AdamSmith

"Debated internally." LOL Dialog among the stomachs. A+

Just about every time it is not convenient to take one, seems like.

That is to say, stomachs.

One of my favorite books. Guy Debord's The Society of the SpectacleWill Self takes a walk through the banlieues of Paris and is astonished by the prescience of Debord's 1967 masterpiece, which so accurately describes 'the shit we're in'inS Will Self The Guardian, Thursday 14 November 2013 10.01 EST 'What other text from the 60s so accurately describes the shit we’re in?' – Will Self on Debord's The Society of the Spectacle. Photograph: Situationist International A small green tent was pitched on the small daisy-spotted patch of greenish grass. It looked tidily enough done; suitable perhaps for a summer rock festival. But this was just outside the Saint-Gratien RER station, north of the rundown riverine port of Gennevilliers, on the outer whorl of the Parisian fingerprint; and the tent – which had the limp-wristed bough of an evergreen touching its flysheet in benediction – was quite clearly being lived in. The mental picture the non-Parisian has of the city's banlieues is framed by the fictive: gangster movies such as La Haine, or TV cop shows such as Spiral that do battle with similar Danish, Swedish, British and, of course, American vehicles, in a race to see which can sandblast its respective society with the greatest quantity of grit. But within this framing, content and dimensionality are provided by recent history, and in particular by the widespread rioting of 2005 that thrust these under-imagined locales on to TV screens worldwide. Not since the événements of 1968 had Parisian street fighting commanded such attention, but whereas the soixante-huitards could be characterised as the vanguard of a stillborn revolution, the young second-, third- and probably fourth-generation immigrants who chucked molotov cocktails at the flics and the CRS during the émeutes neither donned, nor were measured up for, any such ideological camouflage. Instead, the violent eruption of the Parisian banlieues was anatomised by reference to a body politic sickening with pathological metaphors. Implicitly, explicitly … ineluctably, the rioters were the Muslim Other, which, having been almost accidentally ingurgitated as part of the colonialist couscous, was now playing havoc with Gallic digestion. The French state had found itself – willingly or not – as a fellow-traveller on the neocons' coach trip to the rapturous intersection of medieval chiliasm and Fukuyama's neoliberal end-point. Walking from the RER station towards the Seine, I passed not through what the fictive might lead you to expect, but rather low and hummocky hills, the swoop of a B-class road, outcroppings of commerce, small apartment blocks, car parks, duff public sculpture, off-cuts of quasi-open space – over it all an ambiguous miasma of street furniture and signage: this was France, certainly, but a France at once decoupled from any sense of pays, and divorced from the least suggestion of the urbane. In a comparable district of London – picture, if you are able to, Ruislip or Hounslow, Abbey Wood or Enfield – there would be myriad subliminally registered cues, all of which would combine to force on the spectator the unavoidability of her metropolitan condition. In London, the interwar spread of municipal socialism through the arteries of the tube system was accompanied by the soft-modernism of the suburban stations and Harry Beck's matching diagram, which completes their connectivity. In London, the map really is the territory, because the territory really is the map. Not here. The vexed relationship between the map and the territory suffuses The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord's 1967 masterpiece, which argues that not only authentic social relations, but even the bricks and mortar that frame them, and the tarmac that connects one to another, have all been replaced with their representation; a 1:1 scale model. Moreover, for Debord, as a sequel to the paralysis of "historical development", the contrast between town and country has become submerged in a sclerotic suburbia. He is at pains to point out that this annulling is no cod-utopian "supersession" but rather an "erosion … visible in the eclectic mélange of … decayed elements". From the beige depths of a heavily shuttered house beside a hillock from which I could spy the Eiffel Tower, a deep, dark voice spoke: "Qu'est-ce que vous cherchez?" I suppose, had I been the ghost of Jane Jacobs I would have experienced this as reassurance: the eyes, even if unseen themselves, remained on the street. But, instead, I muttered pacifications: "Nothing … just having a look … about", then walked on down and around the hill through a scree of crushed fag packets, centrifugally impelled aluminium trim and the petrified tears shed by long dead cars. Dragon's teeth were sewn across the scabrous roadway – I queased between them and found myself within 100 metres of the riverbank. The A15 soared overhead: two pilotis planted this side of the river, the next pair on the far bank, its two carriageways separated by curved air. Up there was the city, conceived of however you so pleased. Down here, however, was this un-place, an inter-zone, under-imagined and thus free to be itself. Sprays of cherry blossom mimicked by tangles of wire and a shaggy pelt of weedy grass. Two small brown kids sat beside an oblong concrete depression filled with dank water, one had her hair tied in pigtails. They were playing with tin cans, cups and a bucket. Beyond them, right on the river's edge was their Paris: a bidonville of shacks built from bits of scavenged packing cases, plastic tarpaulin, car tyres and all sorts of other stuff. Many of its most sympathetic readers experience The Society of the Spectacle as a concerted howl of disgust. I cannot agree – for me it is the Spectacle that, far from being the creation of some malevolent or false god, emerges instead as the hero of the piece, inasmuch as any hero can be conceived of as the unconscious product of insensate historical processes. The Spectacle, Debord writes, "is the heart of the unrealism of the real society". We are all jammed up against the plate glass of the Spectacle, our faces crushed as we "lèche-vitrine" in search of the same old commodified poison. The entirely manmade nature of the world from which the individual subject experiences alienation is not, for Debord, a factual programme to be passively viewed on the TV screens of the global village, but a belief that is actively entered into. It is the genius of Debord to have characterised the totalising capability of late capitalism so early in its post-industrial manifestation. The Society of the Spectacle reads – if you will savour a cliche – as fresh as paint. Debord's analysis of time itself as a series of epochs is dizzying: such "pseudo-festivals" as sporting events (the Olympics springs immediately to mind), act to convince the denizens of the Spectacle that they are still living in a cyclical and eternal go-round, while only the anointed few, the celebrities, are imbued with the attributes of money and power that signify the ability to make choices – to progress into a better future. "Being a star," Debord writes, "means specialising in the seemingly lived." Sound familiar, "Sir" Peter Bazalgette? But it is most of all in its analysis of the ideology of the Spectacle that Debord's text repays close reading. It is the Spectacle's genius to have "turned need against life" and thus effected "the separation and estrangement between man and man". Hence the Spectacle's embrace of economics as the only form of instrumental – indeed "scientific" – knowledge worth possessing; hence ritual obeisance made before the gods who will confer growth, and hence the fact that more or less any contemporary western politician – from Hollande, to Merkel, to Cameron, to Obama, and back again – who had eyes to see, could find their own Caliban image raging back at them from the pages of The Society of the Spectacle. At Argenteuil centre-ville, I found echoic pedestrian underpasses, faux-19th century streetlamps of twirled iron and postmodern apartment blocks built of scaled-up children's construction toys. I walked on across the oxbow of Gennevilliers, still feeling that I was nowhere at all in particular – standing beside a grocery store or an office block, then crossing between parked cars. The bridge across the re-encountered Seine that led to Clichy was lined with cheerful window boxes, planted with a gaily patriotic tricolour of blooms pinker, pinker and pinkest. Where there are window boxes there must, of course, be a window – this one framed the mirrored cuboids of La Défense to the west, structures that might have been designed expressly to conform to the Debordian paradigm. And then, some way past the Porte de Clichy, I was quite suddenly – if at an indefinable point – in Paris, a city to this day that defines itself by the micro-associations of its smaller parts: the awning of an alimentation, a drain cover, the angle of a pissing dog's leg, the furl of paper around a stick of bread, the white apron around a smoking waiter – quite as much as the high extravaganza of its grand boulevards and gold-leafed public buildings. Rereading The Society of the Spectacle, I was struck yet again not only by Debord's astonishing prescience – for what other text from the late 1960s so accurately describes the shit we're still in? – but also wondered how it was that his dérives across the Paris of the time could have so attuned him to the way in which the urban environment of the near future would become quite so decoupled from any element of the felt or experienced life. After all, Paris was by no means the most Spectacular city of the late 1950s and early 60s; indeed, it's still not on an equal footing to London. Unplanned London, which has just arrived at its square miles of parametrically designed junk space, its CCTV-overseen gated business cantonments and Chinese party cadre-owned luxury encampments, its logo skyscrapers and purpose-built "iconic" tourist destinations. It occurs to me that Haussmann's attempt to impose civic order and authority on the medieval jumble of mid-19th century Paris had not only paved the way for the Spectacle, but it had also afforded its – and his – enemies with the material to rip up for their barricades. There seems a nice congruence between the go-rounds of the Grands Boulevards and centrifugal/centripetal current of French theorising, whereby notions given form in the cafes of the Boulevard Saint-Germain and the classrooms of the Sorbonne and the Ecole Normale Supérieure swirl out in widening circles from the metropolis, only to then gurgle back in again, before eventually disappearing up the arses of their originators. Seen like this, The Society of the Spectacle is at once the bastard progeny of the French Enlightenment – out of Diderot, by means of the Napoleonic Code – and a salutary reminder of how the pursuit of some millenarian ideological purity only ever results – if successful – in the rumbling of tumbrels; or, if a failure, in its wholesale co-option by its stated enemies. That we no longer hear quite so much about "the spectacle" as shorthand for any of the following: the ludic element of consumer society, the post-ideological character of western "democracy", the web-cum-matrix woven by the internet, the glocal character of late capitalism, may be because Debord's concept has now been so thoroughly appropriated – one might fairly say détourned – that there's nothing left of it but its coldly numerical bones. Had Debord not shot himself in 1994 in his rural fastness of Bellevue-la-Montagne, he probably would have turned his gun on the likes of Tony Wilson and Malcolm McLaren (and no doubt me as well); pop music impresarios whose much-trumpeted situationist influence – such as it was – consisted only in a series of pranks, that, while they may have given succour to the culturally anomic nonetheless only resulted in the profitable sale of records, posters and other memorabilia. I doubt, somehow, that either Wilson – chiefly known for managing Joy Division and the Happy Mondays, and setting up Factory Records – or McLaren, rather more famous for his role as the Sex Pistols' svengali, can have subjected The Society of the Spectacle to a sustained critical reading. Had they done so, they would've realised that their antics were anathema to Debord; that the playful elements of situationist practice – the bowdlerising of cartoons, the daubing on walls of whacky slogans, the exaltation of drunkenness – were only ever to be sanctioned if constitutive of a genuine insurrection, such as the few short weeks of 68, and as precursors of that revolution of everyday life (to adapt the title of the competing situationist theoretical work, written by Debord's greatest rival, Raoul Vaneigem), which was to follow the final and complete dissolution of the Spectacle. The relative success of the Situationist International during les évènements also sowed the seeds for the détournement of The Society of the Spectacle itself. I say relative success because it can be doubted – and will always be disputed – the extent to which Debord and his loose confraternity of freelance bully-boys and wannabe revolutionists actually succeeded in either manning the barricades themselves, or screwing the courage of the mob to CRS's sticking post. But the important thing was that the situationists were perceived as having been in the thick of things – as instigators and ideological choreographers of the distinctively ludic elements of this particular civil disorder. The sneering, de haut en bas reception of The Society of the Spectacle on its publication the year before in French, was followed the year after by its rhapsodic one when it appeared in translation. By then, of course, the game was effectively up – something Debord, a man obsessed by war games and strategising, undoubtedly grasped. The Society of the Spectacle so far as being an animator of events, had in a matter of months become simply another text to be subjected to scores, hundreds, thousands of exhaustive academic analyses. The best that could be said for the thing – from its author's point of view – was that the royalties paid his wine bills, and helped to supplement a lifetime of unabashed – and indeed, self-righteous – sponging. Of course, The Society of the Spectacle still animates serious protest to this day – or, rather, since to admit to having been one of the Invisible Committee that authored the highly Debordian The Coming Insurrection (2007) is to court arrest on those grounds alone, the very style of the earlier work remains inflammatory. As to its content, The Coming Insurrection has nothing much to add – how can it, when, as I say, never before has Debord's work seemed quite as relevant as it does now, in the permanent present that he so accurately foretold? Open his book, read it, be amazed, pour yourself a glass of supermarket wine – as he would wish – and then forget all about it, which is what the Spectacle wants. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/nov/14/guy-debord-society-spectacle-will-self

Or, rather, do.

The image is too perfect.

By contrast, Harry teases Wills for "piling on the pounds" since getting hitched... http://zeenews.india.com/entertainment/wellness/harry-teases-william-for-piling-on-pounds_94424.html

I learned eating baked potato skins from a high school sweetheart whose family had emigrated South from Yankeedom, so brought all manner of strange habits. I then found that made the rock-salt-rubbed baked potatoes served by Red Lobster into the most palatable thing on their menu. Back to apples, David Souter's clerks noted it as one more sign of his frugal ways that lunch was always a cup of yogurt and an apple eaten core, seeds and all.

Good lord. Although I've long noticed most grotesquerie store "wheat breads" have cellulose as the main fiber. A wonder we're not evolving into ruminants.

Cartoon tag line: "TV was so lousy last night, I nearly switched it off!"

This seemed too good to bury way down in the Nutrition, Health & Fitness forum. Not that it has anything to do with those things in any event. The McRib: Enjoy Your Symptom How McDonald’s strange, seasonal sandwich explains the rest of its menu Ian Bogost Nov 13 2013, 3:13 PM ET The Atlantic Wire Wikimedia Commons Each year, the McRib makes a brief visit to Earth. Its arrival elicits reactions ranging from horror to awe. And for good reason: this would-be rib sandwich is really a restructured pork patty pressed into the rough shape of a slab of ribs, its slathering of barbecue sauce acting as camouflage as much as coating. “Pork” is a generous term, since the McRib has traditionally been fashioned from otherwise unmarketable pig parts like tripe, heart, and stomach, material that is not only cheap but also easier to mold and bind into a coherent, predetermined shape. McDonald’s accurately lists the patty’s primary ingredient as “boneless pork,” although even that’s a fairly strong euphemism. Presumably few of the restaurant’s patrons would line up for a Pressed McTripe. Despite its abhorrence, the McRib bears remarkable similarity to another, more widely accepted McDonald’s product, the Chicken McNugget. In fact, the McRib was first introduced in 1982, shortly after the company had designed the McNugget. Chicken McNuggets are fashioned by the same method as is the McRib, namely by grinding factory-farmed chicken meat into a mash and then reconstituting them into a preservative-stabilized solid, aka a “nugget.” And both products are bound and preserved by a petrochemical preservative called tertiary butylhydroquinone, or TBHQ. According to the Consumer’s Dictionary of Food Additives, one gram of TBHQ can cause “nausea, vomiting, ringing in the ears, delirium, a sense of suffocation, and collapse.” In a 2003 lawsuit accusing McDonald’s of consumer deception, federal district court judge Robert W. Sweet called Chicken McNuggets a “McFrankenstein creation.” But despite rejoinders like that of Judge Sweet, the Chicken McNugget flies under the radar, hiding its falseness, while the McRib flaunts it. In part, this is because the concept of a Chicken McNugget corresponds with a possible natural configuration of ordinary poultry, whose meat could be cut into chunks, battered, and fried. By contrast, there is no world in which pork spare ribs could be eaten straight through, even after having been slow cooked such that some of the cartilage breaks down. It’s a partial explanation for the horror and the delight wrought by McRib, but not a sufficient one. * * * Sometimes the things we believe aren’t out there in plain view, but hidden away inside. The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan gives the name objet a to the thing that elicits desire. In French the phrase means “object other” (the a stands for autre). For Lacan, our behaviors themselves may be knowable, but the causes of those behaviors aren’t always so. Objet a is not the object of desire (the thing we desire), but the thing that causes the desire to come into being (the cause of a desire for that thing). The philosopher Slavoj Žižek sometimes calls objet a the stain or defect in the world that motivates a belief or action. Psychoanalysis focuses on the operation of the unconscious, the motivations that make us think, believe, and act without us being aware of them. As such, we can’t see those causes directly, we can’t unearth them and hold them in our hands. This is one of the main differences between psychoanalysis and modern psychiatry and neuroscience. The psychoanalyst contends that our rationales are not reducible to their symptoms (for matching to pharmaceuticals) or their measurements (for matching to known neurological patterns). The causes of our desires can’t be seen directly, but must be looked at from a distorted perspective. Žižek calls it a “parallax gap,” a break in perspective separating two things that cannot be synthesized. Here’s how he puts it: “the object-cause of desire is something that, when viewed frontally, is nothing at all, just a void—it acquires the contours of something only when viewed sideways.” Hans Holbein, The Ambassadors (1553) In the history of art, the most famous example of “looking awry” at an image to see what only appears as a void from the front is Hans Holbein’s 1553 painting The Ambassadors. When viewed straight-on, its clear that something is amiss in the foreground near the ambassadors’ feet. But only when the picture is viewed askew, from a different perspective, does the “stain” reveal itself: a skull, symbolizing death, thus betraying the vanity of the vestments and ornaments of the painting’s aristocrats. Even though we see skull in the painting, we don’t really see it for what it is until we look at it differently, until we view it sideways. The McRib is like Holbein’s skull: we experience it as (quasi-)foodstuff, as marketing campaign, as cult object, as Internet meme, but those experiences don’t sufficiently explain it. To understand McRib fully, we have to look at the sandwich askew. When McDonald’s first “retired” the McRib in 2005, it marketed the event as the “McRib Farewell Tour.” The promotion included websites with a mock-petition to save the sandwich, sponsored by the fictitious “Boneless Pig Farmers Association of America.” The same farewell tour appeared again in 2006, and yet again in 2007. Since then, the sandwich has reappeared for a few weeks in the autumn, a predictable part of the holiday season. Together, the eternal return of the McRib, along with the blatant celebration of a sandwich that is obviously and unabashedly fake comprise the cause of desire the public bears for McDonald’s. Not just for the McRib, mind you, but for all of the restaurant’s offerings—most of which rely on the same cheap ingredients, machined pre-preparation, and chemical additives that the McRib embodies to the point of caricature. We know that we do not know the composition of the McNugget or McRib or McWhatever, but we do not know precisely what it is that we do not know. Nevertheless, we desire such products not in spite of the fact that we do not know it, but because we don’t. This apparent paradox rests at the very heart of McDonald’s cookery: the secret components and methods that make it possible to create cheap and predictable, sweet and fat fast food. We normally don’t talk about it, but the chemical composition, mass-manufacture, and freezer-to-tray reconstitution of fast food isn’t just a convenient means to produce a result people enjoy. Instead, that very manufactured falseness is itself what we desire, in food as much as in smartphones—what is high-tech if not designed fakery? In fact, manufactured, technological falseness has become a feature of haute cuisine as much as fast food. As Jeb Boniakowski has argued, apart from context, cost, and class markers, there’s really not much difference between McDonald’s “super-processed” food and molecular gastronomy, the application of food science to haute cuisine. And just as fine dining derives some of its desirability from its infrequence, so the McRib’s regular death and reanimation might be a necessary condition for its viability. Some have argued that if marketplace demand for pork trimmings were to rise consistently, then their prices would rise too, destroying the very conditions that make the sandwich possible. Much like waterways can be overfished, the pork parts market can be over-McRibbed. At least, that seems to have been true of the sandwich’s mythic origins. These days, McDonald’s claims that the McRib is made from ground pork, not from offal. Nevertheless, its scarcity makes the sandwich as much a financial instrument as it does an entrée. In 2012, McDonald’s shrewdly shifted the McRib’s return to December from October, relocating its revenues and thus producing slightly higher fourth quarter profits. If you put a Cheeto on a big white plate in a formal restaurant and serve it with chopsticks and say something like “It is a cornmeal quenelle, extruded at a high speed, and so the extrusion heats the cornmeal ‘polenta’ and flash-cooks it, trapping air and giving it a crispy texture with a striking lightness. It is then dusted with an ‘umami powder’ glutamate and evaporated-dairy-solids blend.” People would go just nuts for that. This year, the McRib’s fate remains elusive; no official announcement has emerged from the proverbial pressed pig plantation. Still, dutiful citizens in scattered locations across the U.S. have already reported sightings of the sandwich, indicating the porcine stampede has begun. * * * The McRib’s stochastic return makes visible the relationship between the eater and the McDonald’s menu. It produces a stain, a tear in the order of things that reveals the object-cause of desire for McDonald’s, but only briefly before it evaporates like faux-cartilage. The fragile conditions that make the McRib possible also insure that desire for McDonald’s food more generally speaking is maintained. Desire is a delicate system. For Lacan, the lover “gives what he does not possess,” namely the objet a that incites desire rather than sustaining it. Likewise, McDonald’s sells what it does not sell: the conditions of predictability, affordability, and chemico-machinic automated cookery that make its very business viable. When we eat at McDonald’s we don’t eat its food—Quarter Pounders or Big Macs or what have you—so much as we consume the mechanical predictability of its overall offering. Chicken McNuggets are the same everywhere. The same shape, the same taste, the same packaging, the same menu, the same uniforms, the same roofline, the same signage. Industrialism is also a kind of magic, the magic of the perfect facsimile. Eating at McDonald’s—eating anything whatsoever at McDonald’s—connects us to that magic, allows us to marinate inside it and take on its power. We might be conditioned to feel ashamed of this desire, to regret or lament wanting to eat at McDonald’s because its shapes and smells and packages are so familiar. But why? We dine at temples of molecular gastronomy like El Bulli or Alinea partly (perhaps largely) for the experience of being shown an experience, of partaking in the concepts, in the presentation of aromas disperses with dry ice vapor or oils flavored with steelhead roe. Eating isn’t an afterthought, but it isn’t the whole story either. McDonald’s knows itself and its customers well enough to realize that it must peel back the curtain occasionally, to show the real cause of desire for its products rather than to coat them in duplicitous marketing about freshness and wholesomeness. It’s necessary to insure that the indirect expression of the desire for its wares take the form of a surprise that clashes with our expectations of what to expect from McDonald’s food. One doesn’t even have to eat a McRib to be subject to it, since mass- and now social media perform the work for us. One can unironically post a Facebook update asking “Where’s my McRib?” or drive a little out of the way to pass the McDonald’s in the hopes of glimpsing the distinctive “McRib is Back” signage. Even if you’d never eat a McRib, it’s important to know when it returns, to remind yourself that industrialized, preserved foods are both a miracle and a calamity. Lacan gave the name “symptom” to the process by which psychoanalytic subjects take part in their unconscious desires. Couldn’t one of Žižek’s famous refrains about the concept, “Enjoy your Symptom,” easily pass as a McDonald’s slogan? The strange, even upsetting relationship between McDonald’s and its customers is not so different from the analyst’s talking cure, which helps the patient see the symptom in order to allow it to be recognized and thereby to disappear. The McRib’s existence injects a measure of otherwise unrealizable gratification into the social fabric of food culture, like the McRib’s sauce covers reconstituted pork to make it palatable. Normally, psychoanalysis is meant to reveal a desire in order to satisfy it. But in the case of McRib, that satisfaction must be temporary, occasional, such that it can return again the next year. A good thing, too because who could bear it every day? Yet, the McRib’s perversity is not a defect, but a feature. The purpose of the McRib is to make the McNugget seem normal. http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/11/the-mcrib-enjoy-your-symptom/281413/

Apple Cores Are a Myth You can eat the whole apple. Americans could be throwing away $13.2 billion. James Hamblin The Atlantic Nov 15 2013, 12:14 PM ET What do you think an apple core is? What's the thing we throw away? It is a ghost. If you eat your apples whole, you are a hero to this ghost. If you do not, you are barely alive. Come experience vitality. Earlier this year, in "How to Eat Apples Like a Boss," a video by Foodbeast, the Internet was promised the gift of confidence in apple-eating. Elie Ayrouth ate an apple starting at the bottom, proceeding to up to the top, and finishing with a wink to the camera, as bosses do. Eating as such, Foodbeast said, the core "disappears." I do them one better and say that it never existed. The core is a product of society, man. There is a thin fibrous band, smaller in diameter than a pencil and not bad to the taste. If you eat your apple vertically, it is not noticeable. There are usually a couple seeds toward the top, which are easy to swallow, though it's probably a better idea to spit them because they contain a substance called amygdalin. That can release a small amount of hydrogen cyanide when digested. God/nature wants those seeds on the ground, not in our colons. You would have to eat a ton of apple seeds for it to kill you, but I'm not here to coax you guys into testing your bodies' limits in metabolizing cyanide. I also don't advocate doing anything "like a boss," much less professing it, much less actively aspiring to it by watching YouTube infotorials, but this is an imperative behavioral modification. If you want to feel like a hero by doing essentially nothing, think of it in terms of the national deficit and world hunger. By eating your apples in their entirety, you are a boss in the most endearing sense—not in that the practice confers swagger or panache, but because you are actively part of a meaningful solution. Google image: apple core; see: waste. Don't google apple core myth. They will come for you. If each of us eats an apple a day, as we all do, and we are all wasting 30 percent of our apples at $1.30 per pound, that's about $42 wasted per person per year—which is $13.2 billion annually, thrown in the trash or fed to pigs. With that kind of money, we could rebuild the Gulf Coast after a hurricane the size of Rita or buy an entirely new Mark Zuckerberg. As a health writer I make a point of not trying to tell people how to live their lives. Today I make an exception. This is the cause I will champion to my grave. I was a guest on MSNBC recently to talk about "chicken" nuggets, ostensibly how disturbing they are as a concept, and I endured criticism for being too ambivalent. Eat what you like, in moderation. Chicken nuggets are not my war. On this point I abandon moderation. Bring me on your television programs, and I will eat an apple in its entirety, and I will disparage anyone who does not do the same. As a nation we must redefine apple consumption, lest it define us. http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/11/apple-cores-are-a-myth/281531/

Excellent graphic of how fast the frustrations of trying to figure out Internet X$FK&S?@ age us!

11 terrifying kids from vintage adverts who will freeze the very marrow in your bones 1. Aww look at that - she’s thrilled that dinner is a succulent blood-clot on toast 2. This girl doesn’t need cereal - she hungers for your soul 3. Not so much a child, more a 40-year-old Tory/transgenic pig hybrid 4. This murderous moppet should not be allowed a sharpened knife 5. Not appropriate, mister ad-man. Not. Appropriate. 6. “It’s easy to DIE DIE DIE…” 7. Slogan: Pears Soap will turn your baby’s bath time into an unimaginable horror 8. “Dear Mom, I hope you die soon” 9. The first rule of parent club is that you don’t let the baby shave itself 10. There is no reason for this kid to be naked but for a fedora 11. You know what other meat tastes exactly like pork? This kid knows He knows Oh God, he KNOWS http://usvsth3m.com/post/66372953934/11-terrifying-kids-from-vintage-adverts-who-will-freeze

Could be worse -- he could use your shirt!

No, they are Kenyan. I mean, has anyone ever seen their birth certificates?

And, for myself at least, not something I can ever remember happening!

Old Dog, New Origin: First Pooches Were European By Stephanie Pappas, Senior Writer 19 hours ago Man's best friend gained that title in Europe, according to a new study that pinpoints the origin of dog domestication to between 18,800 and 32,100 years ago. The study places the origin of dogs before the rise of agriculture, suggesting that human hunter-gatherers tamed the wolf. Whereas previous genetic studies had placed the origin of dogs in the Middle East or Asia, this research is the first to focus on the genetics of ancient dogs, rather than looking at modern dogs and trying to extrapolate back. "All modern dogs analyzed in our study were closely related to either ancient dogs and wolves from Europe or modern wolves from there," study scientist Olaf Thalmann, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Turku in Finland, told LiveScience in an email. The beginning of dogs Dogs are the only large carnivores that humans have ever domesticated, but when and where dangerous wolves became lovable pups has been hard to pin down. That's because, genetically speaking, dogs are a mess. They've been moved around the world for centuries, mixing their genomes indiscriminately at far-flung ports of call, and even — early in their evolution — mating with their wild counterpart, the wolf. Adding to the confusion is the intensive period of selective dog breeding that started in the late 1880s and gave humans the wide variety of dog breeds known today. Archaeologists have found definite evidence of domestication in the form of dogs and humans buried together at least 14,000 years ago. Some have suggested domestication occurred earlier than that, perhaps as long as 33,000 years ago, based on some doglike skulls found in Belgium and in Siberia. Original genetic analyses put dog domestication much earlier, with researchers writing in a 1997 paper in the journal Science suggesting that dogs diverged from wolves more than 100,000 years ago. Those studies compared modern dogs with modern wolves, however, the analysis was muddied by dogs' weird breeding history. In the new study, published Friday (Nov. 15) in the journal Science, scientists analyzed ancient DNA from prehistoric dog fossils found in Europe and the New World. Genetic ties The researchers sequenced mitochondrial DNA from these fossils. Mitochondria are tiny organs inside cells that generate the energy that cells need to run. The genes that control the mitochondria are passed down the maternal line. Comparing the ancient mitochondrial DNA with the mitochondrial DNA of modern dog breeds and wolves revealed a common link to Europe, the researchers found. "Dogs seem to have been domesticated or first evolved from a population of ancient wolves living in Europe," said study researcher Robert Wayne, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Los Angeles. "That ancient wolf population is now extinct." "We've kind of made mistakes [in previous studies] assuming that ancient wolves and modern wolves are direct ancestors and descendants," Wayne told LiveScience. The finding suggests that wolves first started hanging around humans during a time when people hunted large animals like mammoth. The remains of mammoth and other megafauna carcasses would have been good eating, and friendlier wolves may have gradually started interacting with the human hunter-gatherers. The study researchers also examined some of the most controversial prehistoric canid fossils, including one found in a cave in the Altai Mountains of Siberia and others discovered in Belgium. These remains date as far back as 36,000 years ago. The new study finds that the Siberian and Belgian pooches were not direct ancestors to modern dogs. It seems they may have been an unknown species of doglike wolf, or they may have been an "aborted domestication event," Wayne said. A European story Genetics is a tricky way to try to establish the timing of dogs' emergence, said Clive Wynne, a dog cognition researcher at Arizona State University who was not involved in the study. Many of the genetic techniques used were developed to trace the divergence of species over millions of years. Dog domestication happened much more quickly, and a few thousand years makes a big difference in whether dogs were originally the pets of hunter-gatherers or more sedentary farmers, Wynne told LiveScience. Most researchers already agreed that the rise of dogs occurred before the rise of agriculture, said Greger Larson, an archaeologist and geneticist at Durham University in the U.K. who was not involved in the study. But the new geographical information linking dogs to prehistoric Europe is "a really big step in the right direction," Larson told LiveScience. "What it absolutely establishes is that there are canids in Europe that are contributing DNA to modern dogs and that Europe is, without question, part of the story," Larson said. "Zooarchaeologists and archaeologists have known that for a long time, but the genetic data has not backed that up." The next step is to delve into the nuclear DNA of ancient dogs, Wayne and Thalmann said. The DNA in a cell's nucleus is passed down from both parents, and thus holds information the maternal mitochondrial DNA doesn't. It was nuclear DNA studies that revealed Neanderthals and modern humans interbred, for example. New genetic techniques should make similar studies possible in dogs, Larson said. "That'll be a game-changer," he said. Genetic research is also revealing the changes necessary to turn a dog into a wolf. A study published in January in the journal Nature found that, unlike wolves, dogs have evolved the ability to eat starchy food — a talent that may have given them a paw up in surviving off human trash. http://news.yahoo.com/old-dog-origin-first-pooches-were-european-191015214.html

That thing.

Mr. Zip recommends...

"Don't Wipe Your Face on Your Shirt" http://youtube.com/watch?v=Jq1b3eSpeLw

True. But the OP of this sub thread was not really Tom's opinion but rather zipperzone's delicious speculation we might get to watch the cat fight of Tom suing Joan. Imagine trying to lay a gag order on her!

He won me over when he knew how to play the Vampire Lestat. In contrast to poor Mr Pitt who had not a clue what was supposed to be going on.

Evidently only through a process that seems altogether more trouble than it's worth. Thetans and death Non-Scientologists Joel Sappell and Robert Welkos described in a 1990 article in the LA Times how Scientologists believe that when a person dies — or, in Scientology terms, when a thetan abandons its physical body — they go to a "landing station" on the planet Venus, where the thetan is re-implanted and told lies about its past life and its next life. The Venusians take the thetan, "capsule" it, and send it back to Earth to be thrown into the ocean off the coast of California. They quote Hubbard as saying, "If you can get out of that, and through that, and wander around through the cities and find some girl who looks like she is going to get married or have a baby or something like that, you're all set. And if you can find the maternity ward to a hospital or something, you're OK. And you just eventually just pick up a baby."[19][20] Operating Thetan Main article: Operating Thetan According to Scientology doctrine, a thetan exists whether operating a human body or not. Scientology advertises itself as being able to "rehabilitate" the thetan of a practitioner to a state where the individual can operate with or without a "flesh body". The term "operating thetan" would then apply as it does when an individual is operating a body. The Operating Thetan (OT) levels are the upper level courses in Scientology. The Church defines "Operating Thetan" as "knowing and willing cause over life, thought, and matter, energy, space and time (MEST)."[21] The Church of Scientology states as a point of doctrine that an individual exists with or without a body.[22] Cleared Theta Clear Even beyond the Operating Thetan levels comes the "Cleared Theta Clear", a godlike state which Hubbard describes this way: "A thetan who is completely rehabilitated and can do everything a thetan should do, such as move MEST and control others from a distance, or create his own universe; a person who is able to create his own universe or, living in the MEST universe is able to create illusions perceivable by others at will, to handle MEST universe objects without mechanical means and to have and feel no need of bodies or even the MEST universe to keep himself and his friends interested in existence".[23] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thetan