The Rage Diaries

A difficult problem, not easily solved

I stopped eating pork earlier this year, a decision that breaks my heart on a gastronomic level, as nothing is tastier than pork chops with spinach and applesauce, unless it's a good rosemary-encrusted pork loin roast*.

The reason for the pork embargo is not because I'm Irish and Catholic and predisposed to crave suffering, but because I realized my criteria for which animals it was not okay to eat applied to pigs. The criteria: does the animal have a reasonably complex emotional life? Is it smart enough to understand what's happening to it? I had figured that elephants, wolves, most cetaceans, and most primates were off the list. After reading several haunting reviews of Jeffery Masson's The Pig Who Sang to the Moon: The Emotional World of Farm Animals, I concluded that pigs also met my criteria. Therefore, they're off the plate.

Not exactly a stinging rebuttal

Although I'm not a big Tom Tomorrow-type fan, I did smirk a little at the weblog entry "A Day in the Life of Joe Republican."

Naturally, someone had to come up with a rebuttal, "A Day in the Life of Joe Democrat," but it's not nearly so effective.

For one thing, carping about how unfair it is that corn syrup's replaced sugar in soft drinks loses a little of the bite when you consider that the blame can be laid at the feet of Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz, who served in the Nixon and Ford administrations. For a second, complaining about artificially high sugar prices ignores the reality that the Bush administration's fought to keep U.S. sugar markets closed to foreign countries, thus keeping prices artificially high. For a third, complaining about how the FDA sits on medications because of side effect warnings ignores the loosening of manufacturing guidelines so drugs go to market faster, or the post-approval discovery that a drug is linked to increased suicide, or the yanking of a drug after it's caused to increase non-related, life-threatening ailments.

Then again, both pieces are overly simplistic, so perhaps my pesky insistence on the facts just gets in the way.

Atlantis 2.0

Orion's Oct 04 article, "The Submerging World," details some of the sociogeographical changes in store during the 21st century:

Two follow-up items

Item #1: Timothy Noah's assessment of the National Museum of the American Indian, "The National Museum of Ben Nighthorse Campbell," (Slate, Sep 29, 04) is just a wonderful sustained critique, packed with background information and solidly supported premises. (I wrote about the museum's reception here.)

Item #2: "How better to make the point that even new-model snowmobiles would disrupt the quiet and air quality of Yellowstone National Park than to turn on 11 such snowmobiles in the Simon Bolivar Park outside the headquarters of the Interior Department?" -- "Snowmobiles? This Isn't Yellowstone!" (WaPo, Sep 30, 04). Readers/masochists may recall that I wrote a novel on the topic here.

Cool is all in your head

Dorks like me may have never had a chance: Wired's Oct 04, "If You Secretly Like Michael Bolton, We'll Know" investigates Caltech's Social Cognitive Neuroscience Lab's cool test, which measures your brain response to different products and celebrities, and decides if you're High Cool (a "Trendsetter"), High Uncool (a "Critic" or tastemaker), or Low Cool. The intensity of the response, coupled with a 0-5 value on each object, determine which way you skew.

Proving how uncool I was, I immediately thought, "Well, how do you derive the value assigned to each object in an empirically objective way?" That would seem to be the only way to guarantee the test's effectiveness; otherwise, you're looking at someone's pseudo-scientific justification for imposing their hierarchy of taste on you.

Self-promotion

My recap for the season premiere of CSI is up at Television Without Pity.

Also up: my review of dr. vegas for Teevee.

On the Internet, nobody knows you're not an expert

So Salon's piece, "How the Internet Turned Everyone into James Carville," ran today, a mere two days after the NYT magazine ran "Fear and Laptops on the Campaign Trail."

The two kind of fused together in my head because they both reference the usual suspects of left-leaning web punditry -- the Daily Kos, MyDD -- and put forth the premise that the thousands upon thousands of pixels sacrificed to the egomaniacal whims of We Who Will Not Shut Up are changing both the nature of political campaigning and its subsequent mainstream coverage.

Slut? So what?

Sarah Bunting wrote a more eloquent defense first with "A Four-Letter Word," but for anyone who needs a refresher course on why promiscuous women have rights too, check out the NY Press's "The Other S-Word" this week.

Judy McGuire notes of the letters she got saying Kobe Bryant's accuser essentially got what she asked for: " the nastiest of the bunch were written by women." Judy, check out this week's People magazine (go ahead -- read it in line at the grocer's like I did). The nastiest letters, the ones shrilling about how easy celebrity moms have it and what rotten parents they are? All coming from women too.

I have no problem admitting I'm opinionated. Lord knows I am not above swinging the crowbar of judgment at the kneecaps of my designated target. But I believe in thinking big: why carp on someone's private behavior when there's a whole public world out there to sneer at? And why give spectators a catfight if they're not paying me for it?

Honestly. Some folks have no ambition.

I'm not lost, I'm hippocampus-impaired

I am notorious among friends and relatives for getting lost the first time I attempt to travel anywhere. I make wrong turns. I overshoot destinations. Someone tells me to head "north" and I give them a blank look. Maps degenerate into pretty, abstract art, utterly unconnected to the physical landscape they purport to represent. Whenever I'm required to be somewhere new at a specific time, I either add another 30 minutes to the trip to account for the inevitable detour, or I get someone else to drive me.

So the news that spatial memory and the lack thereof may be related to the hippocampus in the brain fills me with joy. Because this means I'm not bad at getting from Point A to Point B. I'm only brain-damaged.

See also: "Why It May Be Harder to Recall Directions Than Things," Better Humans, Sep 27, 04.

It really puts your own deadline difficulties into perspective

Jonathan Mahler's "20 Years and 5 Editors Later" (NYT, Sep 25, 04) makes everyone who's failed to finish their magnum opus feel better by publishing a list of pretigious deadline-blowers.