Category Archives: It’s A Wonderful Life

Hot Air

Fable Folderol

Add this myth to the ever-expanding list of commonly-held falsehoods: the holidays are a significant cause of suicides.

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George Bailey, Preparing To Jump

Yep, you guessed it. It ain’t true at all. It’s so untrue that, in fact, the exact opposite can be argued — the holidays prevent people from committing suicide. That’s what figures from the Centers for Disease control indicate. The CDC tells us fewer suicides occur in November and December than any other time of the year.

So flush this one down the toilet along with the full moon causing mayhem and people using only 10 percent of their brains.

Food Folderol

I’ve patronized Chipotle ever since I arrived in Bloomington mainly because the place serves the kind of ginormous burritos I’d become accustomed to in my Chicago days. Back in my beloved hometown, there’d be burrito joints and taquerias seemingly on every corner. There was even a place that advertised “Burritos As Big As Your Head.”

The truth is if you can find a burrito as big as my coconut, you’ll enjoy an extraordinarily filling repast indeed. Perhaps two.

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La Bamba Burritos

Anyway, Chipotle has been the source of a number of foodborne illness outbreaks in the last calendar year.

You might say the company has been the victim of bad luck. There’s a dizzying variety of ways colonies of bacteria can grow in foods at restaurants and grocery stores. From preparers who neglect to wash their hands after using the bathroom to servers who violate time-temperature guidelines, the food you eat could, at any moment, pack a wallop of microorganisms on your forkful that’ll have you hugging the white bowl for days at a time. In fact, pretty much every single forkful of food you shove into your mouth contains scads of sickening germs. Your body’s natural defense system usually takes care of all the invaders entering your gullet. That is, unless the sheer number of microorganisms overwhelms your defenders.

That’s what happened to hundreds of people, Chipotle diners all, on five separate occasions in 2015. Once is a simple occurrence, twice a coincidence, five times a pattern. Chipotle foodborne illness outbreaks this year have affected poor souls in at least 10 states. The causes of these mass horkings have included E. coli, salmonella, and norovirus, three unrelated invaders, indicating the fast food operation has a big problem on its hands.

Chipotle, of course, crows about its local food sourcing and all-natural ingredients. Well, everybody does, but Chipotle was on it early and big, the first national corporate entity to jump on that bandwagon. Chipotle’s “mission statement” (ugh, I detest corporate-speak) claims it offers “Food with Integrity.” (Double-ugh, I detest — almost as much — profit-making under the guise of altruism.)

McDonald’s Corp. was a big investor in Chipotle Mexican Grill, Inc. from 1998 through 2006, a period of time during which C. grew from a modest-sized Colorado chain to a 500-location coast-to-coast juggernaut. It’s ironic, natch, that a McDonald’s-owned outfit would succeed based on an appeal to the “natural” palate. Mickey D’s “food” is about as natural as that bottle of soap scum remover under your bathroom sink.

A secret: I still, on rare occasions, indulge in a Big Mac. Sue me.

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Guilty

Somehow, Chipotle overcame the negative image of its corporate overlord and actually became known as a crunchy, New Age-y, safe place to eat. College students went gaga over the place. They could eat fast crap while convincing themselves they were still protecting their holy temple bodies. Chipotle told  customers its food was free from GMOs and other weapons of mass destruction.

Yet, five times in the last year Chipotle’s food has caused hundreds of folk to invert their maws. Yuck.

Now comes Henry I. Miller, bio-researcher, former food and drug regulator, and a Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, to say Chipotle’s problems with foodborne illness are a result of its natural, crunchy, New Age-y practices. Miller says locally-produced food is not safer, “pesticide-free” crops actually are rife with potentially dangerous bug-killing substances, organic grains often are tainted by toxins and parasites, and using natural fertilizer — read: animal shit — increases the odds of foodborne illness eightfold.

And it’s not that Chipotle and the like would argue with Miller. Here’s a line from Chipotle’s 2014 annual report (p. 14):

We may be a higher risk for foodborne illness outbreaks than some competitors due to our use of fresh produce and meats rather than frozen and our reliance on employees cooking with traditional methods rather than automation.

In other words, our methods suck — and are dangerous, to boot.

If you spend your time gathering your food info from profit-driven media or, worse, “natural” websites, you’ll become convinced there are only two types of food in this world:

  1. Magic food that’ll make you healthier, stronger, happier, more orgasmic, and will help you live to the ripe old age of 152.
  2. Evil food that’ll cause cancer, heart disease, obesity, rashes, shingles, warts, poverty, pollution, crime, slavery, and Donald Trump’s hair.

In our ultimately unfulfillable quest to live forever, we’ve latched onto food as the magic pill in recent years. Now, not only is it unwise to ingest Drano, cyanide, nail polish remover, and gasoline, it’s considered almost as rash to eat a slice of bread or enjoy a cob of genetically modified corn. Conversely, if we only buy squash from the organic farmer down the road, we’ll live long enough to see humankind populate Mars.

Here’s a truism from an inveterate talker: People talk too much.

Miller concludes:

Although the crops, meats and other foods produced by modern conventional agricultural technologies may not bring to mind a sentimental Norman Rockwell painting, they are on average safer than food that reflects pandering to current fads.

In the words of my favorite cook ever, Chico of Club Lago, shut up and eat.

[Gasp] He’s Naked!

Okay, ready for Evidence Item #33 gazillion that we, the species Homo Sapiens sapiens, are flat-out psychopathic? Here goes.

Some poor schmuck tried to wade through the shallow waters of the Mediterranean Sea the other day in an attempt to get around the barbed wire fence that separates Egypt from the Gaza Strip. He was a Palestinian and he wanted to get out of that god-foresaken apartheid hell and perhaps breathe the relatively freer air of its neighbor to the south (emphasis on relatively).

Egyptian border guards opened fire on him, dropping him like a sack of flour in the surf, errant rifle rounds plucking the waters around him and raising little up-splashes. Huzzah, the sovereign state of Egypt had been protected.

The whole incident was caught on video. The Arabic version of Al Jazeera aired the vid and tut-tutted the tragedy. Only the Palestinian guy had been stark naked as he splashed through the surf, perhaps as a way of showing he wasn’t carrying any arms or weapons of mass hysteria into that ancient land. So, even though we see in loving detail a man’s life being snuffed out in a hail of bullets, Al Jazeera producers protected their viewers from seeing the poor bastard’s cold-turtled junk as well as his bare buttocks by pixellating these horrifying locales.

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Praise Allah — We Can’t See His Penis

Yes, the Earth, where terrestrial evolution’s highest form is more scared of nudity than bloody homicide.

 

 

The Pencil Today:

TODAY’S QUOTE

“When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest.” — Ernest Hemingway. Today’s temperatures should reach the 60s in South Central Indiana.

BOOKS MAKE A HOME

I’ll scream if I hear anyone saying teachers get paid too much. Or that they don’t deserve collective bargaining rights.

Granted, there are lousy teachers. Hell, I was saddled with, oh, seven of them through my eight years of elementary school. The one outstanding teacher I had, Miss Tristano in fifth grade, was a full-fledged hero. She’d been teaching at Our Lady of the Angels in December, 1958, when fire tore through the school and killed 92 kids and three nuns.

Iconic Image Of The Our Lady Of The Angels Fire

Anyway, a teacher doesn’t necessarily have to brave an inferno to do heroic things. Take Kathy Loser, the librarian over at Bloomington High School North.

She visits the Book Corner regularly. She dropped in Wednesday, all aflutter. She was consumed by a brilliant new idea that she hopes the school and the bookshop will buy into.

Kathy Loser

Here it is:

BHSN is one of the few schools in the nation to sponsor a Habitat for Humanity chapter. The kids have been helping build a home for a family with a couple of young children. The house will be ready to move into next month.

Kathy was watching — what else? — “It’s A Wonderful Life” over the holidays. When she got to the point where the Italian family moves into their new home and the neighbors all welcomed them with gifts of wine and groceries, housewarming seed gifts as it were, Kathy got a brainstorm.

Why not present the new family with seed gifts for a new home library?

Her plan is simple. Some of the kids can make a wooden bookscase for the place. Kids in the social studies classes can draw up a list of kids’ books and some standard reference works that every home should have.

Then, with the help of the attractive and charming Book Corner staff, a kind of new home library registry can be created.

BHSN parents and other citizens can come to the shop whenever they need to purchase gifts for their kids or other family and friends. Only the recipients won’t keep the gifts. The customers will select a book from the registry, buy it in the recipient’s name, and the book will be packaged with all the other such gifts and presented to the new home family along along with the bookcase on the day the move in.

What a great idea!

Kathy Loser is so gung-ho for it that she actually bought the first book. It’s “The Giving Tree” by Shel Silverstein. “Every home should have this, don’t you think?” Kathy asked as she plunked the book down on the counter.

I think indeed.

Give Kathy a call at the school, 812.330.7724, ext. 50197, to let her know you like the idea or to make suggestions for the registry or even to donate time or money to the cause.

THE DEFINITIVE REPUBLICAN

What is a Republican?

Someone who espouses financial prudence?

A backer of strong defense?

An opponent of strong federal regulations?

A pro-lifer?

Look no further than State Senator Vaneta Becker, who represents the Evansville area in the statehouse. Oh, she’s a Republican.

Becker: “Do It My Way Or Else. That’s Freedom!”

The Republican, in fact, at this weird, weird moment in American history.

Becker has introduced SB 122 this week. It calls for strict standards to be set for the performance of the national anthem at school events. Performers who violate those standards would be fined.

She says the proposed standards would reflect “how we feel about freedom.”

Not habeas corpus. Not the Bill of Rights (except for the sacred Second). Not torture. Not wiretapping. Not personal information harvesting. Not any of the things that Republicans and their all-too-willing Democratic apologists have created or destroyed in response the the specter of scary brown people.

Nope. The national anthem. That, Becker says, is our freedom.

Becker is the modern Republican.

AMERICA, THE BEAUTIFUL

This is a better song than the “Star Spangled Banner” anyway. And no one could sing it like Ray Charles.

The Pencil Today:

TO HOLLER OR NOT TO HOLLER

A timeless observation from the Basque writer Miguel de Unamuno: “Sometimes to be silent is to lie.”

Miguel de Unamuno

MUGSHOT

Poor Pat Murphy, my drinking buddy at Soma Coffee. Seems as though he only gets his picture in the Herald Times is when his Bloomington Utilities department is looking for more money.

Pat R.H. Murphy

I may tease him and say his middle name should be Rate Hike. He may in turn freeze me with one of his patented dirty looks, though.

JANUARY’S GONE

WFHB radio general manager Chad Carrothers released January Jones‘ resignation letter, addressed (tellingly?) not to him but to the “WFHB Community.”

January had been the News Director for almost a year. She took over for Chad after he, in turn, took over the general manager’s riding crop following the departure of Will Murphy to NPR’s Ft. Wayne station. She resigned last week.

Jones

Chad has whipped the station into a shape it’s never been in before. WFHB beat its fundraising goals in both the spring and fall pledge drives. He’s one of the hardest working human beings I’ve ever met.

January was extraordinarily hard-working as well. Maybe too much so. The key line in her letter reads: “… I’ve realized that the staffing models in the organization make the News Director job a difficult position for me to maintain.”

Without talking to either Chad or January at this time (they’ve not responded to my email messages yet) I can interpret the line two ways:

1) There’s too much work for me to do here without more paid staffers; or

2) There are things I’d like to to have done but couldn’t because I didn’t have the autonomy I need.

I’ll do my best to get more dope on this one.

WE DO FACEBOOK SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO

Here’s a new feature. Since most sentient humans are being driven to psychotic reaction by the flood of spamily, brattle, and breathless revelations of what people had to eat last night on Facebook, we’ve decided to wade through the mess and bring you the most illuminating ideas, events, and developments found there.

Let’s go:

Frank Miller long has been a titan in the comix and graphic novel rackets. His books “300,” “Sin City,” and “The Dark Knight Returns” all have been made into blockbuster movies (TDKR as “The Dark Knight.”) Bloomington’s Michael Redman and Mike Cagle point out that he’s now part of a virulent Hollywood crypto-fascism movement.

Miller on his blog refers to Occupy people as “louts, thieves, and rapists” as well as “pond scum.”

◗ Bibliophile extraordinaire R.E. Paris links to a moving video featuring a kid who was a victim of schoolyard bullying. She tells her own story of catching hell from schoolmates (speaking of louts!) R.E. credits former Star Trek actor George Takei with originating the link.

◗ Chicago-area green economy expert John Wasik points out that the Windy City is home to a Nikola Tesla fan club. Who knew?

Are you sitting down? There are chapters all around the nation!

◗ Finally, San Jose’s Chris Madsen reminds us it’s officially holiday season now that the yearly TV torrent of “It’s A Wonderful Life” airings has begun.

There. Aren’t you a better person for not having to read about someone’s pet bird?

Stay tuned for more.

THE CAT THAT BECAME FAMOUS

Go see Grover & Sloan’s fourth installment in their continuing series of the cat and the air pump, today in “Cats and Machines.”

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