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Nitwit News of the Week
It's been a fertile week for lunacy in the news, even though the full moon is still a few days away.
The Seattle Star-Tribune reports that one of those hypersensitive born-again Christian protest groups finds Starbucks' new logo absolutely pornographic.
Here's the offending picture.
The Resistance, a Christian group out of San Diego says the new image "has a naked woman on it with her legs spread like a prostitute," according to Mark Dice, founder of the group. The Resistance claims more than 3,000 members nationwide and has found a place advancing various conspiracy theories.
Starbucks says the logo is based on a sixteenth-century Norse woodcut: a two-tailed mermaid, or siren. Bare-breasted and Rubenesque, that siren is meant to be as seductive as coffee itself. It's a somewhat bowdlerized version of the company's original logo from 35 years ago, on which you could actually see--gasp!--nipples. Most recently, the company has been using a stylized version of the Norse mermaid, as shown below.
These Christers, as Sinclair Lewis called them, are quite talented at discerning sexual content just about anywhere. Which might explain why so many of them have such large numbers of children. I'm of the opinion they ought to pray more and keep their pants zipped.
Next, we have this tasty Reuters story about how obesity contributes to global warming.
A "study" done by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine claims that obese and overweight people "require more fuel to transport them and the food they eat," adding to food shortages and higher energy prices. This bit of pseudo-science actually found its way into The Lancet, which I have always assumed is a peer-reviewed journal. The, um, scientists went on to say that because thinner people eat less and are more likely to walk than to rely upon automobiles, they occupy some sort of environmental high moral plateau.
I think they are missing something important. The ultra-thin, environmentally hip crowd includes a large proportion of vegetarians and vegans. A diet heavy in vegetable matter produces more intestinal gas than one laden with meat and fat. Thus vegans fart more copiously than normal people, and everyone knows that human flatulence is simply saturated with sulfur dioxide and methane, two of the most notorious "greenhouse gases."
Continuing on the subject of Obesity...
Philadelphia's CBS Channel 3 reports that if you are more wealthy and foolish than you are hungry, you can spend a hundred bucks on a cheese steak sandwich. Reporter Nicole Brewer tells viewers that Chef James Locascio, of Rittenhouse Square's Barclay Prime, created this "haute" cheesesteak, which includes butter poached lobster and shaved truffles. Locascio is quoted saying the sandwich has "every ingredient you want to try in a life time in one." Apparently without regard for whether you can actually taste lobster when it's combined with the other ingredients, and assuming there is something about the truffle--at $900 a pound--that makes it more desirable than the dozens of less expensive, and tasty, mushrooms that might be used. Of course this is not merely a sandwich: it's a status symbol, a paean to conspicuous consumption.
Brewer, on camera, sampled one of the sandwiches and pronounced it worth the price. Of course, you can bet the TV station picked up the tab.
To my cheese steak discerning eye, the thing looks puny and the roll looks overbaked. I may harbor a prejudice because I grew up two blocks from the place, and went to sleep every summer night to the aroma of sauteeing onions, but I don't think you can beat Captain Harvey's of Dundalk for steak sandwiches. True, the price of a half-sub has zoomed to nearly seven dollars, about double what it was a decade ago. But for your money, you get something about the size and heft of a truck driver's forearm, and infinitely more delicious. There is no eat-in, and I would recommend you wear something to protect your clothing from dripping juices. Last time I bought a Captain Harvey's sandwich, I ate my fill and had enough left over for a couple of hefty steak burritos for the next day's lunch.
Finally, this is not especially humorous, but it does involve someone who is overweight and tends to lunacy...
The new June edition of the Baltimore Beacon reports that President Bush signed into law last month S.845, known as the "Safety of Seniors Act of 2007," noting that Ms. Mikulski is a co-sponsor. This law, in the words of Beacon reporter Barbara Ruben, "authorizes new programs to help prevent falls among older adults." So we are now the beneficiaries of a program that is expected to cost at least $178 million over the next two years. Though I suspect the true beneficiaries will be the public health mavens who will be well paid to try to figure out who falls, where, when and why, and what troublesome architectural constraints can be put into place in a misguided effort to prevent it.
Mikulski bloviates, "Falls don't discriminate. This is a serious public health problem..." Except, of course that until the research is done, nobody knows how serious a problem it might be. Plus that little grammatical faux pas in her first sentence.
For the same money, I imagine the Feds could provide every one of us vulnerable old farts with a pair of cushioned ass-pads.