Over at Slate, Jack Shafer has an e-mail interview with Michael Crichton.  In 1993, Crichton predicted that the mainstream media would be extinct by 2002.  He’s not all that far off, actually.  Crichton points out that the media is too conformist and committed to sensational and superficial issues (really??!!!??) to give the public a balanced view of the world.

…the media narrows the expression of viewpoints to an extraordinary degree. We’ve already discussed the small population of talking heads on cable shows. At the same time, the interest aroused by figures like Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul occurred because, in my view, the American public had never heard people talk that way. Similarly, the Rev. Wright is espousing views that are hardly rare, but people react with shock and awe. People should take it as a sign that something is wrong—the media isn’t giving them the full story. By a long shot.  (emphasis added)

We get opinion, with a smattering of facts, not news.  Two topics especially come to mind — religion and pro-life.  Both, of course, are important to me.

For instance, large-scale conversion to Christianity in China is underway. But — particularly since it is mostly conversion to evangelical and pentecostal Protestantism — the MSM won’t touch it.  As we go through the latest breathless round of women being ordained as Catholic “priests”, we get little more than “Vatican sends threat over women priests” — without mention that there are no women Catholic priests.   (For a really good blog on the subject of how the media reports on religion, check out the Get Religion blog.)

It’s the same with pro-life issues.  We never seem to get a story that reports on the philosophy of the pro-life movement (except in religious-affiliated newspapers).   Nope, we’re not rational, we are stereotypes that blow up clinics and shoot people.  And the pro-choicers are the rational ones — even if you never see photos of the ridiculously costumed, inane slogan chanting ones.

Or the anti-Bush sentiment that causes such incomplete reporting as the New York Times editorial which denounced Bush over his opposing a G.I. Bill of Rights. The editorial used pretty harsh language, condemning both Bush and McCain. What they failed to mention in the editorial was that Bush was actually for a different G.I. Bill of Rights that would actually give G.I.’s more benefits.

I’d go on, but you get the idea.  As Crichton says:

Crichton suggests that readers and viewers could more objectively measure the quality of the news they consume by pulling themselves “out of the narcotizing flow of what passes for daily news.” Look at a newspaper from last month or a news broadcast.

“Look at how many stories are unsourced or have unnamed sources. Look at how many stories are about what ‘may’ or ‘might’ or ‘could’ happen,” he says. “Might and could means the story is speculation. Framing as I described means the story is opinion. And opinion is not factual content.”  …

“I want a news service that tells me what no one knows but is true nonetheless,” he says.

Bingo!

The Phoenix lander arrived successfully late Sunday in the”Green Valley” region of Mars (which has the largest concentration of ice outside the poles), making a near-perfect, tricky landing. The mission has two objectives: (1) study the history of water in the Martian arctic, and (2) search for evidence of a habitable zone and assess the biological potential of the ice-soil boundary. The lander is scheduled to deploy a robotic arm to dig through the protective top soil layer to the water ice below and ultimately, to bring both soil and water ice to the lander platform for scientific analysis.

In other words, Phoenix will sit on Mars for 90 (Martian) days, sniffing soil and looking for frozen Martians in whatever form they may take, until the Martian winter darkness sets in, eliminating the solar power needed to operate the lander, and freezing the little guy. Here’s the link to the NASA info on Phoenix.

This is the sixth (out of seven American attempts) successful Martian landings. You’ve no doubt seen all the cool pictures the lander sent back, the first ones within hours of landing. Though you have to wonder about the young woman I overhead commenting that she thought Mars was a red planet, and how come the pictures are gray? (I’m not kidding…)

However, for the young woman and any other conspiracy theorist types, there’s also this one:

What is that shiny white thing in the background? Most experts believe it is either (a) the parachute and backshell of the spacecraft, which fell about 100 yards south of Phoenix’s landing site, or (b) a rock.

I’ve spent a delightful few minutes engaging in wild speculation about aliens. But then reason set in, and yes, it’s probably a darn rock. So much for alien life….but it was fun while it lasted!

I am an unabashed “foodie.”  I love reading cookbooks, looking over recipes in magazines (Southern Living is one of my faves), and I watch Food Network occasionally.  I enjoy cooking, and especially love baking, all of which have had somewhat unfortunate effects on my waistline.

I’ve been cooking since I was in grade school — Mom had five kids, one with a serious medical condition — and my ‘chore’ was helping out in the kitchen, and eventually, taking over and making dinner several times a week.  Mom is a great cook, and taught me well.  My home ec class helped too.  (And I learned to sew too — I still have the 1972 Kenmore sewing machine my folks bought for me that still does what I need it to do when I quilt.)  I have never considered myself particularly domestic but in 2008, I apparently am.  Paul Roberts, author of “The End of Food” writes an op-ed in the Dallas Morning News:

Today, despite a mania for cookbooks, celebrity chefs and 24-hour programming on the Food Network, cooking is a dying art. According to the Department of Agriculture, half of our food dollars are spent on items cooked outside the home, and almost half of the meals served in the average U.S. household lack even a single from-scratch item.

Marketing surveys blame our crowded schedules, our “time poverty”: The average American can spare just 30 minutes a day for the kitchen. But the sad truth is, many of us no longer know what that room is for. Because so many of the roughly 100 million consumers born since the 1970s grew up in households where cooking was already passe, it’s a skill we never learned.

In addition, I’d have to add lack of planning.  The main reason I sometimes stop at Jack-in-the-Box or Subway or Papa Murphy’s to pick up a quick dinner is my lack of planning.  I don’t plan my meals in advance, and often don’t have the ingredients on hand to whip up dinner in 30 minutes.  My husband has an Army term for lack of forethought, but I can’t repeat it here

I can understand the ‘time poverty’ concept — between my 9-5 job, stopping by to check up on my parents several days a week, and getting our home-based business going, time to cook is often in short supply.  It’s not unusual to sit down to dinner around 7:30 or even 8.  Which can be problematic for my husband’s diabetes.  I do cook most of our meals, but I admit to using some prepared shortcuts fairly regularly (frozen veggies in particular). One of the frustrating things about keeping enough fresh, from scratch ingredients on hand is the spoilage factor.  Many of the “fresh” produce items we buy are already rotting when we purchase them — they just look good, thanks to shipping methods and other means of preservation.  I’ve had bell peppers decay in what seems like overnight.  While I would love to put in a backyard veggie garden, I know that I don’t have the time (or inclination — I am so not a gardener) and would end up feeding most of my harvest to the squirrels, birds and insects.  And with gasoline at $4.00 a gallon, I’m not inclined to do a whole lot of driving around for ingredients.

Flying post-9/11 is no longer any fun. From rising fuel surcharges and increased airport delays to overzealous security agents and declining airline quality, spending some time at home isn’t such a bad idea these days. Exhibit A: Japanese customers officer plants a million yen (nearly $10,000) worth of marijuana (other sources say hashish) in a random passenger’s suitcase, and then loses it. Oh boy….

An unsuspecting passenger who flew through Tokyo’s Narita airport left with $10,000 worth of free marijuana thanks to a forgetful customs officer and a sniffer dog with an unreliable nose.

The officer stuffed five ounces of the drug into the side pocket of a randomly selected black suitcase coming off an overseas flight into Narita yesterday so that the dog could get some practice at detecting drugs.

“The dog couldn’t find it and the officer also forgot which bag he put it in,” a customs office spokeswoman said. “If by some chance passengers find it in their suitcase, we’re asking them to return it.”

The spokeswoman quoted the unnamed 38-year-old officer as saying: “I knew that using passengers’ bags is prohibited, but I did it because I wanted to improve the sniffer dog’s ability.”

He was reprimanded by the head of customs at Narita, Manpei Tanaka, who said: “This case was extremely regrettable. I would like to deeply apologize.”

The marijuana, which has a street value of $9,680, was in a metal box wrapped with newspapers. Japan strictly prohibits both hard and soft drugs, with people imprisoned for possession of even small amounts of marijuana.

Fortunately, the passenger found it and turned it over to police.

The customers officer was reprimanded? Well, that would have fixed everything if the passenger had gotten busted somewhere down the line with an illegal substance he or she didn’t even know they had. And what could they say? “But, Officer, that’s not mine.” Ummm, okay. Nobody’s ever used that excuse before.

Another reason to skip flying these days — the fact a customs officer can open your bag without you present and go through your stuff. Yeah, I know, if there’s nothing in there illegal you have nothing to worry about. But it’s embarrassing having people go through your private things. Heck, I don’t even like it when my husband goes through my pocket book.

The system like is ripe for abuse — see above — and theft. Not to mention damage to your things. I travel with a piece of medical equipment that, thank goodness, is pretty durable, but a number of times its gotten stuck back in its protective case backwards — or even not at all.

P.S. - Note to Japanese Customs: That dog isn’t worth whatever it is you feed it as a sniffer dog. You might want to retire it.

Okay, I have a question: how many hips does a dog have if he has four legs?

 Now that I have your attention, there are 3 things the human race HAS to have to survive more than anything else: air, food, and water.  I’m going to address the issue of food here.

There have been a lot of comments dealing with the price of gas and food lately, for obvious reasons. Many have said that because the price of gas, the cost of food is going up. Let us put that in perspective first.  It is NOT the price of GAS that is making food prices go up, it is the cost of diesel fuel. If you check out prices of diesel, you will find that those prices started going up well before the cost of gas.  Why, you ask? Well, the most common ways you get food from point A to point B is either by truck or by train. Since most of the trains are moving mostly things other than food, then the trucks are moving it. Make sense? So, if you wanted to raise the cost of fuel for that segment of the population which has no choice but to pay, who would you raise the prices for? The truckers, of course. From the farms to the processing plants to the storage facilities and then to the stores, all by truck.

So, first we have the truckers having to pay more for fuel because they have no choice.

Now the food. In order to eat, you have to buy food. What a surprise. So even if you buy only the most generic staples you need, you are subject to the prices beyond your control. Goes along the same lines as the diesel fuel. Milk, bread, butter, flour, sugar - only the basics. All of them have gone up and contrary to the alleged “national average”, in most places the prices are higher than the national average. And you have no choice but to pay for them. If you are on food stamps, on a limited income, etc., you are going to pay more and it is going to hurt even more.

Now comes the less than happy news. I read an article today online in the business section and here is what they had to say:

“More price hikes are likely to come from staples producers, which could help the individual shares, but may stoke overall inflation fears, said Brandon Thomas, chief investment officer with Portfolio Management Consultants in Chicago, a unit of Envestnet Asset Management.”

“Consumers are cutting back on discretionary spending, like appliances, but they need toothpaste, milk and everything else,” Thomas said. “I think consumer staples companies realize they have the pricing power.”

“At this point the big question is how much are the energy prices being passed along through in consumer products and hitting the store shelves. That’s the key here,” said Fred Dickson, market strategist at D.A. Davidson & Co. Lake Oswego, Oregon.”

“The real questions is are consumers going to take and ratchet back spending, and do it significantly. So there’s earnings risk, to put it simply,” he added.”

So, the grocery stores are just now realizing they have pricing powers? I think not. They have known it for a long time. They started raising prices when diesel started going up. Even the store brand items have risen in price. For example, in a local store from a major food chain, a case of 24 cans of Diet Coke was $4.49 less than 6 months ago. Now the suggested retail price is $18.99! A loaf of store-brand bread, whole wheat, is now $4.49. Was $1.89.

Consumers cutting back? For food, you can only cut back so far before something gives, like people start to go hungry.

Inflation fears? Sorry guys but it is already here. If the experts do not think so, then they aren’t much of an expert, or someone else is buying their food for them so they do not KNOW. Of course, if you make a lot of money, you might be feeling the squeeze only a little.

But the family of four who has parent’s working at a minimum wage job is feeling, and has been feeling, the pinch. Talk about hopelessness. Ask the parent how he or she feels when telling their children, “that is all we have right now”.

There is a lot more people out there than you might think. Just call and ask your local food banks.

But let’s not be concerned as long as the major food chains make their profit, since “it might be at risk”. They will continue to make their profit at everyone’s expense.

And don’t even get me started on how “obese” the general population has gotten. Have you looked at the prices of the “healthy” food compared to the same “less healthy”food? Some prices are now 5 times more. So as long as it is more expensive, and there is less money to spend, guess which food people are going to buy. No wonder people are going to fast food chains to buy food - it is cheaper and you get more for your money in comparison to stores.  Quite the reverse of what it used to be.

Yup, the nation has a lot at risk. And people have complaints about how the United States is taking advantage of other countries and their people?

We are doing it to ourselves all the time only in the name of profits for the investors. I had thought everyone would have learned from the housing mess.

Yes, there is a lot more at risk than profits.

I’m a rather outspoken advocate for smaller government.  (I can hear my hubby now… ‘outspoken? is that the polite way to call it?’)  I get tired when I hear about this or that government program costing us millions, or even a billion. 

Billion.  Like many of us, I’ve gotten rather inured to thinking of billions of dollars.  Politicians throw it around so casually.  Such as the farm bill that passed last week which is expected to carry a price tag conservatively set at $289 billion. 

The 2008 Pig Book identified 11,610 projects at a cost of $17.2 billion in the 12 Appropriations Acts for fiscal 2008. 

But how much is a billion?

• A billion seconds ago it was 1959.
• A billion minutes ago Jesus was alive.
• A billion hours ago our ancestors were living in the Stone Age.
• A billion days ago no-one walked on the earth on two feet.
• A billion dollars ago was only 8 hours and 20 minutes, at the rate our government is spending it.

It was spending, not the war in Iraq, that cost Republicans their control of Congress in 2006.  It was earmarks, pet projects tucked into spending bills, that ticked off so many fiscal conservatives.  And the next president will face two daunting budget problems. The winner will inherit a large deficit resulting from a weak economy, an expensive war and the persistent political inclination to spend more and tax less. The bigger challenge? Promises made to the growing population of retirees as health-care spending continues to soar.

Unfortunately, neither McCain, Obama, or Hillary have any true commitment to cutting costs.  Which means you and I are going to pay for it.

As a child (yes, back in the dark ages), I would sit outside on clear nights with my telescope and a cardboard star-chart, that I would rotate to the right date, time and hemisphere, and look, among all the fuzzy images, for the next big discovery in astronomy. While I never succeeded in finding either previously unknown astral objects or extra-terrestrial beings, I was fascinated with Jupiter. It showed up clearly in my little telescope, and the Great Red Spot (which is about the size of the Earth) was one of the few things I could consistently locate. Obviously, I wasn’t much good at using the start-chart. I started bugging my parents to take me to the nearby planetarium. Which led to my fondness for laser light shows and Led Zepplin — but that’s another story.

A couple of years ago, much to the surprise of astronomers, Jupiter got another red spot, creatively named Red Spot Jr. (which just tickles my funny-bone for some reason). Now there’s a third red spot (not yet named, but I’m pushing for Red Spot Episode III). Amateur planet-gazer Christopher Go of Cebu in the Philippines (I am so jealous) helped locate the new spot, and the Hubble Telescope took some pictures.

From NASA’s astronomy picture of the day:

From NASA:

For about 300 years Jupiter’s banded atmosphere has shown a remarkable feature to telescopic viewers, a large swirling storm system known as The Great Red Spot. In 2006, another red storm system appeared, actually seen to form as smaller whitish oval-shaped storms merged and then developed the curious reddish hue. Now, Jupiter has a third red spot, again produced from a smaller whitish storm. All three are seen in this image made from data recorded on May 9 and 10 with the Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2. The spots extend above the surrounding clouds and their red color may be due to deeper material dredged up by the storms and exposed to ultraviolet light, but the exact chemical process is still unknown. For scale, the Great Red Spot has almost twice the diameter of planet Earth, making both new spots less than one Earth-diameter across. The newest red spot is on the far left (west), along the same band of clouds as the Great Red Spot and is drifting toward it. If the motion continues, the new spot will encounter the much larger storm system in August. Jupiter’s recent outbreak of red spots is likely related to large scale climate change as the gas giant planet is getting warmer.

Michelle Obama, proud of the USA since her husband is doing well in the primaries, says:

“The truth is, in order to get things like universal health care and a revamped education system, then someone is going to have to give up a piece of their pie so that someone else can have more.”

This goes well with Mr. Obama’s statement that:

We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times … and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK”

I mean, on the one hand, a good argument can be made that we are an overly materialistic, gluttonous, and egotistical society; but trying to bring out the best in people is better than saying essentially “You’re too stupid to watch out for yourself so we will snatch your free will and make your decisions for you.”

These two make me miss the Clintons.

Back when I was toilet-training my son, I had to get inventive.  You see, he’d get distracted easily and pee would end up mostly anywhere but the toilet.  So I floated a small paper bullseye I’d drawn for him to aim at.  Which did the trick.

Well, 20 years later, a couple of Belgians have come up with video game named ‘Place to Pee’,

which allows players to slalom down ski slopes or kill aliens while relieving themselves at urinals.

The “Place to Pee” booth fits two users at a time, and gamers hit their targets by aiming at sensors at either side of the urinal. The makers say that women can play along, too — using a “special paper cone”.   Why thank you, Belgian guys. I’m sure the women will be lined up to play. 

This conjures up visions of drunken peeing contests. And that just can’t be good.

Listening to the radio this morning on the way to work, and somehow the conversation turned to Carmen Electra’s portable stripper pole.  The DJs (husband and wife) were riffing on the subject, but the wife said she was seriously thinking about it. 

Ms. Electra’s ad/endorsement for the pole reads:

“I am so excited to have a new pole coming out, a portable stripper pole. The great thing about my portable pole is you can put it in your own living room or you can do the  workout in your bedroom,” she said. “No one has to see you do it. It’s up to you — you can perform for your husband or boyfriend, or do it more as a workout and focus on that.”

Oh yeah, no more t-shirt and sweatpants during your workout, now you’ll need a black lace thong and garter. Sounds really comfy.

Okay, snark aside, there is more wrong with this than just a lack of class.   Our society is stuck so much on the physical. What you look like.  What you wear.  Whether or not you have six-pack abs or a DD chest, how to please your man/woman in bed.  Love is equated with sex. 

Which is what bothers me about the stripper pole — it’s a subtle diminishing of the love between a married couple from the type of love that is all about commitment and contribution and doing the good for the other, and reduces it to the purely physical.   You’ve gone from “I love you and give you all of myself” to “I love you because you make me feel good.”  From intimacy to performance. 

It’s not a trade-off I’d like to make.