OF A GOLDEN AGE

Graphically, here’s the breakdown of the lowest and highest meat contents from the study I previously posted.

2.1% meat, 48.4% water, 49.5% other:

14.8% meat, 37.7% water, 47.5% other:

Even in the best case, 47.5% of nonmuscle tissue forms the largest portion — fatty, connective, bone, and the not-insignificant plant matter found in both of these examples.

Marty beat me to the punch with a post on gross food secrets, in his case calories and fat content at chains. It’s my own fault, I bullied him into posting. He even took my hamburger study link LIKE A JERK.

McDonald’s restaurants nationwide are throwing a “recession buster” deal today, so if you want 49c hamburgers and 59c cheeseburgers, make your way to a nearby location. (Even 15 years ago a hamburger was 59c and a cheeseburger 69c. I have no idea what the prices are now.)

On the surface this sounds like a good deal, but then I remembered this study (links to PDF) from December 2008′s Annals of Diagnostic Pathology. Of course, all fast food restaurants want to upsell you on beverages* but the study highlights that the meat content of fast-food burgers is low enough that they likely turn a profit even on the cheapest dollar-menu burger item:

Meat content, as evidenced by the presence of skeletal muscle, occupied a small amount of the cross-sectional area (median, 12.1%; range, 2.1%-14.8%) as determined by light microscopic examination; most of the content of the hamburgers were made up of other tissue types and water.

OH BUT WAIT, there’s more!

The water content, as determined in this study, comprised nearly half (median, 49%) of the weight of the hamburger. [ . . . ] Some of the other tissue types [ . . . ] adipose tissue, blood vessels, connective tissue, and peripheral nerve . . . are not unexpected findings. Bone and cartilage, observed in some brands, were not expected [ . . . ] Plant material, observed in some brands, was likely added as a filler to give bulk to the burger.

The upside was that none of the eight burgers contained brain matter, which would move beyond gross findings into palpable health risks like mad cow disease. All of this leads me to believe that even the fattiest ground beef you buy at the store (note: I did not say the cheapest) is better for you in terms of identifiable, likely fresher foodstuffs. When you grill a burger, you also don’t add any fat beyond what’s already in the meat, unlike the mystery-greasy flat top in fast food land.

After all . . . the burgers from one of these chains contained only 2.1% meat.

* When Hank Venture‘s yard-sale grinder business fails, he castigates Dean for going easy on lemonade sales.

My friend Scott is in India taking samples for his geology studies. He wrote a great post on the challenges of traveling as a Korean-American instead of a Korean:

Your average Indian or Ladakhi in Ladakh doesn’t really grasp the concept that one third of the population of the United States are not white, in the classic sense. This says a little about Indian education and a lot about the type of Americans that travel to India (read: Lily-white). And aside from said Lily-white Americans, absolutely no one correctly guesses my country of origin. Instead, what I get are Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and once (inexplicably) Thailand. Your stereotypical Asian tourists–herds, cameras, broken English–are here in force. Despite the fact that I’m travelling alone and speak pretty damn good English, I’m inevitably lumped in with the real Asians.

And to reinforce my friend Kelly‘s previously discussed decision to only carry on luggage for a trip to Italy, Goldblog reports on a TSA experiment wherein Delta employees five-finger-discounted valuable items from the TSA’s planted luggage:

The two 20-somethings have been charged with grand larceny, possession of stolen property and falsifying business records — for some reason, they thought it would be effective to swap luggage tags in attempt to throw everyone off — and now face up to four years in prison if convicted.

Hell, and that was on a domestic flight!

In middle school, our chorus sang under a shrill egoist with some seeming emotional problems. She had that tightly wound temperament where she spun from ecstatic to totally pissed in two seconds flat, contributing to my worst middle-school grades. She constantly used the phrase “brain fart,” which sounded more ignorant than anything I’d never heard.

Partly inspired by The Second Pass’s thoughtful, well-reasoned list of far overrated classic novels, Pajiba posted one of its regular Comment Diversion features on which classics readers “Just Didn’t Get,” an idea that has merit in theory. I opened it anticipating something with some logical backbone, or even something with which I could agree. Pajiba readers have brain power and usually make interesting conversation.

Uhhh, nope. The level of discourse reminded me of a Sunday article in the New York Times: Approval by a Blogger May Please a Sponsor, which presented the issue of kickbacks or free products for bloggers with large followings. But the primary takeaway has nothing to do with money: Why should we care what these people say or endorse?

So far almost 200 people have left various kinds of “OMG I hate this book” comments on the Pajiba post, and few have any reasoning. Someone pointed out that many of us read these “hated” classics during junior high or high school, but few make the connection between hating high school and hating its reading list too.

Mostly, it makes me sad that a smart group of people rounded up straw men like Moby-Dick (a very difficult book to read on your own at any age, but still one of the greatest) and dismissed them as boring, or worse, overrated. I may think that astrophysics sounds boring but that doesn’t mean for one millionth of one second that astrophysics lacks merit or intrinsic value. It means I do not care for astrophysics, which explains why astrophysicists exist. It also means that I don’t have a leg to stand on when it comes time to critique.

If you read for fun, then read for fun. Put down books you don’t care for and don’t return to them. I do this on a regular basis, including with some heralded classics. People who study books, who read for theory and meaning, who try to fit pieces of literature into the human world where their authors worked, work on a different rubric that should garner the same respect. Everything has a place, and history sloughs off those classics suffering from datedness or mediocrity, while elevating overlooked works to classic status in hindsight.

“Still, I slogged through until the last line, repulsed by the sloppiness” — Second Pass’s commenter on Kerouac’s On the Road accidentally summarized my feelings toward the Pajiba post, which I consider a brain fart to the nth degree. Yes, anyone can voice their opinions anywhere they choose. Without reasoning, these opinions come off as maudlin, whiny, or ignorant.

In the past I was a devoted fan of Nordstrom, the only (and higher-end) department store toward which I had any allegiance really. Their shoe department was unmatched in variety, quality, and customer service. In fact, on several occasions I have spent a little more than I should have on well-fitting shoes, because my feet are large and hard to fit and it is especially nice to tell a salesperson, “Bring me all the size 11 or 12 sandals you have.”

Especially in hard economic times, you’d think Nordstrom would welcome with open arms anyone who wants to spend money there, but I guess not. A couple of months ago, I approached a salesperson at the Oak Brook (Oak Brook, Ill.) Nordstrom and said, “I’m looking for a pair of sandals under $40 in a size 11.” She actually laughed and said, “I don’t think I’ll be able to do that.” Was she kidding? I’d just walked past a whole display marked, verbatim, “Sandals Under $40.”

This weekend, at the Old Orchard (Skokie, Ill.) Nordstrom, I gave vague instructions to a helpful salesperson, who brought me five pairs of sandals. Only the final pair fit right, and when he told me they were over $100 I mentally blanched and said, “I’m sorry, I can’t afford that.” He said, “Well, thanks for trying them on,” left the shoes scattered all around where we’d been sitting, and quickly walked away from me without another word.

Andrew Sullivan linked to this post I devoured and loved. The role of the educated, reasonable theologist has been marginalized by those whom Andrew appropriately labels “Christianists,” wielding carefully parsed scripture and quotations as weapons of intolerance or self-congratulation.

Governor Mark Sanford claimed recently to be a King David figure, or at least to draw significant parallels between this parable and his situation. From the WaPo:

And that King David analogy surely is understandable for Sanford, since it makes the governor’s errant ways seem exceptionally minor.

Father Stephen gets to the heart of the matter:

The problem with such use of Biblical imagination is that it simply has no controlling story. Nothing tells us which story to use other than our own imagination (which is generally a deluded part of our mind). [ . . . ] The gospel is not preached – souls are not saved – the Bible is simply brought into ridicule.

One of the problems inherent to our soundbyte-obsessed culture is that people don’t feel the need to acquaint themselves with context before they speak or cite. Recently, Sarah Palin tweeted an out-of-context remark from Walter Cronkite on the “liberal” nature of the media. Of course, Kronkite’s whole conversation involved a more literal definition of liberal rather than political, and he was encouraging the evenhanded and voracious acquisition of knowledge and viewpoints.

Palin acting a fool is no big news, and I think she’s too ignorant to understand the way she manhandles information. But she represents a larger movement toward a people who love quotations more than books, who pull lines from websites and use them as “Favorite Quotes” when they don’t even know who the speakers were or what they represented.

Watching Conan O’Brien tonight, I thought about one of my dad’s more classic topics, which is how much he hates Conan and loves Leno. Right now the parents are in the midst of an anti-Conan renaissance since he took over the Tonight Show a month ago.

I don’t care for Leno, whose style rubs me the wrong way and seems very conventional in line with previous late-night hosts. It’s fine to stay with what works, and this shows in the enormous change in median age of Tonight Show viewers: from 55 to 45 in such a short time. In fact, for a brief time Letterman overtook Conan in the ratings, which makes my heart sad because Letterman sucksss. But now, excepting the bizarre obsession with Michael Jackson’s death and subsequent buoyance of Nightline (SIGH!) to #1 in the ratings, Conan is regaining his footing.

And I can’t explain the major generational gulf, besides that Conan is a self-aware, self-deprecating comedian with a real eye on physicality. Many of his gags involve playing off his own height, paleness, ungainly large head, or all-around awkwardness. He uses dead space and facial expressions to kind of act as an audience to his own show, and he utters a neverending stream of the kind of speedy nonsequiturs now popularized by Arrested Development and other mumbly humor.

Has everyone already said that if Funny People is good it will be Judd Apatow’s real crossing over into Kevin Smith territory? This idea makes me really happy. Of course, I loved Clerks 2, so fit that puzzle piece in however you see fit.

After reading The Postman (see previous post) and thinking on which items I’d include if I carried a single pack’s worth, exactly such a rumination fell into my lap from internetland: My friend Kelly and her husband Jeff are traveling to Italy soon. Kelly’s items fit into one carry-on suitcase and Jeff’s fit into a backpack.

And in case shoelaces are your bag, but especially if they’re not, here are 33 ways to lace them up, including bullet points on the advantages and disadvantages of each. Next time you see me I’ll be hypnotized by my own Star of David arrangement.

Fictional Benjamin Franklin says to our hero in a dream:

It’s said that “power corrupts,” but actually it’s more true that power attracts the corruptible. The same are usually attracted by other things than power. When they do act, they think of it as service, which has limits. The tyrant, though, seeks mastery, for which he is insatiable, implacable.

This is the money idea from David Brin’s The Postman (yes, that Postman), an allegorical near-future dystopia with a LOT of different elements in the mix. All of the civilizations on Earth have been effectively wiped out by a believable one-two punch of war, atomic bombs, disease, and culty survivalist mayhem, tailed by a three-year-long nuclear winter.

As with a lot of books in this genre, we follow the one exceptionally intelligent, reasonable man who is capable of restoring the whole order of things. In Brin’s novel the United States attempts to rebuild itself, and the Oregon towns he visits are each in various stages of western development (hunter-gatherer, feudalism, slave-based societies, communal states) that are influenced by Brin’s traveling hero, Gordon Krantz. Although this is some unspecified future year (2020ish), each village has a historical angle and a different type of characteristic leader, so when Krantz’s behaviors make the villagers self-conscious of their ignorance or return to cruelty, it reads more like speculative historical fiction — in a good way.

The book eventually hinges on a pretty dumb “Western means brutish, Eastern means peaceful and zennnn” moment, and it throws one too many ideas into the stewpot for one paperback to reasonably deal with, but these are niggling points in what is overall a compelling, thoughtful book. I wish Brin had focused on the overall development of the communities instead of introducing a villainous survivalist supergroup for the good guys to war with, but maybe that kind of thing wouldn’t sell books.