Malaysia Wants to Ban Fast Food Advertising

It’s an interesting idea that Malaysia has, they essentially want to treat fast food like how cigarettes are treated in this country, as something dirty. They’re also thinking about a “Sin Tax.”

“This is the only country where people discuss over breakfast where and what to eat for lunch. And then over lunch, it will be what’s for supper,” he noted.

Dr Chua said obesity, which was the “root of all problems,” now affected 37% of the population, compared to 20% a decade ago.

About 12% of the population would suffer from diabetes by 2020 if nothing were to be done, he said.

I’m reminded of Jared Diamond’s “Collapse” a bit. Just in the concept of how islands are good test cases for larger populations. So if Malaysia’s health crumbles it’s not hard to see that America’s would fall a similar trend line. (Basically wasn’t American Samoa that case? Introduce an American-style diet and watch the population in one generation just start dropping dead of heart disease and diabetes?)

In Malaysia’s case I’m using “they” but it seems like it’s only their Health Ministry or Health Minister that is thinking about this change. And it’s likely to encounter resistance in other parts of the government.

I think it’s a real open question whether a nation can collectively change dietary habits for the better. (They can always change for the worse). I’m not saying that everyone in Malaysia or America will become optimally healthy, but it does seem that our collective eating patterns, the national diet if you will, are designed to make us fat. Is it possible to change a national diet to something better? I’m skeptical, but the increased focus on national eating patterns (rather than individual eating habits) has been a move in the right direction.

When patterns effect large populations I’m always more interested in macro explanations then the micro ones. You can come up with an individual explanation why every fat person in America is overweight but when more people are overweight than healthy isn’t it useful to look at the reasons why those trends are occurring than to argue that each individual needs to do better? (Not that I’m not trying to do my part, but I’m also white, middle-class and come from an upper-middle class background. I have better opportunities afforded to me than many trying to lose weight.)

Joel Surnow loves Joe McCarthy?

The Washington Post has an interesting push-back on that New Yorker article about torture on 24. The Post’s Peter Carlson just rolls his eyes that ANYONE could ever possibly take their cues from television.

Am I crazy or is attacking torture by lobbying the producers of "24" almost as ridiculous as trying to make nuclear power plants safer by urging the producers of "The Simpsons" to stop letting Homer play with plutonium in the lunchroom of the Springfield nuke plant?

Yes because we know TV is not an influential medium at all. Even though the people who teach at West Point have said, directly, 'people are looking at 24 and thinking it represents a rational line of thought.' Yes it’s “art” but there is a saying “life imitates art” for a reason.

I even pulled out this old quote from Chris Matthews (from the Washington Post) where here’s a life-imitating-art-imitating-life.

"You know what I find sometimes when I am drifting sometimes on this show, and we do five hours a week? I can't really assume a spontaneous attitude about a guest, so I find myself locking into you. I find myself doing Darrell Hammond doing me, because it's sort of comfortable to get into that sort of slipstream of the way you do me. Isn't that weird?"

-- "Hardball" TV commentator Chris Matthews to his "Saturday Night Live" impersonator, Darrell Hammond. "Yes, that's weird," Hammond agreed. Washington Post February 9, 2004

Anyway the most interesting nugget from Carlson’s article is that Sunrow, who is totally cozy with neo-fascist Ann Coulter, is now collaborating with her on what Surnow describes as “a movie that depicted Joe McCarthy as an American hero.”

I thought Ann had abandoned her crazy line of thinking that people were going to start lining up with Joe McCarthy again but clearly she’s been able to entice others into her way of thinking. And it doesn’t surprise me she picked the most fascist artist of the moment.

Torture on 24: Where Art Meets Reality

One of the issues I’m fascinated by is how TV influences real-life. Not just “serious” TV such as news (which ideally is supposed have influence) but entertainment. So I was super-fascinated to see this New Yorker article “Whatever it Takes” which reported on how the military has responded to the torture depicted in the series 24.

First of all, Human Rights First, had a pretty ingenious idea of setting up a meeting between real Army interrogators and Pentagon officials and the writers of 24. I so want to give props to them for that because you can write a 100 op-eds denouncing something on TV, but actually guilting a writer in person by the real-life people who do the jobs they depict is going to have an impact.

In fact, [U.S. Army Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan, the dean of the United States Military Academy at West Point] and the others had come to voice their concern that the show’s central political premise—that the letter of American law must be sacrificed for the country’s security—was having a toxic effect. In their view, the show promoted unethical and illegal behavior and had adversely affected the training and performance of real American soldiers. “I’d like them to stop,” Finnegan said of the show’s producers. “They should do a show where torture backfires.”

Of course the show’s producer, self-described “right wing nutjob” (he really did call himself that!) bowed out for bullshit reasons.

Several top producers of “24” were present, but Surnow was conspicuously absent. Surnow explained to me, “I just can’t sit in a room that long. I’m too A.D.D.—I can’t sit still.”

Yeah right. More like “I completely don’t respect Human Rights First and don’t want any real facts from people in the know to change my political viewpoints about anything.”

Before the meeting, Stuart Herrington, one of the three veteran interrogators, had prepared a list of seventeen effective techniques, none of which were abusive. He and the others described various tactics, such as giving suspects a postcard to send home, thereby learning the name and address of their next of kin….

I didn’t find it surprising that the show’s head writer admitted that while he’s got some old CIA interrogation journal from 1963, most of the ideas for how to torture people he pulls right out of his ass. Because the show runner, Howard Gordon, isn’t an interrogation expect. He knows that pain scares him and assumes it scares other people. Very interestingly he knows how to create tension visually with a camera, but doesn’t know how to create tension with a suspect who’s being interrogated. It’s not unlike someone who isn’t a doctor or isn’t a lawyer writing a script for what they think those jobs look like. They’re probably convinced they know what it’s like but the reality is going to be incredibly different from a writer’s imagination.

At other moments, the discussion was more strained. Finnegan told the producers that “24,” by suggesting that the U.S. government perpetrates myriad forms of torture, hurts the country’s image internationally. Finnegan, who is a lawyer, has for a number of years taught a course on the laws of war to West Point seniors—cadets who would soon be commanders in the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. He always tries, he said, to get his students to sort out not just what is legal but what is right. However, it had become increasingly hard to convince some cadets that America had to respect the rule of law and human rights, even when terrorists did not. One reason for the growing resistance, he suggested, was misperceptions spread by “24,” which was exceptionally popular with his students. As he told me, “The kids see it, and say, ‘If torture is wrong, what about “24”?’ ” He continued, “The disturbing thing is that although torture may cause Jack Bauer some angst, it is always the patriotic thing to do.”

Gary Solis, a retired law professor who designed and taught the Law of War for Commanders curriculum at West Point, told me that he had similar arguments with his students. He said that, under both U.S. and international law, “Jack Bauer is a criminal. In real life, he would be prosecuted.” Yet the motto of many of his students was identical to Jack Bauer’s: “Whatever it takes.” His students were particularly impressed by a scene in which Bauer barges into a room where a stubborn suspect is being held, shoots him in one leg, and threatens to shoot the other if he doesn’t talk. In less than ten seconds, the suspect reveals that his associates plan to assassinate the Secretary of Defense. Solis told me, “I tried to impress on them that this technique would open the wrong doors, but it was like trying to stomp out an anthill.”

So here are the real people who do this job. And more importantly the teachers who are addressing the next generation who will be interrogating. And what are they saying? Look people are mimicking what they see on TV. The show’s writers basically say “well people know the difference between TV and real life.”

Actually, with discussion I’m sure they do but that involves actually engaging the brain in cognitive thought. But one aspect of TV is that is “normalizes” life. That’s why people are so eager to see themselves reflected back on TV. In Stephanie Coontz's “The Way We Never Were” she talks about why those corny 1950s “family-centered” programs were so addicting. Because they showed how “normal” families were supposed to act.

It’s natural for people to want to see how their actions follow an accepted practice. We are social creatures. One of the lines I really liked in the movie Kinsey was when Alfred Kinsey talks about how his students are desperate to know whether their sexual practices are “normal.” I’ve even caught myself in my own life thinking that because I saw something reflected on Sex in The City what I’m thinking of is an acceptable practice.

And this “normalizing” function isn’t just true for observing guidelines for sex and family life. It’s true for young officers and cadets learning what is acceptable behavior in treating prisoners. It’s fucking scary how the power of “art” has on real life actions sometimes. People love to mimics scenes from “glamorous” TV.

Lagouranis said to me, “People watch the shows, and then walk into the interrogation booths and do the same things they’ve just seen.” He recalled that some men he had worked with in Iraq watched a television program in which a suspect was forced to hear tortured screams from a neighboring cell; the men later tried to persuade their Iraqi translator to act the part of a torture “victim,” in a similar intimidation ploy. Lagouranis intervened: such scenarios constitute psychological torture.

I won’t even go on about the fact that so many lay-men don’t even get the fact that the “I’m not touching you” defense doesn’t mean you can threaten people with rape, death, death of family, or torture, even if you don’t go through with it. IT’S STILL ILLEGAL TORTURE.

So here are people who do the job that 24 writers portray and they say “yeah torture doesn’t work.”

…Finnegan argued that torturing fanatical Islamist terrorists is particularly pointless. “They almost welcome torture,” he said. “They expect it. They want to be martyred.” A ticking time bomb, he pointed out, would make a suspect only more unwilling to talk. “They know if they can simply hold out several hours, all the more glory—the ticking time bomb will go off.”

Moreover part of the issue in 24 is that the writers continue to set up situations where the audience and Jack Bauer absolutely know that who they have is guilty of something and, perhaps more importantly, they know what information their suspect has. That’s a key detail. In real life in Iraq or other places with the U.S. treads more often or not they simply have someone they suspect might be associated with something, but they don’t know exactly what. They don’t know what information the suspect actually has. I take that from this statement by the other interrogators. Just applying pain and hoping they start sprouting information that is new to the integrators is unlikely because the suspect wouldn’t know what you know about them.

“In Iraq, I never saw pain produce intelligence,” Lagouranis told me. “I worked with someone who used waterboarding”—an interrogation method involving the repeated near-drowning of a suspect. “I used severe hypothermia, dogs, and sleep deprivation. I saw suspects after soldiers had gone into their homes and broken their bones, or made them sit on a Humvee’s hot exhaust pipes until they got third-degree burns. Nothing happened.” Some people, he said, “gave confessions. But they just told us what we already knew. It never opened up a stream of new information.” If anything, he said, “physical pain can strengthen the resolve to clam up.”

But the show’s producer STILL insists that sometimes torture is necessary.

Cochran, who has a law degree, listened politely to the delegation’s complaints. He told me that he supports the use of torture “in narrow circumstances” and believes that it can be justified under the Constitution. “The Doctrine of Necessity says you can occasionally break the law to prevent greater harm,” he said. “I think that could supersede the Convention Against Torture.” (Few legal scholars agree with this argument.) At the meeting, Cochran demanded to know what the interrogators would do if they faced the imminent threat of a nuclear blast in New York City, and had custody of a suspect who knew how to stop it. One interrogator said that he would apply physical coercion only if he received a personal directive from the President. But Navarro, who estimates that he has conducted some twelve thousand interrogations, replied that torture was not an effective response.

I find that that attitude of Joel Cochran’s irritating. Here his is confronted with evidence that his belief is incorrect, torture doesn’t work, the situation he imagines it might work doesn’t happen ever, and more importantly if it ever did it still wouldn’t work, but he continues to stress he believes torture is sometimes necessary.

Beliefs are hard things to go away even with counter-evidence. In fact when given evidence that counters a belief people will often cling stronger to their assertion. Overtime, they might be willing to let go and allow the new facts to be processed. But often the brain will simply start screening out the new facts so as to keep the old belief.

Anyway I’m glad to hear that Kiefer Sutherland is growing concerned about the impact of torture. Even if he didn’t come to the meeting (which I wish he had) he’s clearly going to hear about it if not read that article. Other than the writers, he’s one of the “artists” in charge of 24 that can actually make a difference in the crafting of the show.

Why The Edwards Campaign Blew It With the Bloggers

With all the hubbub about the actions of the two bloggers hired by John Edwards, what I think is most misplaced is how the campaign really lost the chance to turn something that was a political weakness into a strength.

Think about it, it’s only February 2007. Campaigns might have a long tail but this story wasn’t going to last. Even Fox News was going to drop it soon enough. It was a weeklong story, at most, and the real audience for the story isn’t the conservative Republicans who watch Fox News or the handful of people who find what Donahue says interesting.

No, the audience for the story in February 2007 is Democratic primary voters and early donors. And guess what? They don’t find Donahue’s outrage all that newsworthy. What the early donors (both the big and the small) want is to know is that the Edwards campaign has a chance to win.

When the story broke in The New York Times (and AP) the Edwards campaign started running around like a chicken with their head cut off. What they should have done is waited. A week is an eternity in politics but there’s also got to be an adage that the farther from the primary the shorter the “entities in politics” lasts.

So if I had been on the Edwards team what would I have advised? Push-back. Let the cable news chatter. And then do some pitch back to friendly columnists. There were points to be made about all of Donohue’s outrages. All of the offensive statements he’s made in the past. How about a simple statement that most democratic voters don’t find Donohue a credible critic (while agreeing that you don’t agree with everything your employees write, you don’t enforce past-tense loyalty tests.)

I think there were many in the media who could have sympathized with the point that the ball can’t be moved so that campaigns are responsible for things that bloggers say before they are hired. (With the right framing). While there are lines, what Amanda and Melissa wrote would probably have been found less offensive than Donahue. Not to mention less offensive than other people, like Michelle Malkin, who were criticizing them. Use the opportunity to link Republican candidates cozying up to conservative bloggers and flash their most offensive statements. (These guys show up at CPAC don’t they?)

Frankly Edwards could have used the opportunity to make his campaign about highlighting the right wing noise machine. The early donors would have liked to see the energy and the ability to push-back. In way I miss “Slick Willie” for his deftness in going around (and sometimes through) personal attacks and coming out cleaner on the other side.

And furthermore the blogosphere would have started giving everything to back Edwards for showing loyalty to his employees AND for pushing back. In the end he might have been able to shift the frame away from “Does Edwards endorse everything his bloggers write” to “Are conservative politicians as much at risk for associating with bloggers?”

More On Gay Marriage.
Plus: Political blogging brings in the posters

First off I know I haven’t been posting much lately. I’m sorry. I’ve been depressed lately but in light of my promise I’m not going to drag my bad attitude in here.

However I find it interesting that my post about anti-gay marriage has attracted some attention (by “some” I mean any). I’m not going to argue with people who come here to post about it. Because we’re looking at the issue from two different dimensions. I’m looking at an apple and calling it a fruit and while they are calling it a piece of dense matter. There’s no common ground to which to hammer out dialogue in the culture war. There’s no starting point to agreement. We don’t agree about the terms of the debate or the stakes.

Besides what changes people’s minds isn’t arguing with strangers on the internet. It’s interpersonal communications in their real life. Knowing someone who is gay, having a gay family member. Maybe if Marshall McLuhan is right then watching a TV show about gay people might help.

But my blog isn’t going to change anyone’s mind. And they’re clearly not going to change mine. We’re looking at the same object but we can’t even think of common words to describe it.

No Marriage Without Procreation

This is the most awesome stunt ever! I wish I still lived in Seattle so I could write about it for The Stranger.

The Washington Defense of Marriage Alliance (WA-DOMA) announced on Thursday that their proposed initiative to make procreation a requirement for legal marriage has been accepted by the Secretary of State and assigned the serial number 957.

That’s right anti-gay marriage types (and the passive majority who keeps voting for states’ anti-gay marriage bans). So if you want to keep saying that marriage is important because it produces children and that because gays can’t produce children they shouldn't be allowed to marry than its time to put your money where your big fat mouth is. No marriage for anyone who can’t or won’t produce children.

Yes it’s a stunt. But it’s a good one. It targets the bullshit right back squarely at the people who want to get upset about gays by using some cockamamie argument against gay marriage. (For the record, I don’t believe it’s possible to be accepting of gays but against gay marriage. I suspect anyone who is really against gay marriage is really just uncomfortable with gayness in general.)

Hat tip Feministing.

Howie Kurtz Doesn’t Praise The Politico, Color Me Shocked!

In the DC media market there’s been a lot of chatter about the new start up politics-centric newspaper-slash-website The Politico. Basically it’s well-funded and grabbed a couple of high-level reporters from The Post and a couple other places but it’s not offering a particularly unique product. There’s Roll Call, The Hill, National Journal, plus of course The Washington Post, and every other paper’s DC bureau.

Now, full disclosure, I applied for a job at The Politico but that’s just because it’s practically down the street from me and I’m unemployed. And no, I don’t think The Politico is anything special but I do believe that competition makes everyone perform better. I bet the very existence of The Politico is going to make all its competitors try harder for a little while.

Most though I want to smack Howie Kurtz on the nose for writing the kind of bitchy, gossipy bullshit “column” about a rival that I expect to find at one of two alternative weeklies sharing the same city.

So Howard Kurtz writes that:

The political-junkie Web site, led by two former Washington Post reporters, wasn't as jam-packed as I expected, or as colorful, and is rarely updated during the day. In fact, most of what is on Politico.com -- and the print version, distributed free mainly on the Hill -- could easily have run in an Old Media relic like this newspaper. It strikes me as solid and substantive, but not knocking anyone's socks off.

Wow, a rival editor who is now reviewing the new product of former colleagues and he finds it lacking? How shocking????

Since Harris and Jim VandeHei, the Politico's executive editor, left high-profile Post jobs in November to launch the site, there was plenty of bleating in the press about the imminent death of print and the ascendancy of the Web. Well, there's no question that online sites are hot, which is why newspapers are pouring resources into their digital operations (including an expanded politics section on washingtonpost.com that just happened to start up last week).

See, says Kurtz, us print newspapers are still the best place to get news. All we have to do is expand our existing sections. More Howard Kurtz please! I want him served up five days a week unvarnished.

Allen and Harris wrote of Hillary Clinton that her challenge was "convincing millions of people that the most famous woman on the planet -- someone who has been astride the national stage for 15 years -- is someone quite different than they think she is." If that sounds like a Post news analysis, maybe it's because they used to be the White House team here.

Or frankly still the old team since today’s front page above the fold story is “Mixed Reviews For Clinton In Iowa” (which should have been called “Post Reporters Are Not Impressed By Clinton’s Moves In Iowa Because We Think People Don’t Like Her And Are Determined To Prove Everyone Agrees With Us”)

Some items are way inside baseball, and a few stories -- such as "Health Problems Pose Governing Challenge," because the average age of senators has risen from 60 to 62 -- seem a bit of a stretch.

But dissing a rival newspaper staffed with former colleagues, that is totally something EVERYONE is interested in reading.

The Web site, which drew about 488,000 visitors in its first four days, is competing for advertising in a different arena: with Slate, Salon, National Review Online, Huffington Post, Instapundit and countless political blogs. Harris, for his part, is relieved that he got the thing up and running in the space of one month.

See those smucks aren’t the only web site competing for dollars. They’re doomed! Not like the Washington Post. They don’t compete for advertising dollars at all.

"I just hope people will judge us over time," he says. "We had never expected to create a revolutionary new brand of journalism on Day One."

And since you didn’t pass the Kurtz sniff-test on your first day, clearly you didn’t. Better give up your day job Jim VandeHei!

Chocolate Gum?

I love chocolate and I love gum. So what better than to combine the two great foods together?

I was in the local 7-11 (stomping ground for special additions and "new" candies) and I saw the Bubble Yum Chocolate. It was $.89 but I decided worth it just to try it out.

Chocolate-the-flavor doesn't often translate well. (See Skittles Ice Cream flavor, which includes "chocolate"). To give Bubble Yum credit, their verison of "Chocolate" is better than Skittles. Its chocolatier than Tootsie Pops (which I think is technically supposed to be fudge, isn't it?) but it's still not really chocolatey.

The other thing about the gum is that the flavor (while pleasant) fades really fast and then turns into an unpleasant flavorless gum with an artificial aftertaste. Yeah, chew this gum for 15 minutes and you'll want to start replacing the flavor in your mouth with mint or something.

Also, has anyone ever thought that Bubble Yum puts too much gum per piece? Chewing a full piece of Bubble Yum starts hurting my jaw after a while. I've been in the habit of only chewing a half-a-piece for a while now. Makes the gum last longer, although in the case of Bubble Yum Chocolate, I don't think I'd buy another pack.

Abandoned Blogs Make Baby Jesus Cry

This blog isn't dead it's just sleeping! I swear! Anyway if you came to look at this blog because of my Aaron Sorkin post (Hi Twoppers!) this blog is mostly about me and Weight Watchers but occasionally I posted little anecdotes of amusement. And sometimes I rant about old episodes of Loveline and Adam Corrolla. Yeah this blog makes no sense, I agree. I'm the total "blogger in her pjs with a freezer full of Lean Cuisines and an apartment full of cats." (For the record, the two cats I live with aren't mine and the Lean Cuisines are very, very old because I don't like them.)

I am about to be unemployed again after a lovely five-month interval of being an actual employed "activisty" blogger. I would love to link to my other stuff on here, but I'm not sure I want the world to know that my regular persona has such low self-esteem.

Loveline interesting moment #2: Cartoon Dialogue

It's time for another post which reminds me why I started this blog. Michael Narren has created four really amusing Loveline cartoons where are based on small snippets of dialogue which he then animated. One is called "Finding Fauntleroy" (where Adam explaines how Drew took the PSATs while still in the womb). I finally found the actually broadcast where this snippet came from, November 16, 2004. It happens about 18 minutes into the broadcast. A female caller says she's definately going to college but is starting at Junior College first. This sets Adam off on his usual "Jr. College" rant. Drew asks the caller what she got on her SATs and the girl says she didn't take them. This is what inspires Adam's musings on when Drew first took the SATs.

Interestingly I think this episode may also be the source of the ubiquitous sound clip of Drew saying "Your gay." It's hard to tell. About 72 minutes into the show Adam is talking about something to do with penises and intros with "This might seem like a possibly gay question."

Whereas Drew is heard saying "You're gay." It comes off pretty natural, not like Anderson playing the clip. But it certainly could be Anderson. It's pretty off-hand though, so maybe that wasn't even the source, just something Drew happened to say that night.

Also see Loveline interesting moment #1: Birth of Chief Thunderbear.

Lip balm mania!

Heh. I didn't realize there was a little club on Flickr that was as obsessed with lip balms as I am.

This Space Left Blank

(Gottfrid) Chair – a love story

I’m not sure exactly when we first met. I know it was after my first roommate moved out and took her re-upholstered kitchen chairs with her. Of course I was heart-broken. My roommate had lovingly repainted and refurbished two older chairs, making them cool. Making them comfy. But now she was gone and so were they.

Naturally she left me the broken kitchen chairs. The ones whose form matched the table perfectly but in function only had three working legs. I knew no amount of glue would ever fix our relationship, it was broken from the start.

So it was with a heavy heart I set out for IKEA, not really expecting to find much. IKEA is the bargin basement of pressboard furniture love. The kind of place where you find Ms.-right-now, not Ms.-I’ll-be-giving-you-to-my-grandchildren-someday kind of furniture.

Some people say love at first sight, but for us it was love at first sit. Oh sure, I had an inkling you were the one when I first saw your curved black form with u-shaped padding. But it wasn’t until I sat in you that I felt my back and my ass just scream with comfort “YES! YES! YES!”

Why do we love the ones they do? Why do we seek to find flaws in others that we miss in our dear ones? I don’t know. All I know was the combination of a curved padded backing, slightly downward titled seating that was wide enough and cushioning enough meant you were made for comfort but your sleek black&white design meant you were still pretty enough to bring home to momma.

There was one minor hitch in our love, we didn’t match styles. You were painted black and white, whereas my kitchen table was a warm chestnut wood. But no matter. I didn’t care if our styles clashed, I was taking you home.

Or I should have. In years since of course I would kick myself for not taking you right there and then. What can I say? I was young. You cost $80 + tax which I thought was exorbitant considering my first chairs only cost $15 at the Goodwill. At best I was only thinking I would be able to buy one of you, an awkward child that would never last in the long-run. The first “real” house or apartment I moved into, the single unmatched chair would have to go. But I wanted you so bad I was willing to buy only one, just so we could be together.

But I waited. Time passed. My fortunes rose and fell, and then fell some more. Spending $80 for a kitchen chair was impossibility when grocery money was measured out by $5 bills.

A turning point in our love

Then things changed. My 30th birthday comes and I am gifted with enough money to buy one of you. Still I hesitate. It feels like I’ve been waiting so long, what’s another few months. A friend convinces me to spend my money differently. To wait further.

And so it goes. I want to make myself worthy of you. I want my large ass not to crack your beautiful frame. I will get in shape. I will lose weight and only then will we be together.

As the date approaches however something goes wrong. Suddenly you are no longer at your usual place, IKEA. All the searching of the globe reveals is that while you remain in England and Canada, you have left America for good.

Heartbreak! It is over. My perfect chair love is lost forever. I consider trips to Europe and Canada. I’m suddenly willing to spend hundreds of dollars to achieve something that cost only $80 once.

Slowly I being to resign myself to our fate...we will never be together. I return to the scene of our first love, Ikea. I flirt with Henriksdal, he has been around forever and is dependable if not exiting. But no matter what I look like, I can’t match your beautiful craftsmanship. Your combination of padding and curves. My back and ass do no welcome other chairs with such job.

In a drunken daze I bring home a $250 filly, marked down to $20 in a liquidation sale. You would think I would be happy with such a high-class chair. One that is normally too rich for my blood.

But alas, all I can think of is you. How happy we would have been together. I weep for our lost love.

A miracle

And then the gods smiled upon us. An innocuous ad in craigslist. “Table and chairs for sale- $100.” How many ads like it have I not clicked on? I don’t know. But I was bored, searching, always searching. And there you were! A pair, bright as day! The ad crucially failed to mention your pedigree, but I knew you on sight. What was one out of reach, what once I would have been willing to shell out hundreds of dollars for was not ripe to be plucked for half price. A pair for $80! I would have even been willing to take the table if necessary to get to you.

And so it was. Your previous owner didn’t need you anymore and I reached her within 15 minutes of her posting her ad. My only concern was that somehow she wouldn’t wait a mere day or two for us to be together. Perhaps another buyer would snatch you out of my grasp once more.

But our love was bending fate to my will. My first paycheck in 4 weeks was direct deposited faster than I expected. I now had the means to buy you.

And so there you both sit in my dinning room. We are as happy as clams together. Although the waiting was cruel I now know that true love only comes from being tested. My back, my ass and your frame will live forever together in harmony.

Gottfrid chair come back?

About five days ago I noticed that the IKEA chair of my dreams, the Gottfrid, disappeared of the IKEA USA website (usually meaning that’s it for the item). I don’t think I can even convey how upset this made me. I’ve been dreaming about this chair for almost a year now. It’s become totally fetishized in my brain as the most perfect kitchen chair (for it’s price range). I was saving up to buy it but also it was going to be my reward for hitting my 10% goal.

So I’ve been randomly googling “Gottfrid chair” a lot the last few days, trying to see if I can find someone selling a used set at least. Apparently it’s for sale still in Canada and the UK.

Yesterday I found the IKEA Gottfrid chair link was working again (it had gone offline) and I managed to order two chairs. But then by the end of the day, IKEA sent me an e-mail saying the chair was out of stock and will not be shipped and so my credit card will not be charged.

Now I see the Gottfrid chair is back on the IKEA USA website, visible even when looking at all their chairs. It’s still out of stock for the entire IKEA USA stores (I looked up stock availability at each store just to see) but perhaps IKEA is thinking about bringing it back, hence why they brought the chair back to the website?

I can only hope.

You know I was reminding myself that I was becoming a lot like the main character in Fight Club by fetishizing home décor. Like that line where he says about his coffee table, “That’s it, at least I knew I had the last coffee table I was ever going to need.” I’ve been thinking how much I’m starting to resemble that character at the beginning of the movie.

UPDATE: I called IKEA customer service and the woman said IKEA is definately *not* selling the chairs anymore. And then I just started looking on craigslist and someone in my neighborhood just happens to be selling two of them and a table for $100. It's not even labeled "Gottfrid" I can just tell by the picture. I MUST HAVE THOSE CHAIRS.

UPDATE II: Check out the thrilling resolution, "Chair, A Love Story."

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More designing with food-Orbitz

This is part of my continuing series of decorating themes with food. Every once in a while you just find this perfect combination of style and cool and just works out better than you ever could have imagined. I've had this bottle of Orbitz (the drink) since at least 1997. I was living in a dorm room and noticed someone had placed a bottle above a swinging lamp that was in every room. Voilá, instant lava lamp.

So naturally I copied it for my own dorm room. After I left the dorms I just had this bottle hanging around. It still looked cool, but I didn't really have a way of duplicating the lamp in my dorm room. So for nine years I just have been carting the thing around, putting it on ledges and window sills for effect.

But last weekend at IKEA I saw these Kubbo lamps. It completely duplicates the instant lava lamp without actually having to sit on a real lamp. It's so perfect and cool looking its like the Kubbo lamp was made just for Orbitz bottles. That's actually a picture of my nine-year-old bottle sitting on the Kubbo lamp.

Oh yeah, I never ever tried the drink. Rumour had it as very nasty, like drinking something super-sweet with phlegm in it.

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Urban Outfitter-IKEA-Crate & Barrel style envy

So I finally got a temp job to start Monday at a large nationally famous non-profit known for helping people out in disaster areas (who's symbol and color is also its name). After not working for three weeks I was about ready to tear my hair out. Not that staying home and playing video games aren't fun. In fact I sort of settled into playing Civilization IV as my only means of keeping me from panicking about my financial situation. I also read Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince for the fifth time. (Re-reading Harry Potter is sort of the equivalent of "comfort food.") As it is, I've already borrowed $300 from my family and will have to borrower rent money--but I intend to refund at least the $300 right after I get my first paycheck. I won't get paid until the same day rent is due so it's more about the timing than the money.

But I find it odd that my mind is already cashing checks I haven't even earned as I slowly start surfing furniture and design stores again. In supreme irony, Ikea seems to have stopped selling the Gottfrid chair I was obsessed over (and which I used my birthday money intended for the chair to sign up with Weight Watchers). Guess I'll have to find another chair to obsess over. I was planning on buying it when I hit my 10% weight loss goal (when you lose 10% of your body weight, which for me is 23 lbs.)

But now that I have a new roommate moving in, (if you read this blog all the way through, in March all I do is talk about my roommate search. I have a lovely girl who's 8 years my junior moving in but I don't intend to talk about her in case one day she reads this blog. But she was pretty much my first choice and the only one I felt in sympatico with when I showed the apartment off the one weekend. And I wasn't even stoned that day.) I'm becoming more and more obsessed with fixing up my apartment, style-wise.

My first roommate and I really worked together to come up with a kind of color scheme. We had a sort of gray, black, white, dark blue and red theme going on. I won't say it was perfectly designed or anything, but it felt like the apartment really "hung" together stylistically. Then when she moved out, she took out her art from the common areas (natch) and my second roommate, other than adding a broken clock and a Dali painting, never really tried to fix up the room. For her this was meant to be a temporary place (well 18 months). I'm not faulting her for it, but we didn't even take down the old picture hooks so we had these new pictures (and the clock) hanging half-hazardly wherever an old picture used to hang. I even resorted to hanging a poster on the wall just to fill some of the empty wall space.

So now that I will soon to earning income again I started to peruse Urban Outfitters and Crate & Barrel and to a lesser extent IKEA (sob! my chair...my perfect chair is gone!). Walking into Urban Outfitters especially makes me feel like a slob with no style. Everything they have looks so "cool" even though part of me knows that it's just mass produced "coolness." Buying fake crappy art to hang on your walls is bad, whereas at least hanging up old advertising posters you personally collected (therefore no one else has) is at least original. But I shouldn't sound too much like a snob about all these. I remember from my Critical Theory class we were talking about the concept of "original" and what does that mean when it's something like a photography or a reproduction. Unless you are hanging the only painting in existence with that particular image is why is "originality" important? What does "limited edition print" really stand for? (Except an attempt to raise the value of an image). I was so swept up into that theory that for my mother's 60th birthday I insisted to my brother we buy her one original painting because I wanted something unique and special in the family. We spent $1,000 between the two of us and bought a beautiful watercolor by David Yeh, a Detriot-area artist.

Currently the art in my apartment exists of my friend's black&white photos. I would like to link to his website because they are really good. For years he took concert photos around Seattle but I actually like his candid shots better. Just weird or interesting images or people. Plus I have another photo from another friend of Courtney Love playing a Christmas time concert (I think 1999). What can I say? It's Courtney and it's a really nice photo of her playing. I also have two badly framed Rolling Stones magazines, one with Courtney & Hole on the cover and the other is Kurt Cobain and Nirvana. NOT his first cover with the iconic "Corporate Magazines Still Suck" shirt (I want that cover) but his second one where he's wearing a suit. I found the magazines in a used bookstore in Seattle one day and framed them.

In my apartment I also have three Tim Wistrom prints as well as a framed Seattle Weekly cover with a detail of a Tim Wistrom painting. Wistrom paints nature landscapes, mostly of the Pacific Northwest but with a sci-fi-ish twist of either cities with a second-Ice Age or global warming. I just like the concept of nature reclaiming the cities images, although I do wonder what happened to the people?

Of course I also have the (now framed) Torani posters. I also have a steamer trunk that serves as a coffee table. I shellacked the top and covered it with multiple kinds of tarot cards. It actually looks really cool, one of the few art projects I worked on that came out well.

I keep looking over at Urban Outfitters to tell me how to make up my apartment. As if I can fix my life by buying a $100 shag rug. I don't know why I always fall into the trap of thinking that buying material things is going to "fix" my life. Make me cooler or happier. Frankly no one ever comes over here anyway.

There has to be some kind of connection between my materializing (ie, buying things will make me happy, looking cool will make me happy, buying things will make cool) and my actual lack of "coolness" because I'm going about it the wrong way.

Food advertising as art: Torani Posters

I suppose in a way this keeps with my blog's theme about "food" since this is essentially a post about food art since I've become obsessed with these old Torani Italian Syrup advertising posters lately.

You may have seen these posters before. They were pretty ubiquitous back in the late 1990s when Torani ran an ad campaign that played off old pulp fiction images. You can see tiny jpgs of their entire campaign here. Their website even had a "compose a Noir story using Torani syrup" contest where I believe each month the winner got a case of their syrup.

Anyway, around 1999 I ordered a set of the posters from Torani’s website and received four of them. Then maybe three years ago, I wrote an e-mail to Torani asking if they had any more of the posters from the old campaign (which they had long since stopped using) and some anonymous kind soul sent me the Soda 2000 poster.

But that still leaves me bereft of this one final poster which you can see here, Chocolate Fugitive. Until recently I wasn't even certain how many posters Torani had produced for the campaign. I owned five, and I remembered seeing Chocolate Fugitive hanging on the wall of a Seattle coffee shop/newstand called Bulldog News. I think I was tempted to ask for it, even back before I started collecting them. However after a little digging I realized there were only six posters produced: Soda 2000, Chocolate Fugitive, Soda Jerk, This Java's Jumping, Seduced by Flavor, and Sweet Nothings.

I got the above jpg only recently when in a random search for the old Torani posters I stumbled across this article in the Madison Avenue Journal written by Kurt Brokaw. It was the first good look at Chocolate Fugitive I’d seen in a while, (as well as a nice run down of the Noir aesthetic) and I e-mailed the author to ask about the image...basically where did it come from?

Here’s what he wrote me back:

I clipped the Torani ad from a magazine maybe five-six years ago....I'm pretty sure Torani borrowed the woman/car scenario from some 50s crime paperback, probably a [paperback] original from a minor imprint. I don't recognize the art from any well known crime/noir novel, and I know this material pretty well. Maybe Torani got the rights and thus the publisher/illustrator info, maybe not.

What Kurt Brokaw wrote fits with the little bits of information I managed to glean from the advertising agency that ran the campaign Gardner, Geary, Coll & Young (now known as Maiden Lane) that they used real pulp fiction covers and then clearly just altered the images. Perhaps the cover rights expired which is why GGC&Y was able to use them. Or maybe they just purchased them outright since I doubt Torani would have approved an advertising campaign if the ownership of the copyrights was questionable.

It may seem weird to hang posters for coffee syrups on your wall as “art” but in a way it reminds me of those fairly famous French alcohol ads from the 1920 you see hanging everywhere , including Trading Spaces episode.

So if anyone sees this Chocolate Fugitive let me know because I would love to have a complete collection.

Long lost cousin edition

I have a pretty unique family name. It's not hard to spell or even unusual, but I've always been under the impression that pretty much the only people in the United States who have my last name are related to me. The reason for this is because my paternal grandfather, and his two brothers, all changed their name at the same time in the 1930s. They basically "Americanized" their names. So while it's easy to spell and pronounce, it's also unique because it's made-up. I always thought it was curious that you have these three brothers sort of keep the bloodline obvious by all of them changing their names. Ironically however the family last name has pretty much only been passed on by my grandfather and his children. His brothers ended up having girls or boys who died too early to have kids.

I have a first cousin who had a My Space webpage and today she was contacted by another girl who ironically had the exact same last name and first name. The girl was eager to figure out if they were related because, like me, she assumed pretty much the only people with our last names were related to us.

My Aunt Annie figured it all out. The girl's grandfather is my grandfather's first cousin. We're third cousins and our parents (the girl's father and my aunt, plus my father) are second cousins. Apparently, unknown to most of the living members of my family, while my grandfather and his brothers all changed their names in the 1930s, his first cousin also changed his name, albeit not until the 1950s.

I still find that fascinating. Changing a family name is kind of a huge step. Sure we're Jews (and no, our name isn't and wasn't something like Goldberg or Silver) but the last name thing still means something. I find it odd that here's this guy, and he has a last name. Yet for some reason when he was in his 20s or so decided to change his name to the same name as his cousins, who had done this 20 years before.

Unfortunately this girl's grandfather passed away some time ago (the one who changed his name) but her father is around and apparently as interested in this as my aunt and my father are. My aunt gets really into family genealogy because my grandfather/her father passed away when she was 15 years old.

He was the only grandparent I never met, although I'm sad to say I just found out my last grandmother (maternal) has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's. I'm not ready to deal with that yet. But over the years I've thought a bit about this "missing" grandparent a lot. I'm far more like my Dad than my Mom and I've wondered how much he was like his Dad. (I didn't really get along with my paternal grandmother all that much. Kind of your typical old Long Island Jewish woman.) I've often thought about how much I rely on my father still, for advice, for money, for conversation and I'm 30! I can't imagine losing his company when I was 22 or 15.

I've often thought my aunt has a little "daddy-shaped" hole in her heart where she lost hers so young even though she's in her late 50s now. I was even chatting with my Dad on the phone about all these long-dead (or missing) relatives and he started getting emotional (which he rarely does).

So anyway, there's at least one other set of people out there with my last name aside from the the people who are all related through my grandfather. This long-lost cousin--the first cousin of my grandfather-- apparently had two children, a boy and a girl (I think, I know he at least had a boy). That boy, my grandfather's first cousin-once removed, also has two kids. The girl is the one who contacted my cousin with the My Space page and she has an older brother. That guy, along with my brother and my cousin, are the only "males" of the next generation with that same last name (my brother, my uncle's kid, and this new long-lost third cousin). My brother is the only one of those three males who's married. The other two are in their mid-to-early 20s AND my brother does have one child, a 2-month old girl. I think this new niece of mine is the first of the new generation in the same family name in 17 years. But she's a girl so she really can't "pass on" the family name beyond her (of course, she's TWO MONTHS OLD, she can't even hold her head up.)

I was thinking how interesting it would be, one more generation out, and there could be an entirely new branch of the family that is unaware of "the others" with the same last names. I'm sure if my cousin, my uncle's kid, gets married I'll come to his wedding and when he has kids I'll be "aware" of it in that vague way you keep track of first cousins. But I bet before this guy hits 50 I will lose track of him entirely; basically after both our parents are dead. There are cousins I'm closer to, and with e-mail it's a little easier to stay in touch, but as the family spreads across the map if you aren't seeing these cousins regularly. If you aren't "growing up" with them or hanging out together the imperative to stay in touch basically goes away after your parents/aunt/uncle die. They become just people.