Diet Poison

If you didn't already know that anything presented by American food companies was nothing more than a tarted-up lie smothered in rich, velvety caramel, yet another group of researchers has linked diet soda consumption to very bad things.
   Even better, the work was done right here in San Antonio, currently the 3rd fattest city in the nation.* Seems that in a decades-long study, people who consumed lots o' diet soder had, on average, 70 percent more belly fat than those who didn't consume said soder.
   Christ on a crutch! SEVENTY percent?! If the guys who did the study weren't wearing white coats I almost wouldn't believe it. That's enough fat to float a boat, which is a truly disgusting image if you think about it long enough.
   Of course, correlation does not equal causation. It could be that people who gained a lot of weight consumed more diet soda because they were trying to slim down, rather than gaining weight because of their aspartame intake. You need more to make the link between consuming aspartame and becoming a big fat sucker.
   And there is more - in a related study, mice given a diet spiked with aspartame had elevated glucose levels but decreased insulin levels. In other words, they were becoming diabetic. Take this study with the increased belly fat study and it's hard to argue that artificial sweetener has any benefits at all.
   So the verdict is essentially in with this one. Diet soda is poison. More specifically aspartame is poison. There ain't nothing good about it.
   Which means I have no excuse now to keep drinking soda. Oh yeah, I'm off the wagon again, if I hadn't mentioned that. I need to stop drinking soda. For real. I wouldn't keep drinking rat poison if someone pointed out to me that strychnine was causing my convulsions, and I don't need any more diet soda now that someone has pointed out to me my spare tire is exacerbated by aspartame.
   It's hard. Just look at the number of times I've stopped and started right back up again. The stuff is like cigarettes you don't have to light. But it's poison, and I need to give it up. So I'm gonna. Starting tomorrow.



* because we're not trying hard enough to be Number One, evidently

I Need A Theme Song

I was watching Guys and Dolls last night, the movie version with Frank Sinatra and Marlon Brando. Yes, I own a copy, you got a problem with that? I didn't think so...
   Anyway... Sinatra sings most every song in the movie, EXCEPT for the one he's probably most recognized for. In the movie Brando sings 'Luck Be A Lady' not Sinatra. Yes, Brando sings, and evidently he really did, they say that's his voice on the soundtrack. But, aside from 'New York, New York' that song, 'Luck Be A Lady' is what most people know Sinatra for, especially with the Baise orchestra backing him. It's kind of his theme song. Whenever I think of this song I think of Sinatra, and whenever I think of Sinatra I think of this song.
   I need a musical score like that. You know, something iconic, something that ties me to it and it to me down through the ages. Something that could accompany me as I make my rounds in the salons, imparting my bon mots to a mildly amused intelligentsia.
   So I thought it through and came up with a few suggestions. I went through a few iterations before I found the perfect one.

Some Kind of Wonderful, Grand Funk Railroad.
   Hold on, this is about a girl... maybe not. Besides, who remembers the Railroad except hippie burnouts? Well, and me.

Been Caught Stealing, Jane's Addiction
   Except I haven't been caught. Not that I steal. That any of you people know of. Don't need to call attention to that. So that one's out.

Free For All, Ted Nugent
   Uh... while I might be The Nuge where it counts, deep inside - and the tune is definitely catchy - I think people might get the wrong idea if they heard this whenever I was around. Or maybe too much of the right idea. Keep looking.

Nobody Home, Pink Floyd
   Quite possibly my favorite Floyd tune. But it's about a guy slowly going crazy as his wife cheats on him. Mebbe not just yet for this one.

Sex Machine, James Brown
   Nah, hits too close to home and sounds more like an advertisement or testimonial. Or bragging. Try again.

If I Should Fall From Grace With God, The Pogues
   And... we have a winner. A jaunty Irish tune that's filled with macabre imagery sung by a man who got kicked out of an Irish band for drinking too much. Yup, that's right. He was too drunk for an Irish band.

So now you can all imagine that song following me wherever I go. The grocery store, the gas station, the gym, the office. You know, everywhere a reel performed by an inveterate lush is appropriate.

Everything Old Is New Again

I was in Austin Friday, going to tech startup/incubator/mentoring quasi-business quasi-service provider. It's the kind of place that's all over Silicon Valley, and which the owners of the place in Austin are trying to get going in Texas. I met a lot of engaging entrepreneurs, I saw that my brother-in-law and I are farther along than most people, and I heard some interesting ideas. But one business in particular struck me as something you could really only get going in Austin, and yet it was also something that my grandmother must have done in the depths of the Depression.
   One guy has started a business recovering yarn from old sweaters. Really. And he's making money doing it.
   I had a few thoughts. My first was 'Only in Austin' my second was 'He must have been laid off in the last two years,' my third was 'That's actually kind of cool' and my fourth was 'What else did my grandmother do that no one's doing now?'
   Back in the Depression people recycled everything. EVERYTHING. That's why things like old tin toys and copies of Action Comics #1 are so rare, they were all recycled. When clothes got worn enough that they weren't presentable for company they became work clothes, and when they were worn enough that they weren't suitable for that they became rags and when they were so used up they couldn't be rags any more they got left for the rag picker who probably sold the scraps to be incorporated into paper currency. The ultimate in economically-enforced frugality.
   And this guy, the sweater recycler guy, probably hit on his idea independently, I don't imagine he studied Depression-era re-use principles. Although it is Austin, maybe the dude's got a PhD in it.
   It's with the Baby Boomers that we got the throwaway economy. Growth predicated on planned obsolescence. That crap don't fly no more. People are keeping things longer, cars, clothes, houses, furniture, what have you. And they're looking for sustainability; they don't want fresh-cut timber, they want the wood that's re-used from the demolished factory. And if they knit they want yarn that's recovered from discarded sweaters.
   I think his idea has legs. And not just for yarn, for everything. I know I like to buy things once. If I buy a vacuum cleaner I'm going to have that appliance until the color fades and the wheels drop off. Same with my cars. Same with my clothes. And furniture. And pots and pans. So if I were an entrepreneur, perhaps with a mind to manufacture things, I'd go for quality right now. Made in the USA, durable, quality stuff. You could charge more for it because it would last. And I know customers would respond.
   And if you could figure a way to dismantle, say, a couch into its component parts and re-purpose them, you'd have something. For as long as you had discarded couches, I suppose.

Judgement Day

This my 666th post to this blog. Really. I don't feel particularly evil but I must be since this is my 666th post. There you are, some nice circular logic to start off with.
   You know we just had a judgement day come and go with nary a person raptured up into the sky. But there's another one coming - they assure us it's for reals this time - in October, just a few months away. Which got me to thinking: do I really want to chance going to meet my maker without being absolved of my sins? I've got a skeleton or two in my closet that might just keep me from being raptured, assuming they check that sort of thing. I better come clean. I'm not Catholic but I do approve of the sacrament of confession, it keeps you honest.

So in honor of my 666th post, here are my confessions, in no particular order.

I'm not big-boned, I really am fat.
   I'm the one who threw the spit wad
I bought beer for minors in college. I actually made some decent walking-around money too.
   You know that thing, that one time, that you thought someone else did? I did it.
I never thought Gore Vidal's articles in Playboy were very good.
   I used to pee off the balcony of my apartment when it rained at night.
I don't care about the Spurs or the Cowboys. The latest plot twists of 90210 concern me more, and I don't even know what channel that show's on.
   I didn't take complete advantage of the opportunities that were presented to me in college. Like Mary Ellen - her real name - I could have totally hit that and I never did.*
I stole the office chair I'm sitting in right now.
   I think most newborns are ugly. Except my nieces and nephew, of course.
I was cruel to Dave when he needed kindness. But he was a real dick so it's actually not that bad.
   I didn't like M*A*S*H without Frank Burns. Just didn't work.
As a font, Garamond doesn't do it for me.
   Pussy Galore? Who names their kid... oooohhh... I just got it...


* words of advice given to me by a wise Okie friend of mine: 'Every piece of tail you turn down puts you one behind for the rest of your life.'

Passing The Torch

Last week my older niece got a job as a waiter.* Her younger sister starts the same job in a month or so.
   I am now officially NOT the only person in my family to have been a waiter.
   It's been my contention since I brought my first plate of lasagna to my first ungrateful and undeserving customer that everyone should have to work a food service job early on in life. Much like the Swiss have mandatory military service for all their citizens, we should have mandatory restaurant duty. You don't necessarily have to be a waiter, you could be a busser, a bartender, even a hostess, any job where you have to deal with the Great Unwashed on a daily basis.
   See, having to deal with people on a decidedly unequal footing - your job is to bring them their food, presumably spit-free** - makes you realize how poorly you've been treating others. Slinging hash, or spaghetti, or burgers, or in my niece's case tortillas, brings you into contact with some genuine people. And by that I mean not only genuinely nice people, I mean genuine assholes. There are customers who come in the door looking to take their bad day out one someone, and since the waiter has the apron he's elected.
   It's a learning experience for sure, not only in reading people and their intentions but also in controlling yourself. And in controlling your finances, and in managing not only your work but others' work as well. When you're first on the Tuesday evening shift and the cook is coming down off some righteous bud you need to plan for his inevitable screwing-up of the order and general lack of urgency to repair his own mistake. And at the same time your customers don't want to hear any excuses, especially lame ones about the cook being stoned off his ass. It's a PR job and the first acting gig I ever had.
   It builds character. When you dance like a trained monkey for 15% or less, you learn to find inner validation. And then, when the night is done and the restaurant is closed and you're so tired you can't hardly stand up, you discover that everything - EVERYTHING - is the funniest thing you've ever heard. My best friends are people I worked with when I was a waiter. Good times, good times.
   So congratulations to my nieces on their new adult jobs. Welcome to the working world, it sucks worse than you can possibly imagine. But if anybody gives you a hard time let me know, me and my boys will take care of it.


* waitress, server, waitron, wage slave, food getter... it's all good and all means the same thing

** no guarantees

Eco-Friendly LED Pot

I've been slowly converting the light bulbs in my house to LEDs. Slowly because LEDs are expensive - REALLY expensive - and because sometimes they don't give enough light for my purposes. I think LEDs are the way to go for the sustainable future instead of poisonous and awful compact flourescents, which I predict will become the 8-track tapes of the lighting world. Let's hope.
   Today as I was surfing the web looking for what's on the cutting edge of LED technology (you can't rely on Lowe's to lead innovation), I saw an application that had never crossed my mind.
   Grow lights. Indoor grow lights.
   I know, I know there are legitimate uses for indoor grow lights. Like... uh... well, I'm sure there are some. But I know and you know and everybody in the country knows the real use for indoor grow lights is pot farming.
   I had an Indian friend* who bought a house years ago. It was a bank repo long before that was common, and he got a fantastic deal on it, mostly because the previous owner defaulted after some legal problems. Criminal legal problems.
   My friend had me over to his new castle and showed me around. It was an older house in Pasadena and so didn't have AC. Except, he pronounced, in the attic which was colder than penguin turds. When he and his wife wanted AC they just pulled down the step ladder and let the cool air waft over them.
   He showed me into the attic, which was indeed painted perfectly, finished out, with a great-big AC unit in one end. There were also electrical outlets every 18 inches on-center, and a hook above a weathered circle in the finished attic floor between each and every rafter for the length of the house, both sides.
   "You know what this used to be, don't you?" I asked him. Blank stare back. "Pot farm."
   He didn't believe me. At first. But as he looked I saw the realization dawn in his eyes; the guy before had one marijuana plant between every set of rafters, a huge grow light hanging from the hook above each plant, a pan to catch the water below, and Arctic air conditioning to keep his stash from wilting in the heat. Pretty slick setup except for managing the heat from all those grow lights.
   Fast forward to today and the modern, eco-minded pot farmer. If you used LED grow lights you wouldn't have any of the temperature control problems you have with regular grow lights. And no heat would mean your pot farm wouldn't be betrayed to infrared sensors on police helicopters. PLUS you'd be saving electricity which means more profit for your illegal operation. Win-win-win all around. Of course, you'd have to not be totally baked all the time to have your wits about you enough to make this a reality. It could happen.
   Like everything else, I'll bet vice drives innovation in the LED lighting market too.


* Slurpee Indian, not casino Indian

Black Gold... Texas Tea...

You know what you almost never seen any more? Big puddles of oil in parking lots. That's not to say that there isn't any oil at all in parking lots because there is, but not like there used to be back in the old days.
   I remember my grandfather would put down cardboard and newspaper underneath his cars in the garage, and he'd change out the newspaper weekly, as regular as mowing the lawn. Dripping oil was just a fact of car ownership, something you dealt with. You expressed a drive from San Antonio to Dallas in miles, gallons of gas, and quarts of oil. That's about 290 miles, sixteen or seventeen gallons of gas and at least a quart of oil, maybe two.
   Not so much any more. It's so rare to see anything dripping in parking lots that when I see a fresh, glistening streak of wetness underneath my truck I'm instantly alert. I look at the placement of the drip, where it might have come from if it's from my truck, what kind of fluid it might be. I become a truck doctor. It's never from my truck, of course, it's always someone else's problem. Back when I had my '72 Chevelle the only time I would have been concerned is if I'd come out of a store and hadn't noticed any drips. That would have meant I was running dry on one of the car's vital fluids. I loved that car but it leaked like a Civil War battle survivor.
   Are cars that much better-made now? Absolutely. And not just tighter engines built to smaller tolerances either, the whole thing's just better. I'd trust my convertible more in a crash than I ever would have my 3000 lbs of Detroit steel Chevelle.
   But... I don't know... while no drips is certainly better for the environment - especially when multiplied by all the cars on the road - it's just not the same. I think people put too much trust in their cars now, they're too reliable. You ever see someone broken down on the side of the road these days? They're helpless, utterly beside themselves and at total loss as to how to get themselves out of the jam they're in. I used to drive with a tool box in the trunk so I could fix whatever went wrong as it was happening.
   Less oil on the road means less need to know how to fix things which means more reliance on other to make those repairs which means we're becoming a nation of passive aid-seekers rather than a nation of problem-solvers. I think we need more oil in parking lots, more breakdowns, more self-reliance and less calling for AAA.
   Unless it's too hot outside. Then you should definitely call the tow truck. AAAAARRRRGH! See? It's happening to me now!

Amazing Powers Of Observation

I feel like Sherlock Holmes today. Or Sherlock Hemlock, who was green and fuzzy but no less a deductive genius.
   I was leaving the house this evening and the garage door wouldn't close. Just wouldn't budge. It went up and down perfectly fine when I got home an hour or so before, and it went up like normal once again but for some reason it decided that going down just wasn't in the cards tonight.
   So I got out of the truck and thought about it. Cogitated. Ciphered, if you're Jethro Clampett. Then I realized that the setting sun was shining directly into the safety lens. That's the electric eye thingy that keeps little kids and pets from getting crushed under the garage door. Bright sun meant the electric eye thought there was a little kid or a vulture or a leprechaun standing under the door and so it did what it was supposed to do and kept the door from working. I stood so my shadow fell on the lens and - voila! - door goes down.
   An amazing display of deductive ability, if I do say so myself. But the question now is: what do I do with my skills?
   I could put on a deerstalker hat and try to solve crimes in Victorian England... but that's already been done. I could put on a bat costume and fight crime with my brains and my fists. And an underage sidekick. So maybe we'll hold off on that one for the moment. If I were Asian and had a Number-One son I could solve crimes in Chinatown. I could always wear a snap-brim hat and suspenders and work in a dirty corrupt city where it's always dusk. Or I could put on the Who's greatest hits and deliver snappy one-liners in CSI:San Antonio.
   Maybe I'll just chalk this up to good luck and forget about a career change for right now. I gotta say, though... that bat costume is looking mighty tempting...