Hair Loss: Implications
If anybody I know is going to have a quarter-life crisis anytime soon, it’s not going to be me. I finished with that years ago. I look at my hairline and I see it peeling back ever so slowly, and I know that the first signs of aging are upon me. I have been looking forward to them in the mirror, as the marks of youth have for so long seemed unfaithful to the person that I am.
Instinctively, any man’s response to hair loss is denial–at first. Grow a little extra, comb it over the affected area, and think about it later. As it becomes more difficult to ignore, accept the loss and purchase Rogaine and other similar products. Perhaps, if rich, consider grafting hair from other locations. A man’s instinctive response to a problem is to fix it.
But hair loss is not a problem: it is merely a symptom of mortality. If mortality were a problem to be solved, we would have more than fables regarding the fountain of youth. Mortality is the most beautiful thing we have. The reason the world is at all worthwhile to us is that we recently experienced it for the first time, and it therefore still has new things to offer us. We came, we saw, and maybe we didn’t conquer, but we breathed, and some of it was good… and so that we might understand that some of it was good, the rest was neutral or bad. For reference.
It’s not that I don’t instinctively want to preserve the status of my hairline. I do. Survival instincts are natural. But as we may learn from phobias: instincts commonly misfire. Open spaces are not inherently scary, nor are closed spaces, or in my case, dogs. Similarly, hair loss is a natural progression related to aging, and all that can be done to manage it is to accept it and progress happily forward towards the grave.
My survival instincts will be put to better use shunning industrially processed foods and excess fats. Baldness is not nearly as threatening as heart attacks.
Some shave their heads entirely and embrace the bald identity. Some develop a strange head-hugging hairstyle reminiscent of an egg wrapped in fur. I do not yet know which way the wind will blow on this one, but I do know which way it will not: I don’t need a toupee or grafts or a comb-over or any of the other paralytic traits which mark a narcissistic person incapable of accepting reality.
Let it fade.
Tape on the Fishtank
My brother is a mischevious guy. When he was very young he once decided that throwing marbles around the living room would be fun. At the time we had a tropical fish tank. You see where this is going? When I discovered him attempting to use Scotch tape to prevent the water from leaking through the spiderwebbing crack in the middle of the glass surface; I told him that it wouldn’t work. His response? “But it has to!”
Mind you, he was very young then and I think now he’s a bit better at taking responsibility for his actions.
Yesterday I was listening to NPR on the way back from work, and heard a comment on graduation rates at community colleges. Since enrollment is up because people can’t find jobs, the fact that graduation rates are abysmal is seen as an on-the-radar problem that should be tackled by the kinds of experts who speak on prestigious talk radio. I found this somewhat depressing. No amount of research you do can quantify this for you, but as Editor in Chief emeritus of the student newspaper of one of the best, largest community colleges in the country: I’d like to set the record straight.
Graduation rates at community colleges are poor because a disproportionately high number of people who attend community college either: should be out of school and in the workforce because they are too inept to successfully proceed with their education, or have a crisis of self-esteem that is preventing them from attaining their maximum potential in school. Many students are faced with a mix of both problems. The former problem can be tackled by making admission to degree dispensing programs at community colleges require a demonstration of merit based on a probationary period of consistent performance. The latter is a problem of the human spirit, and no bureaucratically ordained action has yet and likely will ever make any difference there. But if they want to, these disembodied voices can feel free to put tape on the fishtank.
If a racehorse develops bad knees but a lot of people already bet big money on him, how can we make sure these people get their money back? The best answer I’ve got that cuts losses is to shoot the horse before the race. Apparently the owner (whose head is in the sand) thinks that surgery is the answer. We all know that the horse won’t ever run the same, and therefore he’ll never be a contender again. The best thing for wise gamblers to do is move their money to a healthier candidate: preferably a younger one that shows promise. The federal government, by bailing out GM, is putting tape on the fishtank… but some of that is my tape, and it has my last name on it, and I don’t want people to think that my kids want to claim ownership of said fishtank. I really wish they’d have put that to a national vote.
If humanity learns one thing from mortality it should be that death is inevitable. When death comes knocking, we should all have the dignity to answer the door with a smile.
Origins of Spiritual Euphoria
I find it deeply satisfying that the only official response to this article thus far was from a user evangelizing an addiction. I’ve heard the same pitch from cigarette and cannabis smokers, as well as alcoholics and opiate abusers.
Once you’ve [used my drug], you won’t need anything else!
I think the missing link between predisposition to addiction and the habitual formation of addiction (which were discussed in the article, which you should read) lies in the process by which a religious person reaches an ongoing spiritual high. Particularly, what conditions must be met in order for a person to become spiritually high? At least part of the answer lies in the anonymous comment on the linked article.
It is selfless love that provides lasting happiness because that is the means to having a relationship with our Creator. To *know* that there exists a Being Who created you and loves you beyond your comprehension fills the unquenchable thirst that people try to fill destructively.
Cultists and religious fanatics first subvert and suppress the set of priorities and identifiers that comprise the self. After achieving mental and physical isolation from the self, these people train their brains to feel pleasure that is not dependent on any variable: essentially, they learn to love nothing. If you can convince yourself to love nothing, by extension you’ll be a giddy mess regardless of external stimuli, as you’ll always have an infinite supply of nothing on hand.
People mistake this nothingness for a property of a specific deity, but any casual observer of religion can identify it as a transitive concept. Interestingly, this mental state is attained in different ways by different religions. Chassidic Jews get their religious high from group chants, songs, and dances. Buddhist monks obtain Zen by conditioning their minds to retain focus in spite of physical setbacks such as starvation or extreme temperatures. Evangelical Christians find ecstasy in throwing themselves to the ground and thrashing about, babbling nonwords and phrases in a process that seems to be a cathartic rejection of normative human behavior.
What all these processes have in common with a teenage girl cutting her legs with a razor blade and a skydiver holding off on pulling the parachute cord for just another second are the conditioned release of dopamine, and the absence of physical substance intake. If I had a research grant, I’d be scanning the brains of people who are able to release dopamine without drugs. If this process could be isolated, simplified, and reliably duplicated by a majority of people trained in it, it could create an apolitical alternative to drugs and religion for managing happiness and revolutionize psychiatric care.
The Half-Life of Art: Not Quantifiable, But Observable
Art is inextricably linked to medium in that if you attempt to separate an art from its medium, you must in some way translate it. Translation may preserve the original spirit of a work of art, but it certainly does not preserve the artwork in its original form. This is a fine concept, because translation can give a work of art an afterlife that extends long after the culture and artist that gave birth to it has passed into distant memory. If it were not for translation, we would not have or understand the Bible, the works of Homer, Henrik Ibsen, and increasingly even William Shakespeare, whose works seem to require miles of footnotes to approximate contextual understanding for first-time readers. Mediums, like works of art, are subject to limited lifespans and eventually give way to more accessible or at least more culturally relevant forms; but this does not mean that they have to completely die once they have become out of date.
Due to this phenomenon, the death of the novel has been incorrectly forecast and announced more times than I can recall, and yet novels strangely seem to persist in spite of the claims of former unhappy English students and cynical scholars alike. Media conglomerates have been, for as long as I can recall, hailed as conquerors of all our attention spans and subsequently the world. Rumors of Big Media’s constitution seem to have been greatly exaggerated. With Time Warner newly shriveling like a date in the desert sun, two things stand out to me:
- The edifices of humanity, be they buildings, art, media platforms, or wonders of the world are all subject to the same laws of entropy that bind the rest of the universe. This may seem obvious to the practically-minded among us, but to traditional artists the idea that Michelangelo is not immortal is as much of a damned lie as it is the gospel of lawnmower-spraypainting modern artists who wish to become relevant.
- Art and its mediums are not binary: they are not simply alive or dead. Rather, they are subject to a variable half-life, relative to the whims of present culture and their economic viability. As a work of art or a medium ages, its nuances become less relevant yet its underlying absolute truisms become more obvious. Due to the unfamiliar arcane presentation and references obscured by time surrounding these absolute truisms, the works that bear them sometimes take on a strange magical quality for us, and therefore endure in our interest like the classic works of the authors I previously mentioned.
To return to the novel with this concept in mind… Novels are not dying; they are simply enduring a digital evolutionary shift away from physical book media. If I had money to invest, I would attempt to invest it in the unfortunately privately-held company that produces E Ink. Book readers that are based on E Ink technology reproduce the visual qualities of novels without the expensive and expansive production costs, and will allow the novel to survive in a post-industrial world quite happily. Many might dismiss these products as niche, but once their usefulness for the digestion of daily written media and educational applications become widespread knowledge, they will penetrate society deeper than the iPod. I believe that E ink readers or an analog of them will become an essential personal possession as printing presses and bookstores close for good. I won’t miss books, just as I won’t miss newspapers: I’ll only feel a bit nostalgic about them from time to time. Once the children of my generation are grown, attachment to physical books will be niche, and not the other way around.
Due to the Internet, we have taken massive leaps forward in terms of the accessibility of publication. Currently, the medium of the Internet is in the adolescent years of its evolutionary process: there are a wide variety of voices speaking, and due to the ubiquity of anonymity and access, to call many of these voices worthless would be unfair in that it would not express the sheer volume of counterproductive influence they have over the public consciousness.
Mature mediums such as newspapers in the 1970’s had their negative aspects, such as their initial unwillingness to circulate small, local stories that ultimately had a large impact on culture as a collective. However, one thing that many did have to their advantage over the Internet in its current state was a reputation that demanded reliable sources. If we were asked to name consistently reliable news media today, the people figuratively next to us could name numerous exceptions and invalidate them all. We do not have an Edward R. Murrow or Walter Kronkite today, and it is disappointing at best that our best journalists are men like Jon Stewart who aren’t beholden to the profession. The Internet has yet to harness its ability to filter for inaccuracy until after the fact, and printing a correction to the public consciousness is a difficult problem due to the fickle nature of attention spans online. As a result, grossly inaccurate ideas such as President Obama being muslim are present in the public consciousness.
A solution to this problem of unreliable information will present itself as the Internet matures as a medium and grows more organized. A solution to the problem of newspaper and magazine distribution costs exceeding profits already exists in E Ink. Even if traditional media corporations cannot be made to embrace this new technology, a brilliant and immediate future awaits us where every book Google has ever scanned and every book Amazon sells are all available from the same device you use to receive your news and your kids use to read their textbooks. I’ll be waiting with baited breath for one of these things to feature a word processor. I’ll finally be able to update blogs and work on my novels without staring into a bright light. Hopefully this happens before I go blind. My fingers are crossed.
The Ethics Behind Economies of Private, Torrentbits-based Bittorrent Tracker Communities
I promise: in this highly specific article I will discuss the topic, but for the sake of context I’m going to have to update you on a bit of history and hopefully get out of the first person. Readers of this article who are are familiar with P2P history and Bittorrent should skip to the paragraph that begins “A well-trod…” Anyway.
Relevant venues for piracy preceding Bittorrent in semi-chronological order include USENET, IRC, Private FTP ‘dumps,’ Napster, Gnutella-based networks (BearShare, Limewire), FastTrack-based networks (KaZaA, Grokster), DC++, and eDonkey.
The methods prior to eDonkey are relevant due to the fact that they laid the groundwork for the piracy community, which has evolved to consist of a tiered system of distribution. If you want to compare the piracy community’s distribution methods to the levels of programming, you’ve got the warez scene and their content rippers at the machine code level, dealing with acquiring raw data. USENET, FTP, and IRC users receive this content directly from members of the scene, and are vaguely accessible by casual human beings; similar to assemblers. That’s a stretch, I know, but I’ve got to ride this metaphor through. Gnutella/FastTrack networks are loaded with virus and spyware-afflicted files along with scene releases, but some are still in use in spite of their antiquity; kinda like Visual Basic 6.
eDonkey deserves an aside. It was the first major P2P client to implement hash checks, which solved two important problems in P2P distribution: identical files with different names are grouped together in search results and fake files posing as other files will be separated from the real ones in search results. Hypothetically, this foils the RIAA/MPAA tactic of sharing falsely identified files on P2P networks because these files will ultimately be less popular. As well, IP addresses of these RIAA/MPAA peers can be blocked by the popular PeerGuardian software, which I’ll get back to in a minute. Returning to the metaphor, eDonkey could be considered the first high-level P2P distribution channel: it automated a lot of preparation for end-users and distributors via the hash-checking, and the Boolean search options which defined filetype features like bitrate made it easier to sort through files.
Bittorrent took hash checking and ran with it. Essentially, bittorrent software examines a .torrent file, which is a list of hash values for a series of identically sized pieces of a file (or series of files) as well as an ip address for the tracker that disseminated the .torrent file. If the client detects that the files listed in the .torrent are already available to it, it will notify the tracker that it is a seed for the files after it verifies their hash values. If the files are not available, the client will notify the tracker that it is seeking them, and seeders along with peers who are sharing the files or at least some pieces of the files will be connected to the client and begin transfers. Finally, we’re at the subject of private Torrentbits-based Bittorrent tracker communities.
Torrentbits is an open source PHP-based framework for a website-based community intended to distribute .torrent files that includes a fully-featured search engine, a complex user-controlled moderation system, as well as a forum for community interaction and of course, a specialized Bittorrent tracker. Each user account is assigned a passkey by the specialized tracker that allows the tracker to collect user-specific information, specifically the total amount of data downloaded and uploaded. This allows the Torrentbits-based site to track a user’s upload-to-download ratio and quantify whether the user is providing more bandwidth to the community than they’re asking for. Accounts on private Torrentbits sites are usually available by invite only to keep the total number of users on the network at a level suitable to the server running Torrentbits, and to hypothetically ensure that users of the community exhibit good behavior.
A well-trod topic of discussion is whether or not piracy itself is good behavior. People who believe in absolute freedom of information will say that it is, and people who do not will say that it is not, and reasons are extremely varied. For the purposes of this paper, we’re going to assume that piracy is a good thing so that we can discuss whether the economics of Torrentbits-based communities are ethical within their frame of reference. With that in mind, a preliminary question becomes: are Torrentbits sites (which will now be referred to as private trackers) the best way to acquire files through Bittorrent? If they were not, they would not be worth discussing, but the answer to that question is absolutely yes. Because private trackers are usually heavily moderated, torrent files that have been available following a certain period of scrutiny by the community are sure to be genuine and not corrupted with viruses or spyware. Typically, peers on public trackers (such as The Pirate Bay) without incentive to seed will download from a torrent’s peer group until they have the files they want and then hop off the torrent without seeding 1 to 1 or above, effectively rendering them a drain on bandwidth and keeping download speeds relatively low. Ratio enforcement rules are used on private trackers to ensure that users exhibit good behavior, as previously mentioned, in that if they do not share at least 1 to 1, they will be banned from the community for leeching after a certain amount of transfer is reached. With this incentive in place, users who download a torrent will seed as long and with as much bandwidth as possible in order to effectively capitalize their ratio (which acts as a currency on the tracker), which in turn makes download speeds from these private trackers much higher than those on public trackers.
Since it can be difficult to accrue ratio on a Torrentbits-based tracker for a user who downloads unpopular files or has less upload bandwidth than download bandwidth (which is a qualification that belongs to most users in the US), there are a variety of systems in place at different private trackers that allow users to boost their ratios. Think of these systems as though they’re welfare for Bittorrent that’s available to everyone regardless of ratio standing. Most common are ‘freeleech’ periods, where for a set length of time, the site will not track the amount of data downloaded but will track the amount uploaded. Unfortunately, on many private trackers these periods are only announced while they are going on, so they usually reward the most active members of the community first. The flaw in this method is that community members with lower ratios will become conservative with their activity and visit the site less because if they download much more they will be banned, which then leads to these users who would benefit most from freeleech to miss freeleech periods. A superior method for boosting ratios is having flagged torrents which are always freeleech, which if seeded by a user will gradually accrue ratio from new users who want to establish a large buffer of ratio and users who have fallen on hard times due to their greed. Flagged freeleech torrents are more effective ratio boosters for the community because they are not beholden to a schedule. However, all of these methods of ratio inflation are ethically unfair to users who always have a ratio above 1 on every torrent and users who contribute and seed original content. However, boosters make participating in a private tracker easier for the casual users that make up the bulk of a private tracker’s userbase.
Most private trackers take donations in order to pay for server bandwidth and hardware maintenance costs. Questionably, some private trackers provide ratio returns to donors, which has the outward appearance of a pay-to-pirate system which violates the ethics of many piracy advocates who believe that pirates should send money to artists whose work they’ve pirated and appreciate. Introducing actual currency to piracy outside of ratio diminishes the inclination of pirates who feel they’ve already paid for content to pay the content’s originator(s). Ethically neutral methods of rewarding donors at some private trackers are status indicators displayed next to usernames of recent donors and custom titles in the forums.
Since ratio is essentially the monopoly money of a private tracker, many concepts that apply to money are used to manipulate and exchange ratio. For instance, a sign-up bonus of a few gigabytes of upload are sometimes given to new users, and at some private trackers users can contribute some of their upload credit to a raffle pot in order to try and win a lion’s share of upload credit. As well, some users attempt to seed files to dummy accounts in an attempt to artificially increase their ratio: which amounts to the private tracker equivalent of printing counterfeit money. Whether or not stealing from thieves is ethical is highly subjective considering that whether or not pirates are thieves is itself a highly subjective topic. Every method of distributing ratio credit to a private tracker’s users amounts to distributing a gift certificate redeemable for any number of copyrighted works. Depending on your perspective, this can be wonderful or horrifying.
Swine Flu Barbecue
I hate disease scares. First it was SARS, then it was the bird flu, now it’s the swine flu… and hey, even though garden variety influenza is deadlier than the special versions, it’s familiar so it’s not as scary. Even a recognizable portion of the Mexican population realizes this. With that in mind, I think Americans should stage their own form of protest against scaremongering disease-hype. Sitting in the midst of hopeful boyish speculation that swine flu victims will spring from the dead as zombies and usher in the zombie apocalypse and awesome flash games that allow us to simulate the spread, I, as a faithful citizen of the internet, would like to contribute the concept of the Swine Flu Barbecue.
Pork sales have to be suffering at the moment. People are stupid about contaminants. So why not take advantage of the definite discounts that are taking place in the wake of this paranoia and have massive pork barbecues all over the place? Pork chops, sausages, bacon, and of course, pork ribs should be the order of the day at any such event. Also, it’s very important that I receive an invitation so that I can know how awesome and clever you are for having a Swine Flu Barbecue, as well as whether or not you prepare good ribs.
User-Created and User-Filtered Content’s Double-Edge
Due to technological advances that make producing art cost a fraction of what it once did, the internet is literally flooded with the works of unrepresented private individuals, whom Time dubbed person(s) of the year in 2006. Now that distribution and production costs are approaching zero, art only requires two things: time and a willing audience. Unfortunately, deciding which works among this pool of art to pay attention to has become a bit difficult. Most often, it’s not the cream that rises to the top but rather the creamiest shit.
A barely teenage kid can now produce a video with a webcam for youtube and receive over 20 million views. That’s a refreshing concept, but what’s not refreshing is that in order to reel in an audience, youtube’s most-subscribed user makes a mockery of himself and doesn’t manage to make a statement about anything other than the puerility of his audience. According to Lucas, he created Fred while bored in order to mock the mundanity of youtube. That he’s received such an overwhelmingly positive response because viewers find Fred genuinely entertaining (and/or sexually attractive) and not due to parody is depressing. Back in the good old days, a work of art could achieve wild popularity because it spoke loudly to the prominent issues of its day and generate artistic discourse. This is the variety of discourse that Fred generates on the internet, and finding a method of excluding that garbage without censorship of quality material is one of today’s most important media issues.
Media filtration was historically handled by editors of newspapers and magazines: this kept what people were exposed to in the realm of institutional endorsement and ignored popularity. Payola put undeserving artists like Cher a lot higher up on the charts than they actually were in the hearts of the public. In traditional media, critics with well-grounded opinions like Roger Ebert could earn the respect of a readership if they were reliable: but the subject matter they addressed was always pre-approved by a higher power.
The internet democratized media popularity: now you can look at iTunes and see who’s the top selling musician, or at a private Bittorrent tracker’s top list to see who the most popular musician is when money isn’t a factor. But when it comes to articles on websites, which are by default available freely, we increasingly rely on social media to determine what’s good and relevant. For a refresh on social media: a registered subset of a social media site’s viewership falls into the role of editor and submits and votes for content that they like based on interest categories.
The idea is that if enough people are interested in something it will rise to the top and the front page of a social media site will be riddled with relevant, interesting content of many varieties. Unfortunately, internet democracies devolve over time into mobs of like-minded individuals whose collective critical opinion increasingly approaches disappointingly average until the elite users generate a Randian exodus along the vein of Atlas Shrugged to a newer, less tainted site. Afterward, the status quo at the original site arrives at excrement. Examples of popular social media sites include reddit at the approaching exodus stage, and digg at the excrement stage.
The lack of professional scrutiny displayed by social media mobs is far worse than their average taste and uniform opinions. Proper sourcing and careful selection of sources, something that is essential in professional journalism, is almost completely absent in social media. Every now and again on reddit, there will be a call to abolish unreliable sources which will promptly be ignored by the userbase. What these sites need is a moderation tool that will prevent users from lowering the level of discourse and quality of content for their fellow users without completely censoring them, but due to the nature of such a concept it is difficult to approach.
The midpoints between traditional media and social media are aggregated sites that pull their content from several high profile sources. Examples of this include Google News for current news, and Metacritic for media reviews. Because aggregated sites are moderated by their owners instead of their users, sourcing can be and is usually handled professionally. A combination between these sites and an RSS reader subscribed to independent blogs (like mine!) will allow a user to dive into a stream of content suited to their existing interests without necessitating that a user plumb the depths of social media. However, reliance on these sites will ensure that a user will not frequently encounter obscure content producers: many of whom would be followed by the user if only they had some reliable method of discovery.
I think that in order for the internet to be valuable for media filtration as well as distribution, metrics of quality that do not entirely rely on popularity or old media critics should be adopted by our current media filtration services or presented by new ones. The task of providing internet users with the best content out there is not being handled perfectly by anyone, and whoever manages to create a new model for talent discovery that does a better job of leaving the shit in the john will have my thanks.
Soda As It Was Intended: An HFCS-Free Lovefest
One of my rare bits of snobbery is that I absolutely dislike high fructose corn syrup in my drinks. I will drink it sometimes when other options are not available and I want more flavor than water, but on the whole I prefer to skip high fructose corn syrup and go for cane sugar. Sugar has a lighter texture in the mouth; allowing the carbonation in sodas to really bounce on the tongue. The level of sweetness provided by sugar is high, but not overpowering to the tastebuds, so the more delicate flavors in sodas are more noticeable. As well, sugar mixes more thinly with spiced Caribbean rum and scotch whiskeys, so I prefer sugar-based sodas for my mixed drinks: there’s nothing worse in a bubbly mixed drink than it turning to sludge.
Cane sugar was the original sweetener used in sodas when they first became popular. Soda fountain syrups across the United States were sweetened with sugar, including all the original formulas of Coca Cola, Pepsi and Dr. Pepper brand syrups: many of which are still available in their authentic form if you put in a little detective work (or just read this entry, as I’ve done the homework for you because I’m such a nice guy).
I’ve got a laundry list of favorites, which sadly for the excited sugar-addled consumer are often limited to regional availability in America. In no particular order they are:
- Cane sugar-based kosher for Passover Coca Cola and Sprite are seasonally available depending on when Passover falls. Since corn-based ingredients are not permitted by the diets of some Jewish sects on Passover, about a month before the holiday falls every year, Jewish grocery stores and the corporate Giant stores will carry yellow-capped bottles with this delicious goodness.
- Dr. Brown’s, a brand of soda dating back to 19th century New York, has a cream soda and root beer that are seasonally available in kosher for Passover varieties that are generally excellent in this category.
- Pepsi-Cola’s ‘new’ Throwback branded versions of Pepsi-Cola and Mountain Dew just went on sale all over the country and will be available throughout the summer. They’re fantastic. Hopefully their popularity rises to a point that convinces Pepsi to convert all of their main beverages back to the superior sweetener.
- Jones Soda’s Berry Lemonade, Fufu Berry, and Strawberry Lime are available year round wherever Jones Soda is sold, and are all great fruity sodas, and their product is creatively branded with consumer-submitted photography.
- Dublin Dr. Pepper is available at a bit of a premium price online, but makes up for the exorbitancy with a flavor excellent enough to quench your buyer’s guilt.
- Whole Foods Market’s store branded sodas are all cane sugar based. I’ve not had access to these, but I have overheard many stark ravings about them among health nuts. gmpalmer on reddit recommends their key lime flavor for first timers: my thanks go out to him for a few of the recommendations in this list.
- Blenheim Ginger Ale is the best ginger ale I’ve ever had. This one is a real winner with Knob Creek bourbon and a cube of ice.
- Red Bull Cola will throw you off if you expect to simply suck on sugar syrup. It provides a cornucopia of flavors to which I’ve found no precedent, and it holds its own as an energy drink as well.
- Foxon Park’s sodas were on the Food Network awhile ago, and they are delicious, but a bit pricey compared to their more contemporary alternatives. I’m sure they’re a great deal if you happen to be in Connecticut.
- Fans of Idiocracy will recall Brawndo, the Thirst Mutliator with affection, and the real deal is an awesome pure cane energy drink. Unfortunately, it’s a bit over $2 a can, so this is only for die-hards with money to spend. On the other hand, Brawndo makes a great party favor for LAN parties, so geeks may rejoice.
- Those with access to a local hispanic grocery store should try out Jarritos, a Mexican brand that is the number one selling soda among Latino customers for a good reason.
- Southerners should check out the store brand soda at Winn Dixie for some sugar-based grape and orange soda.
- The West Jefferson, NC Dr Pepper bottling company offers a wide variety of recognizable sodas with pure cane sugar in sexy glass bottles.
- Boylan’s is available at Trader Joe’s, and is highly rated among the sugar snobs at Bevnet.
- Out of California, Blue Sky offers a full range of cane sugar options.
Honorable mentions for non-carbonated drinks go out to Pepsi-owned Sobe’s pure cane teas and juice blends as well as Glaceau’s Power C Vitamin Water as an HFCS-free sport drink alternative. For the alcoholics out there who need to mix with more than soda and refuse to use raw ingredients, Stirrings is probably the best pre-blended brand for cocktail mixes out there, and yes, like the rest of my links here they are all cane sugar.
For those of you who prefer to make your own beverages, I think I’m going to have to do a little how-to series on DIY soda with a few recipes sometime in the future, so if it would please you, subscribe to my RSS feed via your favorite method to be notified when that’s available.
Teddy Faley - Apple Juice
My memories involving Teddy Faley are of scattered brief encounters. Nine years ago Teddy’s in his darkened bedroom at his parents’ house experimenting with a sequencer; building beats. A year later I’m at a park and one of Teddy’s friends is attempting to chop a bee in half with a samurai sword like it’s normal. When Teddy gets a turn with the sword, he runs after me. Skip five years. I see Teddy partying at his brother’s College Park apartment–he’s clutching a bottle of Hennessey and engaging in verbal combat. Teddy’s label profile says:
Teddy exudes an honesty that is both brutal and awkward yet still incredibly easy to relate to.
I’m always skeptical when a person tells me they’re honest. In Teddy’s case, the proof is in the presentation. He gives away the lyrics notebook that led to his EP, Apple Juice, for free on his myspace. The EP itself? Also free in 192 kbps MP3. If you don’t hate his music, I bet Teddy won’t hate your money.
While you’re downloading Apple Juice (and I assume you are), here’s my take:
This album is a reflection of the man behind it. Concepts that are conventionally important may be addressed by Teddy’s lyrics, but his approach is unique to his experiences and therefore, yeah, it’s honest. Apple Juice focuses on resisting an external world of directed materialism and personalities tainted by that influence. That resistance is characterized by his sense of humor, which lyrically skips along holding hands with his frustrations. Teddy’s raps are raw, with every gasp for breath left as audible punctuation for his emotionally charged confessional cadence. His production style shows chopped and screwed influences, and sample choices which aren’t trite or obviously borrowed from someone else. Teddy’s backing music isn’t poppy: it mostly serves to emphasize the tone of his metaphorically-laced lyrics.
While Apple Juice is a solid listen from start to finish, and thought was clearly given to ensuring it flows well, I think new listeners should start with the tracks that show Teddy’s talents at their top: “80 Proof Beautiful” and “Straw Man Argument.” Will I qualify this statement? No.
My biggest complaint with this EP is that I had to hear a drunk girl talk. Teddy: if I want to hear drunk girls talk, I can go outside. The version of Well that’s included on this EP is by no means bad: it just doesn’t have as much character as this one even though Teddy promises at the beginning that it’s the same song. That’s okay. Even honest people tell a white lie now and again.
Support Baltimore rap and buy this EP. I may. If you like it, go see Teddy and his label-mates from The Rape perform at Sonar on May 15. I may. Of course, the uncertainty here is due to the related facts that I am both broke and overscheduled. If you are not… really, adopt this course of action.
The R-Word
My earliest experience with racism was in the second grade. I made a new friend, and for the purposes of this article his name was Nelson. Nelson invited me to come over to his apartment after school to play Double Dragon on his Nintendo. There were older kids clustered around in the kitchen when we got there, and the first thing I heard aside from raucous laughter was “Nelson, you brought home a white boy? What the hell’d you do a thing like that for?” and similar derogatory comments. Nelson casually told me to ignore them, but I had mentally stiffened before he got the words out. The idea that there was something wrong with being white had never been presented to me before, but bullying had: I wore glasses, and that doesn’t go over well when you’re the second shortest kid in your class. It’s not that I had a terrible time with Nelson that day or disliked him at all, but I never did make it back to his apartment after that.
In the third grade, we performed a human wax museum for black history month. Each person in the class held a portrait of a famous black person in front of their face, and on the back of the picture were some of the words that made that person well known, which we read to guests who wandered the classroom and squeezed our hands. I was Langston Hughes, and on the back of his portrait was his poem “Harlem [2].” I didn’t yet understand the meaning of Hughes’ speculation as to the fate of deferred dreams, but I parroted it as well as I could.
Social studies class in middle school was a lot more detailed with regard to black history month: we watched videos depicting the firehoses and dogs in Montgomery, the KKK’s burning crosses, and the “No Colored” signs of legally endorsed segregation. We were told that the water fountains and bathrooms in the halls of our school were once designated as white and colored after the population was integrated. With knowledge of this history, a few students drew lines in mental sand: I felt their eyes begin to judge my white peers and I for the actions of people with whom we had nothing in common other than skin color. We studied Martin Luther King Jr’s “I Have A Dream” speech in class, and were asked to speculate in an essay as to whether we were living Dr. King’s dream or not. I wrote then that I thought we were, as we were integrated in school and in my neighborhood, and that racism was a fading relic of an aging generation.
I went to my first rock concert Sophomore year of high school with a friend. We rode the metro to get home afterward, and had to transfer at Metro Center, in the heart of DC. As we approached the platform, four black teenagers surrounded us. The biggest one addressed us, “What are you doing in our station white boys? and then me, “That’s a nice watch.” The watch was a gift from my father. We were both silent. No one else was in sight: what were they going to do to us? “Hand it over.” What choice did I have? I gave him my watch. He then said “Go like this,” and lifted his arms as if we were holding a gun at him. We complied and they rifled through our pockets, taking our money and my friend’s cell phone. “Never come here again, you hear? Come back here, and something much worse is gonna happen to you.” We ran to the platform as they ran off with our things and our dignity. We asked the first woman we saw if she had a phone because we needed to call the police. She turned to us with tears in her eyes and said she’d love to help us, but she’d just been robbed. We boarded the train, my friend looked wordlessly at the floor, and I was infuriated. I pounded the plexiglass coating over the station map with my fists, wishing I’d had the strength to defend myself. We reported the crime to the police after we got back to Rockville station, and although the perpetrators had been caught on CCTV, the police never tracked them down and we were never able to press charges.
When college acceptance rolled around, I learned what affirmative action meant: that I was less likely to be admitted to the schools of my choice and that I was not eligible for the majority of scholarship money because of the color of my skin. Students from my neighborhood whose parents’ income levels mirrored my parents’ received assistance that I did not because they were not white. I had by this point been exposed to the social truth that it is passable to openly slander my people (the Jews), but merely saying the word ‘nigger’ in public could result in severe physical harm, social exile, and even legal repercussions. It was by this point that I developed the opinion that racism is not a social taboo in America so much as racism against blacks is. White guilt isn’t merely something that is felt by whites: it is assigned to us even if we have had no hand in oppressing anyone.
I’ve been told that I have social advantages that I might not understand because I’m white–that the police aren’t automatically against me, for instance. Often, I am told this by people who haven’t been victims of corrupt police. A couple years ago, I was taking photos around the courthouse in downtown Rockville on a cool spring night, and I was approached by a distraught hispanic man, who asked if he could use my cell phone to call the police. I told him my phone was dead, and asked if he needed any help. He said no, and left. I was then approached by three white men in plain clothes. One of them accused me of being ‘friends with the Mexican’ and sucker punched me in the eye. I used my body to shield my camera, which at the time was my most expensive posession, and bore his kicks until his friends pulled him away. As they ran off, I yelled that I was going to call the police, and the man who attacked me yelled back that he was the police. Less than ten minutes later, the officer I summoned approached the men, who had returned to the scene of the crime to catch a cab, and I was stunned to see the man who attacked me pull out his badge. Long story short: the police department ‘lost’ my incident report. The officer who took the report was black. How does race play a part in this? It doesn’t. Cops are corrupt no matter where you go, and no matter the color of your skin.
If I were asked today whether I believe we are living Dr. King’s dream, I would say no. I would say, in the words of Langston Hughes, that it has been deferred. Dr. King’s dream is being pissed away by racists of all colors, who resurrect and revitalize the spectre of racism in the name of social justice. Affirmative action doesn’t work because it turns economic problems into color problems and breeds resentment among the equally unfortunate people that cannot benefit from the crutch. Social integration can never occur so long as we treat people of different skin colors differently. Racism will always persist unless we no longer condone all varieties of hate: even varieties that may seem justified.
