apple juice

Raising Minimalist Children in a Society of Excess:

“Don’t feel guilty. Modern parents are made to feel as if they are depriving their children of ‘the best’ if they don’t sign them up for every lesson, take them to every movie, or buy them every brain-enhancing toy. Advertising companies are paying billions of dollars to make you think this. It is not reality… it is a fictional version of reality they are selling. Let it go. Don’t ‘buy’ into it. You are not depriving your children; you are enhancing their mental and emotional development by letting the real world around them captivate and interest them. Do you think the Smiths’ kids are really better off because they spend all their free time in front of a television or playing with a DSI?”

Amen!

However, the temple for waisted male self-esteem is Old Navy, where I easily slid into a size 34 pair of the brand’s Dress Pant. Where no other 34s had been hospitable, Old Navy’s fit snugly. The final measurement? Five inches larger than the label. You can eat all the slow-churn ice cream and brats you want, and still consider yourself slender in these.

Sonja called me from the store today. I found an awesome pair of pants for you, do you fit in a 34? Maybe? I replied.

As it turns out, that wasn’t such a bad answer:

Are Your Pants Lying to You?

I get a fair amount of my internet oddities and goodness from kottke.org — you should check him out.

And this recent post of a post about meat eating is very interesting…

From the Guardian, a review of a book called Meat: A Benign Extravagance by Simon Fairlie. In it, Fairlie argues that meat production isn’t actually that inefficient when done properly and veganism as an ethical response leaves something to be desired.

“But these idiocies, Fairlie shows, are not arguments against all meat eating, but arguments against the current farming model. He demonstrates that we’ve been using the wrong comparison to judge the efficiency of meat production. Instead of citing a simple conversion rate of feed into meat, we should be comparing the amount of land required to grow meat with the land needed to grow plant products of the same nutritional value to humans. The results are radically different.

If pigs are fed on residues and waste, and cattle on straw, stovers and grass from fallows and rangelands — food for which humans don’t compete — meat becomes a very efficient means of food production. Even though it is tilted by the profligate use of grain in rich countries, the global average conversion ratio of useful plant food to useful meat is not the 5:1 or 10:1 cited by almost everyone, but less than 2:1. If we stopped feeding edible grain to animals, we could still produce around half the current global meat supply with no loss to human nutrition: in fact it’s a significant net gain.”

(Via kottke.org.)

i’d be concerned when guys like this are losing…

Inglis, who boasts (literally) a 93 percent lifetime rating from the American Conservative Union, received the wrath of the tea party, losing to Gowdy 71 to 29 percent. In the weeks since, Inglis has criticized Republican House leaders for acquiescing to a poisonous, tea party-driven “demagoguery” that he believes will undermine the GOP’s long-term credibility. And he’s freely recounting his frustrating interactions with tea party types, while noting that Republican leaders are pushing rhetoric tainted with racism, that conservative activists are dabbling in anti-Semitic conspiracy theory nonsense, and that Sarah Palin celebrates ignorance.

Confessions of a Tea Party Casualty

“What interesting and unusual music are you listening to these days?” my Uncle asked me during Sunday dinner of bar-b-que and beans.

Good question.

I may be falling into that mid-30s rut where your musical tastes are locked into the bands you loved in college and shortly thereafter (or just straight through college, depending on how long it took you) Following in that thread, The Arcade Fire just released a new album entitled, appropriately for our current situation The Suburbs.

I don’t own it yet, I’m having a quick internal debate about whether I should buy the MP3s on Amazon for $3.99 or if I should order the Vinyl + Digital Download direct from Merge Records.

Anyway, say what you will about Pitchfork, they just nailed me into a corner with this observation in their review of The Suburbs:

This is another 2010 example of a Boss-indebted band (see also: the National and Titus Andronicus) making epic outpourings of modern disillusionment and disappointment for people who can commiserate and return to fretting about their jobs and bank accounts once the house lights go up. But just because the concerns of The Suburbs are at times mundane, that makes them no less real. And that Arcade Fire can make such powerful art out of recognizing these moments makes our own existences feel worthy of documentation. By dropping Neon Bible’s accusatory standpoint, The Suburbs delivers a life-affirming message similar to Funeral’s: We’re all in this together.

I love the National! And who is this Titus Andronicus?

Guilty as charged.

Update: I’ve purchased the MP3s. Instant gratification. Merge’s store appears to be down at the moment and I didn’t want to wait to find out how much the vinyl is.

Another reason for the lack of recent blogging is my mild depression regarding all things government. Health care: underwhelmed. Financial regulations: meh. More tea party crazies in government: Positively scary.

And then this…

We’re Gonna Be Sorry

I could blame Republicans for the fact that not one G.O.P. senator indicated a willingness to vote for a bill that would put the slightest price on carbon. I could blame the Democratic senators who were also waffling. I could blame President Obama for his disappearing act on energy and spending more time reading the polls than changing the polls. I could blame the Chamber of Commerce and the fossil-fuel lobby for spending bags of money to subvert this bill. But the truth is, the public, confused and stressed by the last two years, never got mobilized to press for this legislation. We will regret it.

 

Friedman’s op-ed actually opened up a new line of reasoning I hadn’t considered before. What exactly would the motivation be for climatologists to fake global-warming? If someone could answer that for me, I’d love to know.

Internet, I love you, but you’re bringing me down.

(with all apologies to LCD Soundsystem)

I can’t get up the motivation to blog about much these days. Summer is here, the socks are off, Emilia keeps growing and growing, and there just isn’t much time for blogging.

I should be a better journal-er, I know it’s in there somewhere… but the priorities go something like this…

1. Spend QT with Family

2. Relax by medium-sized body of water suitable for swimming

3. Cook tasty meals with the ample vegetables received from our CSA: Featherstone Farm.

 

…

…

…

99. Wax Car

100. Blog more

101. Beat Mario Galaxy

That may be a little overstated, I did play Mario Galaxy for 20 minutes a few days ago instead of blogging.

Regardless,

I’m starting to get on the wagon when it comes to the idea that multitasking is bad for your brain. I didn’t hop on this train after I turned 30, either. Most of the research that I have seen lately says that people are cognitively better off to focus on one specific task at a time. The PBS documentary Digital Nation wades right into to this debate. Turn off your IM, your email, your TV. Quit every application that you don’t need running and FOCUS.

It’s funny, but one way I think the iPad is a glimpse into the future of computing is by the way it forces you into a single-tasking environment. It’s almost too bad that one of the major new features of iOS4 is the ability to “multi-task”. I guess it will be good for allowing Pandora to run in the background, but personally, I feel like we don’t need any help doing more things at once. If anything, we need help (serious, lie-down-on-the-couch type help) doing less.