Acai, "Purple Gold."

After much exhortation from my mother, I was finally convinced to take a trip to Costco to buy some cactus juice. (It's good for you!) I couldn't find what she was telling me about, so I bought Acai berry juice instead (~$9.50 for two one-liter bottles).

I drank a small glass of it with my dinner. It was bittersweet and had a thick, viscous consistency, almost like a syrup - not like any of that watered-down Apple Dandy stuff that kids drink today. I was pretty buzzed for awhile, and I'm wired on it now! I don't know how I'm going to fall asleep; it's almost 10pm and I feel pretty energetic. I should've had it early in the morning as recommended, as a replacement for coffee/tea.

This stuff is great and claims to have the equivalent of 110 servings of fruit in terms of antioxidant power in one serving. I don't know if it would be great for losing weight, though. In terms of taste, the bottle I got had blueberry juice mixed in, so I couldn't tell what the pure juice tasted like. It might be pretty bad....

It's pretty amazing that the acai berry has gone mainstream, a lowly, once-unknown fruit from the Amazon now blown to stardom by Oprah and spam generators. This once-humble fruit is now available to the general public, Walmart shoppers! According to this NYT article, 53 new acai-containing food products were introduced in the US in 2008, up from 4 in 2004, with over $106 million in sales in 2008.

Sunday

Sometimes you wish you could go back and undo something. Sometimes you wish it were as easy as pressing CTRL+Z, but unfortunately, there's no "undo" button on life.

The only person who can hit the undo button for us is Christ. Through his blood, we are made perfect again, and all our flaws become nothing.

Fried Eggplant Sandwich

Sorry for the lack of content. Eat this in the meantime.

EDIT: One of the neat features of Blogger is that it saves old drafts that you never published and allows you to retroactively publish them. I just went and published a few of those half-thoughts from earlier this year.

Slumdog Millionaire - Mausam and Escape by AR Rahman

Pretty intense.

Work and Life Poll

Harris Poll, why must you torment me?

Paean.

I'll say it loud here by your grave, those angels can't ever take your place.

One of Tori's most mournful songs, written for the daughter she miscarried while on tour in the 90s. She blames herself for being a rock star mother, inadequate, etc. I didn't understand that this song was a paean for her lost daughter until I listened to it about 100 times and finally understood the meaning. Definitely listen to the CD version - some covers have too fast a tempo, a flirtatious bent, and forget that this is a song of mourning.

Omnia Vanitas

Vanitas vanitatum omnia vanitas. -Ecclesiastes 1:2
Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.

Vanitas, -atis, f. (L)- falsity, unreality, deception, untruth, bragging, lying, vanity, worthlessness, frivolity

One of my favorite painting styles is the Vanitas still life, a medieval kind of symbolic art that captures the transience of the mortal life, the futility of material possessions, and the inevitability of death. Wikipedia article, I couldn't have said it better myself. Some examples:


David Bailly. Self-Portrait with Vanitas Symbols, 1651.

Oh great, this is cluttered, this is as messy as a dorm room desk, but there are always some things that I don't understand, so many different layers of complexity. The man holding a portrait of himself as an old man, for example. His expression is unreadable. What is he feeling? Does he know that he is going to die?


Charles Allen Gilbert (1873-1929). All is Vanity. This image is more popular in the optical illusions circuit, I'm afraid. I think this painting would be better if the mirror were broken.

An artist by the name of Alain Khadem has done some 21st-century retakes on the vanitas style to fit the "absurdities of our fast-paced modern life. I especially like the one with the Molotov cocktail, and Overacheiver/Underacheiver.

/absinthe.

Megalomaly

chronological anomaly = Anachronism

I was looking down my flixster queue and realized that I had several movies about Guantanamo Bay on it. In the future, hopefully, we'll look back on Guantanamo as a horrible relic of the Bush administration, or even think of it as a place like Auschwitz.

To think of it, a third of my life was spent under the Bush administration and wartime conditions.

Barack Obama: he completes us.

I saw this on the Daily Show when Obama first accepted the Democratic party nomination in November, and it's still as inspiring today, after the inauguration.

Engrish

Some Great Instructional Videos.

How to be Happy.

Step 6: Stop Dwelling.
Leading psychologist Sonia Lubamersky has found that the happiest people don't dwell on negative or ambiguous events. Furthermore, excessive introspection may sap your mental resources, making it harder for positive changes to occur. So turn off that Morrissey record and go outside!

How to Give a Man Hug.

Blessed be.

Happy holidays! A reminder of how small we really are, and how great His glory.



In this, the darkest time of year (in the Northern hemisphere, at least), stay warm, love one another, and go on doing good.

Cheers,
J

Marketing Hysteria 101

Create a problem. Bonus points if this problem is psychosomatic, caused by microscopic germs or other parasites invisible to the naked eye, or something that causes your skin to crawl and reach for disinfectant (ACME* Brand Ultra-Antiseptic Strength).

Create a product that solves this imaginary problem or tries to address it => $$

Examples of hysteria created by the advertising industry:

DUST MITES

RESTLESS LEGS SYNDROME

Soap the only way Tyler Durden would have it.

There's a new ad campaign by a major soap company that starts with D* that shows how most soaps leave an imperceptible scum or residue on the skin after showering, while D* doesn't. The ads show two different women using soap, one with D* and the other using a competitor's product, and then compare the two under a mysterious purple UV/infrared light. The competitor's soap leaves streaks of soap scum on the woman's skin after showering, while D*'s doesn't.

This ad campaign bugs me on a number of different levels because we shouldn't be using detergents on our skin.

Most "soaps" on the market today are actually detergents.

Detergents: harsh cleaning agents common to laundry detergent, shampoo, antibacterial liquid soaps, body washes, etc, that usually contain sulfates, artificial colors and fragrances.
Soaps: made in the traditional way from boiling animal fat and alkali (lye).

Detergents are better cleaning agents than soaps because they don't form soap scum in hard water, while fat-based soaps do. Of course, this is great for laundry, leaving your white clothes brilliantly white, or for scrubbing bathroom floors and shower walls sparkly clean.

However, detergents strip the skin of natural oils, leaving it dry and flaky, which is why I use oil-based, sulfate-free soaps as often as I can. I look for natural products with a high content of natural oils, moisturizers, and plant extracts. I've found olive oil soaps to be the best.

My favorite is Dr. Bronner's Magic Soap. At first, bathing with something enitrely oil-based may seem strange, but I've found that these products are just as effective as detergents. They don't leave any kind of "invisible" residue that I care about (yeah, that's the soap product market creating more hysteria so you'll freak out and go buy detergents) and in fact, I WANT the olive oil and plant extracts to stay on my skin and moisturize and nourish it.

This goes the same for shampoos, too. At first I was reluctant to use Dr. Bronner's as a shampoo, thinking that all of the oils would make my scalp oilier, but it cleaned just as well as my sulfate-based shampoos, and lathered well too. The only issue I had is that it left my hair with a coarse kind of texture, I guess the way nature intended, not with the polished, fake, shiny, smooth, silicone-coated sheen that that cosmoceutical marketing departments love to try to sell.

Use real soap, not detergent.

Some further reading:
Truth and Lies in Organic Personal Care
The Campaign for Safe Cosmetics

SNL Lazy Sunday - Parnell/Sandberg

This really cracks me up.

How Hot Dogs are Made.

Are you disgusted yet?

Green Gifts

Timbuk2 Hidden Tote, Recycled PET Fabric.

Folds up into a zip-up pouch. Should've had one when I went to the market today! Also comes in a backpack style.

Grim Fandango trailer (1998)

I'm replaying this great film noir epic, and enjoying the lush Art Deco Aztec art.

The Illusion of Food

This is the title of a painting that my mind has not yet created, born of a quote of my brother's. It might also be the title of a diet book that no one has written yet (so is Eat Neolithic).

The illusion:


The reality, which is lost behind smoke and mirrors and the flashing neon lights of consumerism:


Happy Thanksgiving, and I hope everyone eats Neolithic on our day of gratitude.

Eating Neolithic

I'm reading Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food (a follow-up to his successful Omnivore's Dilemma from a few years ago) and I'm awed. Some interesting points:

-The American Paradox. Everyone knows that the French eat a high-fat, buttery diet and drink wine and yet remain slim and have long lifespans (the French Paradox). On the other hand, Americans, the people most obsessed with diet and nutrition, have the highest rates of obesity and chronic diseases like diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer (!).
-Our diets are precisely engineered. No other animal needs PROFESSIONAL HELP figuring out what to eat.

In order to avoid the slew of Western diseases and live healthier, longer lives, we ought to basically eat what we evolved to eat. (We haven't evolved responses to high fructose corn syrup, which has been around for about half a century, whereas the human species has consumed maize for thousands of years longer.) Eat what our Neolithic ancestors ate, he says. That means a diet of whole-grain, nonprocessed food, foods prepared according to cultural traditions that unlock key nutrients (for example, processing maize with limestone unlocks niacin), and nothing that ever passed through a factory or manufacturing facility. Would you eat something extruded through a nozzle? Squirtable Go-Gurt? Hydrogenated cardboard Pringles? Fluorescent orange plastic cheese? Splenda? Some other unrecognizable chemical compound that was made in a lab? This stuff is completely unrecognizable as food, but this is our post-industrial diet.

Neolithic or Paleolithic?
This made me think about whether a Paleolithic diet or a Neolithic one would be better.
Hunter-gatherers were the original affluent society. Before agriculture, foragers would spend 20 hours a week acquiring food, and then have plenty of leisure time left over to shoot the breeze, visit relatives, make jewelry, weave baskets, play with children, and so on. With agriculture, cultivation of crops became crucial and people spent 7 days a week, 24 hours a day slaving away on a farm. Generally, the foraging diet was more diverse and higher quality nutrient-wise than an agricultural one based on few key crops and livestock, but it probably tastes terrible. Let's see what I can gather....Insects. Raw weeds and tough, fibrous leafy greens. Okra. Bizarre seasonal fruits like durian and mango and avocado and grapes and pears that grow only at the foothills of the most remote mountains in China, but have incredible antioxidant and nutrient properties. Crustaceans. Minimally cooked.

Taste-wise, definitely go Neolithic. I'll take some stone-ground wheat bread and home-churned butter and cheese any day. Soba noodles. Beancurd, mmm. The Neolithic diet sounds yummy and feels like home. It's been 10,000 years and we're still around! Don't eat any of that processed post-industrial garbage.