out of context

I'm lovin' it?

Amid reports that corporate parent McDonald's may soon spin-off and sell it's recently purchased "upmarket" and "fast-casual" Mexican food chain Chipotle, devoted fans of the popular burrito assembly line are left with many questions, such as, "you mean to tell me my favoirte burrito joint was owned by McDonald's?" 

One question you don't hear too many patrons ask is the nutritional information of the hefty meal. I had been a regular Chipotle patron, going with co-workers approximately one day a week - we even went so far as to declare a day that we partook of the giant burritos a "Chiopot-Day."

In a New Year's zeal to re-examine my consumption habits, I took into consideration the nutritional and dietary effect of my weekly Chipotle intake.  Unfortunately, the Chipotle website, while in keeping with the painstakingly-crafted hip brand image of the chain, did not offer clear nutritional information.  I was therefore left to search for an alternative site with nutritional information.  I found it in Chipotle Fan, which provides a very handy interactive nutritional guide to the famed burrito chain. 

Simply enter in how you order your burrito, and they calculate the nutritional information for you.  Be warned:  if you are health conscious and a Chipotle fan, you may not want to know this information.  The thing is, the food is seemingly nutritious: it's made from simple, wholesome, fresh ingredients, prepared right in front of you.  But the end result can be scary.  The way I ordered mine (fajita burrito, with rice, mild salsa, cheese, and lettuce) was seemingly harmless.  But after I put it through the nutritional calculater, I realized that my weekly treat was packed with 44g of fat, 107g of carbs, and over 1,000 calories, (over half the recommended daily amount).  By comparison, a McDonald's Big Mac has 30g of fat, 46g of carbs, and "only" 560 calories.  Go ahead and try the calculator yourself - if you dare.  I myself have not been back to the chain since I found out just how much I was consuming.

The other surprise on this Chipotle Fan website (besides its own existence), is their generous public service - which they provide free of charge - to help consumers of this multi-national-owned food chain find their "burrito soulmate."  I kid you not:  you can enter online how you like your burrito, and search for that special person out there that likes their burrito the same way.  What's sad isn't the fact that some guy from George Washington University named Matt decided to create this fan site in the first place.  It's also not sad that he offered people the opportunity to cheapen the very concept of a soulmate (if that weren't already cheapened enough by our pop culture).  No, what I find sad is that over 4300 people have used the site to find their burrito soulmate, and over 2600 of them have been successful.   

[image via Chipotlelovers, another sad fan site.  why do these huge corporations need fan sites?  you don't see anybody clamoring to be a GElover or Citigroupfan, but I may be speaking too soon...]

Coping with a Second Term

There's got to be some healthier ways to cope with the W2.  (Image via from the front cover of The Stranger, Seattle's alternative news weekly, and one of the best in the country.)

A Nation Unites

The time for national healing has come.  It is time that we set aside our partisan differences and join forces to rally behind a noble cause that has the potential to unite the whole country:  working together, just maybe we can convince Brad and Jen to get back together.   For the sake of all of our country's future.  (Image via And I Am Not Lying, For Real via Gawker.)

Laci who?

In October, I went with my friend Katherine to a couple of events as part of The New Yorker Festival.  One was a panel discussion with the three network news anchors, "From Where We Sit:  the Campaign and the Network News."

After about an hour of moderated conversation by the New Yorker's media critic Ken Auletta, they allowed questions from the audience.  I knew this would be my chance to vent some of my frustration with the mainstream media, so I hurried up to one of the microphones to ask a question.  I didn't know it at the time, but C-SPAN was filming the event (my mom was flipping through and saw me the next day).  I also got a call a few days later from my old co-worker Jennie in Sacramento and then from my friend Adam's brother Alex in Cincinnati, both of whom had sworn they had heard my voice on the radio.  Sure enough, the NPR show Fresh Air played portions of the panel, which you can listen to here (to get to my question, fast-forward to minute 31:30).   
 
Here's what I asked:

"You all have spoken very eloquently this morning about your frustration with only having 18 or 22 minutes every night to report the serious issues - and everyone agrees that there are very serious issues affecting our world, and affecting, you know, our country  - so I wanted to hear kind of a justification from you about why you feel the need to cover the Kobe Bryant trial, the Scott Peterson trial, and I wanted to hear a defense of how that impacts my life and the public good."

Peter Jennings of ABC News refuted the question:

"I didn't cover the Laci Peterson 'thing' on our broadcast at all...I think we did only two pieces on the entire Kobe Bryant trial on World New Tonight."

Dodging the question, Tom Brokaw of NBC News spoke about the emergence of blogs, saying:

"it is a democratization of information, and frankly I think that's very healthy for our society."

I thought that only Dan Rather of CBS News honestly tackled the question:

"If I understand the core of this question, the answer is yes, taken as a whole, there's more reporting about celebrities, reporting about entertainment, people, trends - this is, what I have called in another context, the 'Hollywoodization of the News,' [this has] been a dangerous trend and continues to be...this undertow has developed, once news operations, particularly the major network news operations, became a profit center, it was inevitable that these pressures begin to work...it's a real and present danger that you succomb to...it's very hard to resist that each and every time."

Well lo and behold, today I came across the following story from none other than Peter Jenning's "we didn't cover Laci Peterson" network: "ABC News Original Report: Why We Were Infatuated With the Peterson Case."  Brilliant, Peter, absolutely brilliant.  You krazy Kanadian, you sure know a lot of about journalistic integrity and what's really important for people to know about in today's complex world.  

Media Overdose

My head is spinning right now.  It's Sunday night, and I have been a major media consumer these past several days.  I think that I've o'd on media.

Just in the past week:

I've watched the following TV (about a week and a half ago, my roommates and I got DVR, which, like TiVo, is a device for recording television...side note: a couple of months ago, I was talking about TiVo/DVR with my coworker Eddie and he was incredulous that I didn't have them yet - he questioned my logic and my very existence, saying "I don't know anyone under 25 who doesn't have [TiVo/DVR]," so now I have the opportunties to record and fast forward through the commercials for these shows): The Daily Show, Jack and Bobby, The NewsHour, This Week with George Stephanopolous (go Z), Meet the Press, Best Week Ever, 60 Minutes, Arrested Development, Scientific America Frontiers, Frontline, VH1's Robbing the Cradle (go Meg), the West Wing, Tim Russert interview with George Carlin, CNN special on evangelicals, Charlie Rose, Family Guy, part of the McLaughlin Group, Saturday Night Live, Da Ali G Show, part of the Giants game and a US soccer match

I've watched the following DVDs (I recently renewed my account with Netflix): Freaks and Geeks, the BBC documentary Walking with Cavemen

I've seen the following movies in the theatre: Sideways, the documentary film The Corporation

I've read in print:  part of the book "The Tipping Point," The New York Times, the Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, the New Yorker, Harper's, part of "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genuis", part of "Democracy in America"

I've read online: Wonkette, The New York Times, Tom Watson, Slate, Drudge, Gawker, the Black Table, Washington Post, Salon, the Onion, McSweeney's, BBC, DailyKos, FoxNews, the Note, MSNBC, CNN, and dozens of other linked sites,

I went to a Mike Bribiglia comedy show

I've listened to: my iPod, poor jukebox selections at the East Village bar HiFi, NPR (morning edition and This American Life), KEXP (online), KCRW (online), and my roommate play guitar;

This is not to even count all the headlines and magazine covers I've glanced at, or the ads I've seen on websites, on Television, on the radio (even though all of my regular stations are "public", there are still many "sponsors"), on billboards, at bus stops, on people's clothing, on people's shopping bags, in my mail, in my email, on the subway, on tops of taxis, in the elevator at work, in the grocery store, above urinals, on matchbooks, and along emails in my gmail inbox.

I have a voracious appetite for consuming stimulating media - whether it's a thoughtful magazine article, a clever website, an insightful op-ed, an entertaining book, a satisfying satire, a funny show, a balanced news item, an informative segment, an engaging interview, a dramatic depiction, humourous observations, or a powerful song - I want to take it all in. 

I think I need a break.  I don't have enough time to really process anything - I'm just overwhelmed with the sheer magnitude of it all.  How do I discern all that I consume?  How do I reflect on what I read or watch or listen to?  How do I stay afloat in this sea of media?  How do I get a handle on all of this? 

The Eggin' Cajun

From the James-Carville-is-officially-on-crack department, we have his performance with his Republican strategist wife Mary Matalin on Meet the Press this morning, where he smashed a raw egg on his face because his prediction in March about the election results was wrong.  Mary, in between moans and groans, still proclaimed "I love this man" and then consoled, as she helped him wipe off the egg off of his face, jacket, and the Meet the Press desk, "it's not that bad, it was a valiant effort." I assume she's referring to her Democratic husband's efforts with the Kerry Campaign, not the egg.

Who's sorry now?

This is a sorry state of affairs.  In addition to the orginal apologetic-to-the-world-on-behalf-of-the-48%-of-Americans-that-tried-to-vote-Bush-out-of-office, sorryeverybody, we now have the very defiant counter sites: sorryeverybodymyass, notsorryeverybody, and werenotsorry, (which doesn't sound right without the punctuation...couldn't they have gotten wearenotsorry, or don't they know how to talk without using contractions?)  Finally, to bring this all together, we now have notsorrynoteverybody, a sort of meta-apology/defiance site.

Let the healing begin.  (By the way, I feel bad for anyone that knows that pirate dude, or anyone that has to interact with him on a regular basis.)

Advice on Surviving the W2

For surviving 4 more years of Bush, Salon's Rebecca Traister offers 10 tips, mostly based on spite ("have extremely deviant sex" and "get divorced") or escapism ("Go to the movies" and "Quit drinking? Start again. Quit smoking? Congratu-fucking-lations. Light up").

As she points out:

"At first it was just exhaustion and the damaging psychological reversals of Tuesday's demoralizing polling-results debacle. We were left sore and nauseated, as if we'd taken a baseball bat to the belly. But it didn't get better after a good night's sleep. Next came rage -- at friends, family, entire states, individuals we've never met. If I could have burned Rudy Giuliani in effigy, I would have. This blinding, electric fury was at least an embrace of something vivid and alive, before the inevitable turn to existential despair. It wasn't about politics anymore. It was about life: there is no hope, no belief. Everyone and everything lets you down. There's been crying -- so much crying. At work and on the street and on subway platforms and at my friend's 30th birthday party on Saturday night at a swank private club. Just little rivulets of tears falling down the faces of
people I don't know to be easy weepers. So common that no one even remarks on it anymore.

So yeah, it all sucks, elementally. We lost. We don't have anything to look forward to. We have been defeated, by our own country, by ourselves. We gave everything we had, just like our parents told us to do, and it wasn't enough. The Enlightenment is being rolled back before our eyes. We can't get a firm enough grip to hold it in place. We're dying. We're all going to die ..."

I remember my rage phase.  I think I'm over that now.  The folks over at Free Williamsburg offer their own tips for getting over the Bush election.  A sampling:

"Be white, straight and rich.

March, impotently, against a disinterested Washington, protesting the latest atrocity.

Theorize about conspiracies. Conspire about theories.

Knock up a Bush twin."

Finally, Base Tree offers it's own 10-step guide for surviving in our new theocracy, which incluces advice like "dust yourself off" and "make money."  (Picture of "WTF" eagle from Urban Botique.)

So Long, New Deal

James Surowiecki's Financial Page in this week's New Yorker is a must-read.  He breaks down the myth of Bush's rosey-sounding proposal for an "ownership society" and sheds light on the result that privatization (of social security and medicare) will really lead to an increased risk for individuals:

"Generally, we want people to reap the benefits of their own successes and pay a price for their failures. But Social Security and Medicare are designed to protect people from things they have little control over—risk of illness, risk of macroeconomic change, risk of industrial obsolescence. To manage that kind of risk, you have to do it collectively. What’s more, as the political scientist Jacob Hacker has pointed out, Americans’ everyday lives are considerably riskier than they used to be. Jobs are less secure. Health-care costs are increasingly difficult to plan for. And the pace of technological change—which can lay waste to entire industries almost overnight—is faster than ever. So now may not be the best time to undermine the few programs that provide people with some protection against bad decisions and bad luck."

This is not to say that Social Security doesn't need reform or adjustments.  The New America Foundation, a hip new-ish think tank offers some compelling analysis on what will fast become an enormous public policy crisis:

"The public needs to know there is no silver bullet when it comes to Social Security reform. While investment accounts can help ensure that money is saved and Progressive Private Accounts can do so in a way that is true to the fundamental principles of the program, all plans will involve making tough choices. In order to devise a plan that is fair to younger participants and future generations, we need to start making these choices immediately."

If we're going to have a radical re-structuring of our basic social contract that was drawn up over 70 years ago, then we need to adequately understand the repercussions. (Cartoon is Tom Toles, from The Washington Post.)

We have a winner

So I was listening to my favorite radio station, KEXP, which is a listener-supported radio station out of Seattle that I listen to online.  (If you've never listened before, it's definitely worth checking out for really good, non-commercial music.) 

This morning, the DJ John Richards was giving away tickets to the Interpol concert this Thursday and Friday in New York at the Hammerstein Ballroom (KEXP has a huge audience outside of Seattle, so they promote shows all over the place). 

I waited for the cue asking for caller #12, and then called into the toll-free number (1-866-903-KEXP).  At first, I didn't get through.  After several attempts, a friendly woman answered saying "we have a winner."

I felt a rush of excitement fill me up - I've never really won a contest like this.  I said to the friendly station woman, "really?!  that's great! that's so awesome!"

It was at this point that the woman interrupted me, saying "yeah, it is great, for the winner - we already have a winner."   I had misinterpreted what she was initially saying.  So I didn't win anything.  I was just a big loser. 

"Oh, I see, I get it" I stammered, "well, thanks, I guess."   And then I hung up.