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GO GREEN AND SAVE THE PLANET! (Not really, it's just corporate hype to save some bucks)
Isn't it great how big corporations are allowing us to "go green" by letting them email our bills and junk ads rather than their having to mail them? Gives you warm, green shivers doesn't it? Never mind that the real reason they want us to "go green" is because it saves them postage and printing costs.

The truth is it takes the procurement and refining of lots of metals and minerals (including gold and silver) and extensive molding of plastics and the use of hydrocarbons just to make a computer. And guess how you run a computer? Electricity that comes largely from the combustion of coal.

And never you mind that dead electronic devices have become a huge stream of toxic waste that we have yet to fully deal with.

I like paper bills and paper junk mail. Besides, I'm Irish so I'm already well acquainted with green.

THE TROUBLE WITH THE NEW H1N1 FLU SHOTS IS MARKETING! Why does the cost of H1N1 flu shots keep going down? Two months ago they were unavailable in my area, then when the vaccine showed up it was $20 a shot. Now it's $10. Maybe they'd sell more of the shots if they tried a different marketing approach.

So many drugs have happy, smiley names, like Celebrex ("Celebrex good times, come on!!") and Ascenden ("I'm ascending, I'm floating my way up into the sky, ahhhhhhh") and even old Dimetapp (sounds cheap, huh?...but based on the real price they ought to call it "50-cents-a-tapp").

The drug companies should rename the H1N1 shot and maybe call it "FluOver," like "YOUR flu fears are OVER!" (or like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest).

Or maybe they should call it "Affluent" to give consumers the feeling they're rich because they've had their shot. Millions of people are out of work. We need to hear words like "affluent."

Considering how dangerous the shot appears to be to some people, maybe they should market it as "Advench-aflu." ("Be adventurous! Get pandemic relief with Advenchaflu!")

Or just market it as protection against a very strange flu, and base the campaign on price ("Your expensive $20 flu shot is now PRICED JUST RIGHT! Get your shot, give us a $20 bill and we'll give you TEN DOLLARS BACK, guaranteed! Now that's change you can believe in!").

(Overhauling the banks is a no-brainer: Reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act, which limited speculation by banks and others, which was repealed in 1999. That repeal led to the current Great Recession. But it's like Vice President Hubert Humphrey said in 1969 about how to end the Vietnam War: "We must not look for easy answers.")

QUOTE OF THE YEAR (SO FAR:)
"Let’s get one thing clear once and for all: the only person who has ever been allowed to “reach out” (and, in her case, touch someone you love) was Diana Ross. Anyone else should just “get in touch with” their colleagues, perhaps even “write a letter” asking for their views. What was once a mild rash has become a contagious bug and we need to find a vaccine for all this reaching out. Not only is it a drippy, meaningless phrase, it also conjures up an unpleasant image of people’s sweaty paws grabbing at you.

"The people who “reach out” are also those whose thinking is always “blue sky”, who can’t describe anything vaguely contemporary without incorrectly enlisting phrases such as “minimalist” or “modernist” and who don’t have to hurry to the airport but need to “rocket” there. But for now if we can just get everyone to delete “reach out” from their memory banks, opening our emails in 2010 will be a less tense experience. And if they don’t, perhaps we’ll have to reach out – and grab them by the throat."
-- Monocle magazine

A Marist College poll shows how much we hate certain overused words.

It may be a sign of our cultural laziness that we allow our communication to be so debased. When it comes to the rich, cultural heritage of the English language, we should be ashamed to obfuscate our precious language. Anyway at the end of the day, it is what it is, you know, whatever.

...We got a new refrigerator not too long ago. When it happened my family leapt into the 21st Century. It's really nice because you don't have to use trays to make ice. The icemaker works great, but it's just not the same as having big squares of ice for a soft drink. These ice "cubes" are like big, thick half-moons. Every time I reach for a handful of ice, I drop at least one "cube" on the floor.

I'm going to try the built-in ice crusher soon. I'll probably find a way to drop some of that on the floor too. But since they're not ice "cubes" anymore, what do I say to my family? "Oh, I just spilled another ice half moon again?" "Oh, look, again I spilled some slush?" They're already worried about me. I can't say that.

SIX STRANGE FOODS
AlterNet has come up with "The 6 Weirdest, Scariest Processed Foods," and they are remarkable. I already knew (did you?) that the prime ingredient in the white filling in Oreos is Crisco, a vegetable alternative to lard, but a fat is a fat. The other prime ingredient is sugar.

Did you know that the addition of chemicals like trisodium phosphate in Kraft Easy Cheese (the cheese from the spray can, remember?) causes much of the calcium to be leeched from the cheese-like product squirted from the can? So Kraft has to add extra calcium to make up for it.

Canned condensed soup contains about 90% of the sodium (salt) you should have in one day. AlterNet says Spam is essentially pork-flavored Jello. And what are those things that look like blueberries in blueberry waffles? Are they blueberries? No, they're bits of blueberry-flavored sugar.

And you may have looked at the ingredients in Kraft's guacamole dip and noticed that avacado is not an ingredient. Real guacamole is always made with avocado, so how does Kraft do it? Flavoring. AlterNet points out that when this was brought to Kraft's attention, the dip was renamed "guacamole-flavored" dip.

With as much Easy Cheese, Spam, Oreos and condensed soup we were fed when we were children, how did we live through childhood?

On blogs such as this one you're supposed to rant, so I just wanted to mention that one of the things that really bugs me about some people is when they say, "Listen up!" As soon as you say that I immediately stop listening. If I were in the military and my DI said that, I'd listen. I'm not so I don't.

I also stop listening to anyone who refers to me as part of a crowd when that person addresses us as "You people," or even worse, just "people." As in "listen up, people." What? I was listening kindly till you addressed me in that demeaning, stupid way. -- MS

GOOD MORNING SUNSHINE!
(Robin Meade didn't make up that phrase, y'know) This is from the other day in Yahoo! Finance: "Retail maven" Howard Davidowitz says THERE'S NO HOPE FOR AMERICA! We're "in the tank forever" he says, just to make sure we know he's acquainted with hyperbole.

Davidowitz

"On retail:

"The retail business is terrible... It's almost all negative."
"We're going to close hundreds of thousands of stores."

On the consumer:

"They’re still over leveraged, they're losing jobs, their credit has been cut back."

On America:

"We are in the tank forever. As a country we are out of control, we're in a death spiral."

On the stock market:

"We're in terrible shape. That's what the fundamentals tell me. I can't explain the stock market."

He does offer some hope -- yes, hope despite our "death spiral:" He likes Family Dollar, Dollar Tree and 99-Cents Only stores (we coulda told you they're great places for bargains, but he says they're also exceptionally well-run retailers).

Oh and he says Kohl's will be among the few survivors among department stores when the economy rebounds, because of Kohl's cost controls.

So I want to ask Mr. Davidowitz: when is the economy going to finally rebound? Given his penchant for optimism, I would expect an answer like, oh, "2017."

Green shootdown? As hybrid cars gobble rare metals, shortage looms The Prius hybrid automobile is popular for its fuel efficiency, but its electric motor and battery guzzle rare earth metals, a little-known class of elements found in a wide range of gadgets and consumer goods.
That makes Toyota's market-leading gasoline-electric hybrid car and other similar vehicles vulnerable to a supply crunch predicted by experts as China, the world's dominant rare earths producer, limits exports while global demand swells.

Perhaps it's a story of the often-thin line between talent and madness...

Speaking of the Houston Press, it's now ten years ago that the little Oil Town weekly free-paper did a heartbreaking history on the rise and fall of a quite talented filmmaker from Texas named Eagle Pennell.

When I knew him he was one of the most enthusiastic would-be movie directors you'd ever want to meet. He had such charm because this gangly young guy dearly loved to talk about movies, just as my friends and I did. Later he started to become successful and for some reason, his downhill slide was much too quick.

Eagle Pennell

Not long before he seemed ready to descend upon Hollywood with a resume that you might envy, he ended up a homeless derelict. Still, I raise a glass to you, Eagle. I know you wish you could be here to be part of it, both for the glass and to once again talk film.

The grande auteur of Eagle's Houston Press story, Steve McVicar, caught up with Pennell for this tender story just as Eagle's psyche eventually caught up with Eagle, you might say. Never mind McVicar's crass judgment that Pennell was a "loser." To me, it's a tragedy in the classic sense of the term:

FADE TO BLACK

Eagle's insightful movie about hope and hopelessness in The Lone Star State -- The Whole Shootin' Match -- has now been released on DVD:

LET THE EAGLE SOAR

At the end of the year, I remember the death of John Hughes, the brilliantly talented comedy writer and director who made so many great movies, from the "National Lampoon's Vacation" films to the "Home Alone" movies to my personal favorites, "The Breakfast Club" and "16 Candles."

In case you missed his obituaries, he worked hard and became a solid filmmaker, but was also known to be a fine human being, something of a rarity in Hollywood. Maybe that's why he didn't spend his last years in LaLaLand.

Here's a very touching blog from a Hughes fan who got to know him pretty well and can corroborate Hughes' kindnesses -- and fondness for those of us who loved his work:

wellknowwhenwegetthere.blogspot.com

Okay, so columnists keep saying that Tuesday's Massachusetts election indicates that people are fed up with President Obama's policies. So the nation is moving toward Republicans. As an Independent, I have to ask you:

If you vote Democrat and you don't like what's happening and then you vote Republican and then you don't like what's happening...isn't that kind of like Einstein's definition of insanity: You keep doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results?

More Columns by Mike Shiloh

Henry Gibson dies at 73; original cast member of 'Laugh-In'

What? Christopher Dodd isn't going to run again for Senator from Connecticut?
Maybe the Obama administration is grooming him for Treasury Secretary.

Carville: Airport scanners can 'measure my penis'
It's a dirty job but somebody has to do it, right? Ah, what savoir faire. That's the great thing about Carville. He's such an angel. He's always up in the air harping about something.

INDEPENDENTS ESSENTIAL TO MASSACHUSETTS UPSET
High turnout among Independent voters seen by some as key to victory for Republican Scott Brown.

The Disposable Worker
Pay is falling, benefits are vanishing, and no one's job is secure. How companies are making the era of the temp more than temporary

Henry Gibson dies at 73; original cast member of 'Laugh-In'

What? Christopher Dodd isn't going to run again for Senator from Connecticut? Maybe the Obama administration is grooming him for Treasury Secretary.

Carville: Airport scanners can 'measure my penis' It's a dirty job but somebody has to do it, right? Ah, what savoir faire. That's the great thing about Carville. He's such an angel. He's always up in the air harping about something.

INDEPENDENTS ESSENTIAL TO MASSACHUSETTS UPSET High turnout among Independent voters seen by some as key to victory for Republican Scott Brown.

The Disposable Worker Pay is falling, benefits are vanishing, and no one's job is secure. How companies are making the era of the temp more than temporary

What? Christopher Dodd isn't going to run again for Senator from Connecticut?
Maybe the Obama administration is grooming him for Treasury Secretary.

Carville: Airport scanners can 'measure my penis'
It's a dirty job but somebody has to do it, right? Ah, what savoir faire. That's the great thing about Carville. He's such an angel. He's always up in the air harping about something.

INDEPENDENTS ESSENTIAL TO MASSACHUSETTS UPSET
High turnout among Independent voters seen by some as key to victory for Republican Scott Brown.

The Disposable Worker
Pay is falling, benefits are vanishing, and no one's job is secure. How companies are making the era of the temp more than temporary