Cupcakes and Circuses

Today's Betty is probably the best choice to kick off what I suspect is going to be kind of a bitchfest.

There are serious things happening, and the water situation in California seems to be coming to a crisis, but another way to look at it is that it should have been dealt with a long time ago, and might have been except that it would have been inconvenient.

So we're waiting until it goes from being an inconvenience to being a disaster.

Sort of the way we avoid spending to maintain bridges such that, when they finally fall apart completely, we have to spend far more to replace them. And, if we can justify the additional expenditure, to add a plaque commemorating the people killed in the collapse.

But to quote the philosopher K.S. O'Hara, tomorrow is another day and we'll think about it then.

The Romans reportedly kept the people distracted and happy with bread and circuses, but we've upped the ante to cupcakes, and not just regular cupcakes but huge, modern gloppy diabetes-inducing-cupcake-as-receptacle-for-frosting cupcakes.

I was going to observe that at least bread was healthy, but then somebody would probably insist that the Roman Empire collapsed because of all that gluten, so never mind.

In any case, it's only a metaphor. When Jesus said "Blessed are the cheesemakers," it wasn't meant to be taken literally. He was referring to any manufacturers of dairy products.

Same thing with "bread and circuses." It refers to any form of baked goods and public entertainment.

 

Moderately Confused reflects upon a current addition to our endless flow of waste, the result of stores turning receipts into promotional brochures.

For a time, K-Mart was handing out three streamers of receipts for each purchase, but has cut back to only one, and I'm cynical enough to suspect it's to save money, not because of the absurd waste factor.

But we're awash in messages thanking us and telling us how much we've saved and begging us to come take their survey when all I want is to be able to show that they charged me $4.58 for something that was marked down to $3.

I can watch the numbers come up on the screen and do that, and so I only really need a printed receipt for tax purposes, which mostly limits it to Staples and the post office.

Some stores now ask if you want the receipt, but only at the co-op do they ask the question before they print it out.

The co-op also asks if you want paper or plastic and offers a slight discount if you bring your own.

I need a liner for the dog poop container by the porch each week, but, if they ever stopped offering free plastic bags (which don't always get used for that after all), I could buy a two-and-a-half year supply of poop-can liners inexpensively. (Oooh -- gift wrap available!)

I haven't decided whether California's ban on plastic grocery bags is tokenism or the leading edge of a coming reform. But whatever the impact of the ban might be, it's just been put on hold and possibly derailed entirely by a ballot initiative by (you can't make this stuff up) the American Progressive Bag Alliance.

So, here we are back in the depths of Idiocracy, but let's not pretend any of it is new. As I've said before, progressives -- the environmental kind, not the American Bag kind -- were horrified back in the early 70s when milk was first offered in plastic jugs. 

Up until then, returning glass bottles was simply part of life. It wasn't universal: You could buy milk in waxed cartons. But returnables were no big deal.

Forty-some years later, it's a completely unrealistic expectation nobody feels they should have to put up with.

And now Californians will get to vote on the plastic bag ban.

I would suggest the APBA buy a lot of ads in "Cupcake Wars" and "I Hate My Kitchen."

 

Getting back to those cheesemakers ...

I think God the Father has really softened and improved His image with the hat, yes, but I'm not so sure about His divine plan as outlined in today's You Damn Kid.

Well, yes, I am. I'm agin it.

Despite what Rina Piccolo has to reveal about medieval manuscript doodlers.

Maybe a few emoticons. I'm not a religious fanatic, after all.

I still use an occasional emoticon in casual conversation, but I want emoticons to stay as emoticons, dammit, and not magically transform into emojis when I hit "post."

Emojis are for people who still LOL, and the irony is that nobody over 12 should use them and nobody under 12 does.

And yet there they are, apparently existing under the benevolent protection of the American Progressive Emoji Alliance.

 

Hitting the road

Emily Flake offers this riposte to ride-sharing apps, as she closes out her month at the New Yorker's daily cartoon site, and a very good month it has been. 

I'm going to miss her cartoons, but I don't much miss hitchhiking.

I miss what it was when it was interesting, though. Back when interesting people both hitched and picked up hitchhikers, you could meet some fascinating people.

I gave rides to a commercial photographer who had just done a shoot of Tricia Nixon for Vogue and was hitching to the West Coast with a buddy who had recently completed his masters in marine biology identifying types of brain coral off Aruba, and I once picked up an artisanal cabinetmaker who explained all about using hand-carved pegs instead of nails, and, another time, I even offered a couch for the night to a fellow who had spent a couple of years mining nickel underground in northern Manitoba and had great tales to tell.

And then it all changed and it was nothing but junkies and spaced-out evangelists and I learned to avert my eyes until I was old enough that they didn't expect me to stop anyway.

I don't know much about ride-sharing apps, but I know that Craigslist was pretty cool when it first started, and it's my understanding that Yelp didn't totally suck at first, either, so I guess we'll see, won't we?

 

Yeah, you wish

  

 (It was best to avoid the extremely rare occasions
when this actually happened.)

Comments

[Dave from Phila]

Wonderful use of the word "inconvenient."

[Mary in Ohio]

My cousins wife wrapped all the Christmas gifts in brown paper one year because she "saved trees by not using wrapping paper." Of course, she would have had to BUY wrapping paper and the brown bags were free with her groceries. So someone reaped some savings, but it wasn't necessarily the environment. ;-)

[Mike Peterson]

One of the persistent issues I addressed with kids when I was doing tours was the "dead trees" idea, which was that producing paper impacts old-growth forests and the Amazon and suchlike. It can -- Indonesia had some incredibly rapacious cutting going for production of fast-food packaging used in the Asian market which supposedly has been at least lessened after pressure on some of the multinational food companies.

But the bulk of newsprint was from tree farms, which are softwood and, while not as short-term as corn or wheat, a similar rotating use of land. Also, most newsprint was up to 50 percent recycled paper (there's a limit to how often pulp can be reused for web printing, because shorter and shorter fibers lead to easy tearing, so most 100 percent recycled stuff is for sheet-printed items like menus and placards).

There is now a stewardship program to assure that pulp is cut sustainably -- I may have mentioned before that LL Bean yanked the contract for their catalog paper from a mill I covered in Maine not because it wasn't using sustainably harvested timber but because it wasn't documenting the fact. The loggers I knew were happy to use sustainable practices but needed guidance to meet standards.

In any case, tell your cousin's wife that grocery bags are made with the kraft process that puts dioxin into the water, while gift wrap is more environmentally neutral. I don't think the dioxin thing has been true for a quarter century or more and I have no idea how gift wrap paper is produced, but niggling over the environment does not require knowing what the hell you're talking about on either side of the question.