules this month that will require any oyster served from April through October to undergo a sterilization process before it can be sold in restaurants or on the market.

The rule will essentially eliminate raw oysters -- at least as Louisianans know them -- from restaurant menus for seven months of the year. Even oysters that will eventually be cooked during those months would have to go through the same cleansing process before being added to any dish, a move some say would undermine the culinary integrity of some of New Orleans’ most famous delicacies.

“It’s not only going to include raw oysters. You can’t fry oysters for a po-boy, you can’t put oysters in a gumbo and you can’t charbroil oysters unless they’re post-harvest processed,” said Tommy Cvitanovich, owner of Drago’s restaurant, a mainstay for oysters in the metro area. “That’s ludicrous.”
Than Nguyen shucks oysters at P&J Oysters in the French Quarter on Tuesday. New FDA regulations that could begin in 2011 would require that oysters, from March to November, go through an intense sanitation process before they could be served in restaurants or on the open market. The effects in Louisiana -- and nationwide -- will be tremendous, from oyster-loving consumers down to seafood dealers and fishers, industry representatives and state government officials say. Louisiana is by far the largest oyster-producing state in the country, responsible for more than a third of the oysters brought to market nationwide.

The vast majority of those oysters are sold out of state.

“You talk about an economic impact that keeps going and going,” said Al Sunseri, the general manager of P&J, which has operated at Rampart and Toulouse streets since 1876. “You’ll have a number of people that count of the Gulf states during those months that will no longer be able to provide product to their customers.”

Local industry representatives and state health officials are highly critical of the FDA plan, with one oyster processor, Mike Voisin, equating the new guidelines to a “nuclear bomb” on the industry.

Alan Levine, secretary of the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals, said in a statement Tuesday that his agency has worked with the oyster industry for years to do biological tests and implement new guidelines requiring refrigeration of oysters less than five hours after they are harvested.

“What is particularly interesting is while the FDA seems focused on domestic oyster production, there is wide evidence that imported seafood is a far greater health threat, and there seems to be little movement by the FDA to get their arms around that problem,” Levine said in the statement.

Robert Barham, secretary of the state Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, added in a joint statement, “The effect of the proposed ban would greatly impact the Gulf Coast oyster industry and threaten thousands of jobs here in Louisiana and all along the coast.”

The vibrio vulnificus disease, the target of the FDA initiative, affects about 30 individuals per year nationwide who eat raw oysters from Gulf Coast. About half of those who get the disease, which invades the bloodstream and can cause a severe fever and skin lesions, eventually die.

But those most at risk from vibrio are people who already have immune system disorders, such as AIDS, cancer, kidney disease, diabetes or alcohol abuse.

The oyster industry and FDA have been working for more than a decade to inform consumers who are most susceptible to the disease. But this month the FDA changed course, instead announcing that the industry would have to institute the new technology by 2011 to eliminate any risk from the disease during the months of April through October.

“We no longer believe that measures which reduce the hazard, but fall well short of eliminating it, such as improvements in refrigeration, are sufficient to meet the purpose of the regulation, given the severity of the hazard,” Michael Taylor, a senior adviser to FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg, told an industry group earlier this month.

The primary complaint from industry is that the infrastructure is simply not in place to comply with the FDA’s 2011 timetable.

The months of April through October, identified as the time of risk for the vibrio vulnificus disease, make up about 60 percent of the state’s oyster production, based on average harvests over the past 10 years. But the technology needed to comply, known as post-harvest processing, can currently handle only about 10 percent of the total production during those months.

The result could be oysters priced twice, even three times as much as they are now, according to industry estimates.

“The oyster community is made up of mom-and-pop operations that are not capital-intensive,” said Voisin, the owner of Motivatit Seafoods in Houma, who owns one of the three plants currently equipped to sterilize oysters under the upcoming FDA guidelines. “It would create a huge need for capital investment, at a time when huge capital investments into mom and pops are not being made.”

While there are sterilization processes that would allow consumers to still eat oysters from the shell, the technology in some cases actually would pry open the oyster itself. So the freshly shucked oysters at taverns across the city, dredged from the reefs less than a day earlier, would disappear for most of the year.

We produce one-third of the oysters in the whole country, and 4 million people in Louisiana can’t eat them all,' says John Tesvich, a local oyster processor.C.J. Casamento, the owner of Casamento’s restaurant on Magazine Street, said many chefs have tried the sterilized oysters in the past but have stopped because the flavor isn’t the same. His restaurant is already closed from June through August, but the guidelines would cut into one of his peak seasons: Jazz Fest. “People who come down here to eat raw oysters wouldn’t be coming down here to eat these things,” Casamento said of the sterilized oysters. “If they try to implement this, it will destroy all the raw oyster restaurants in the city.”

Because the guidelines have only recently been announced, it’s possible that the state could issue separate guidelines for oysters sold within Louisiana. FDA controls interstate commerce, but not business within individual states.

But the demand for Louisiana oysters nationwide would still put a crimp on the state’s industry, which employs more than 3,500 residents and is worth more than $300 million.

“Most of our oysters go out of state,” said John Tesvich, an oyster processor who owns one of the other plants capable of processing sterilized oysters. “We produce one-third of the oysters in the whole country, and 4 million people in Louisiana can’t eat them all.”

Chris Kirkham can be reached at ckirkham@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3321.

Food Democracy Now

2009-10-29T10:11:00.001-07:00

Dear Friends,

Speak up to stop Big Ag.

President Obama has found himself with some strange bedfellows lately.

While on the campaign trail in Iowa, Barack Obama boasted, “We’ll tell ConAgra that it’s not the Department of Agribusiness. We’re going to put the people’s interests ahead of the special interests.”1 Despite that promise, it seems that ConAgra’s friends at Monsanto and CropLife are still finding their way into the USDA.

Last month, President Obama nominated two “Big Ag” power brokers--Roger Beachy and Islam Siddiqui--to key agency positions, putting agribusiness executives in charge of our country's agricultural research and trade policy. Please join us in telling the President that this isn't the change we voted for. We don't want Big Ag running the show any more.

Siddiqui's confirmation hearing is set for next week. Please help us reach our goal of 50,000 signatures to make a real impact.

http://fdn.actionkit.com/go/65?akid=35.1117.opQTqV&t=1

Obama’s first agribusiness selection is Roger Beachy, to be head of the USDA’s newly created National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA). Beachy is the founding president of the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis, MO. It may sound innocuous, but the Danforth Center is essentially the non-profit arm of GMO seed giant Monsanto; Monsanto’s CEO sits on its board, and the company provides considerable funding for the Center’s operations.2

As the head of the USDA’s new research arm, formerly known as the Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service (CREES), Beachy is responsible for deciding how U.S. research dollars will be spent in agriculture.3 Translation: more research on biotech, less research on how to scale sustainable and organic agriculture.

Unfortunately, Beachy has already started work at the USDA, but the next nominee—Islam Siddiqui—still must be confirmed by the U.S.Senate. Siddiqui, the Vice President of Science and Regulatory Affairs at CropLife America, was recently nominated to be the Chief Agricultural Negotiator at the Office of the US Trade Representative.4 Amazingly, when Michele Obama planted her “organic” garden on the White House lawn, Siddiqui’s CropLife MidAmerica sent the First Lady a letter saying that it made them “shudder”.5

During his career, Siddiqui spent over 3 years as a pesticide lobbyist, an Undersecretary at the USDA and a VP at CropLife. In defending Siddiqui, the White House has stated that he played a key role in helping establish the country’s first organic standards.6 What they neglect to mention, though, is that those original organic standards would have allowed irradiation, sewage sludge and GMOs to undermine organic integrity! The standards were so watered down that 230,000 people signed a petition for them to be changed, which they eventually were.7

Fortunately, the organic community stopped Siddiqui and his cronies then, and we need your help now to do it again. If Siddiqui’s nomination is allowed to go through, then agribusiness will continue to control the seeds, the science, and the distribution of global food and agriculture.

Please join Food Democracy Now! and a broad coalition of other groups, in calling on President Obama to keep his campaign promise of closing the revolving door between agribusiness and his administration.

Please click here to add your voice.

http://fdn.actionkit.com/go/65?akid=35.1117.opQTqV&t=1

Thanks for standing with us and our coalition partners from across the country, including: The Pesticide Action Network (PAN), National Family Farm Coalition, Food & Water Watch, Farmworker's Association of Florida, Institute of Agriculture & Trade Policy, Greenpeace and the Center for Food Safety in calling for President Obama to live up to his promises to put people's interests ahead of special interests

Sustainably Yours,

Dave, Lisa and the Food Democracy Now! Team.

If you'd like to see Food Democracy Now!'s grassroots work continue, please consider donating. Your donation of $5 or more will help us continue our work. We appreciate your support! http://fdn.actionkit.com/go/25?akid=35.1117.opQTqV&t=1

Sources:

1. Obama slams corporate agriculture, two Illinois firms, The Chicago Tribune, November 10, 2007
http://fdn.actionkit.com/go/58?akid=35.1117.opQTqV&t=1

2. Another Monsanto man in a key USDA post?, Grist, September 24, 2009
http://fdn.actionkit.com/go/59?akid=35.1117.opQTqV&t=1

3. A New Direction on Research at the USDA? The Experts Weigh In, The Huffington Post, October 15, 2009
http://fdn.actionkit.com/go/60?akid=35.1117.opQTqV&t=1

4. Obama’s attempt to tap an agrichemical-industry flack runs into trouble, Grist, October 10, 2009
http://fdn.actionkit.com/go/61?akid=35.1117.opQTqV&t=1

5. Michelle’s green garden upsets pesticide makers, The First Post, April 23, 2009
http://fdn.actionkit.com/go/62?akid=35.1117.opQTqV&t=1

6. Agriculture nomination steams greens, Politico, October 10, 2009
http://fdn.actionkit.com/go/63?akid=35.1117.opQTqV&t=1

7. USDA Enters Debate on Organic Label Law, The New York Times, February 23, 2003 http://fdn.actionkit.com/go/72?akid=35.1117.opQTqV&t=1

Tort Reform Discussion

2009-10-16T12:31:00.000-07:00

Person 1 (lawyer):

For obvious reasons, I'm vehemently against tort reform (the only real democratic leaning I have, besides being closer to pro-choice than I am pro-life). For those of you who are for tort reform, what you need is real stories of human tragedy to put a face on the issue. How's this for the worst thing you've ever heard:

17 year-old girl in rural Kansas. Father is abusive, mom an alcoholic. She goes to see a hack psychiatrist in rural Kansas for her emotional issues stemming from parents. Psychiatrist prescribes an anxiety drug that is extremely potent, and bears a warning on the box in big letters that strongly warns against exceeding max dosage, and says that if you see any sign of a rash to go to the doctor immediately. Problem is, he gives her the samples without the warnings, and while he's at it gives her double the max. dose. She takes it, ignores the rash that begins growing on her chest after a couple days, and finally is life-flighted to city hospital. after going into arrest. Turns out, she has Stevens-Johnson syndrome - the worst possible side effect from overdose of this drug. It literally burns your body from the inside-out. It burns up all your organs, then burns off all of your skin, burns your eyelids so you go blind, and burns off your scalp. Many organs are rendered essentially useless, and you spend your life in extreme pain as a complete vegetable, at constant risk of fatal organ failure. She is treated at KU Med. in the worst case of SJS they have ever seen, and racks up over $2 million in medical bills.

She is now at home, a complete vegetable, with little skin, no hair, is blind, and in immense pain every minute of the day. I have over 50 pictures that I can't show you, but believe me, you wouldn't want to eat after seeing them.

Who to sue? Well, the hack psychiatrist only has $200K in insurance, because that's all he's required to have under Kansas-law. He's judgment proof, as he's basically broke, because he's a sh*tty doctor. No case against the manufacturer, because the warnings were clearly there, had the doc. not given the samples only without a supplemental warning. Thus, the max she can collect is $200K. Medicaid paid all of her medical bills, and has a lien for the $2 million, so any of the $200K she collects goes straight to their pockets. Thus, what can she collect? 0.

I've seen dozens and dozens of cases of brain-dead infants, quadriplegics, people who died too young, crippling orthopedic injuries, strokes leaving people incapacitated with cognitive deficits, and nearly everything else you can imagine. I think this is the worst I've seen, which is why I felt compelled to share.

This isn't a direct product of tort reform, but is a product of the state allowing doctors to run around committing malpractice with too little insurance coverage, when they are otherwise judgment proof. What other recourse is there for this girl? None. Because some doctors who make well over $500K a year, which believe me, most do, whine that their coverage is too high. There are no easy answers, but believe me, if you saw cases like these everyday, you would not believe in tort reform.
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Person 2 (lawyer):

Completely agree. Legal costs are expensive, yes, but that doesn't mean you punish victims to fix it. I think damage caps are unconstitutional and unconscionable because they take the power out of the courts' hands to make their own decisions on a case. Why would the legislature know how much a victim should be awarded more than the jury in the case?

So the newspapers pick up a story and run "Woman spills hot coffee and is awarded a billion dollars." People look at that and think, "god, I'd spill hot coffee on my crotch for that. Sh!t happens. We need to do something about tort judgments." But you never hear the full, gory details like what you just gave us.

Damage caps to me are like saying we need to fix the health care system so we're just going to allow doctors to perform $50,000 of treatment, no matter how much treatment is actually required to fix the person. We certainly would cut down on medical costs but I don't think people would actually be better off for it.
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Person 3 (non-lawyer):

Interesting commentary. I know little of the subject and welcome the knowledge.

I guess I have the following questions:

- who ultimately finances the cost of justice-seeking?

- to what extent is there data available that categorizes the nature
(degree of frivolity - not that such a score is easily and unanimously
determined, but you know what I mean) of all cases. I require data.
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Person 1:

Good questions. Here's the best I could answer:

(1) A doctor or R.N. typically pays (or has paid on his/her behalf) insurance premiums for "primary" coverage through a carrier of either his/hers or the hospital's choosing. Such primary policies are high in jurisdictions where there has been no tort reform (in Illinois, most docs. or nurses have at least $2 million in primary coverage) and abysmally low in jurisdictions where the insurance lobby has convinced the legislature to invoke caps on pain and suffering, wrongful death, etc. and/or doesn't require that doctors carry much by way of primary coverage (in Kansas, most docs. or nurses have $200,000 in primary coverage - which doesn't begin to cover damages in a catastrophic case).

Then, the doc. or nurse has excess coverage from a different carrier or state fund in the event that the primary coverage is satisfied by way of a jury verdict (verdict is 1.2 million, primary policy is only 200K, the excess policy comes into play), or settlement (primary carrier tenders their 200K, bringing the excess policy into play). Again, the extent of excess or "umbrella" coverage varies by state. Using IL and KS as examples, again, most excess policies are 4-6 million in IL, and 800K in Kansas.

The decision to settle or try a case to verdict is solely in the hands of the carrier. A doc. may pressure the carrier to settle on his/her behalf if it's a bad case, because he doesn't want the bad PR, but it is ultimately up to the carrier and the doc. has little to say about it. A carrier can be liable for bad faith if they refuse to settle in a case that is clearly very bad, because by refusing to settle within policy limits they are exposing their insured to a personal excess verdict. If they are found to be in bad faith, they will have to cover the excess. (This factors in in the case with the 17 year-old girl - there is no coverage at stake and a verdict in excess is of no value, because the psychiatrist has no assets).

Thus, insurance comes heavily, heavily into play here, and the state legislatures dictate how much coverage a health care professional must have, and whether damages are capped.

(2) Whether on the defense or the plaintiff's side, I have always been against tort reform, but in favor of getting rid of frivolous suits. The thing people don't realize, and why the issue gets muddled, is that the frivolous suits weed themselves out. It costs so much money for a plaintiff's attorney (who only gets paid on a contingency, if his client gets a settlement or verdict) to try a medical malpractice case these days (at least $100 - $150,000 for a big case) that he can't afford to go on a witch hunt and try cases of no merit. It simply doesn't happen. If it does, the insurance company refuses to settle, and the case goes to trial. Then, in 99% of frivolous cases, the jury will return the right verdict. The "McDonald's case" is representative of .0000000000001% of the cases that are filed. It simply doesn't happen. It's a freak occurrence, and is not representative in any way of the types of cases we see now. I can tell you personally that I never saw a "frivolous" suit, ever, as a defense attorney - only, at worst, ones that we would probably win, but that could reasonably be brought by a plaintiff. Now, on the plaintiff's side, we look for reasons to reject cases, not the other way around. It's fiscally irresponsible, and gives you a bad reputation. Thus, while I can't give you a percentage, I can tell you that anyone who supports tort reform because of "these frivolous lawsuits" has no idea what they're talking about.
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Person 2:

Generally, the cost of justice seeking is financed by two parties: the injured person's attorney and the injurer's insurance company, which really gets passed along to everybody who pays for that type of insurance (med mal, etc.), which then gets passed along to the customers of that industry (patients in the med mal case). That's why the tort reform movement is so appealing to some people. It seeks to cut down on costs for everyone.

As for frivolity, you could try looking at jury verdicts but those almost always tend to be 50/50 for the plaintiffs and defendants. Going to trial is literally a coin flip's chance of getting a favorable result. Therefore, statistics are hard to measure because an overwhelming majority of cases are settled out of court. Nobody wants to spend the money to fully litigate something that is so uncertain. Even a lot of frivolous cases settle because it sometimes costs less to pay out a relatively small settlement than to litigate it fully. The settlement agreement is usually not public record either. I have a feeling that companies generally do a pretty good job of knowing which cases are frivolous and which are not, and they tend to act in their best financial interests when it comes to litigating or settling.

Legal costs are a problem, in my opinion, because of the lengthy discovery process. Much of this is set up to provide victims--especially poor ones--with as much access to the courts and to information in the control of the other party. As a country, we decided long ago (whether you agree or not) that it was good public policy to not deny injured people access to the court system because they couldn't afford it or because they couldn't get to the information. That is why we have contingency fee arrangements where a lawyer can provide services where he gets money only if he gets a favorable result*: people with no money can still hire a lawyer. For the same reason, we don't make the loser pay the other's costs. I don't necessarily agree with that policy, but that's the way it is. We have decided that nobody should ever be injured and not be able to be made whole again because he was too broke to sue. I think it comes down to America regarding the plight of one person as being more important than the health of our overall society. Same with criminal justice. We would rather see 99 guilty men walk free than incarcerate one innocent man.

Legal costs are ridiculously out of control, I think we could cut down on this by making the loser pay and encouraging mediation as much as possible.

*So lawyers are also gate keepers when it comes to frivolous lawsuits. Good lawyers don't take bad cases.
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Person 3:

I would be interested to see numbers on the percentage of cases (or claimed failures) per "treatment" (or doctor-patient interaction)... The number of failures should have a positive correlation with the increase in the number of the patients and care-givers. The greater the number of treatments, the greater the number of failures. In theory, any deviation from this fixed % should be able to be explained... unless of course there was a boon in frivolity, which, as you say, is not the case.

Naturally, as treatments increase with technology and population, it reasons that the cost to fix malpractice will increase accordingly, along with all the other healthcare costs.

The answer to who pays for this is everybody.

And, quite simply, the only way to curb health care costs is to decrease treatments, which can only be achieved by improving the health of the population.

Tort-reform - upon cursory thought - therefore appears to be missing the point...

Food Democracy Now

2009-10-14T15:00:00.000-07:00

Tell Tom Vilsack to stand up for family farmers.

It’s time to end the bureaucratic squabbling at the USDA and put beginning and minority farmers first.

What new and minority farmers need most is access to affordable land — unfortunately USDA officials are stalling a potential solution.

A new program created by sustainable agriculture advocates in the 2008 Farm Bill, called the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) Transition Option, offers incentives to land owners enrolled in the CRP to sell or lease the land to beginning and minority farmers using sustainable or organic practices at the end of CRP contracts.

Please sign this petition to help grow the next generation of sustainable and organic farmers by giving them access to the land.

Currently, 4.3 million acres enrolled in CRP are about to leave the program and this land is badly needed by the next generation of farmers to overcome the greatest obstacle to new farmers – affordable land.2

Unfortunately the USDA’s bureaucratic wrangling and fear of lawsuits is holding up implementation of this vital program. Rather than release the land as it should be under new Farm Bill rules, the USDA is holding it up with an unnecesary environmental impact study. Any further delay will deny beginning and minority farmers the opportunity to get access to the land they need in the next 2 years.3

Please join Food Democracy Now! by asking Secretary Vilsack to implement the Conservation Reserve Program Transition Option now.

Our beginning and minority farmers don’t have a moment to waste.

Please sign this petition to tell Secretary Vilsack to provide access to a new generation of beginning and minority farmers so they can create more sustainable and organic farms.

Sustainably yours,

Dave, Lisa and the Food Democracy Now! team.

If you'd like to see Food Democracy Now!'s grassroots work continue, please consider donating as little as $10 or $25. We appreciate your support! http://fdn.actionkit.com/go/25?akid=30.1117.We9Xnn&t=1

Sources:

1. 2008 U.S. Farm Bill Enhances Beginning Farmer Provisions

http://fdn.actionkit.com/go/48?akid=30.1117.We9Xnn&t=1

2. CRP Transition Option

http://fdn.actionkit.com/go/49?akid=30.1117.We9Xnn&t=1

3. USDA Delays Land Program that Enables Beginning Farmers

http://fdn.actionkit.com/go/50?akid=30.1117.We9Xnn&t=1

In honor of one of the best weekends in San Francisco

2009-10-05T08:51:00.000-07:00

First, a big Thank You goes out to Warren Hellman, the billionaire investment banker who puts on the what is probably the best free music festival in the country, Hardly Strictly Bluegrass. It's in a forest (Golden Gate Park), there are top acts, and you're allowed to bring in whatever you want to the festival: chairs, coolers, beer, wine....anything.

Check out this quote from Hellman, who is also an amateur banjo player and puts on the festival as a gift to the city. I talked to a guy who said there is even a provision in his will that the festival should continue after his death.

Hellman says "it costs a lot -- bigger than a bread box, smaller than a house, one of those new billionaire homes, I guess." He tells how he was approached by someone who said he ran America's biggest (non-bluegrass) festival. "He wanted to buy mine. I said, 'Why? It's free.' He said, 'Well it wouldn't be if I owned it.' " Hellman said it wasn't for sale. "There's this famous Texas oil guy's remark about money: 'It's like manure -- if you spread it around, beautiful things grow. But if you leave it in a pile it smells like manure.' "

Awesome.

Thanks again, Warren, for paying for me to see Okkervil River, Dave Alvin, Boz Scaggs, The Old 97s, Steve Martin (comedian/banjo player), The Ferocious Few*, Richie Havens, Robert Earl Keene, Steve Earle, Elvis Perkins, Booker T and the Drive-By Truckers, Billy Bragg, Allen Toussaint, Galactic, Mavis Staples, Neko Case, Emmylou Harris, Old Crow Medicine Show, and Amadou and Mariam.

*Actually, you didn't pay for them. They just showed up.

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This weekend was also LovEvolution*. I went this year and didn't feel the need to go hear obscenely loud electronic music in front of City Hall amidst sweaty spunions while Hardly Strictly was going on, no matter how many underage topless girls there were at Love Parade. But that orgy of late 20th Century chemical energy gives me the perfect excuse to post this all-time classic video, TECHNOVIKING:

*Formerly Love Parade and then Love Fest.

Part Three: The Relationship Between the Level of Regulation under the FDCA and the Health Status of a Product’s Targeted Population

2009-09-29T09:32:00.000-07:00

[From BioLaw/AgLaw]

An Introduction to the History of Quack Medicine

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there was a remarkable growth in the marketing of sham products to treat and cure disease.

At that time, the rate at which quack medicines were being introduced into the market far outpaced the development of the science necessary to establish the efficacy and identify the risks associated with each new product. This scientific lag time created a period when there was an information void that
predatory commercial interests were quick to use to their advantage. As the FDA carried the burden of proof to show that a product did not work or was unsafe in order to remove the product from the market, during this lag time predatory commercial interests were able to profit from scientific uncertainty to the detriment of public health.

During this long period in U.S. history, the curative claims of the predatory sham medicine salesmen were limited only by the gullibility of their targets. In many cases, the degree of gullibility was proportional to the level of desperation of the individual for a cure. The more dire the condition, the more vulnerable an individual was to the ‘flim flam’ of the greedy snake oil salesman. And the more dire the condition, the greater the degree of harm when the sham medicine did not work, causing injury over and above the original illness and/or causing a delay in seeking effective medical treatment. Thus, this lag time between initial marketing of a sham product and the development of the science necessary to resolve uncertainties over the new product’s safety and effectiveness was very costly in terms of human suffering and loss of life. Slaying the Hydra: The History of Quack Medicines

In 1962, after a series of highly publicized public health crises, legislation was passed to close this ‘space between’ created by scientific uncertainty by switching the burden of proof for safety and effectiveness from the FDA and onto product manufacturers.

Read the rest here...

Great video on sustainability in the wine industry.

2009-09-24T12:57:00.000-07:00

In particular, I really enjoyed the shot beginning at the 2:49 mark.

Part Two in AgLaw/BioLaw's series on the FDA

2009-09-22T11:55:00.000-07:00

I tried to put up a comment last week asking the author what she thought about the rather tenuous link between high cholesterol and heart disease, but it wasn't approved. That's splitting hairs, though, because the point is not whether high cholesterol really does cause heart disease but whether products can claim that they can lower your cholesterol without subjecting themselves to FDA regulation.

http://aglaw.blogspot.com/2009/09/post-two-of-series-relationship-between.html

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Post Two of a Series: The Relationship Between the Level of Regulation under the FDCA and the Health Status of a Product’s Targeted Population

The first post of this series began by asking whether functional foods should be regulated as drugs if they claim to treat abnormal health conditions. For example, was it appropriate for the FDA to characterize Cheerios as a drug as a result of its advertising claim that “you can Lower Your Cholesterol 4% in 6 weeks?” An abnormally high level cholesterol level is a serious risk factor for disease and those with high cholesterol levels are in an abnormal state of health. By virtue of its claims to help this group of unhealthy consumers with their struggle to return to a normal state of health, should the manufacturer of Cheerios be required to undergo the FDA's premarket approval process to show that eating Cheerios is effective in lowering cholesterol as claimed?

The answer to this question may become more apparent by looking at another category of products that claim to help unhealthy people return to a normal health status – weight loss products.

Click here to read the rest.

The best person at Outside Lands

2009-09-18T16:39:00.000-07:00

Original Content! Yea!

From BioLaw/AgLaw

2009-09-16T10:31:00.000-07:00

http://biolaw.blogspot.com/2009/09/post-1-in-series-relationship-between.html

Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Post 1 in Series: The Relationship Between the Level of Government Regulation under the FDCA and the Health Status of a Product’s Targeted Population
Cheerios -- a Drug?

This past May, the FDA issued a warning letter to General Mills stating that the claim on Cheerios cereal that “you can Lower Your Cholesterol 4% in 6 weeks” turned the Cheerios from a food into an illegally marketed drug. When bloggers heard the news, posts ran from scolding the FDA to “grow-up,” to those which lauded the FDA’s action.

Who is correct? Is targeting a cereal one of those cases where, as one blogger suggested, the FDA has its priorities wrong? A look at one recent food trend may help answer this question.

By making its cholesterol lowering claims, Cheerios is entering the growing market for functional foods. In 2008, functional foods -- which are defined as foods that claim to have health benefits over and above the delivery of nutrients -– were a $30.7 billion dollar market. This market is predicted to grow by 40% over the next several years.

Examples include: probiotics in salsa and ketchup; omega-3 fatty acids in orange juice, eggs and peanut butter; pasta enriched with calcium; heart healthy ginger ale infused with green tea; ‘energy’ drinks with amino acids for joint health. The list goes on and on. One never knows what might pop up in a favorite food.

And now a new category of functional foods is cropping up which industry is calling cosmeceuticals -– foods that are being marketed to enhance appearance. (A bit confusing because that term is commonly used to describe drugs that are being marketed as cosmetics. Perhaps cosmefood would be better?). One example of a cosmeceutical for skin beauty is a product on the market that consists of marshmallows infused with allegedly skin-boosting collagen.

Fortified foods are not new. Iodine has been added to salt since 1924 to reduce the incidence of goiter. Grains have been fortified with niacin, thiamin, riboflavin and iron since 1943, a public health move that almost eliminated brain/skin degenerating pellagra within a decade. However, present day functional foods are flooding onto the market before the science exists on the effectiveness of many of their associated health claims.

Where should the FDA draw the line on regulation? Should the level of product regulation be linked with the health status of the product’s targeted population? While not stated explicitly, it appears that this is the strategy that the FDCA has followed since its inception. See Van Tassel, K., Slaying the Hydra: The History of Quack Medicine, The Obesity Epidemic and the FDA's Battle to Regulate Dietary Supplements, 6 Indiana Health L. J. 203-251 (2009).

Traditionally, the greatest amount of regulatory protection under the Food Drug & Cosmetic Act (“FDCA”) has been applied when products are targeted at vulnerable, unhealthy populations and claim to aid in an individual’s struggle to return to normal health. Examples of products that fall into this category by making health remedy or recovery claims include drugs and devices. For these products, the modern FDCA establishes a premarket enforcement process that places the majority of the cost and burden on the product manufacturer to establish safety and efficacy through the clinical trial process prior to distribution to the public. Without premarket approval from the FDA, these products will be deemed both adulterated and misbranded as a matter of law.

Conversely, the FDCA requires less regulatory protection when products are targeted to healthy populations to maintain or improve a normal state of health. Examples of products that fall into this category are traditional foods, and (until recently) a very limited number of functional foods and (once again, until recently) a similarly narrow category of dietary supplements. For these products, the FDA carries the burden of removing an unsafe or ineffective product by proving that it is adulterated or misbranded.

Currently, far too many functional foods and dietary supplements are being marketed to the unhealthy and vulnerable by making health recovery or remedy claims without demonstrating through premarket approval that their products are both safe and effective. It appears that Cheerios is just one product of many that are making these claims.

An abnormally high cholesterol level is a serious risk factor for disease and those with high cholesterol levels are in an abnormal state of health. Cheerios is claiming to help this group of unhealthy consumers with their struggle to return to a normal state of health. As one commentator remarked, it is possible “that some people with high cholesterol will see eating breakfast as a clinical treatment, perhaps even offsetting a more pressing need to cut back on French fries.” Consequently, by sending its warning letter to Cheerios, it appears that the FDA is heading down the right path.

The merits of the FDA’s position on Cheerios specifically, and functional foods more generally, may become more apparent by looking at another category of products that claim to help unhealthy people return to a normal health status -– weight loss products.

The next in this series of blog posts will provide a general introduction of the current problems with the claims being made by weight loss products, particularly in the context of the obesity crisis. The focus on the example of weight loss products will provide a structure for the following posts which will take a look back through the history of the relationship between the FDCA, the FDA and predatory commercial interests. Through this exercise, regulatory patterns will be identified that appear to link the level of product regulation with the health status of the product’s targeted population.

The goal of this series is to take lessons from the past and apply them to assist in the analysis of current regulatory issues involving food, functional food and dietary supplements. This first series will provide the ground work for the second series which will delve into the use of nanaotechnology in consumer products for direct and indirect human consumption -- including food (directly and through the food production process), food supplements, cosmetics and sunscreens.

My advice for the day

2009-09-15T15:00:00.001-07:00

Pollan on health care reform

2009-09-10T10:40:00.001-07:00

Why forcing health insurance companies to stop denying coverage on the basis of chronic diseases or pre-existing conditions could help turn the tide on reforming the farm bill.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/10/opinion/10pollan.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=opinion

Big Food vs. Big Insurance

By MICHAEL POLLAN
Published: September 9, 2009

Berkeley, Calif.

TO listen to President Obama’s speech on Wednesday night, or to just about anyone else in the health care debate, you would think that the biggest problem with health care in America is the system itself — perverse incentives, inefficiencies, unnecessary tests and procedures, lack of competition, and greed.

No one disputes that the $2.3 trillion we devote to the health care industry is often spent unwisely, but the fact that the United States spends twice as much per person as most European countries on health care can be substantially explained, as a study released last month says, by our being fatter. Even the most efficient health care system that the administration could hope to devise would still confront a rising tide of chronic disease linked to diet.

That’s why our success in bringing health care costs under control ultimately depends on whether Washington can summon the political will to take on and reform a second, even more powerful industry: the food industry.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, three-quarters of health care spending now goes to treat “preventable chronic diseases.” Not all of these diseases are linked to diet — there’s smoking, for instance — but many, if not most, of them are.

We’re spending $147 billion to treat obesity, $116 billion to treat diabetes, and hundreds of billions more to treat cardiovascular disease and the many types of cancer that have been linked to the so-called Western diet. One recent study estimated that 30 percent of the increase in health care spending over the past 20 years could be attributed to the soaring rate of obesity, a condition that now accounts for nearly a tenth of all spending on health care.

The American way of eating has become the elephant in the room in the debate over health care. The president has made a few notable allusions to it, and, by planting her vegetable garden on the South Lawn, Michelle Obama has tried to focus our attention on it. Just last month, Mr. Obama talked about putting a farmers’ market in front of the White House, and building new distribution networks to connect local farmers to public schools so that student lunches might offer more fresh produce and fewer Tater Tots. He’s even floated the idea of taxing soda.

But so far, food system reform has not figured in the national conversation about health care reform. And so the government is poised to go on encouraging America’s fast-food diet with its farm policies even as it takes on added responsibilities for covering the medical costs of that diet. To put it more bluntly, the government is putting itself in the uncomfortable position of subsidizing both the costs of treating Type 2 diabetes and the consumption of high-fructose corn syrup.

Why the disconnect? Probably because reforming the food system is politically even more difficult than reforming the health care system. At least in the health care battle, the administration can count some powerful corporate interests on its side — like the large segment of the Fortune 500 that has concluded the current system is unsustainable.

That is hardly the case when it comes to challenging agribusiness. Cheap food is going to be popular as long as the social and environmental costs of that food are charged to the future. There’s lots of money to be made selling fast food and then treating the diseases that fast food causes. One of the leading products of the American food industry has become patients for the American health care industry.

The market for prescription drugs and medical devices to manage Type 2 diabetes, which the Centers for Disease Control estimates will afflict one in three Americans born after 2000, is one of the brighter spots in the American economy. As things stand, the health care industry finds it more profitable to treat chronic diseases than to prevent them. There’s more money in amputating the limbs of diabetics than in counseling them on diet and exercise.

As for the insurers, you would think preventing chronic diseases would be good business, but, at least under the current rules, it’s much better business simply to keep patients at risk for chronic disease out of your pool of customers, whether through lifetime caps on coverage or rules against pre-existing conditions or by figuring out ways to toss patients overboard when they become ill.

But these rules may well be about to change — and, when it comes to reforming the American diet and food system, that step alone could be a game changer. Even under the weaker versions of health care reform now on offer, health insurers would be required to take everyone at the same rates, provide a standard level of coverage and keep people on their rolls regardless of their health. Terms like “pre-existing conditions” and “underwriting” would vanish from the health insurance rulebook — and, when they do, the relationship between the health insurance industry and the food industry will undergo a sea change.

The moment these new rules take effect, health insurance companies will promptly discover they have a powerful interest in reducing rates of obesity and chronic diseases linked to diet. A patient with Type 2 diabetes incurs additional health care costs of more than $6,600 a year; over a lifetime, that can come to more than $400,000. Insurers will quickly figure out that every case of Type 2 diabetes they can prevent adds $400,000 to their bottom line. Suddenly, every can of soda or Happy Meal or chicken nugget on a school lunch menu will look like a threat to future profits.

When health insurers can no longer evade much of the cost of treating the collateral damage of the American diet, the movement to reform the food system — everything from farm policy to food marketing and school lunches — will acquire a powerful and wealthy ally, something it hasn’t really ever had before.

AGRIBUSINESS dominates the agriculture committees of Congress, and has swatted away most efforts at reform. But what happens when the health insurance industry realizes that our system of farm subsidies makes junk food cheap, and fresh produce dear, and thus contributes to obesity and Type 2 diabetes? It will promptly get involved in the fight over the farm bill — which is to say, the industry will begin buying seats on those agriculture committees and demanding that the next bill be written with the interests of the public health more firmly in mind.

In the same way much of the health insurance industry threw its weight behind the campaign against smoking, we can expect it to support, and perhaps even help pay for, public education efforts like New York City’s bold new ad campaign against drinking soda. At the moment, a federal campaign to discourage the consumption of sweetened soft drinks is a political nonstarter, but few things could do more to slow the rise of Type 2 diabetes among adolescents than to reduce their soda consumption, which represents 15 percent of their caloric intake.

That’s why it’s easy to imagine the industry throwing its weight behind a soda tax. School lunch reform would become its cause, too, and in time the industry would come to see that the development of regional food systems, which make fresh produce more available and reduce dependence on heavily processed food from far away, could help prevent chronic disease and reduce their costs.

Recently a team of designers from M.I.T. and Columbia was asked by the foundation of the insurer UnitedHealthcare to develop an innovative systems approach to tackling childhood obesity in America. Their conclusion surprised the designers as much as their sponsor: they determined that promoting the concept of a “foodshed” — a diversified, regional food economy — could be the key to improving the American diet.

All of which suggests that passing a health care reform bill, no matter how ambitious, is only the first step in solving our health care crisis. To keep from bankrupting ourselves, we will then have to get to work on improving our health — which means going to work on the American way of eating.

But even if we get a health care bill that does little more than require insurers to cover everyone on the same basis, it could put us on that course.

For it will force the industry, and the government, to take a good hard look at the elephant in the room and galvanize a movement to slim it down.

Vern

2009-09-09T14:28:00.000-07:00

http://outlawvern.com/2009/09/09/bulworth/

Bulworth

Recently I was reading last month’s Rolling Stone article about the Democrats caving on all the meaningful parts of health care reform. It paints a convincing picture that if they give up on the public option then the plan won’t help much, could even make things worse, will hurt the Democrats politically and hurt the chances of real reform happening any time soon. I thought jesus, what is wrong with these people, we elected them for “change” and now the opportunity to do what we asked them to do makes them run around in a panic, peeing on the floor like a dog on the 4th of July. (Another American reference for you there.) Are they really all in the pocket of insurance companies? They have the majority, they have the majority of the people. You really worried those dumb fuckers at the town hall meetings are gonna be mad if you give them cheaper health coverage? I don’t think that’s worth losing sleep over.

You flash back to a few years ago when the Republicans controlled everything, had everything they wanted, including two wars and all kinds of rampant butt play in their overseas prisons, and still saw themselves as victims. They overplayed their hand. The Democrats are doing the opposite, they have the chance to do something great for their country and their children and grandchildren, they would rather do nothing at all. They’re folding their cards too early. Fuck you motherfuckers. Why can’t somebody cut the shit and stand up for what is obviously right?

mp_bulworthAll that was on my mind but also I had recently watched SOUL MAN so my solution was to watch another well-meaning but racially questionable satire, BULWORTH. Starring and written and directed by Warren Beatty, BULWORTH speaks to alot of this anger I have, but it does it in a way that makes me cringe. And I don’t think this is supposed to be uncomfortable comedy like THE OFFICE or something.

Beatty plays Senator Jay Bulworth, a Democrat who’s on the eve of his re-election campaign and hasn’t eaten or slept in days. When an insurance lobbyist (Paul Sorvino, KNOCK OFF) bribes him to kill a reform bill, Bulworth takes out a huge life insurance policy and hires an assassin to kill himself. He’s stressed and has nothing to lose so he just starts Telling It Like It Is at his campaign stops. For example at a black church he tells them that the Democratic Party doesn’t care about them because what are they gonna do, vote Republican? At a Hollywood industry party he says “my people aren’t stupid, they always put the big Jews on the schedule,” then starts flipping through his notes saying, “They must’ve put something bad about Farrakhan in here somewhere.”

bulworthIn South Central two young (very stereotypical) black women are so impressed by his candid statements that they volunteer for him, which means they follow him around cheering him on, snapping at people and gossiping. He goes to a club with them and, unfortunately, learns about rapping. And starts doing it. Throughout the rest of the movie.

Most of the ideas behind the movie are admirable, and there are other things I like about it, which I’ll get into. But there is no way to get around the rapping. He freestyles horrible nursery rhyme type lyrics and says them slowly, syllable by syllable, in a bizarre style that’s part out-of-touch-white-guy-attempting-to-co-opt-what-he-believes-to-be-black-slang, part speech impediment. He makes Vanilla Ice seem like Rakim or Slick Rick.

Late in the movie, after Bulworth rhymes to Don Cheadle and a gang of underage crack dealers in South Central, one of the kids asks, “Is that how white people rap?” It’s the movie’s only acknowledgment that he’s horrible at it. I mean, I never thought we were supposed to think he was good, but his entourage acts like he is, and nobody ever cringes or runs away like you want to do at home watching the fucking thing. The main joke, definitely, is that all these stuffy white people have to hear rap, and listen to The Truth from this guy, who by the way is on a spiritual quest assigned to him by a homeless street preacher played by the controversial poet Amiri Baraka.

But I guess if you look at ISHTAR (to be honest I’ve never seen the whole thing) it’s clear that Beatty finds something really funny in people performing awful songs. Still, I’m not sure he understands just how painful it is to watch this one.

I remember I read somewhere that Warren Beatty was hanging out with Suge Knight when he made this movie, as research. But I’m not sure he found the authenticity he was looking for. He kind of makes it seem like most black people are selling crack or working for crime lords, but have the potential to do good if only they would decide to get it together. Perhaps when nudged to do so by a white politician. And it’s a little painful to see Halle Berry trying to act “street,” saying “yo” and acting tough. She does look good with dreadlocks though. I can see why Bulworth goes for her. I would think the rapping would actually be a dealbreaker though. This was before Eminem raised people’s standards for white rappers, but I still don’t think anybody is gonna forgive how this guy raps. I sure won’t. Ever. Never forget.

What I do like about the movie is that it comes from a left wing point of view but criticizes the Democratic party as compromised and sold out. From my point of view most Democrats are too centrist, but the mainstream media usually doesn’t acknowledge that point of view. They offer Democrats as the furthest left you can get without being a communist (or sometimes they consider them actually to be communists). Senator Bulworth has sold out his values, promoting himself as more conservative to try to get votes. With Halle Berry he talks reverantly about the Black Panthers, but on TV he complains about welfare being “out of control.”

Usually in a political movie you’re either gonna have one side as the good guys and one side bad, or all politicians bad. In this one Republicans don’t even really figure into it. It’s not about the right wing at all. The blame is on the Democrats, arguing that they are the ones who believe in health care as a right, they’re the ones that should be doing something about it, but they never do because they’re more worried about campaign money than about their constituents and their country and the human race and things that are good. And that’s why BULWORTH is relevant now (despite the rapping), because we have the same thing going on now. Republicans just want to stop health care reform because they want to make Obama look bad, and as a bonus they get to cause the deaths of many poor people, which is a hobby many of them enjoy. But it’s not in their court, it’s up to the Democrats. They could and should do it and would do it if they weren’t mostly a bunch of dumb assholes.

The opening scene is actually a really good one. It’s a montage of Bulworth in his office watching all the different variations on his new TV spots, repeating the same bullshit about welfare and “the new millennium.” And then he just starts to cry. It’s a really effective scene because the commercials seem pretty real and you just have to hear the same phrases over and over and over, not only showing you what empty slogans they are but showing you how he must feel having to say the same shit every time. He just feels like a phony. Because he is a phony.

Believe it or not the movie is scored by the great Ennio Morricone. But then it also uses some great hip hop songs like “100 Miles and Runnin’” by NWA and “The N**** You Love To Hate” by Ice Cube. It’s a bizarre combination, but strangely appropriate. When I reviewed ORCA a few months ago I talked about how Morricone’s music seemed to infuse the whole thing with depth, make it seem profound and poetic. Here’s an even better example of how fucking good the guy is. At the end, Bulworth embraces gorgeous young Halle Berry. As a viewer I’m still thinking this movie is ridiculous and what the fuck would she see in him and no way would this ever happen and neither of them (especially her) are particularly three-dimensional characters, but somehow, with the music, it seems kind of touching, like we have watched these two teetering on the edge of falling in love and invested ourselves in them and now we are relieved to finally see it coming to fruition. Completely unearned by the movie, but collected in full by Morricone.

And the end credits are really cool – a suite of Morricone music with hip hop songs by Ol’ Dirty Bastard and others occasionally fading in and playing for a bit and then drifting away as the orchestra continues.

Yeah, I guess I mainly just like the opening scene and the end credits.

Djokovic v. McEnroe: How can you not love this?

2009-09-08T15:42:00.001-07:00

I almost feel bad about all those times I called him Quitter or Chokovic.

Were The Sex Pistols the first modern hipsters?

2009-08-19T10:45:00.000-07:00

First read this article in Adbusters entitled "Hipster: The Dead End of Civilization." I think it adequately sums up why hipsters are a bad thing and indirectly explains the difference between a true hipster and somebody who merely subscribes to modern fashions and wears tight pants. To summarize, it comes down to hipsters standing for nothing really except seeking authenticity through consumerism. Co-opting working class values and trends and spending lots of money doing it.

A lot of quote-unquote hipsters are really just artsy people who do cool things like sell street food in The Mission or make swimming pools out of dumpsters in Brooklyn. These people are not actually hipsters in my eyes. They are doing something and creating interesting things rather than buying something obscure and then ditching it when it isn't obscure or authentic enough for them anymore.

Again, great article, but I disagree with it where it draws a bright line between hipsters and punks...which brings me to the penultimate punk band, The Sex Pistols.

They declared their allegiance to the working classes and held mainstream society in contempt but really I think it's pretty safe to say they were just intellectually retarded nihilists consumed with image, self-indulgence and popularity. Sound familiar?

Sid Vicious was chosen for his attitude rather than his musical ability and they ended up becoming just as vacuous and rich as the ruling classes and cliched rockers they claimed to abhor.

Punk was sort of an interesting counter-culture moment and I see the value in bands like The Ramones and The Clash. I like the do-it-yourself attitude and the quesitoning of authority, but check out this quote from Johnny Rotten: "[The Ramones] were all long-haired and of no interest to me. I didn't like their image, what they stood for, or anything about them; They were hilarious but you can only go so far with 'duh-dur-dur-duh'. I've heard it. Next. Move on."

Newsflash...The Ramones were developing your sound while you were busy tearing holes in your Pink Floyd shirts and spending money on hair gel and red dye. Get over yourselves. Who cares how long their hair was?

Also, The Pistols (and pretty much all punks and hipsters) constantly talked about how much they hated hippies. The punk-hippie dichotomy really deserves to be explored fully in another post, but when you come down to it, they really weren't that different. The main difference I see is that at least hippies were trying to do something and change the world* while punks were consumed more with rebelling for the sake of rebelling and were ultimately a much more selfish group of blowhards. It's the same difference between a hiptser and somebody who isn't utterly worthless.

*That they failed and ended up becoming the big wigs they were rebelling against is irrelevant to me. At least they initially stood for something.

Wow

2009-08-14T14:11:00.001-07:00

America's unjust DUI laws

2009-08-10T17:00:00.000-07:00

Though the number of unjust laws in this country is staggering, the Economist zeroed in on one area recently and took on our Draconian sex offender laws. That's right, The Economist. This isn't coming from High Times or Harper's or Hustler or even the "liberal" (as right-wingers see it) New York Times. This is from a magazine that opposed the provision of aid to the Irish during the Great Famine.

The magazine makes a great point that the system lumps all "sex" offenders together and makes it harder to differentiate who the truly dangerous deviants are.

According to Human Rights Watch, at least five states require registration for people who visit prostitutes, 29 require it for consensual sex between young teenagers and 32 require it for indecent exposure. Some prosecutors are now stretching the definition of “distributing child pornography” to include teens who text half-naked photos of themselves to their friends.

The Economist argues that watering down the sex offender registry makes it actually less effective in preventing child abuse. And the registry will most likely only continue to become further watered down because politicians will only continue to make the laws tougher and tougher in order to not appear soft on crime.

Few politicians dare to vote against such laws, [let alone propose to reduce the harsh penalties] because if they do, the attack ads practically write themselves.

This article seems to sum up about sex crimes what I have been thinking for a while now about drinking and driving laws.

It seems that our society insists on gravitating further and further back to the time of The Scarlet Letter. I wouldn't be surprised if sex offenders have to start identifying themselves with some sort of giant S on their clothing (we're almost there with their houses), nor would it shock me if people convicted of DUI soon have to brandish their car with some sort of giant warning. Many already have conspicuous breathalyzer boxes in the cars. Why not require giant pizza delivery-esque glowing signs that say "Hey, I like to drive drunk!"?

To be certain, driving drunk (and the key word is "drunk") and committing sex crimes are terrible acts that deserve to be punished. So many families have been permanently damaged by the stupid and often selfish acts of men and women who took their lives and the lives of other people on the road for granted when they tried to make it home after a serious bender.

I belive to correct this problem, it's not as simple as make the penalties increasingly harsher and make the threshold lower to prosecute. Laws of this type should be more about protecting the public and less about generating revenue for the state or allowing the politician to appear for photo ops and generate material for his reelection campaign TV ads.

As usual, the politicians have missed the mark on how to truly benefit the most people. According to MADD, "In 2002, 2.3% of Americans 18 and older surveyed reported alcohol-impaired driving, compared with only 2.1% in 1997." So as the penalties were getting stiffer and the threshold BAC has been reduced to where people can have only a couple drinks be over the limit, drunk driving has not really decreased at all. One study has suggested that lowering the BAC has had an ambiguous effect at best. The bottom line is that people are still getting behind the wheel and people are still dying from alcohol-related crashes. And if 2.3 percent is the number reported, then there are lots and lots of people who are also lying on their drinking and driving surveys.

So how many ways has the government tried to reduce the deadly effects of drunk driving on our society other than increasing the penalties and generating more revenue and political capital for campaign ads? If you ask me, the answer is zero unless you count meaningless public service announcements.

Aside from the most progressive of cities, how many places actually try to get cars off the road? To me, if you want to curb drunk driving, you have to get people to focus more on the driving part than the drinking part of the equation. Build more public transportation, encourage urban planning that allows for more walking or taxi rides, partially pay for people's taxi rides after midnight, instruct police officers to do more than lie in wait to nab drunk drivers and get them to proactively assist intoxicated people make it home without driving.

People who drink lots alcohol generate tremendous amounts of tax dollars for cities and help keep urban districts alive. It's hard to imagine a thriving city center where there were no bars or nightclubs. Drinkers deserve to be treated with more respect than gotcha policing and thousands of dollars in fines and legal costs and mandatory education. They also deserve more options than compete with the rest of the drunken hoards for an expensive taxi, find a sober driver to hang out in a loud and crowded bar all night, walk until dawn, or drive drunk.

I repeat, drunk driving is a terrible burden on public safety, but so is text messaging and talking on a cell phone while driving. Some studies have suggested texting is even more dangerous than drunk driving. But do you see texters losing their licenses for a year and having big black boxes installed in their cars to breathe in? When it comes to oncoming traffic, I would much rather see a responsible driver heading home after two or three drinks than somebody with his/her face in a Blackberry.

It's time to start examining our laws and what roles they really play in making society a better place*. Big problems need creative solutions, not the same old dog and pony shows that politicians have been using to get reelected for centuries. Let's stop treating streakers like child murderers and let's stop treating buzzed drivers like involuntary manslaughterists.

*I'll save drug laws for another blog post.

[Mostly] Spot-on San Francisco Take

2009-08-10T14:30:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the lack of posting. I wish I could say that I've had better things to do than to transcribe my ramblings, but the truth is that I've caught a raging case of the lazies when it comes to writing.

To tide all three of you over, here are Anthony Bourdain's thoughts on my current home. For the most part, I think he does an excellent job of describing it. Tune into the Travel Channel tonight to see the SF No Reservations.

I'm Not Angry
By Anthony Bourdain on August 9, 2009 11:57 AM Permalink

Let me come right out and say it. I love San Francisco. I am helpless and unwavering in my affection--in spite of every effort over the years to find fault, to dismiss, to sneer. And there's surely lots to sneer at, San Francisco and the Bay being pretty much the epicenter of so many of my most cherished aversions: political correctness, veganism, rich hippies, sanctimoniousness about food, food fetishism, animal rights terrorists, gastro-dogma, and loud locavores who actually get their produce flown in from Chino Farms in San Diego.

But at this point, I bore even myself railing against the above. Hell, I'm not even bitter about San Francisco taking the lead in banning smoking anymore. They won that battle long ago. Game over.

I guess it's like any love that's true--sooner or later you learn to accept the good, bad and silly all together. It's all part of the package when you know, without any question, that you want the package. It doesn't even matter if one's love is returned.

Okay ... it does still drive me berserko watching a blissed out St. Alice, burning up a few cords of firewood (in Berkeley no less!) to cook two eggs for an unusually credulous Lesley Stahl.

But in general, I got it all wrong, didn't I?

It may be the town of Alice Waters but it's also home to Dirty Harry. The Grateful Dead? Yes. But also the Dead Kennedys. The excrutiating and treacherous lite FM sounds of the Jefferson Starship? True enough. But also Blue Cheer, the Count Five, Big Brother, Sly and Family Stone and the greatest band that never was: the Brian Jonestown Massacre. None of these entities could have come from--or taken root--anywhere else.

I don't think you could have one San Francisco without the other. If the San Francisco area weren't the perceived headquarters of anti-foie gras forces, I doubt very much there'd be an opposing force doing something as crazy as developing a foie gras vodka. I don't know that a less crunchy community would require a stuck-joyously-in-time museum of beef like House of Prime Rib. It's like a yin and yang thing ... a balance, man, one thing creates a need for another.

San Francisco, underneath a gossamer thin veneer of granola is in fact, a two-fisted drinking town, a place of oversized martinis, silver zeppelins overloaded with bleeding slabs of meat, restaurants you could call "institutions" that defiantly refuse to suck, and in an ever tidier, cleaner, Disneyfied world--where even New York's Times Square looks like a theme park, still, a delightfully nasty, dirty, beautiful, carnivorous, vice-filled town.

And you can, apparently, recklessly careen around town at high speed in a rented Mustang (from whom we received, by the way, absolutely no money, consideration or thing of value), shooting guerilla-style, possibly without appropriate permits or safety precautions--and the local constabulary can be remarkably understanding. I doubt they would have been as tolerant of the impromptu filming of a car chase where I'm from.

Oh ... and I'd like to mention that though Swan Oyster Depot does not appear in the show (because we shot a segment there for the previous series), I ate there almost every day while shooting in town. Mopping fat and roe out of those Dungeness crab backs with sourdough bread and washing it down with a cold beer? Perfect happiness.

Pollan on the decline of cooking

2009-08-03T15:30:00.000-07:00

Great essay in the New York Times from Michael Pollan on everything from how cooking has become a spectator sport to the new movie "Julie and Julia" to how a return to cooking could save your health. Like everything that Pollan has ever written, I highly recommend you set aside 20 minutes or so and take your time digesting what he has to say.

Ruhlman's post about Pollan's essay also makes a great point about the distinction between cooks and foodies, which is really quite a large distinction.

Nothing else really needs to be said. Read this stuff because it's a lot better than anything I've ever written. I'm not kidding, damn it. Read it.

Why don't hipsters dance?

2009-07-30T09:26:00.000-07:00

If somebody can provide me with a logical answer, I will come over to your house and cook you dinner. This is not a novel observation and something I have kvetched about thousands of times in the past, but last night really hammered the point home for me.

At the Magnolia Electric Co. show at Bottom of the Hill, the second to last song they played was a kick-ass cover of Warren Zevon's "Lawyers Guns & Money." Not only was it a recognizable cover, it was easily one of the most rocking songs of the night. Check out a video of the same song from an earlier show in Austin*:

For most people, that is a formula for dancing, toe tapping, mild head-bobbing, etc. But as I was jumping up and down and pumping my fist, I happened to notice that the crowd around me looked like the extras in a "Saved By The Bell" episode when Zach Morris calls a time-out.

Like I said, this is definitely nothing new. I wasn't even close to surprised, but I never seem to not be disappointed when I go to high energy show and the hipster throngs are doing their best to not move.

Is it lack of appreciation? Probably not. Fear of accidentally touching somebody else during the dancing and thereby suffering the indignity of human contact? Maybe. I think it could have most to do with the fear of looking uncool** by allowing the world to see just how bad they are at dancing. I guess I can somewhat sympathize with that because my dancing looks like a full-body dry heave. I have no idea how I haven't ended up on youtube by now with a ton of snarky hipsters making fun of me in the comments section like my good buddy Cameron Gunn.

*By the way, doesn't the guitarist look like a wampa from "Empire Stirkes Back"?
**This is a hipster's number one fear in life.

How does food policy relate to health care?

2009-07-28T09:13:00.000-07:00

Check out this editorial on Civil Eats. Paula Crossfield argues that all this health care hullabaloo really misses the mark. While liberals and conservatives are arguing about socialism and single payer systems and all this other crap that we can't understand from the proposed bill anyway, nobody has bothered to ask what's making us sick in the first place.

Why are people unhealthy? For those who see our food system as the magic bullet, the answer is pretty obvious. And while the food system is the number one contributor, bad urban planning is a big part (see Public Space). And Crossfield makes a great point about how financially dependent we are on The System and how that hurts our overall health.

Higher education is so expensive now that workers are bound to their workplace because of massive debt, feeling compelled to overwork in order to keep their health insurance, and therefore are too exhausted to cook. It’s all related.

The greatest strength of Crossfield's article is that she points out Obama's greatest weakness so far*: his inability to get the lobbyists out of Washington. Definitely no small task, but his pre-election rhetoric on this point was pretty strong. All you have to do to figure out why which politicians are aligning themselves on which sides of this issue is to follow the money. You will inevitably find ties to the business interests that have a stake in the outcome.

To fix health care--to fix our lives--we need big changes. We can do everything we can on a local and personal level, but it would be nice to see Washington working with us on this rather than against us. For that, Washington is going to have some major surgery of its own. Let's see if Dr. Obama will really follow through on his diagnosis and cut out the tumor known as special interest lobbying.

*Keep in mind we're not even a year into his Presidency.

First great movie about the second Iraq War.

2009-07-22T09:24:00.000-07:00

A quote at the beginning of "The Hurt Locker" says it all: "War is a drug." Of course if you watch the preview above, you know it's not just referring to our bombastic and bellicose government leaders or the Military-Industrial Complex.

"The Hurt Locker" is about what it takes to survive in an Army Explosive Ordnance Disposal Unit (EOD bomb squad) in the middle of the war which has had more need for a bomb squad than any other in history. Jeremy Renner plays the bomb defuser with a reckless streak, and his survival instincts are to throw caution to the wind and dive in head-first. To him, human emotions like fear, doubt, caution, prudence and the desire for self-presevation will just get you killed.

I have to give Renner credit because I honestly thought he was a terrible actor before this movie. He plays it perfectly, though, and pulls off the cowboy act without descending into farce. This probably has something to do with Kathryn Bigelow's direction and because of the crew's focus on realism. The script comes from a journalist who was actually embedded with an EOD crew in 2004. Most of the Iraqis are played by Iraqi refugees who escaped across the Jordan border during the war. Renner, who trained with EOD for the movie, said that shooting in Jordan added to the authenticity.

There were two by fours with nails being dropped from two-story buildings that hit me in the helmet and they were throwing rocks... we got shot at a few times while we were filming," Renner said. "When you see it, you're gonna feel like you've been in war."

I certainly can't claim to know what it's like in Baghdad, but I definitely felt like this helped me imagine what it might be like. It also became that much harder to imagine why we would put a bunch of kids in harm's way to fight a war against an invisible idealogy like terrorism. For the bomb squad, they never actually see an enemy army or an objective to accomplish to win the war. The IEDs are just a bunch of crude wires connected to things that will get them killed.

Defusing the bomb neither accomplishes an objective nor makes the United States any safer. It simply allows the EOD to live another day and continue defusing more bombs--to get another fix. War really is a drug.

Who should fill in for The Beastie Boys at Outside Lands?

2009-07-20T13:18:00.000-07:00

But first, I just want to say thank you to Tom Watson (from Kansas City) for getting me to believe the impossible could actually happen--even if it was just for a little while.

So....Adam Yauch has the cancer, which leaves a headline spot open at Outside Lands. It will be interesting to see who they have to back up the Brinks truck for to take their place.

1. This isn't life threatening, but get well soon, MCA.

2. It seems like so many people are getting cancer these days, even kids I went to college or high school with. I would have bet my life savings that cancer rates were increasing at an unprecedented rate and I would have told you it was because of the chemicals they intentionally or unintentionally put in our food, water, and air. But according to cancer.gov, new incidents of cancer have been decreasing since the early '90's. Shows what I know.

3. The Outside Lands twitter page has asked for suggestions on who to add. I'm glad I'm not the person who has the responsibility of signing a major artist to a festival and just over a month to do it, but it's nice that they're looking to the fans for input. So, who ya got?

I would say to get some cool up and coming band or somebody with local history, but this is the headliner of a $90/day festival, so they're going to have to get someone with a Name to compliment DMB and Pearl Jam. I just hope it's something just a little unexpected. So far, the lineup is pretty insipid and designed to appeal to the broadest audience possible.

My favorite 17 albums of the year so far

2009-07-16T08:55:00.001-07:00

SF, DON'T FORGET TO SEE FOOD INC. FOR FREE TONIGHT

Tuesday was the All-Star Game, so we must be halfway through the year. And that means it's the time of making lists about the first half of the year.

DDoff Daily posted his albums of the year so far, so I feel obligated to give my five devoted readers the same royal treatment*. I used criteria that is entirely objective, so this is pretty much a factual, undisputed ranking and probably the only list worth reading**. Oh, and I'd appreciate if you commented with your list of favorites, which if you're a hipster, will include Animal Collective at #1.

And without further ado.....

17. We Were Promised Jetpacks - "These Four Walls" I've heard these guys will be the biggest thing to come out of Scotland since the janitor from the Simpsons. I don't know if they're even half as good as Frightened Rabbit but it certainly seems that the heavy, crescendo-ing drums and guitars and soaring vocals are resonating with me. I guess early U2's influence has finally crossed The North Channel.

16. Grizzly Bear - "Veckatimest" The best of the hipster pop of the year. Maybe a little overblown but still pretty catchy.

15. Wilco - "Wilco (The Album)" I love Wilco a whole lot but this album just hasn't hooked me yet. Still, there are some great tracks on this album. My guess is that it will either have grown on me by the end of the year and make it to the top 10, or it will join the giant scrap heap of discarded latter efforts of great bands.

14. Neko Case - "Middle Cyclone" Solid effort from Neko. Doesn't quite measure up to her early work, but the songs are good live. Too bad her nerdy banter isn't included on the album.

13. Patterson Hood - "Murdering Oscar (and other love songs)" A solo release from the Drive-By Truckers front man more than 10 years in the making, this record has some nice balads and whatnot. Hood is quite the lyricist and the songs come off as much more personal and [slightly] less dark than what he puts on Truckers albums.

12. Iron & Wine - "Around the Well" Should this even count since most of the songs aren't new? I don't really care, this is still the best baby-making music around. I seriously wish that I had this in my repertoire to lure girls back to my rape cave, I mean dorm room, instead of the ubiquitous "Have you heard the latest "1x1" > "Rock" > "I'm Not Alone" from the latest Paolo Soleri run? It's pretty h3tty."

11. Son Volt - "American Central Dust" Solid alt-country. Son Volt is somehow still an under the radar band despite great talent. Jay Farrar must look at Wilco playing huge venues and wish death upon Tweedy every night.

10. Pink Mountaintops - "Closer To Heaven" Listening to this all the way through for the first time as I write, I'm thinking that this might actually be one of my favorite albums of the year. Like its mother band, Black Mountain, it's just the right mix of hard psychadelic rock and Candaianness. Unlike BM, it's a little bit lighter and easy to listen to.

9. Black Joe Lewis & the Honeybears - "Tell 'Em What Your Name Is!" Hard to believe that people are still making old music this good. This "garage soul" band from Austin sounds like it could have been made in the 70s. Joe says he wants to be the Black Elvis, but I'll be content if he continues to the be the modern James Brown.

8. Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit - "Self-Titled" I can't sing this guy's praises enough. I'm sure it was tough to get the boot from the Drive-By Truckers following his divorce from bassist Shonna Tucker. He has had to start from scratch and play smaller half-full clubs while Patterson Hood is being interviewed on CNN and the Truckers are selling out bigger venues and joining forces with The Hold Steady. Isbell is an incredible guitarist and lyricist, though, so I think he'll be just fine.*** This is his second album and he shows that "Sirens of the Ditch" was no fluke.

7. Danger Mouse & Sparklehorse - "Dark Night of the Soul" This really doesn't sound like anything else, which is a good thing. Check out the story behind this album:

It's a friendly collaboration that turned out to be a match made in limbo. Sparklehorse's Mark Linkous and Gnarls Barkley's Danger Mouse wrote a set of comely, haunted songs for alt-rock heavies (Black Francis, Julian Casablancas, James Mercer, Wayne Coyne, Iggy Pop) to be sold with a coffee-table book of darkly ironic photos by director David Lynch (who also lent his keep-your-day-job warble to two songs). But EMI inexplicably shelved the album. In response, the Horse and the Mouse came up with a sneakily Borgesian stunt, commodifying their music's very absence by selling blank CD-Rs online, with Lynch's book.

6. Ryan Bingham - "Roadhouse Sun" I'm not sure if I like this album for itself as much as I like that it reminds me of the show I saw at Hotel Utah, which has probably been my favorite live performance of the year. Bingham's Texas/New Mexico sound is both different and familiar at the same time. I can play his music for just about any type of fan and they all seem to enjoy it. This is music that has some sort of universal appeal.

5. Various Artists - "Dark Was The Night" Again, maybe this album shouldn't count but this is a double album that has probably gotten more plays around my house than any other. Just look at the artist list and tell me this isn't a great album. And if you downloaded this AIDS benefit album from the Internet, you better not eat before sundown at Yom Kippur this year.

4. The Decemberists - "Hazards of Love" You have to love the amitious effort from Colin Meloy here. Not too many people can pull off the rock opera. I saw him perform the whole thing from start to finish with a straight face, and I am here to tell you that this album kicks ass like no other folksy, pseudo-19th century rock epic has before it.

3. Phoenix - "Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix" I'm almost a little embarrassed to say how much I like this French electro-pop, but this has become my new cooking music. What can I say? A guy can't listen to roots music all day, every day.

2. Justin Townes Earle - "Midnight at the Movies" Your grandpappy's country music. Earle is making music that nobody else that I know of is making today. Son of Steve, named after Townes Van Zandt, these songs come from somebody who knows the blues. Good to know that kicking crack hasn't affected his song writing ability.

1. Magnolia Electric Co. - "Josephine" Alt-countryish master Jason Molina's first album since the band's bassist died in a tragic gardening accident****. Soulful vocals, good guitar work, country influence....it should come as no surprise that I love this music.

*Plus, DDoff likes that hippity-hop music, so I knew my list would look completely different from his.
**Actually, I just picked the 15 albums I've listened to the most--or upon making this list, wish I'd listened to the most.
***Check out the video below from his solo-ish performance at Cafe du Nord last year.
****It may have actually been an apartment fire in Oakland.

See "Food Inc." for free and a great profile of an urban farmer

2009-07-13T09:10:00.001-07:00

Will Allen, the ultimate urban farmer and a truly larger than life figure, was profiled in last week's New York Times Magazine. It's a great read and indirectly poses an important question: Can the good food movement be sustained without some sort of subsidy, whether it be in the form of private grant or government pay?

Michael Pollan, when I saw him speak at the Herbst Theater (click here for video), argued that no food system has ever been successful without some sort of subsidy. That's why some have argued it's important that we redirect our government emphasis on commodity crops like corn and wheat and soybeans and reward more complex systems that grow a variety of plants, such as vegetables.

My grandmother told me that she would love if it were economically viable to grow something else besides GMO corn*. Is there any reason the Farm Bill won't pay Will Allen a dime and would discontinue paying my grandparents if they planted a row of broccoli next to the corn?

*Whether it is realistic for octogenarians in South Central Kansas to switch to organic farming at this point is a question better left for another day.
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http://blogs.sfweekly.com/foodie/2009/07/free_screening_of_food_inc.php

Free Screening of 'Food, Inc.'

By Tamara Palmer in Events, Palmer

Wednesday, Jul. 8 2009 @ 1:30PM

Still haven't seen Food, Inc.? Your procrastination is paying off, for once. Catch a free screening of the startling film -- sponsored nationwide by the burrito chain Chipotle -- on Thursday, July 16, at Embarcadero Center Cinema (One Embarcadero Center) at 7:30 p.m. Get there super early to guarantee yourself a seat; you know how people can be when it comes to free things.

More info on Chipotle's screenings is here, and to get in the spirit before you go to the theater, read SFoodie Editor John Birdsall's conversation with Food, Inc. director Robert Kenner.

Why is English the language of rock and roll?

2009-07-08T15:16:00.000-07:00

I first started thinking about this at a Jens Lekman show last month. What would possess a person born in Sweden to sing in a second language? I started to think about other foreign musicians like France's Phoenix, Germany's The Scorpions, or Peter, Bjorn and John, also of Sweden. Why would all of these people not choose to sing in their native tongues? It worked for Autobahn, didn't it?

There are notable exceptions, but for the most part modern music--the vast majority of which is derived from from rock and roll--is sung in English. The French have even gone as far to establish quotas of how much francophone rock must be played on the radio.

There are, I think, some obvious reasons why music is so often sung in English*.

1. Rock and roll was invented here. If you are a foreign musician and you're into rock and roll, then you probably grew up listening to music by English-speaking artists. Singing in English would be a natural progression if you happen to be proficient in English. Which brings me to my next reason.

2. English is the most common second language in the world. If you were going to write lyrics in a dialect that is not your own, chances are it's going to be English. And because so many people understand English, your market appeal is that much wider than if you were going to sing in a language like Swedish.**

I guess those two reasons could just about explain it, but then I start thinking about how hard it is to write a song in the first place***. It seems like it would be 10 times harder to write a song in a language you weren't as familiar with. Music is already such a personal art form that it's hard enough to express yourself in a first language.

I would be terrified of coming off like a cheesy foreigner writing a song in Spanish or something. Imagine if Manu Chau had translated "Me Gustas Tu" into English before recording it. I doubt all the white kids at festivals would be singing along with the lyrics the likes of "I like marijuana, I like you, I like airplanes, I like you, I like your kitchen, I like you."

Furthermore, we can look at other periods of time when a certain type of music developed from a certain language. Opera began in Italian but quickly spread throughout the rest of Europe. Wagner didn't write his operas in Italian. Why is that?

So, all you not scared of leaving comments, why is English the language of rock and roll?

*Of course, as a blogger, I have done no serious research whatsoever and these reasons can be taken as pure xenophobic speculation.
**Sigur Ros is one band I can think of that sings in a Nordic language and has achieved commercial success. Wait, does Bjork sing in Icelandic? I guess that would make Icelandic the language of pretentious art rock.
***Or maybe it's not? Just like at Phish's lyrics and the success they have achieved. Maybe getting a good sound is even more important.

More movies

2009-07-07T09:28:00.000-07:00

Bruno

I don't need to say much else because I don't want to ruin anything and so much else will be written about it this summer, but I saw "Bruno" last night and my throat still hurts from laughing so much. Funniest movie I've seen in a long time.

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A genius dies

Yesterday, July 6, somebody far more important than Michael Jackson died: Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War. He came off as pretty much a typical shithead politician while in office a la Condy Rice or Donald Rumsfield but later in life was in this absolutely amazing documentary called "The Fog of War." The whole thing is him talking about public policy and reflecting on his life. The guy has an incredible mind. Rent the movie. It won the Acadmeny Award for Documentary Feature.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_McNamara

Robert Strange McNamara (June 9, 1916 – July 6, 2009) was an American business executive and the eighth Secretary of Defense. McNamara served as Defense Secretary for Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson from 1961 to 1968. Following that he served as President of the World Bank from 1968 until 1981. McNamara was responsible for the institution of systems analysis in public policy, which developed into the discipline known today as policy analysis.[4]

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The two best trailers I saw during the latest movie binge:

"The Cove" - It's "Man on Wire" meets "Sharkwater"

"It Might Get Loud" - Jimmy Page, Jack White, and The Edge. Can't wait for this one.

Double Feature Sunday: Woody Allen and Food Politics

2009-07-06T11:44:00.000-07:00

Is "Food Inc." a movie for the average person?

"Food Inc." is the new documentary* about the way we produce and eat food in America and the latest attack on Nutritional-Industrial Complex. It basically takes Michael Pollan's and Eric Schlosser's writings and reduces them to an easily consumable 90-minute documentary.

Being familiar with just about all the stories in the film, I found it easy to follow and still found myself outraged at the actions of the government and the corporations who are most responsible for our Western diet and all the diseases that come along with it: cancer, obesity, and whathaveyou.

Towards the end, I started wondering if they weren't trying to present too much information or spending too little time on certain aspects. I found myself wanting to hear more about the court cases Monsanto brought against farmers, more from Joel Salatin, or more about what people can do to get involved. I was a little surprised the letters C-S-A weren't mentioned even once.

So I was left wondering if it's a movie that is perfect for elucidating the average viewer who eats at McDonald's and buys groceries at Wal-Mart or if it was simply another sermon to the converted to make us high-fallutin' liberals feel better about spending half our income on fancy food. I honestly don't have a good feel for what the answer to that question is.

And maybe I don't have a great answer to that because so far it has made barely more than a million dollars at a mere 83 theaters** (compare that with 4300 for Michael Bay's latest defecation on celluloid). It still has yet to hit one major outpost in the Corn Belt that I know of, Kansas City. I suspect, though, that the movie is probably intentionally enjoying a slow release so word of mouth buzz can spread. Its $2,900 average per theater puts it way ahead of mainstream movies like "My Sister's Keeper" and "Year One."

So it's proably going to take more time to see if this movie will have any crossover appeal or if it will get lumped in with all the other indie documentaries like "King Corn." I do know that some farmers near where I grew up weren't that impressed. I feel like farmers are the real heroes of the film, but I can see how my grandparents, who grow commodity crops in Pratt, KS, would get upset that Big City-types think that they know what's best for folks on the farm.

So if you've seen the movie, now would be a good time to tell me what you think. And please see if you can't get a somebody who isn't converted to go see the movie and report back.

*Follow link for trailer.
**http://www.boxofficemojo.com/weekend/chart/
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"Whatever Works"[insert pun about how well or not well you think the movie works]

Discolure: I am complete Woody Allen apologist. I may recognize the occasional fault in some of his films but I have enjoyed every single one of them on one level or another.

After seeing the man himself in the stands at the marathon Wimbledon final on Sunday, it was a no-brainer to see "Whatever Works" last night.

There are so many things I love about Woody Allen but almost above all, I love that he continues to work no matter what. Even if he were to acknowledge the existence of writer's block, you wouldn't be able to tell because he would still release one or two movies that year.

I love that no matter what else is going on in the world, I can count on that familiar smile coming to my face as a black screen with plain white type appears, old-timey jazz starts playing and I am informed that Jack Rollins and Charles Joffe were executive producers of the movie I'm about to see (even though Charles Joffe is dead), and I'm about to find out some more universal truths about love, death, and the human condition.

I love that though so many themes and plotlines tend to show up again and again, each film seems to be a different statement from the director about himself. Is the initial tone of this film so much more angry because Woody is pissed about what's going in the world? Is he getting cranky in his old age or is it just because he wanted to write a character who would be easier for Larry David to play? Is there any way his overall theme of telling everyone to stop being so damn judgmental is not influenced by everyone in the world judging him for choosing to ignore society and fall in love with the most unlikely of brides?

I suspect many will deride the movie for not being funny enough, for the characters being a little too caricatured, or for the narration direct to the audience just not working. I don't think Larry David is going to ever be successful at not playing himself, but he definitely excelled in the role as Boris. All of the characters were well cast as well and by the closing credits, they had somehow gone from caricatures to dynamic characters.

For a Woody Allen apologist, this was classic latter-day Woody. In the end, I laughed; I learned something; I didn't feel like I wasted $11.

Food Safety First - Send Bill Marler Packin' to DC!

2009-07-01T20:11:00.000-07:00

It’s time to get serious about food safety.

The USDA has yet to appoint the Under Secretary for Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) – and it’s time that we had a real reformer at the USDA.

Every year in the U.S. an estimated 76 million people get sick with food borne illnesses and 5,000 die. One person who knows this fact better than anybody else in the country is food safety lawyer Bill Marler.

You may remember him as the generous patron who offered to pay for author Michael Pollan’s visit to Washington State University after his best-selling book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, had been removed from the freshman reading program. But Marler’s been known as a leading advocate for food safety for nearly two decades.

In 1993, Marler served as the lead attorney in the famous Jack in the Box E.coli outbreak. Since then, he’s led the charge in protecting the rights of consumers against unsafe practices by major corporations.

As someone who’s been on the front lines of America’s food safety crisis for nearly 20 years, he has seen first hand the devastation that can be left in the wake of poor food safety practices. We believe that Marler understands the problems that create food safety outbreaks and knows the solutions. He believes that inspection is an important process that not only protects consumers but could save farmers, hospitals and businesses money as well. He understands the importance of regionalizing our food system to build more processing plants that will create a safer food supply and real jobs for rural America.

Known as a fair and fierce opponent, Marler is the perfect candidate to help reform America’s bankrupt food safety system from the ground up. As unprecedented food safety legislation winds its way through Congress that will redefine the Food and Drug Administration’s role in keeping America’s food safe, it’s important that the USDA has an individual with a strong commitment to food safety and consumer health. Bill Marler is that candidate.

Write to President Obama and Secretary Vilsack today and ask them to appoint Bill Marler as the next Under Secretary for food safety at the USDA.

It’s time that America leads the way in having the safest food possible. Bill Marler can make that happen.

Click here to send Bill Marler to the USDA and make our nation’s food supply more safe. http://www.fooddemocracynow.org/?p=428

Sustainably yours,

Food Democracy Now!

If you'd like to see Food Democracy Now!'s grassroots work continue, please consider donating as little as $10 or $25. We appreciate your support! http://www.fooddemocracynow.org/?page_id=9

Please write President Obama and Secretary Vilsack today!

You can cut and paste the below letter and send it to President Obama at the link below
and email Secretary Vilsack at the email below.

SAMPLE LETTER:

Send Comments to the White House: http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/
or
Email Secretary Vilsack: AgSec@usda.gov

Sample Letter:

Dear President Obama and Secretary Vilsack

In an age of record food safety outbreaks, it’s important that America has a reformer on the frontlines in the effort to rebuild our nation’s broken food safety system. In just the past few weeks, U.S. consumers have had to contend with E.coli O157:H7 found in Nestle Toll House cookie dough and a massive new E.coli outbreak in over 421,000 pounds of beef.

On June 24 the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) issued a Class 1 recall for primal cuts of beef from the JBS Swift Beef Company in Greeley, Colorado. According to the FSIS website, this recall has a high health risk to American consumers and at a time when they should be relaxing and enjoying the festivities of our nation’s Independence Day, mothers and cooks will have to worry if their children or loved ones could get sick from eating tainted meat on the 4th of July.

It’s time to put this to an end.

I believe it’s important that America leads the way in food safety for the 21st century and support our nation’s leading food safety attorney, Bill Marler, being selected to lead the way as the next Under Secretary of the FSIS.

America can no longer afford to appease an industry that has made our food less safe and continues to put lives at risk because of convenience or profit. Please show us that you care about our nation’s consumers and children by nominating Bill Marler to become the next head of the FSIS.

Sincerely,

[Your name
city & state here]

Updating Previous Stories

2009-06-29T19:05:00.000-07:00

ABC Drops the Hammer on Buckshot

I came across this article in the Guardian last week. The ABC, which had already been threatening to pull the liquor licenses of some of the city's finest music venues (Café du Nord, Slim's, Swedish Music Hall, Great American Music Hall, Rickshaw Stop, Bottom of the Hill, etc.) over some arcane Puritanical Blue law bullshit, has claimed its newest victims in The Campaign Against Fun.

When I first wrote about the evil ABC, I wasn't sure whether there really would fire accompanying the smoke (see e.g. any pre-smoking ban hysteria from bar owners), but according to the article, ABC has already body slammed two local bars over similar food sale-related issues. From the Guardian:

Most recently, Revolution Café in the Mission District had to stop selling beer and wine for 20 days after ABC cited them for patrons drinking on the sidewalk adjacent to its front patio. Inner Richmond's Buckshot's liquor license was pulled because of technical violations of alcohol and food regulations, forcing owners to close their doors for a few weeks.

This is government idiocy at its finest, and I pray to the god I don't believe in that they don't touch any of the city's music venues. I would say they need to go find something better to do, but they're already a pretty stupid bureaucracy to begin with, so I doubt there is anything else.

taxdollarsatwork'd

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Lucero* Makes Me Look Stupid

After gushing about Lucero's dedication to being a professional bar band, I came across the trailer for a show called "$5 Cover" that recently premiered on MTV. Craig Brewer of "Hustle and Flow" fame apparently put his name on this, but from the acting and cinematography, I would guess the people behind "Undressed" may have had more to do with it than anyone else.

Check out Ben Nichols on the motorcycle and then the whole band playing "San Francisco" on stage near the end.

MTV five dollar cover Trailer (HD)

Normally I would be pumped that a band I like is doing a series about struggling bands and the Memphis music scene. But this series happens to be by MTV, and paraphrasing Broke-Ass Stew art, the "M" in MTV stands for "Making me hate humanity."

Furthermore, I learned via wikipedia that Lucero recently signed with Universal, so maybe they'll make it to the big show after all. If so, just go ahead and completely disregard my last Lucero post.

*And by Lucero, I'm really referring to myself here.

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The Media Gives Nadal a Pass

I'm not sure if I should be surprised at this or not. Nadal is a media darling, but we're also living in the age of gotcha journalism.

So far I have yet to see anyone in the mainstream media** call out Nadal for being a spineless coward. Shortly after I questioned the seriousness of Nadal's injuries, there was an article on espn.com/tennis about Nadal's parents getting divorced. called "Personal Woes Affecting Rafa?" The writer, Greg Garber says that his parents' divorce, and not his kness, may be behind Nadal's withdrawal, but he never takes Nadal to task for being the first champion ever to not defend because of dubious ailments.

The article was never was on the front page and was archived off the tennis page in a matter of minutes, hours at the most. Nowhere on the New York Times tennis blog did they mention the personal issues, nor have I heard any espn or NBC commentators mention it. I guess we're all just supposed to accept Uncle Toni's version of things.

I definitely find this free pass more than a little unpalatable, and I still say Nadal should be out there unless he honestly cannot move without risking serious injury. Looks like even in the gotcha age, some people are still above the law.

Oh, and I think Wimbledon has been pretty great so far. I like the Murray and Hewitt story lines.
Federer and Roddick both look great. What a compelling final it would be if either Murray or Roddick faces Federer. Roddick beating Roger would be an incredible moment for American tennis, and this could be the year it finally happens. Sucks that Oudin lost today, but the Williams sisters are looking awesome. Why, oh why, must I be working the one week when I could be watching tennis all day?

**I don't count.

One from the Archives

2009-06-25T13:48:00.000-07:00

Yes, this was written five years. No, I don't think it's particularly well written.

But this review of David Byrne from 2004 when I was working for the Lawrence Journal-World was salvaged from Byrne's Web site just in time to preview his show at the Greek tomorrow night. I'm not exaggerating when I say the show I saw in '04 was in my top 5 of all time.

This will be my first time at the Berkeley monument, and it's a long time coming. Tickets are still available and DeVotchKa is opening. Get on it.

http://www.davidbyrne.com/music/cds/grown_backwards/grown_press/Lawrence_com.php

By By Kendall Dix - Journal-World

Friday, September 17, 2004

Kansas City, Mo. — Few musicians possess the ability to have Wookie-lookalikes and bespectacled old men in high-water pants dancing side by side in the aisles. David Byrne, though, displays a limitless imagination and unparalleled work ethic that few musicians could even dream of having.

On Wednesday night, the creative force behind Talking Heads tore through a two-hour set at The Uptown Theater in Kansas City, Mo., as if he were Hurricane Ivan. At 52, Byrne parades the same fire he showed in "Stop Making Sense," the Heads' epic concert film.

The skinny, silver-haired Scot treated the crowd to classics like "NaÃive Melody," "Psycho Killer" and "Life During Wartime." Dressed in a brown uniform that matched his fellow band members', he jumped, ran in place and spastically danced his way all over the stage. When he picked up his guitar or microphone, he showed no signs of aging after almost 30 years of touring. However, if his energy and the purity of his voice have not changed, the sound of Byrne's new material was a far cry from his rock music of the late '70s and early '80s.

Accompanied by a three-piece rhythm section and The Tosca Strings, a six-piece band from Austin, Texas, Byrne showcased cuts from his new album, "Grown Backwards." The record favors a mature sound, with influences from samba to classical to opera. Of the concert's 21 percussion-and-string-laden songs, five were new and four were off 2001's "Look into the Eyeball." He included a cover of "One Rainy Wish" by Jimi Hendrix, which substituted heavy strings for electric guitar.

The show had more variety than Liberace's closet.

The enthusiastic crowd seemed almost as appreciative to hear the new material as the Heads tunes. Byrne received extended standing ovations whenever he wasn't talking or playing. After each, the consummate New Yorker smiled and looked at his band as if he were pleasantly surprised by the passionate Midwestern crowd.

The hyper-busy artist rarely finds time to stop through the central U.S. He tends to tour internationally and splits his time with some of his other hobbies: exhibiting his artwork in museums, directing documentaries, composing musical scores and recording a track for an album to benefit the MoveOn PAC.

The way Byrne is going now, he could tour until he's hooked up to an oxygen tank. He'll probably be back soon with another album that redefines what we think of as rock 'n' roll.

Rooftop Farming; Change Comes to Kids First

2009-06-23T09:30:00.001-07:00

First, the New York Times reports on rooftop gardens, which I have been saying for a while is the best way to bring health and change to the food desserts in inner cities. We still need to reclaim some of the urban sprawl for farmers--especially for small animal farms--but producing food in the middle of the city on existing infrastructure makes so much sense that I imagine it will sell itself.

Inner cities have become hotbeds for childhood obesity and family disconnect, but the acts of gardening, cooking and eating have been community-building activities for millenia. Bringing back real food and family meals could help rebuild some of our most impoverished. According to Shawnee Mission School District nurse, Nancy Nicolay, who is occasionally prone to hyperbole, some of the worst neighborhoods in Kansas City have been transformed by the simple act of planting a community garden.

Speaking of schools, it looks like the cafeteria might be seeing some of the most attention from the Obama administration. While the President has made some minor concessions to the growing number of food activists, such as a White House organic garden and whathaveyou, I have yet to hear anything that makes me think radical change is coming to the industrial food complex.

Michelle Obama, on the other hand, seems to be the one who will be spearheading this issue. She recently said:

"To make sure that we give all our kids a good start to their day and to their future, we need to improve the quality and nutrition of the food served in schools. We’re approaching the first big opportunity to move this to the top of the agenda with the upcoming reauthorization of the child nutrition programs. In doing so, we can go a long way towards creating a healthier generation for our kids."

It's great to hear that the First Lady wants to put healthy and safey on the top of the agenda. She has said that her own children, representatives of our next generation, have been lecturing her about what to eat and have encouraged her to change her eating habits. Hopefully, Mrs. Obama will have the chance to speak with Ann Cooper, the revolutionary lunch lady who tranformed the Berkeley school lunch system and is now headed for Boulder.

Though the dark forces who want to keep things the way they are will come up with a thousand reasons why it's impossible to change our agricultural system, it will much harder to argue that we shouldn't be feeding our kids better while they're at school. The school lunch reauthorization is a great opportunity to fight obesity before it's already hit and to set up the future generation with knowledge about what food actually is.

Nadal withdraws from Wimbledon? Really?

2009-06-19T12:29:00.001-07:00

You've got to be kidding me. Nadal just held a press conference after he lost a tune-up match to announce that he won't defend his title at Wimbledon.

He says throughout the presser that he feels good but is not 100 percent. Basically his logic is that he knows he's not going to win, so why even try? This amounts to nothing less than an act of cowardice.

You're the goddamn defending champion. If you can walk, you should be out there on the grass. This is Djokovic-esque quitting before you lose, and it's despicable.

Now, I'm not saying that Nadal should be out there if there's a chance that he could injure himself and jeopardize his tennis future. But that's simply not what he's saying. Check out the quotes:

"When I start a tournament like Wimbledon, it is to try to win, and my feeling right now is I'm not ready to play to win."

[in regards to his knees]: "It's not chronic. I can recover, for sure."

He's not saying he's worried about permanent injuries. He just knows that he'll lose to Lleyton "I have no friends" Hewitt in the second round.

A true champion knows how to lose with dignity as well as win. A true champion would be willing to face defeat and would try to defend his title even if he wasn't 100 percent.

I hope Nadal takes a beating on this from the press. He deserves it. Just like Federer deserves to have his number one ranking back, which he will get if he wins Wimbledon this year.

SBS blog commenter Mark Nemtsov had it right when he said several weeks ago that Nadal lacks the mental fortitude of Federer.

MORE THOUGHTS:

Aside from Ivanisevic who had shoulder surgery and a couple guys who back in the old days turned pro and weren't allowed to return, every single other champion in the history of the tournament has returned to defend the title. I'm sure at least one of them was hurting or injured going into the title defense. They probably knew they were going to lose and felt like hanging out by the beach instead of losing in the early rounds.

But did these former champions wait until they saw whom they were going to face and then quit? No, they sucked it up and went out there and took their lumps.

If Nadal can run, which he can and did in these exhibition matches, then he should go stand out there and lose with dignity, rather than quitting right after the draw is announced.

Video of the Day and Free Wild Salmon Dinner

2009-06-19T10:24:00.000-07:00

First, the follow up to last week's dance mob from Sasquatch from one of my favorite bands, Lucero.

They're one of those great bar bands that will probably never make it big but keeps on grinding it out. They have put out something like seven albums, they have a rabid fan base, but they still don't play venues any bigger than a few hundred people*. To me, there is something about that business model that is just goddamn awesome--like a un-depressing and more successful Anvil.

Here's to professional bar bands and here's to Henry, one hell of a dancer.

*I saw them a few weeks ago at a sold-out show Slim's and (along with Black Joe Lewis), they blew the roof off that place. Check them out next time they're in town.

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Second, if you're broke like me, then why not check out a free traditional tribal salmon bake tonight on Ocean Beach? Fresh Klamath salmon caught by Yurok fisherman will be served at 6:30.

Plus you'll be supporting Salmon Aid, a really cool organization devoted to protecting wild salmon. And according to Salmon Aid, the best way to protect them is by eating them. Sounds good to me.

Can't make it tonight? Check out the festival in Oakland this weekend. Zydeco, afro-beat, blues, and salmon galore.

Phish at the Fox... a guest posting

2009-06-17T20:08:00.000-07:00

Having not seen Phish since their (underwhelming) end to the “post-hiatus” at Coventry, there were naturally lots of thoughts going through my mind driving to St. Louis yesterday… ranging from a personal interrogation into justifying this continued behavior to the fond memories I have of all the friends I miss and wish could also be there to, finally, how I felt that they were even back on tour now 5 years later…

What’s evident is that unlike their previous return, this time they appear to be taking it on with more of a focus on the quality of their live product, which is to say that they aren’t up there lollygagging (see also Bull Durham) and doing whatever they want to just b/c they are who they are and they can basically get away with it. Of course, there’s a fine line between experimentation and structure, but I guess the best way to put it is that they appear more disciplined altogether.

At least that’s the impression I had from the setlists and reviews of their first several shows. And it’s something that I’m comfortable endorsing now that I’ve seen them again.

Standing a quarter of the way up the middle balcony inside the magnificent (Fabulous) Fox prior to the show, I was sort of unable to mentally process the gravity of the fact that I was about to see a band play that had not played such a personal environment in, well, since I was old enough to drive and see them. Seriously, an amazing treat… gawd I love Phish.

Although admittedly, at this juncture in my musical evolution, I find that I rarely listen to Phish at all anymore. I don’t really crave them like I used to… I still consider them my favorite band, but in the absence of seeing them live – which is the true addiction – I’ve simply gotten older and moved on.

And that is precisely why, as show time neared, I flat out could not wait to see them just blow it up at the Fox. I think that was everybody’s vibe, which – as always – results in crazy anticipation and subsequent discussion re: the Opener. Naturally I thought they would show up with a tap-in par, some kind of fashionable, tasty intro. Something unexpected, but classy, and excitable. The other half of me thought they’d screw that notion and walk right out there and slam a monster right off the bat, like a YEM or a Reba or a Ghost…

So the place is just dripping with adrenaline, ready for the roof to just fly off, and they come out and drop two duds right off the bat: Kill Devil Falls and then Ocelot, two of the new songs that they’ve recently debuted. Talk about sucking the life out of the place. I mean, people were still pretty receptive and the songs were interesting enough, but prevailing sentiment is always to put those somewhere other than right at the beginning. Definite letdown.

But they completely exuded sync and discipline. Sharp, crisp. Trey wasn’t hiding behind the nasty ass post-hiatus distortion. I think that I read (or heard) that they were going back to their old amp rigs, so old sound and equipment. Old stage setup, too, with Fishman back on the right side of the stage, which I think is cool.

The rest of the first set was pedestrian in terms of what they played and how they played it. Highlight was probably Ya Mar for me, just b/c I love that song… lots of Page, too… and they really let him jam out his keys for that as well. And it’s pretty much impeccable sound inside that venue. The Possum was also huge. The Reba I’d rate standard, but really well done and I forgot how sweet Kuroda is with the lights, too. Uncanny how much he’s able to add in that capacity.

First Set

Kill Devil Falls

Ocelot

Brian and Robert (gentle and reflective, I love this song)

Sample in a Jar

Rift

Ya Mar

Reba

Train Song

Horn

Possum

Slave to the Traffic Light

So from a personal standpoint, I wasn’t gaga over the first set, but still, pretty cool to see the overwhelming assemblage of prowess at work again… easy to take for granted until you go 5 years without really hearing that kind of cohesive awesomeness.

Second set was indeed Fabulous. More energy, funk and power. Less structure. Halley’s Comet right off the bat… this would probably be on my ultimate setlist. They go right into a good Runaway Jim and then a Frankie Says only to drain all the energy out the of building with another new song, Time Turns Elastic, my only objection to the second set. My first impression – unlike the two they dropped in the first set – was negative on this song, which kind of sucked b/c it lasted for probably 15 minutes.

But after that they completely ripped it up. One of the better Mike’s > H2 > Weekapaug that I can recall seeing… so much energy; the place was really ready to let it out, too. Tremendous F# Mike’s Jam… totally rocking and dominant baseline, not all that funky per se, but kind of dark and spacy, enough for me to wonder if they’d turn it into a Simple Jam. Really really good. Followed by an outrageously heady Boogie On Reggae Woman, Page driving an awesome laser-funk sound throughout that jam… I could have sworn that they were teasing the Macarena, which would have been a badass full-fledged segue. They finished with a powerful Character Zero, a perfect example of a song that depends on how and where they play it… and they killed it.

Second Set

Halley’s >

Runaway Jim

Frankie Says

Time Turns Elastic

Sleep

Mike’s >

I am H2 >

Weekapaug

Boogie On

Character Zero

Encore

The Star Spangled Banner

McGrupp

While My Guitar Gently Weeps.

Choice encore. Very solid way to end it. A totally playful and perfectly executed a cappella Star Spangled Banner into the rare gem of the night: McGrupp and The Watchful Hosemasters. I like to think that when the band comes across a special moment or place or juncture in some capacity, then they decide to mark it with a small slice of Gamehenge, which I was actually expecting/hoping to see at some point in the night, and the encore was the perfect slot – totally tranquil and serene and batty.

Overall, they sounded about as good as they ever have, which is probably the most significant takeaway from this resurgence. I would say mostly average setlist, but certainly special to see them at such a classy, intimate joint. Only 4300 people, which is quite the excellent departure from raucous “productions” at much larger venues…

Going into it, I was debating to what extent I’d go out of my way to see them and re-embrace them at this point… not just with respect to my own life and where I am along the musical path, but at this point in the band’s existence.

Coming out of it, it’s hard to not walk away wanting to do it again.

The return of the monoculture

2009-06-17T08:29:00.000-07:00

I didn't really think I'd be posting so soon about an alcoholic monoculture, and I'm not sure it really deserves a post to it self, but again last night, only a few weeks removed from the last bewildering experience, I found myself at a bar where only one alcohol was being served.

At least this time I was expecting it. And at least this time it was whiskey--and a decent whiskey at that--which is a damn sight better than a sea of Bacardi. And it was free, another notable distinction from the last debacle.*

This particular monoculture was advertised beforehand as a promotion for (ri)^1 whiskey, which is some relatively new rye production from Jim Beam. For those who didn't have the differences between rye and bourbon or plain old whiskey explained to them last night, here's the deal: All whiskey is distilled from corn, wheat/rye, and barley mash. Like bourbon, rye also sits in oak barrels to age.

Rye, though, must be made from a mash of at least 51 percent rye grain, whereas bourbon is made from at least 51 percent corn. Pre-Prohibition, rye was the whiskey of choice in the Northeast. So if you are really, really old and you had a whiskey drink in New York, Boston, or any of those other fancy Yankee cities before Carrie Nation ruined this country for a few years, that was what you were drinking.

After Prohibition, rye didn't really survive. Maybe it's because in the past I found rye to kick like a mule and bourbon to be more smooth, or maybe it's because the rise of corn-based whiskey after WWII has to do with the nefarious plot masterminded by the USDA and the military-industrial complex to inject us with as much cheap corn as possible and cripple us with obesity and apathy while they conspire with the Federal Reserve to financially enslave us and..............WHOA.

Sorry about that. So maybe it's just because people prefer bourbon.

Anyway, rye has enjoyed new found popularity and traditional rye cocktails like the sazerac are making a comeback. Jim Beam is capitalizing on this trend with (ri)^1, hence the tasting event last night.

Strangely enough, though, the event last night hardly seemed to be about whiskey at all. Sure, the whiskey label was clearly visible throughout the art gallery, but the only four drink choices involved copious amounts of simple syrup, citrus juice, herbs, chunks of pineapple, and even chipotle peppers. My company (all female) agreed that most, if not all, of the drinks were too sweet, even by their hairless chest standards.

It was explained to me that the purpose of the event was to present rye as a versatile alcohol that can be used in a variety of ways. The slogan on their Web site is even "mixes well, but never blends in." So the point was to show all sorts of people who think they don't like rye whiskey that it can be just as palatable as the insipid vodka. I guess that could make sense if you were trying to expand your market, but to me it's kind of silly.

I'm fairly certain that rye whiskey is never going to replace the ubiquatous and tastless vodka as the base liquor of choice for cocktails among people who enjoy drinking lots of sugar. It's just not.

I would think it would make more sense to show people what their whiskey actually tastes like, which I found to be fairly smooth and enjoyable. If people don't want to drink it straight like I did, then have some cocktails like the sazerac that show what rye is all about. Why would people switch to rye if it's flavor is masked just like vodka? It seems even more likely that people would opt for vodka when it's so much cheaper than the $40 and up price tag I've seen on (ri)^1.

The only way you could get some people to start drinking expensive rye if they don't even know what it tastes like is to market it as something hip and cool. Therefore, you hold a free event in a hip gallery, invite lots of young people who are interested in trends, hire attractive young women to serve drinks and give them tight-fitting futuristic/nostalgic orange dresses to wear, and hope a bunch of other trend-savvy people see them order (ri)^1 next time they go to a hip, new bar.

I think that could work in the short term (like maybe one or two visits to a bar after the event), but I still don't see people ordering a bottle of rye next time they go to Ghostbar or wherever. That won't come until they convince L'il Wayne to put down the cough syrup and slug some rye next time he's on camera. Even then, most alcohols who go down this road until people became sick of it or move on to the next hooch de jour.

But then again, I guess they are big enough that they already make plenty of money from Knob Creek, Basil Hayden's, Booker's, Baker's, and Old Overholt. So with all the cushion to work with, I guess this foray into tempting the average liquor swiller might actually be a pretty good plan. Thanks again for the rye, Jim Beam, and good luck.

*Thanks again to Dan Cohen and Rachel's friend Greg from Australia.

Street music (updated)

2009-06-15T10:50:00.000-07:00

Everyone in this town knows that The Mission has the best street food. I guess it makes sense that it would also have the best street music.

Last Thursday, I was waiting for a bus at the corner of 16th and Valencia and a full-blown concert was taking place. This wasn't just a guy in a ponytail with an acoustic guitar; they were plugged in and loud, and people were dancing and cheering.

After doing a little Internet research, I'm convinced that the band was the Ferocious Few, a local rock/punk/rockabilly band. Though the band is officially a duo, there were at least a couple other guys playing instruments with them, including a crazy guy in a sombrero playing a tambourine. I'm not sure if they were encouraged to play by the band or just a couple of enthusiastic members of the audience of about 30 that had gathered on the corner.

I absolutely love the do-it-yourself attitude in the Mission. Don't have enough money to open a restaurant? Take your creme brulee or curry skills to the streets. Can't book a gig on Thursday night? Take your drum kit and amp to a street corner.

I'm not exaggerating when I say these guys were truly rocking that corner. I've paid a lot more money to see bands I liked a lot less. But I think my favorite part was that when I was on my way home more than an hour later, the band was still playing and people were still crowded around and dancing. And the cops were no where in sight.*

Maybe if really great street performing takes off, they'll come to disperse the crowds like they did at the Linda Street Friday night food festival a couple weeks ago, but for now be on the look out for Ferocious Few while you still can.

*Well, actually they were in sight, but they were a few blocks down arresting some malcontent who had caused trouble on bus.

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UPDATE: Ferocious Few, along with The Red Verse, is opening for The Blacks at the Rickshaw Stop on Thursday night, and I won tickets. Let's do this thing.

Coming attractions

2009-06-12T10:20:00.000-07:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/12/books/12book.html?_r=2&ref=books

A new book on urban farming has shot straight to the top of my To Read list. Novella Carpenter's "Farm City" chronicles a city girl's attempts to make food right in the city limits of our neighbor to the east, Oakland.

Like me, Carpenter is a city dweller at heart. She likes to eat but she can't imagine trading the comforts of city life (restaurants, young people, and music venues for me) for the relative solitude of country life. Unlike Barbara Kingsolver, who wrote an amazing book called "Animal Vegetable Miracle" about moving her family into a small farm in the middle of Virgina, I'm guessing this book will be filled with more stories that I can relate to.

If there is sufficient interest, maybe some other urban farmer wannabes out there will read this book along with me and we can discuss it on here chapter by chapter.

The power of the female voice and spontaneous dance mobs

2009-06-11T14:18:00.000-07:00

Last night at the Neko Case show at the Warfield, I couldn't stop thinking how absurd it was how impressed I was by a singer who can actually sing.

Silly as it sounds, in what may be the Golden Age of Autotune, it often seems like you don't even need to have an actual singing voice to be a singer. Stars are chosen for their looks or God knows what other reasons and we're presented with a live show complete with prerecorded vocals and multiple costume changes like it's supposed to mean something.

It doesn't seem like it would be that hard to find a woman who can sing and just let her do her thing. It worked pretty well for Patsy Cline, Janis Joplin, Emmylou Harris, and Aretha Franklin.

Despite the changes over the last fifty years in what society thinks popular music should be, female vocalists still seem to dominate the landscape. Apparently this Taylor Swift person has made quite the run on the charts, as did that Umbrella girl who got beat up a poor man's Ike Tuner.

My friend Jordan will probably read that last sentence and give me shit for what he sees as willful ignorance and hipster indifference, but I can promise that my apathy is real. I listen to pop music and feel like I have no idea if the people singing can actually sing. Everything is so manipulated that I get better idea of the producer's talents than the musician's.

I had no such problem last night.

Neko Case's soaring vocals had the crowd captivated and rapt for a couple hours with nothing but a solid band, a great backup singer, and the ever-present banter between the songs. There wasn't a single costume change or pyrotechnic display--just one talented ginger lady and a microphone.

For me, it was refreshing to hear a woman's voice and react with child-like wonder. It had been a long time since I paid to see a woman sing and I didn't know what to expect. Needless to say, I got my money's worth.

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VIDEO OF THE DAY

Check out the scene from Sasquatch Music Fest. We all need more of this.

Two quick reads

2009-06-10T16:11:00.000-07:00

The BLT challenge from Ruhlman, in which he asks his readers to grow their own tomatoes & lettuce, cure the pork belly, and make the bread and mayo from scratch. Very interesting. I don't have a smoker anymore, but I think I can get away with cured bacon and do this.

Mark Bittman, longtime fish eater, writes in the New York Times about how complicated it is these days to eat fish. I, too, have become sensitive to these issues. A trip to the Monterrey Bay Aquarium where I picked up one of their sustainability cards pretty much sealed the deal for me. I am now a finnicky eater when it comes to seafood. I ask where the fish was caught and with what method. I sometimes long for the days when eating was little more than a hedonistic act for me, and in no way political, but now that I know fish are disapprearing from the oceans, how could I in good conscience continue to eat sea bass and bluefin tuna and farmed salmon?

Operation Wildfire – Act Now to Help Save America’s Dairy Farmers‏

2009-06-10T15:11:00.000-07:00

Since December 2008, the price that farmers are paid for the milk they produce has dropped over 50 percent -- the largest single drop since the Great Depression -- to a point far below the cost of production. This unprecedented collapse in prices has occurred in large part due to market manipulations and increased foreign imports by milk industry giants.

Increasingly, dairy farmers are at the mercy of these giants, such as the Dairy Farmers of America, the country's largest dairy "cooperative" which controls 40% of US milk production. Last year DFA was fined $12 million for price fixing by the US government and has also been implicated in the recent massive increase in imported milk products.

Already banks across the country are cutting off farmers' access to credit and at least two dairy farmers have committed suicide in California. The latest estimates are that the crash in domestic prices might lead to the loss of up to 30 percent of the remaining dairy farmers by the end of this year -- as many as 20,000 family dairy farmers could be off the land by the end of this year.

The loss of this many family farmers across the country will have a devastating economic impact on rural America, erasing over $52.7 billion of economic development in less than one year. Even worse, the loss of domestic supply will also create a serious gap in U.S. food safety as the DFA and others dramatically increase foreign milk protein concentrate (MPC) imports from countries such as Mexico, India and China -- countries which have much lower food safety standards than we do.

Today we're asking that Secretary Tom Vilsack, head of the United States Department of Agriculture, halt this injustice and adjust the price of milk paid to farmers to "reflect the price of production” by invoking his authority under Section 608c (18) of the Agricultural Marketing Agreement Act of 1937. This legally mandated "floor price" should be at least $17.50 per cwt (a cwt is the standard measure for milk producers).

Because of the importance of this matter and the fact that we want every voice to be heard, we have partnered with Credo who has agreed to send a fax in your name to Secretary Vilsack's office.

Please send an electronic fax to Secretary Vilsack today to let him know that you support America's family dairy farmers.

https://act.credoaction.com/campaign/vilsack_milk/?rc=fdn

We must stand by them so they can continue to produce a safe product that not only nourishes our children, but also our rural communities. Without a fair price for their milk, they can do neither. Now is the time to embark on meaningful reforms in dairy pricing to ensure that a disaster like this never happens again.

If you'd like Secretary Vilsack to hear your concerns in person, please call his office at (202) 720-3631 after you send your fax and tell him that you stand with America's dairy farmers during this crisis.

Thanks again for your action on this, America's dairy farmers are counting on you!

Sustainably yours,
Food Democracy Now!

If you'd like to see Food Democracy Now!'s grassroots work continue, please consider donating as little as $10 or $25. We appreciate your support! http://www.fooddemocracynow.org/?page_id=9

We'd also like to encourage you to sign Farm Aid's petition to Secretary Vilsack urging him to use his authority to establish an emergency floor price. For the past

Bourdain: Kansas City has one of the 13 best restaurants in the world

2009-06-05T11:37:00.000-07:00

http://www.menshealth.com/bestfoods/food_features/13_Places_to_Eat_Before_You_Die.php

13 Places to Eat Before You Die

Anthony Bourdain

Any seasoned traveler can tell you that the "best" meals on the planet are the result of an ephemeral confluence of circumstances. A table at the most expensive restaurant in the world does not guarantee a truly great meal. That said, if you're planning on dying in the near future and want to knock off a list of final, glorious dining experiences, these places would make a very respectable binge. Start with one. Make a reservation today. Go on an empty stomach. Trust me: This is livin'.

1) St. John (London) If I had to die with half a bite of anything hanging out of my mouth, it would probably be the roast bone marrow in Fergus Henderson's plain-white dining room at St. John. Scooped out and slathered onto a crust of toasted bread and sprinkled with sea salt, it's simple yet luxurious. The menu is proudly English, a rebuke to anyone still laboring under the impression that English food sucks. Famously pork-centric and focused on traditional offal and game dishes, St. John is as wonderful for what it does as for what it doesn't do: compromise. It specializes in good ingredients from "happy" animals that are treated with love and respect. Henderson has become a reluctant spiritual leader to a whole generation of chefs--and even the old-guard guys love to stop by for crispy pig tails, ham in hay, or a properly roasted bird. This is one of the truly bullshit-free zones on the culinary landscape.

2) elBulli (Girona, Spain) It's the hardest reservation in the world. And everything they say is true: It's an adventure, a challenge, a delicious and always fun acid trip to the farthest reaches of creativity. Brothers Ferran and Albert Adrià and their team are the most influential and creative people working in food--and this surprisingly casual restaurant on a sleepy cove on Spain's Costa Brava is probably the most important restaurant of our time. Love it or hate it, if you have the opportunity to wangle a reservation, do it. It's like seeing Jimi Hendrix's first show. Forget any preconceptions you might have. Is it good? Yes. More important--is it fun? Yes. Yes. Yes.

3) The French Laundry (Napa Valley, California)
4 Per Se (New York City) The best sit-down, multicourse, white-tablecloth meal of my life was at the French Laundry. And subsequent meals at Per Se, also run by chef Thomas Keller, were no less wonderful. There's no better way to go than the full-on tasting menu, a once-in-a-lifetime marriage of the best ingredients, creative thinking, and high standards, along with the personal imprint of the most respected chef in the world. How can Keller be at both restaurants at once? It doesn't matter. Pick one. Fast for 2 days, stretch your stomach with water the day of, and then see how they do it at the very top. It's a level of perfection in food and service that few even try to approach.

5) Sin Huat Eating House (Singapore) It's grimy looking, the service can be less than warm, the beer is served in a bottle (often with ice), and the tables sit halfway into the streets of Geylang, Singapore's red-light district. But the crab bee hoon--giant Sri Lankan beasts cooked with a spicy mystery sauce and noodles--is pure messy indulgence. The whelks, steamed spotted cod, prawns, scallops (in fact, any seafood available that day) are all worth having. Warning: It looks cheap, but it's not.

6) Le Bernardin (New York City) This is the best fish joint . . . anywhere. And it's relevant and fun, despite its formal service and fine-dining ambience. The grand tasting menu is a stripped-down thing of relatively austere beauty. And whatever they're doing this year or this month is always, always interesting.

7) Salumi (Seattle) It's a sandwich shop with a couple of tables, and a true mom-and-pop--even if they're the mom and pop of famous chef Mario Batali. Anything cured, anything braised, any of the limited hot specials . . . in fact, anything the Batalis make is worth grabbing with both hands.

8) Russ & Daughters (New York City)
9) Katz's Delicatessen (New York City) Russ & Daughters started as a pushcart nearly a century ago, and it now serves some of the last traditional Eastern European Jewish-style herring and smoked belly lox, sable, and sturgeon. And since you're close, walk down a few doors to Katz's to remind yourself how pastrami is done right. This is what New Yorkers do better than anybody else. And here's where they do it.

10) Etxebarri (Axpe, Spain) Victor Arguinzoniz grills unlikely ingredients over homemade charcoal: baby eels, imperial beluga caviar, oysters. (The fresh chorizo and prawns work, too.) Theoretically you can't grill a lot of this stuff, but a handcrafted series of pulleys that raise and lower each item makes it possible. Eat here, and no one is eating better.

11) Sukiyabashi Jiro (Tokyo) The best sushi on earth? Maybe. Jiro Ono is more than 80 years old, and he's been doing old-school Edo-style sushi his whole life. Every piece of fish is served at precisely the right temperature and the rice and seaweed alone are blackout good. Ono will ruin sushi for you from anywhere else.

12) Hot Doug's (Chicago) This place convinced me the Chicago red hot is, in fact, superior to the New York hot dog. And it's home to two great innovations in American gastronomy: the "foie gras dog" and the weekends-only practice of cooking French fries in duck fat. It's proof that food doesn't have to be expensive to be great.

13) Oklahoma Joe's Barbecue (Kansas City, Kansas) People may disagree on who has the best BBQ. Here, the brisket (particularly the burnt ends), pulled pork, and ribs are all of a quality that meet the high standards even of Kansas City natives. It's the best BBQ in Kansas City, which makes it the best BBQ in the world.

Anthony Bourdain is the host of the Travel Channel's No Reservations.

More proof that raising taxes is career suicide

2009-06-03T08:39:00.000-07:00

From today's Chronicle...

California's budget crisis is so bad that the Governator has proposed massive budget cuts that would close more than 200 state parks, take away scholarships from college kids, and--this should come as absolutely no surprise to anyone--take away welfare from poor people.

Everyone knows the state is in dire straits and needs some financial help in the worst way. Apparently the only two solutions to this problem: borrow money from Wall Street or slash some of our best and most beneficial programs. Read the article. Taxes aren't mentioned anywhere.

Instead of figuring out ways to generate money through taxing those who can most afford it, we're releasing people from prison and taking away health care from poor children. Why not tax the shit out of gasoline? That would help the environment by taking cars off the road and generate revenue at the same time. Why not stop pretending that the War on Drugs is working and legalize marijuana for recreational purposes like Tom Ammiano proposed?

California has long prided itself on being a progressive and trend-setting kind of state, but with Prop 8 and the ludicrously uncreative approach to solving its budget crisis, it's hard to take that kind of boasting seriously.

"Food, Inc." opens a week from Friday.

2009-06-02T14:16:00.001-07:00

So far, the word has been pretty solid on the new documentary about our industrial food system. From the preview, it looks like the movie will have a much more serious tone and far-reaching scope than 2007's "King Corn."

I'm not going to be able to pre-screen this before it comes out, but I'll be sure to let you know how great/awful it is when I do finally see it.

And check out the trailer for "Pressure Cooker," which at first glance seems to be the "Hoop Dreams" of cooking:

http://www.nonsequiturproductions.com/pressure_cooker.html

From the fertile soil of Roland Garros....

2009-05-31T10:22:00.000-07:00

Rafael Nadal just can't stop sticking it to Roger Federer.

Usually it's by winning, but now the obnoxiously talented Spaniard has done both Roger and the rest of the world a disservice by losing his first ever match at Roland Garros. Nadal not only deprived us of yet another electrical final, but if Federer does win the French this year, there will undoubtedly be legions of writers and fans who are ready to throw up an asterisk next to the victory because he didn't have to beat Nadal to do it.

Of course, any even casual tennis fan looks forward to Federer-Nadal finals, but this year and this Slam are of particular interest to me. There are several reasons for this.

1. The French Open is probably my favorite tennis event. I studied in Paris and am an unapolegetic Francophile. As cliched as it is, nothing beats Paris in the spring. I always picture Parisiens eating their bread and coffee in cafes and enduring the familiar yet alien smell of the festering Metro to ride to the stadium to cheer on their favorite players (including Andy Roddick?!). The trees are blooming and they're probably eating a lot better than me*.

There's also something about Roland Garros. Maybe it's because the clay is so bright and red and different from the other surfaces, and it's fun to watch the players get dirt all over themselves when they're sliding around for balls. Maybe it's because there's some connection to the soil that is evoked and that clay--like grass--takes so much care that it's almost like agriculture, that it generates something more visceral in us than watching sports on concrete. Maybe it's the knowledgable and undeniably French crowd that makes the event so fun. I really don't know what it is, but I love the goddamn French Open.

2. Federer is my favorite tennis player. I share David Foster Wallace's obsession with seeing him hit shots that are seemingly impossible, doing so with grace and class and what looks like little effort.

Federer has also never won a French Open.

He certainly is talented enough and has pretty much dominated every other event in tennis. But right when he had tuned his game enough to win one in Paris (and potentially all four Grand Slams in one year), a young, butt-picking Spaniard wearing a tank top and capri pants emerged on the scene and dominated the event with Federer-esque ease. Nadal had not lost even one match at Rolan Garros until now.

So whenever the French Open comes around, I get excited for Roger to get the final feather in his cap and cement his legacy as not just another Pete Sampras, who can dominate on grass and concrete so easily that it's almost to the detriment of the sport but can't get it done on the trickiest surface in the sport. Federer may indeed get it down this year, but his naysayers will always point to the fact that he never had to beat the surface's arguably best player of all time to do it.

3. Ever since I read this article about how Federer owes Nadal a debt, I have become obsessed not only with Federer eventually beating the younger and stronger Nadal, but doing it at the French Open in dramatic fashion. To sum up the article, the writer makes the point that every great individual sport athlete needed a foil. Fans don't like watching coronations and choreography; they prefer struggle and drama.

Without his struggles later in his career, Ali might never have become the beloved champion that he is. Without Frazier, Ali would not be Ali. The same could eventually hold true for Federer if he manages to eventually get the best of Nadal. Rafa will have pushed him to places he never would have gone when he was mowing over opponents without dropping a set, which he did at the 2007 Australian Open. Sure, Roger has beaten Nadal before, but recently it has looked like Rafa was destined to cruelly rip the Slam record from Roger's grasp and brutally relegating him to second banana status. People would say, "Federer was pretty good for a while, but only because it was before Nadal came around."

I openly cried right along with Roger at the Australian Open when it seemed that he might have nothing in the tank and that he might never win another Major. That article made me realize that Nadal's claiming of the number one ranking wasn't the end. It was just the beginning.**

For whatever reason, I just had a feeling about this year. I had the whole thing scripted out in my mind. Roger would dry his tears and hunker down after the Australian Open. He would rethink his strategy and push himself harder than he ever has before, maybe even hire a coach to help him. Nadal--better than ever--would seem unbeatable. Every major writer and expert would say that Federer had no shot at all at beating Nadal. They would point to the beatdown from last year's French Open Final and the Australian Open and say that Federer just couldn't beat Nadal anymore and that he should probably just retire. Federer and Nadal would both oblige and cruise through the tournament to meet in final. Roger would then come out and struggle in the beginning of the final and dig himself into a two-set whole, setting off one of the greatest and most improbable comebacks in tennis history. Federer would finally cement his legacy by tying Sampras's record at the event Sampras could never win, beating the one oponent he couldn't beat, all while finding value in adversity and winning over the last few people who don't love him.

Great story, but alas, Nadal has left us wondering what could have been. Maybe he lost his Samsonian power by taking off his manpris or he got too complacent or he just had a bad day, or...whatever, he blew it and couldn't get past Robin freaking Soderling.

I'm sure there will be lots of speculation about would have happened in the Finals. As for me, if Roger does win it, I'll be thinking a lot about what happened two weeks ago in Madrid, when Federer beat Nadal. On clay. In Rafa's home country.

*The French, not the trees.
**I also just realized from typing that paragraph that I need to turn in my man card for crying at tennis.

Kansas City: Leading the pack yet again

2009-05-29T16:34:00.000-07:00

http://www.kansascity.com/105/story/1218210.html

The mighty Paris of the Plains is getting ready to unveil a one-of-a-kind garden, which seems at first glance to be a combo art gallery and science museum for agriculture. Michael Pollan was given a sneak peek and seemed to be more than impressed by the greatest city in the world's newest contribution to society.

Powell Gardens, which is just outside the city, has spent $9.2 million to produce a 12-acre garden that will used to teach visitors about how food is grown and to inspire them to eat real food. The "edible landscape" is the largest and first of its kind and will open June 14th to the public. No surprise to anyone familiar with the city that Kansas City would be leading the way on this as it has in countless other arenas. (By the way, according to the article, Pollan's crowd at Unity Temple was the largest of his book tour).

Also, check out The Star's photo gallery. The place looks like it will be more a teaching tool than anything, which is good because most actual farms are far too busy and ill-equipped to center their businesses around education. Hopefully people will come to Powell Gardens and then go volunteer on a farm or perhaps even turn part of their lawns into more productive green space.

I, for one, can't wait to get back to the Midwest and check out the newest monument to sustainable agriculture*.

* As well as eat some real BBQ and check out the new K.

Take back farmland from the city

2009-05-28T08:49:00.000-07:00

From the often despicable SF Weekly comes a story about reclaiming urban land for green purposes. Apparently there are laws on the book that will allow you to tear up the sidewalk in front of your property--even if you are a renter so long as you get your landlord's signature. PlantSF, an organization dedicated to urban renewal, will even link you to the forms you need to alert the city of your plans.

There are, of course, several catches: 1. There must still be four feet of sidewalk left for people to walk on, and 2. There is a one-time fee of $215 (less if you can get more of your neighbors to go along with your plan).

Certainly, this will take some time to recoup your investment (especially if bums or other interlopers run off with your crop), but what a great way to turn some worthless concrete into some productive green space. And if you have received a 30-day Notice to Repair from the city, then there really is no excuse not to put that repair money toward the permit fee.

PlantSF will hook you up. Get on it.

The Real Reason We Love to Cook

2009-05-27T16:18:00.000-07:00

Great post from Ruhlman on a great article in the New York Times about working with your hands and how cooking helped us evolve. I don't really have much to say about it other than please, please, please read what these brilliant men have to say.

"The Omnivore's Dilemma" a Controversial Book?

2009-05-27T08:52:00.000-07:00

http://aglaw.blogspot.com/2009/05/pollan-book-selected-dropped-from-wsu.html

Apparently, The Omnivore's Dilemma was selected, then deselected, then selected again at Washington State for some sort of freshman reading list. WSU is a former land grant school (like K-State), so I'm sure agricultural issues are a big deal there.

The first comment on the blog is from an agricultural lawyer who says that it was a shame that the book was dropped because more discourse is a good thing, but the young lawyer also goes out of his way to paint Pollan as one of the most biased reporters on the topic. Another friend of mine asked me the other day if Pollan was super pretentious when I saw him speak. At the time, I thought it was a rather out-of-left-field question, but maybe now it makes a little more sense.

Is Pollan seen as an elitist member of the Liberal Media who has an axe to grind with industrial agriculture? I never even knew that this was a viewpoint held by anyone. He certainly doesn't paint the system with a positive brush, but I see little bias in his reporting. It seems to me that he often presents the point of view of agribusiness*.

My grandparents are traditional farmers, and I know a great deal about their point of view. I think they and their fellow farmers are adequately represented in Pollan's books. In fact, I see him as an advocate of any traditional farmers like my grandparents. He sees problems with the system that tells them what to grow.

Then again, I've never been very good at spotting bias in The Media, so maybe I'm not the best judge of what's straight truth-telling and what is "pusing an agenda."

* Right before he debunks it.

MONOCULTURES SPREADING...

2009-05-23T10:10:00.001-07:00

In what is surely one of the most bizarre and aggressive marketing campaigns in the history of advertising, Bacardi® tried to seduce me caveman-style with sheer, brute force. For better or for worse, they definitely got my attention by clubbing me over the head, but I'm not sure they managed to drag me back to their cave to consummate the relationship.

For those who didn't attend the Ghostland Observatory show at the Mezzanine last night, the event was so inundated by Bacardi® propaganda that in retrospect, I can't believe admission wasn't free.

The ad wizards at Bacardi® decided the best method to endear me to their product was to take away my beloved whiskey and microbrews and replace them with [cornfield-like] row after row of fermented sugar cane. My choices were either sobriety or Bud Light® and rum drinks*.

There literally wasn't a drop of bourbon or pale ale in the house, so I'm sure you can imagine how thrilled I was.

My compensation for suffering this indignity? A plastic baggie filled with metal coins embossed with the rum giant's corporate logo that could be traded for Bacardi® merchandise, such as freshly screen-printed crappy white T-shirts, crappy Bacardi® posters, and cheesy photo-booth pictures which I'm sure were tagged with the nefarious organization's signature markings. Pretty cool, right?

I wonder if Bacardi® also pays the Haitians who cut their sugar cane in the same funny money to be used at the campesino store. Thanks for the 16 hours of hard work, fellas. Now go get yourself a Bacardi® beach towel and a pint of rum to take back to your shanties.

So what are we to take from this experience, other than that supply seems to drive demand when it comes to the industrial food and beverage complex? Has the government started to subsidize sugar cane? Is rum making a Prohibition-like comeback? Are alcoholic monocultures the wave of the future? How much responsibility should The Mezzanine and Ghostland Observatory share in this debacle?

Those questions are probably best answered by somebody smarter than me. All I know is that I probably won't be drinking Bacardi® for a long, long time**.

Nice backfire, marketing guys.

* I opted for a steady diet of mojitos.
** Possibly ever.

More proof that the Internet is allsome.

2009-05-22T08:26:00.001-07:00

In an article in today's Wired, the magazine highlights a Bay Area start-up with an aim to connect small farms to restaurants through a type of social networking site.

With a suite of mobile apps for use in restaurants and on farms, FarmsReach wants to create an online food marketplace that would directly connect farms with restaurants.
“The food supply industry is ripe for ‘disintermediation’ because of the internet,” said Alistair Croll, a startup consultant working with FarmsReach. In other words, middlemen beware: Food could undergo a transition like the one that swept through classified ads, air travel and dozens of other industries.

If it catches on, this could be a boon to farmers, restaurants and eaters everywhere. But I say why limit it to restaurants. Wouldn't connecting smaller, local grocery stores make as much, if not more, sense?

Better to get this good food directly to people's stomachs at the lowest cost possible, which usually doesn't involve a chef's expertise and a wait staff. I love to eat out as much as the next person, but I'd much rather be able to get good produce from a local farm at my neighborhood grocery store for when I missed the weekly farmer's market. Maybe there is already an answer to this that has to do with distributor contracts or bullshit USDA regulations?

Still, this is great news. Maybe with the help of the Internet, my favorite burrito places can afford to use local produce and meat and keep costs low. And then I won't feel guilty for supporting CAFOs and Big Agribusiness when I'm eating my second Super Burrito al Pastor on the day.

Prohibition making a comeback?

2009-05-21T09:38:00.001-07:00

The Puritanical forces of evil fire another shot across the bow of all that is good and fun:

Apparently Bottom of the Hill and other SF music venues aren't selling enough old hot dogs and soggy pizzas to satisfy the California Alcoholic Beverage Control's stringent demands for how much food a MUSIC venue has to sell. Despite not having many (or sometimes any) complaints on their liquor licenses, Slim's, Great American Music Hall, Cafe du Nord, and Bottom of the Hill are in jeopardy of not having their liquor licenses renewed.

That's right, the same people who brought you patrolling bars to dole out MIPs and issuing three-figure fines to pimply faced cashiers who lazily sell beer without checking IDs are now threatening some of the city's best music venues. In these times of economic hardship, the ABC has decided to target small businesses that are making this community vibrant and creative.

Way to go, ABC, let's make sure 18-year-olds have no place to hang out at night. We all know they get into less trouble when they're roaming the streets and public parks. Much better than letting them listen to some live music.

Notes from a food desert....

2009-05-21T09:14:00.000-07:00

Two firsts last night: First time at the gorgeous Fox Theater in Oakland and first time seeing The Decemberists. Both exceeded my expectations.

The Fox is a beautiful and comfortable enough venue to warrant a trip no matter who is playing:

I can't speak highly enough about this place. The concourses are spacious, there are plenty of concession stands (being able to take beer into the theater was an unexpected surprise), and the seats were more comfortable than most office chairs. Plus, it looks like a museum or a place to see opera--definitely a nice change from the flop houses and gin joints I'm used to.

As for the music, I was happy to finally see this band with Rachel, who has long been a fanatic. We didn't know what to expect after listening to the NPR podcast of their performance at SXSW. I figured there was a chance they would play the new album, Hazards of Love, but I wasn't really ready for it when it happened.

The whole first set was basically a rock opera, full of seamless segues and instrument changes. The tone of the songs changed from lighter country to almost heavy metal and somehow managed to all make sense. What an ambitious undertaking for a band almost always primarily described as "literate."

My only wish was that I was down on the floor, so I could have started head banging and bowling over the hipsters who were mostly standing there with their arms crossed, but alas, we had decent balcony seats. The tight jeans crowd was spared my wrath for at least one more night.

Full review from the Mercury News.

Can efficiency be a bad thing?

2009-05-20T13:42:00.000-07:00

Despite having a profound mistrust of those with blind faith in the Free Market, principles of economics often do make a lot of sense in almost every arena of life--if applied correctly. Generally, the ultimate goal in free market economics is efficiency: when the dance between suppliers and consumers results in perfect harmony and production proceeds at the lowest per unit cost.

This morning I was reading Michael Pollan (a current daily ritual), and the author marvels at the brutal efficiency of our industrial food system. With a mere 1 million farmers, we are able to feed nearly 300 million hungry consumers. For a handful of quarters, a customer at McDonald's can get more calories than most people in Africa consume in a day*.

From an energy**-cost perspective, this is remarkably efficient. There was a time when food was scarce, calories were much harder to come by, and calorie binging then made much more sense.

But,, if you are asking yourself whether this calorie surplus is actually beneficial to the modern consumer, you probably wouldn't be alone. This seems to be one instance where "efficiency" can lead us down a dangerous path if all variables aren't considered when calculating what is efficient.

Read this article by Andrew Leonard about the dangers of efficiency as an end goal in the business world.

"If we are simply optimizing bad processes, efficiency as an end-goal means very little."

Hear, hear.

* I just completely made that up, but I'm 99 percent sure it's correct.
** By energy, I mean that calories are the energy that the human body needs to run.

Salty, Bitter, and Sour

Best movies of the last 10 years

Conversation about pet insurance

My overly simplistic solution for solving unemployment and public health

Am I wrong or was this guy a flaming douchebag?

A few messages regarding The Riot That Wasn't

The World Cup stole my ability to blog

Thought on Lew Perkins and the KU ticket scandal

Food Democracy Now

You're not allergic, just picky.

Full body scanners at KCI

Learning to accept consequences

Happy Cinco de Mayo

Surprise!

Senators oppose Know Your Farmer Program

Democrats fail at setting the agenda again

Looks like "organic" might be the next dirty word

New hipster slur

Having children

What it's like to know someone who went to K-State

In Germany, it's a crime to be an asshole.

Tell me why non-endangered whales shouldn't be harvested.

You don't eat meat but you do eat fish?!

Which team would you rather be based upon the past 12 years?

Food Democracy Now

Take a stand for organics, tell the USDA to reject Monsanto's GMO alfalfa

Ryan Bingham

If anyone out there still checks this blog

Go, Kansas City, go!

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Why I never take out of town guests for seafood

The most interesting person I've heard about in a while

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Food Democracy Now

Tort Reform Discussion

Food Democracy Now

In honor of one of the best weekends in San Francisco

Part Three: The Relationship Between the Level of Regulation under the FDCA and the Health Status of a Product’s Targeted Population

Great video on sustainability in the wine industry.

Part Two in AgLaw/BioLaw's series on the FDA

The best person at Outside Lands

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My advice for the day

Pollan on health care reform

Vern

Djokovic v. McEnroe: How can you not love this?

Were The Sex Pistols the first modern hipsters?

Wow

America's unjust DUI laws

[Mostly] Spot-on San Francisco Take

I'm Not AngryBy Anthony Bourdain on August 9, 2009 11:57 AM Permalink

Pollan on the decline of cooking

Why don't hipsters dance?

How does food policy relate to health care?

First great movie about the second Iraq War.

Who should fill in for The Beastie Boys at Outside Lands?

My favorite 17 albums of the year so far

See "Food Inc." for free and a great profile of an urban farmer

Free Screening of 'Food, Inc.'

Why is English the language of rock and roll?

More movies

Double Feature Sunday: Woody Allen and Food Politics

Food Safety First - Send Bill Marler Packin' to DC!

Updating Previous Stories

One from the Archives

Byrne continues to redefine rock

Rooftop Farming; Change Comes to Kids First

Nadal withdraws from Wimbledon? Really?

Video of the Day and Free Wild Salmon Dinner

Phish at the Fox... a guest posting

The return of the monoculture

Street music (updated)

Coming attractions

The power of the female voice and spontaneous dance mobs

Two quick reads

Operation Wildfire – Act Now to Help Save America’s Dairy Farmers‏

Bourdain: Kansas City has one of the 13 best restaurants in the world

13 Places to Eat Before You Die

I'm Not Angry
By Anthony Bourdain on August 9, 2009 11:57 AM Permalink