Surviving the Workday

I thought I was having deja vu, but I really did read two completely different articles this week that made me facepalm.

In The Washington Post, we read the tragic stories of ordinary people who have had to begun scrimping and saving because of our floundering economy:

Gindraw-Parrott no longer buys brand-name products unless she’s at a warehouse store like Sam’s Club or BJ’s Wholesale Club. She’s even begun sending herself reminders on her BlackBerry so she doesn’t forget a case of water on sale at CVS or the twice-monthly sale on milk at Kroger.

…

Poli Marinova, a Bethesda marketing communications manager, said she has cut her grocery bills by almost 30 percent without switching to conventional foods. Instead, she skips “luxury items” like sushi and prepared sandwiches and soups. “We’re buying a lot less overall at Whole Foods. We used to buy juice, biscuits and baby food from there,” she said. “Now, we get a lot of that stuff at Costco or the Giant so we can afford to keep buying organic.”

Sorry honey, but if you are sending yourself reminders on your Blackberry to buy cases of bottled water, or still shopping at Whole Foods, you are not earning any sympathy from me.

A day later, I read in The Buffalo News more heartwrenching tales of deprivation:

“It’s a disgrace,” grumbled T.C. Crews, while pumping gas into his SUV at a Citgo gas station on Jefferson Avenue and East Ferry Street.

…

Steve Francoforte, a city worker from North Buffalo, said he expects his usual summer plans will have to change.

He said he will probably have to leave his Chevy Tahoe, which now costs $125 to fill, at home more and ride his more fuel-efficient motorcycle.

He also figures that he won’t take his 22-foot boat out on the water as often as he would like.

Call me insensitive, but stories like this belittle the true hardships that many people are dealing with right now. You know, the ones who drink tap water and don’t own SUV’s and boats.

Whaling is down. So you know what the whaling industry needed? An angle. And apparently that angle is that eating whale results in less carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere than eating other sorts of meat. That is one of the dumber arguments to be made for large scale whaling and rivals the wearing fur is green greenwashing.

Via Treehugger

 I would like to file this under What the F***? but alas, we have no such tag.

Seems a supervisor at a “motivational coaching business” had some crazy ideas as to what exactly motivates people. He woke up one day and said “I know! Waterboarding!”

A supervisor at a motivational coaching business in Provo is accused of waterboarding an employee in front of his sales team to demonstrate that they should work as hard on sales as the employee had worked to breathe.
    In a lawsuit filed last month, former Prosper, Inc. salesman Chad Hudgens alleges his managers also allowed the supervisor to draw mustaches on employees’ faces, take away their chairs and beat on their desks with a wooden paddle “because it resulted in increased revenues for the company.”

Regardless of whether or not Hudgens participated voluntarily in this exercise, as the company alleges, at some point in time, someone has to be the grownup here and say “Hey, wait a minute! This is stupid and harmful and I’m not going to participate in your shenanigans!”

In the latest installment of the New York Times hurl-worthy series, Sensible Portrayals of the Emotionally Bankrupt Parents (Part 1 Children Are Not Decor), here is Part 2: Never Too Young for That First Manicure. I’d say that’s just not true. And that photo would be a lovely place to start a discussion with your child about class.

It may be time to admit to the world that…drum roll….

1. Clowns scare me in a really deep primal way;

2. I loathe the Beach Boys and think they may be evidence of the decline of civilization.

So a Clown-Preacher named KoKoMo spreading the gospel would be enough for me to run from church screaming.

Yes, this is my Christmas gift: Kokomo the Clown-Preacher.

Steve Lopez of the LA Times surveys the merchants of Beverly Hills about their attitudes toward the economy: A strange trip into the land of $2500 sneakers.

One might expect more from the nation’s largest grower of fruits and vegetables than to have foreign (Nicaraguan) workers use a pesticide known to sterilize workers, but then one would be deeply disappointed in Dole. The take-away notion here is that U.S. companies can indeed be punished for being generally moral-free in other countries, but the financial penalty is not steep all things considered:

Overall, the workers were awarded $5.7 million from jurors who found that the Westlake Village-based corporation acted fraudulently when it sent workers into its Nicaraguan fields without warning them that the pesticide had sterilized California plant workers.

The pineapple. It is not so sweet.

You are too red for our own good.

Since 2004, the USDA and Department of Agriculture have allowed for meat gassed with carbon monoxide to be sold on shelves in supermarkets:

Treating packaged meat with CO extends its shelf-life by keeping it red long after it begins to spoil. In fact, gassed meat holds its color for upwards of one year, whereas CO-free packaged meat typically starts to turn after just 10 to 12 days on the shelf. It’s easy to see why the meat industry likes CO: Gassed meat could save retailers $1 billion annually in lost sales resulting from that finicky consumer aversion to browning meat.

Why would the government permit this practice? After all, the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act provides that a “food shall be deemed to be adulterated — if damage or inferiority has been concealed in any manner; or if any substance has been added thereto or mixed or packed therewith so as to — make it appear better or of greater value than it is.” This bar on concealing adulteration is what drove the USDA to ban the use of paprika in fresh meat products in 1969. CO injections are no different: Their sole purpose is to conceal inferiority and damage.

A few retailers have banned gassed meat including Whole Foods, Wegmans (CC!), Stop & Shop, and now Safeway.

You want to keep meat red? You keep it cold. That keeps it “fresh.” When you inject it with carbon monoxide, it looks “fresh” when it’s already spoiled as you can see in these photos of old spoiled yet still red meat. I hope other supermarkets follow the trend of refusing to sell gassed meat.

Read the whole story in the Topeka Capital Journal.

I’m so glad that VH1 decided to present Little Beauties (warning: very creepy photo of made up little girls), because my “evidence of the decline of civilization” category needs more posts. I think beauty pageants for women are sick. They aren’t talent competitions. They aren’t even scholarship competitions as they claim (ask any winner whether she got the money she was promised). But I think it’s infinitely more sick when beauty pageants are for six-year-old girls, and when the practice is then glamorized in a “light-hearted look”:

Little Beauties: Ultimate Kiddie Queen Showdown is a one-hour documentary special that will take a light-hearted look into the wonderful world of children’s beauty pageants through the eyes of four, precocious six-year old girls. This documentary reveals the humor and love behind an American tradition; the always colorful characters on the pageant circuit; and the “sparkle” it takes to win a crown.

 You really can’t start too young with the commodification and sexualization of women.

Via Feministing

I have a love-hate thing going with Trader Joe’s. I love some of the food (coffee, tea, wine, blood orange soda, soy milk), and hate some (”organics” from China, and everything else imported, which is the exact opposite of shopping locally and sustainably). And I wasn’t really impressed in my interactions with customer service either when I asked about labeling and Chinese products (”Trust us” as a customer service saying doesn’t really inspire trust).

However, in the end, it was not the food or customer service that drove me out of the store; it was the crazy crowds. Our local Trader Joe’s is so crowded that it’s hard to find a parking place and hard to move your cart once you’re inside. Not only that, people push and shove once in the store all the while screaming on their cell phones about inane things. Grocery shopping became the low point of my week, and involved considerable strategizing with Jim in order to find a time to shop that wouldn’t drive us over the edge. We settled on mid-week at 8:30 p.m., just before closing.

I thought it was me, but then I came across this comment on a Yelp review about our store:

-People shopping here act like every F’n product is a gold nugget or 10ct diamond and will fight you for the last [insert frozen product here]. Guess what, it’s just food!!! The poser people here also annoy the crap out of me and their whole fake hippy atitude. Then I see them climb into their hybrid SUV (see the problem here) out in the parking lot which is always FULL!!!

-The only way I can make this place bearable to shop at is to go sometime during the middle of the week, approximately 30-minutes before they close.

So apparently it’s not me. And it’s not just that Trader Joe’s. The one on La Brea in LA is gawdawful as is the one in La Canada and the one in Goleta. So, so long Trader Joe’s. I’m sure I’ll be back occasionally, but I just can’t take the crowds.

<———–This is my cat Spider. Spider is (mildly stated) stark raving mad. He has killed twelve birds in the past month. He is currently running around howling and literally climbing the walls–he got about five feet up at one point. He is a wild child, and cannot be caged, and believe me we’ve tried. He is deeply offended by the presence of paper and has eaten most of my mother-in-law’s Maeve Binchy paperback. He has been known to drag entire loaves of bread into a corner to gnaw on. His best friend is a stuffed (and disemboweled) banana slug named Sammy.

And even Spider thinks it is crazy that a company is marketing bottled water for dogs.

I’m not quite sure how I feel about a church in Kentucky asking their congregation to write letters of love and support for Britney Spears.

On the one hand, she is one messed up girl and I feel more sad for her than anything. So do a lot of other people (like how I slipped in yet another Tori Amos reference there? Steph is going to KILL me one of these days if you all don’t do it first.) Writing letters of love for Brit is a good exercise in finding empathy for someone who isn’t exactly the easiest person to love right now.

But I’m not entirely certain if it’s a church’s place to provide such public loving care and support for a washed up celebrity misfit, no matter how in need of it she is. I can’t help thinking a better exercise might be for them to volunteer at a homeless shelter (lots of mentally ill people there) or create a mentorship program for young mothers. This just smells like a publicity stunt.

-GhostGirl

First, does anyone remember an Austin Powers movie with Fembots? Because I think that’s really where I first heard the term. The term is, however, being repurposed here on the Today Show in a non-story about ”fembots” . And, glory of glories, the story manages to conflate all of the following under the term “fembot”:

• women who don’t eat cupcakes;
• women who don’t have feelings;
• women who have careers;
• women who are confident; and
• women who are child free.

Yes, fembots. All of them. I’m sure you know a fembot or two.

Via Feministing