Come senators, congressmen please heed the call...

I was very sad to hear that the outcome of the summit on climate in Copenhagen ended with what seems like no result at all. I think this teaser from the WSJ's website sums it up nicely:

"The United Nations summit on climate change ended Saturday with a fractious all-night debate over an agreement brokered by China and the U.S. that has no legal force, and is vague on crucial details."

The key words here, are "no legal force" and "vague". The full article is here. Now I haven't read a whole lot of on the details of the accord, but the German news reports that I did consult, are much harsher in their criticism than the Wall Street Journal (who point out as a negative, that the accord will make it hard for companies to make investments in carbon-reducing technologies, since it's not legally binding; take that however you want to). The German reports call it a "fiasco" and the "miserable end" of the summit, which approximates my opinion pretty well.

I could go on a big rant on how China should really not be considered a developing nation any more, or how the Western countries should lead the way much more affirmatively by setting good examples, but really, I just wanted to communicate the sense of hopelessness this leaves me with.

Ice, ice baby.

Do you like ice cream? Well I love it. And Christina loves it. And we have it way too often. Or not often enough, depending on how you look at it. One thing's for sure though, we're living the dream. And that dream just got a whole lot sweeter because we have found ice cream scoop bliss.

When I was a kid, my parents had, and still have I believe, one of those scoops with the mechanical handle, where a piece of metal would release the ice cream from the scoop and into your bowl of waffle. It was nice, but of course the mechanical part is not that easy to operate sometimes, and has the potential of breaking. When we moved to the US, we thought we'd get a nice scoop, and went with Kitchenaid. The scoops they had looked nice and we thought we were getting great quality. It made pretty round scoops too, but to get the ice cream out of the scoop I had to use a teaspoon to help it. And not before long, the shiny chrome-looking coating was nicked and started to come off. Huge letdown. Then Christina got another nice scoop from a company named Wilton, that makes all kinds of great baking tools and accessories. It worked pretty well, but because of it's shape it was really difficult to get into the corners of the ice cream containers and impossible for me to make anything that even resembled a nice round scoop. Might as well have used a simple spoon. We've looked around some more, but none of the ones we saw really looked any better. They either had that chrome coating or a funny shape.

And then we went to the city last weekend, to witness some of the madness and get a few last gifts. And inside the MOMA store, we found a scoop that very much appealed to us: a great shape, made out of aluminum alloy (so even if the ice cream sticks, using a spoon wouldn't hurt it) and made in the USA since 1935. Oh, it also uses a scientific principle to help the ice cream come out, namely a heat-conductive fluid. I assume that your hand warms the fluid in the handle, which then provides heat to the scoop part and melts the ice cream into your bowl or cone. And best of all: It really works! I am amazed by this ice cream scoop and it was well worth the price. Beautiful round scoops that come out of the scooper absolutely effortlessly. Ladies and gentlemen: Zeroll Original Ice Cream Scoop.

Well, that pretty much reads like a comment somebody who's being paid by the scoop's manufacturer would leave on an online shopping site or review page, but I just had to share the great news.

Spreading it on too thin

Pantyhose are not the same as regular pants. This becomes especially obvious when the sun is out. And people can all too clearly see the tattoos on your butt as you walk into a fast food restaurant.

It's like déjà vu all over again

We carved pumpkins for Halloween and gave out candy, and we also watched Scream, which I had actually never seen before. And there is this really hilarious, possibly embarrassing, line by Neve Campbell in the movie, which I used as the title for this post. So remember folks: careful when using those fancy words, unless you're 100% sure what they really mean, especially when you use them in a sentence.

Früher war alles besser

Internet, I have a confession to make: I still buy CDs. Go ahead, laugh at my old-fashioned ways. You know what else? I have never bought music in a non-physical format, either. I have downloaded a handful of songs via file-sharing several years ago, but my main purpose there was to discover new music. I can easily do that with the help of myspace, official band websites, free custom radio services and various internet music stores these days, so no more need for me to participate in file-sharing. Because I do believe that it's wrong to become to possess music without paying for it. But anyway, what I really want to talk about is the devaluation of music. And by that I don't really mean the fact that a lot of music is being illegally acquired by listeners, but to a much larger extent the way in which music is being listened to and consumed, and not always appreciated consciously.

I've been trying to figure out the root cause of this devaluation, but I think that it's just a matter of perception. As in I perceive there to be a devaluation, but it probably is not really happening. It's just that people now have the means to listen to and acquire music in a way that best fits their listening habits. Personally, I like to listen to whole albums and focus on the music, immersing myself in it as much as I can. I don't like listening to music I don't know in the background. I don't listen to music on my commute because the noise and all the people are too distracting. I usually have a song in my head that I'm whistling actually.

But enough about me. I think that a lot of other people, maybe even the majority of them, are happy with listening to just single songs, and mixing up their favorites while doing so. They're the ones with the iPods etc. Now when CDs and records were your only option, singles were a very cost-ineffective way of buying music, because albums had a lot more songs on them, and cost less to buy per song. For example, back in the days, a CD single was about 10 Deutsche Mark, and album about 30. So if you bought 3 singles, you'd have about 6 songs, and usually 3 of them were just filler or a remix or something, depending on what kind of music it was. If you got the album, you got at least ten songs most of the time, with a good chance that there is some more enjoyable stuff on there. With the current MP3 pricing structure, there is only a very slight advantage to buying a whole album, if there is one at all.

Does this lead to musicians becoming more song-oriented and moving away from things like creating coherent song collections, arranging the songs on an album in a structured way or even concept albums? Who the heck knows? I think most popular-type music has always been song-oriented. And I don't want to start a debate about whether this is because people naturally respond to and enjoy that kind of format for music, whether it's just out of convenience, or whether it is a result of the song format being pushed on people through various marketing channels. That's irrelevant and I'd be talking to myself anyway.

Feed me Seymour.

Not sure if you read this investigative piece in the New York Times, launched by a woman's tragic fate after eating a hamburger. It's so maddening to read the practices of the meat industry and might push Ginger even closer to becoming a vegetarian. I highly recommend reading that article and if you haven't already, also read Eric Schlosser's "Fast Food Nation", which was first published in 2001 but does not seem to have lost any relevance. I mean, think about it, McDonald's advertises their great ingredients so proudly, but when anyone says "100% Beef" on their product, it really has no meaning at all. All those fat trimmings, no matter how much feces they are contaminated with, are considered beef. Oh, and if you're you're a patty-maker and would like to test the stuff other people supply you with, they might just stop supplying you because of that. That's how confident they are in their hygiene practices. So disgusting.
This industrialized process of making food is a serious problem, and I'm sure we'll hear about a push to irradiate our food to kill e.coli, but that would only fight the symptoms, not the cause. To paraphrase Eric Schlosser, irradiating meat might just lead meat manufacturers to be even less rigorous with hygiene standards, as they know they can just zap it afterward. So in the end you would end up with even less good meat, but more irradiated feces on your plate. Enjoy!

Who will make them leave their keys?

It's not hard to dislike Oprah. I have, involuntarily, seen my fair share of the dribble that passes as true concern and compassion, and wondered about the short attention span, that I'm not sure if it was born out of the perceived necessity to always cover the newest and the latest, or out of the desire to devise a grand marketing scheme. Nothing they ever talk about seems to last longer than a week. One day Oprah announces she is done with dieting and accepts her body the way it is, which I thought was great considering that she didn't appear to be entirely unhealthy. And the next thing you know she is bawling about having fallen off the wagon yet again. The conversation on her show seem utterly insincere to me, in desperate attempts to be deep and meaningful. I like to think that it wasn't always that way, but that she has simply been on the job for way too long.

Enter Wendy Williams. The way I see it, because of the way she revels in superficiality and irrelevance, strangely enough, she ends up being much more sincere than Oprah. And I think it's because there is no pretense about being pretentious, which sounds like such a tired cliche but in the wide world of TV talk shows should be considered poetic.

And so the other day we saw Gloria Gaynor performing on the Wendy Williams show, the audience was dancing and everyone was having fun, and I said something to the effect of "Can you imagine what this would have been like on Oprah?" to Christina. And using her best Oprah impression of how she announces celebrity guests that she is really excited about, Christina goes "Glo-ria Gay-neeeeer" (yes, it is spelled with an o, but not the way Christina's imitation of Oprah has it). And that completely cracked me up. You had to be there to appreciate it, but as an eyewitness, let me tell you: It was hilarious.

Talk of the town.

Man, two nationally televised presidential speeches in just one week. Obama is keeping busy. I watched a repeat of the back to school speech and saw the speech yesterday live on TV. I like the idea of addressing the kids directly like that, as they most certainly deserve to be shown that kind of respect. I didn't like the speech itself very much, though. The message was good and positive over all, of course, but nothing new that attempted to rattle a jaded teenager. Not that a single speech could achieve that.

My main criticism consists of two things: Firstly, he mentioned no blue collar jobs, disregarding the important contributions that every person in the workforce is making. Secondly, because of this emphasis on the small percentage of people that rise to the very top, he puts additional pressure on kids, and makes those that end up as the school janitor, and somebody in our society will have to do that job, most definitely feel like losers. Of course every student should try to take their talents as far as they can and realize their full potential (Lyndon B. Johnson had some great things to say about wasting resources and potential), but Obama painted an outdated romantic picture of children that want to be lawyers and doctors one day. I, for one, never had that dream. I imagine being a lawyer is mostly boring and I feel a lot of them lack a sense of moral wrong and right, focusing only on the legality of things. And what about all those accident lawyers? Did they really achieve something great? Judging from the ridiculous lawsuits we hear about all the time, I beg to differ. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a truck driver, or operate some other kind of heavy machinery. Then, for the longest time, I had no idea what the heck I wanted to do. Fact is, people fixing drains, picking up trash, repairing roofs, selling books or programming databases all contribute an equal part to making sure that our society is functional and prosperous. To suggest otherwise is an affront to any hard-working person out there. What I think is great about an good education, is that it offers you a choice. It allows you to try different things, until you find the right fit. If you quit high school without graduating, your choices are severely diminished. That, I think, is the message we should teach our kids.

Oh, yeah, parents that had their kids miss the speech for fear of indoctrination are obviously fanatical paranoids.

The health care speech was really great I thought. I felt his attempt to show that he is willing to consider objections and new ideas was genuine, while he made clear how much reform is needed, and how much of a moral obligation it is to provide better health care. I guess that is what I don't get. It is plain to see that health care in the US is not distributed according to need (I got a whole 'nother post in the pipe on supply and demand in markets) and that this is a huge moral challenge. Now why would anyone in their right mind oppose giving people access to the care they desperately need, but simply let them die (and that is actually what is at stake here) in pain and poverty instead? You'd have to be a paranoid fanatic.

Diabolical dishonesty.

The other day, and I don't really feel like retracing my steps and providing the links, I somehow stumbled upon Michelle Malkin's website and saw that she had written a book in which she attempts to set the record straight on the WWII internment camps in the US. From what I gathered there, she claims that racism was not a big factor when people from various ethnic backgrounds were moved to internment camps, that it was not predominantly Japanese-Americans that lived there, and that it was a military necessity to create the camps. This might not be a 100% accurate depiction of her position, as this is just from memory, though. Oh, I also remember a claim stating that some people moved there voluntarily. Somehow, it seemed really fishy, and without further research I thought that putting people that have been convicted of no crimes in camps is just wrong, no matter how you rationalize it.

After looking into it a little further, I quickly discovered articles refuting her claims piece by piece, written by expert scholars on the subject. And as much I was outraged by somebody putting forth such false and misleading claims, I also thought about a tendency I have observed, where this kind of intellectual dishonesty, especially by those who like to cry the loudest, is becoming more and more widespread. Because a lot of people will read this book and take it at face value, and no matter how much the experts explain how wrong and misleading it is, the damage will be done. I loathe people deliberately deceiving the public like this, all in the name of uncovering the truth, but really trying to further their agenda. Case in point: Michelle Malkin claims that she wrote the book as somebody not affected by the internments in any way, thus not having any vested interest in the outcome of her findings. However, she immediately takes her findings to argue that racial profiling should be used more widely to deter acts of terrorism. How someone can keep a straight face and present themselves as a messenger of truth while at the same time arguing in such a way is simply beyond me, and taints the public debate upon which a functioning democracy relies.