Altoids Gum

i used to love altoids gum. it was pepperminty and soft, lasting hours upon hours. then a few months ago, i noticed i couldn't find the red and silver tins of white gum pellets anywhere. i asked various store clerks but no one knew what happened to my gum. i even wrote an email to the company asking what happened to my happy little gum. here's the dull reply, which didn't even answer my question:

Thank you for visiting altoids.com and for your interest in purchasing our products. We are always happy to hear from our consumers and truly value your comments.

We encourage you to visit our online "shoppe" at www.altoids.com. Please be sure to visit frequently for updates and new product offerings.

Again, thanks for contacting us, and we hope you'll continue to enjoy our products.

Sincerely,

Laura Richards
Consumer Affairs Representative

after a few weeks absence, stores started carrying them again. i was happy, that is, until i tasted it. had my familiarity with the gum changed? it was hard and nasty. then i compared the ingredients listed on an old tin compared to a new tin and sure enough, the ingredients are different and reordered! how could they! the first ingredient on the good altoids is gum base. the first ingredient of the bad altoids is sorbitol.

the moral of this story: altoids gum stinks and so does altoids consumer affairs.

Bank it Like Beckham

i'm already sick of david beckham and his spicy wife, posh. non-stop press since news yesterday that he signed with the la galaxy. he'll make $1 million a week. i had no idea he was that popular.
a few yawns to beckham's arrival

Get Rid of Your Foes

are "terrorists" bothering you? well, if you want to get rid of your "terrorists" call the USA! we're ready and willing to bomb your country, big or small. just give us a target. we will get rid of those "evildoers" until evil falls off its axis.

now somalia? how absurd is it to think the US can just keep bombing the "terrorists" (and anyone else in the way) until they're all dead? how do we know somalia didn't just have a few people it wanted to get rid of?

democrats? religious leaders? anybody?

i don't want to get all "pat robertson" on you, but this is set to be a really bad year, folks, especially for those of us who know better. brace yourselves.

Ataxia II March 20

that makes this a John Frusciante day!
it's coming... the second Ataxia record is expected to be released in the u.s. March 20, according to recordcollectionmusic.com. this record is the followup collaboration of the lovely John Frusciante, Joe Lally and Josh Klinghoffer. the first CD was called Automatic Writing, a brilliant album.

Dolby Lowers Volume

dolby has a new technology that lowers the volume of commercials. yay!
there you are, watching tv at a reasonable volume. then the commercial comes on and you have to lower the volume, and then your show comes on and you have to raise it again.

Pursuit of Unhappiness

this is the last few sentences of a NYT story about positive psychology:

“My personal satisfaction is the personal measure for me, and my personal satisfaction is great,” he explained. “I hate to say this, but really in the scheme of things we’re not going to change the war in Iraq.” Then he paused and thought how that sounded. “We can only fix the world one person at a time.”

can i just say "ick."

Positive psychology teaches people to be “happy.” But not just Happy Happy, as in pursuing pleasure, rather Authentically Happy, as in being of service others.

Well, promoting a more generous society seems to be a plus for positive psychology, but, gosh, why do we have to be happy? Isn’t it just as selfish to say that we should give to others because it will make us happy? How about being kind to others and giving for its own sake? Why do we have to get something in return? What if giving to others or being kind was painful? Does that mean we shouldn’t do it?

what is happy anyway? According to the dictionary: favored by luck or fortune; enjoying or characterized by well-being and contentment.

Seems to me our society’s constant pursuit of happiness, whether it be the Happy Happy kind or the Authentically Happy kind, is driving the madness. We feel so entitled to happiness. If we don’t feel happy, we take drugs – prescribed or otherwise – we eat, we shop, we work, we find religion, we try to push our religion on everyone else. We are in a word: selfish.

Given the state of world affairs, if we're any kind of thinking, feeling human being, how can any of us have an overall state of mind that is “happy?”

Here’s a better question: should we be happy?

Happiness is overrated. I think we need pursue another state of mind, one that is unhappy and irritated and called to action because we care and because we DO think we can change things like the war in Iraq, rather than seek out “personal satisfaction” like the student in the story and settle for happiness.

UFO Group Perturbed

for not being named as the original source for the chicago tribune's story a few days ago and for the reporter's comments that the UFO group tried to get the reporter to write that earth was visited by an alien spaceship.
here is a second report of the sighting.
the group has a transcript of the NPR interview with the reporter here.
this from the national UFO reporting center
regarding the ufo sighting in chicago:

Moreover, it is unclear why Mr. Hilkevitch responds to the question by saying, "...they ((i.e. Peter Davenport, Director of the National UFO Reporting Center)) kept wanting me to say this was a visit from some other world and further proof that, uh, we, on this planet are visited regularly by other beings..." To set the record straight on this point, no such representation was made to Mr. Hilkevitch. His claim we consider to be a misrepresentation of the facts regarding our role in the case. We did nothing more than contact the Chicago Tribune in mid-December to apprise that newspaper of the sighting, and to provide Mr. Hilkevitch with details of the case, to include our subjective view of the veracity of the reports, and the apparent credibility of the witnesses. In the final analysis, once we were satisfied that the Chicago Tribune was interested in following up on the case, we contacted eyewitnesses, to request that they contact Mr. Hilkevitch directly, if they were willing to do so.

Contrary to Mr. Hilkevitch's claim during his interview on NPR, we did not attempt to influence him as to what he wrote in his article.

Amazon to Sell Space Travel?

too much money leads to....space travel. maybe jeff bezos will sell trips on amazon. if you're an aerospace engineer, jeff is looking for you!
cool photos
from BBC

The Goddard launch took place in Texas in November 2006
Spaceship launch
The billionaire founder of Amazon.com has released the first images of the launch of a private spacecraft that could bring space travel to the masses.
A video of the cone-shaped Goddard vehicle shows it climbing to about 85m (285ft) before returning back to Earth.

The test launch took place in November 2006 in a remote part of Texas, but details have only now been released.

The images mark the first time Jeff Bezos has broken his silence on the work of his space company, Blue Origin.

Writing on the company's website, Mr Bezos said: "We're working, patiently and step-by-step, to lower the cost of spaceflight so that many people can afford to go; and so that we humans can better continue exploring the Solar System."

"Accomplishing this mission will take a long time, and we're working on it methodically."

Short trip

Mr Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000 with the intention of developing a vertical take-off and landing vehicle, called New Shepard, able to take passengers to the edge of space.

No timescale for commercial trips has been announced but documents released by the US Federal Aviation Administration suggest they could start as early as 2010.

The latest videos show there is still a lot of development work to do before the company reaches that stage.


My only job at the launch was to open the champagne
Jeff Bezos

The footage shot on 13 November 2006 from a site about 200km (120 miles) east of El Paso in Texas shows the first craft to launch under the New Shepard programme.

Called Goddard, the retro-looking development vehicle is shown standing on four legs before blasting off in a cloud of smoke from thrusters on its base. The vehicle continues to ascend for approximately 10 seconds, reaching a height of nearly 300ft (90m).

It then starts to descend before making a controlled landing back on its feet approximately 25 seconds after take-off.

The launch, described by Mr Bezos as "both useful and fun", was watched by friends, family and a team of engineers.

"My only job at the launch was to open the champagne," said Mr Bezos.

The website message does not say whether the vehicle contained any passengers or why there was a delay between the launch and release of the footage.

Commercial space

Mr Bezos now hopes to recruit a team of engineers to the New Shepard programme to develop the design and increase the altitude and duration of flights.


In particular, he is looking for "experienced propulsion engineers" and people with "experience on large, modern vehicles such as Delta IV or Atlas V".

Blue Origin is one of several private companies vying to open up space to the public.

US-based Space Adventures has already taken four space tourists to the International Space Station, while in September 2006, Sir Richard Branson unveiled a mock-up of a rocket powered vehicle that will carry six passengers and two pilots to an altitude of about 140km (85 miles).

His Virgin Galactic design is based on SpaceShipOne, the craft designed by Scaled Composites that won the Ansari X-Prize in 2005. The first passengers could take off in 2009.

Other entrepreneurs jostling for their place in space include hotel tycoon Robert Bigelow who launched Genesis 1, an experimental inflatable spacecraft, in July 2006.

Mr Bigelow hopes the water-melon shaped craft could form the basis of a future space hotel.

Amazon's Fluctuating Prices

ever wonder why items in your shopping cart go up after a while:

The Mystery of Amazon's Fluctuating Prices
All David Streitfield wanted to do was buy a book. Looking around for a copy of THE IRON SKILLET COOKBOOK to "boost [his] dubious culinary skills," the LA Times writer found a copy at Amazon.com, put it in his shopping cart, and forgot about it. The next day, he decided to buy it, only to get a pop-up message that the price had increased from $11.02 to $11.53. He checked with friends, who noted the price increase as well. How could this happen?

read the rest at media bistro's galleycat

Stranger to the Rescue

when all the world seems to have gone mad...
from the NYT

January 3, 2007
A Man Down, a Train Arriving, and a Stranger Makes a Choice
By CARA BUCKLEY
It was every subway rider’s nightmare, times two.

Who has ridden along New York’s 656 miles of subway lines and not wondered: “What if I fell to the tracks as a train came in? What would I do?”

And who has not thought: “What if someone else fell? Would I jump to the rescue?”

Wesley Autrey, a 50-year-old construction worker and Navy veteran, faced both those questions in a flashing instant yesterday, and got his answers almost as quickly.

Mr. Autrey was waiting for the downtown local at 137th Street and Broadway in Manhattan around 12:45 p.m. He was taking his two daughters, Syshe, 4, and Shuqui, 6, home before work.

Nearby, a man collapsed, his body convulsing. Mr. Autrey and two women rushed to help, he said. The man, Cameron Hollopeter, 20, managed to get up, but then stumbled to the platform edge and fell to the tracks, between the two rails.

The headlights of the No. 1 train appeared. “I had to make a split decision,” Mr. Autrey said.

So he made one, and leapt.

Mr. Autrey lay on Mr. Hollopeter, his heart pounding, pressing him down in a space roughly a foot deep. The train’s brakes screeched, but it could not stop in time.

Five cars rolled overhead before the train stopped, the cars passing inches from his head, smudging his blue knit cap with grease. Mr. Autrey heard onlookers’ screams. “We’re O.K. down here,” he yelled, “but I’ve got two daughters up there. Let them know their father’s O.K.” He heard cries of wonder, and applause.

Power was cut, and workers got them out. Mr. Hollopeter, a student at the New York Film Academy, was taken to St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center. He had only bumps and bruises, said his grandfather, Jeff Friedman. The police said it appeared that Mr. Hollopeter had suffered a seizure.

Mr. Autrey refused medical help, because, he said, nothing was wrong. He did visit Mr. Hollopeter in the hospital before heading to his night shift. “I don’t feel like I did something spectacular; I just saw someone who needed help,” Mr. Autrey said. “I did what I felt was right.”

UFO in Chicago

who doesn't love a good ufo story. apparently, chicago airport workers spotted one, according to today's Chicago Tribune. there's also a video at the site, but not one of the ufo, just the reporter saying that the witnesses were serious but the FAA denied it at first.
original case report

Jon Hilkevitch

In the sky! A bird? A plane? A ... UFO?
Video: UFO over O'Hare Airport?

Published January 1, 2007
It sounds like a tired joke--but a group of airline employees insist they are in earnest, and they are upset that neither their bosses nor the government will take them seriously.

A flying saucerlike object hovered low over O'Hare International Airport for several minutes before bolting through thick clouds with such intense energy that it left an eerie hole in overcast skies, said some United Airlines employees who observed the phenomenon.

Was it an alien spaceship? A weather balloon lost in the airspace over the world's second-busiest airport? A top-secret military craft? Or simply a reflection from lights that played a trick on the eyes?

Officials at United professed no knowledge of the Nov. 7 event--which was reported to the airline by as many as a dozen of its own workers--when the Tribune started asking questions recently. But the Federal Aviation Administration said its air traffic control tower at O'Hare did receive a call from a United supervisor asking if controllers had spotted a mysterious elliptical-shaped craft sitting motionless over Concourse C of the United terminal.

No controllers saw the object, and a preliminary check of radar found nothing out of the ordinary, FAA spokeswoman Elizabeth Isham Cory said. to read the rest you have to register, unfortunately.

here's what some of the eyewitnesses said:

Witnesses shaken by sighting

"I tend to be scientific by nature, and I don't understand why aliens would hover over a busy airport," said a United mechanic who was in the cockpit of a Boeing 777 that he was taxiing to a maintenance hangar when he observed the metallic-looking object above Gate C17.

"But I know that what I saw and what a lot of other people saw stood out very clearly, and it definitely was not an [Earth] aircraft," the mechanic said.

One United employee appeared emotionally shaken by the sighting and "experienced some religious issues" over it, one co-worker said.

A United manager said he ran outside his office in Concourse B after hearing the report about the sighting on an internal airline radio frequency.

"I stood outside in the gate area not knowing what to think, just trying to figure out what it was," he said. "I knew no one would make a false call like that. But if somebody was bouncing a weather balloon or something else over O'Hare, we had to stop it because it was in very close proximity to our flight operations."

if you see one, here's the report form

The Story of the Year

and the most underreported story of 2006 is the coming class divide and the consequences. 2006 was the tipping point, the year when more people started to really notice (kind of like global warming) that the rich are getting richer, we're talking mega, grotesquely rich, and the rest of us will soon be begging for bread. okay, i'm being a wee bit dramatic. but homeless people, for example, are, more than ever, at the mercy of society's generosity but as we've seen, society isn't that kind anymore. witness katrina. of course, there were brilliant acts of generosity but overall, as a people, we care less.

we already have the ultra rich like oprah, bill gates, warren buffett and the like deciding who gets what. it's nice that some of the wealthy are generous but what about the ones who aren't? there are a lot of those. they are the people who believe in survival of the fittest. they believe that the smartest, the ones who work the hardest are most deserving of riches. they feel entitled, worthy. they are, after all, the ones who "create the jobs," they say. they believe that everybody can and should be like them. they feel everyone who tries hard enough can be rich or go to harvard. they feel the poor choose to be poor.

but life isn't like that. and the plight of the worker bees, the working poor and the plain poor is getting worse. more than ever, quality education, the equalizer, is out of reach for many people. why should we care if more people are becoming poorer? because it's good to be human. certainly, there are some economic benefits of fairness. other than that, i don't know. maybe it is all about darwin -- survival of the fittest --too bad if you can't cope.

but here's my working folks solution for the new year. get out of debt! get rid of credit card spending. do less shopping! i know, easier said than done. find other joys in life. spend more time with your family. ask for a raise. learn how to live a "sustainable" lifestyle. stop paying attention to what celebrities are wearing, doing, buying. ugh. they are perhaps the worst influence on our culture ever. these people are, in the big picture, fairly meaningless. i love a good movie or tv show, but celebrities aren't worthy of all the material goodies lavished upon them.

next, be less productive. i don't mean loaf on the job. get better at what you do. learn as much as you can. i mean take vacations and don't make them working ones. take time off. quit at quitting time. combining these two actions--less shopping and getting back some of your life--will give you more time and more money. time is better than money, well, for me anyway.

next, invest. i'm not advocating day trading. invest for the long haul and start soon! sharebuilder is an example of a nifty way to invest in a few stocks for cheap. vanguard doesn't charge fees for some of its funds and compounding is a glorious thing. don't forget savings accounts. forget about banks that don't pay interest or pay neglible interest. put your savings in a high interest account. go to bankrate.com and compare rates. open an account that offers the highest interest rates and no fees. for learning about investing, i recommend motleyfool.com.

but don't wait to figure out the stock market. the only way to figure it out is to actually do it. don't risk a lot of money, of course. just a little until you get the hang of it.

go to dinkytown (funny name, great calculators) to figure it all out. want to know how much to save before you reach $1 million? dinkytown will tell you.

next, share with others who have less than you.
finally, i'm no financial whiz, just someone who never wants to be in a position of begging for bread.
finally, finally, happy new year!

Disneyland Buys Chili Peppers

disneyland has licensed the chili peppers' "around the world" for the ride Rockin California Screaming and the chili's cover of stevie's "higher ground" for Space Mountain.

Hanging Jubilee

we have elevated ourselves as human beings, eh? oh, that's right justice was done. and aren't we all so much better for it?
the NYT writer who wrote this must be proud:

By MARC SANTORA
Published: December 31, 2006
BAGHDAD, Dec. 30 — Saddam Hussein never bowed his head, until his neck snapped.

Omega-3 Fatty Acids

eat more fish, kill fewer people. that's what Joseph Hibbeln says. he studied the effects of Omega-3 fatty acids, in fish or in capsules at the store, on people across the world. he found that places where people ate more fish, there were fewer murders.

also, he said that fish-eating people are less inclined to be depressed. that means omega-3 is a mighty potent and wonderous substance because what causes people to be violent and what causes people to be depressed are two different things.

he said people stopped eating fish as they moved away from the coasts.

he also correlates fish eating and fewer people who need psychiatric help.

so let that be your new year's resolution -- eat more fish, or just buy omega-3 at the store. for fish haters or people who like to see fish swimming in the water, there are other sources of omega-3.

Divine Strake Public Comments

possible lead-in to nukes?....public comments on the divinity of the divine strake, a large explosion planned at the nevada test site this coming year, can be made at divinestrake@nv.doe.gov.
get up to speed on the possible reawakening of the nukes.
we all know what divine means. but what about strake?
here's the definition:

Strake: A device for controlling air flow over an aircraft. A strake is also a part of a boat or ship used for generally the same purpose in water rather than air. It is a strip of planking in a wooden vessel or of plating in a metal one, running longitudinally along the vessel's side, its bottom or between them on the turn of the bilge.

Saying Goodbye to Dead Soldiers

i was thinking about getting a calendar today, you know, planning for the New Year, when i heard a story on NPR about Ian Black, an anethesiologist, who has to wear galoshes in the operating room at the hospital in Baghdad because the blood is so deep. he tells how the hospital workers say goodbye to the dead soldiers.

the way he told the story, it is radio after all, was so poignant, that it made me feel bad about buying a calendar, planning for the future and all. so, if you're suffering any post holiday blues or have forgotten about the wars going on, imagine serving in iraq, where sadly it seems lives are being wasted. better yet, listen to the story. it is uplifting in a twisted way, also a reminder that "peace on earth" is a quaint, outdated notion.

Quentin Blake

Quentin Blake illustrated most of Roald Dahl's books. brilliant.
painting on hospital walls, the nightingale project

Divine Strake

oh, the irony. Divine Strake. nukes from heaven. anyway, while the U.S. is telling certain countries that they had better put away their nukes or else, it appears the U.S. is fooling around with its own nukes in the nevada desert, specifically at the nevada test site. oh, the hypocrisy.

i would reckon this is one of the most underreported stories of the year.
see the letter. mind you, the divine explosion is being billed as that-- an explosion, you know, like mentos and diet coke.

the test site is a 1,375 square miles outdoor top secret lab. the famed Area 51 also is nearby as well as Nellis Airforce Base. Area 51 is a cool place to visit if you ever get a chance. of course, i never crossed the lines, big bulky guys with big guns and dark sunglasses make their presence known. it's always creepy fun to lurk around.

here's a primer for you from the official site: A unique national resource, the Nevada Test Site is a massive outdoor laboratory and national experimental center that cannot be duplicated. Larger than the state of Rhode Island, approximately 1,375 square miles, the Nevada Test Site is one of the largest restricted access areas in the United States. The remote site is surrounded by thousands of additional acres of land withdrawn from the public domain for use as a protected wildlife range and for a military gunnery range, creating an unpopulated land area comprising some 5,470 square miles.

Established as the Atomic Energy Commission's on-continent proving ground, the Nevada Test Site has seen more than four decades of nuclear weapons testing. Since the nuclear weapons testing moratorium in 1992 and under the direction of the Department of Energy (DOE), test site use has diversified into many other programs such as hazardous chemical spill testing, emergency response training, conventional weapons testing, and waste management and environmental technology studies.

Larger than many small countries, the Nevada Test Site offers an enormous amount of space, including more than a 1,000 miles of completely undisturbed land available for new projects. The vast site also offers security. The boundary and security areas are guarded, and the area is isolated from population centers.

as you know, what happens in vegas stays in vegas. this is a letter from the gov. of Nevada, dated Nov. 26, 2006.
here's some links
Divine Strake from Citizen Alert
globalsecurity.org, anything you want to know about Divine nukes, from the government's perspective
washington post story
"nevada test site issues"
wiki Divine Strake

End Poverty or Yacht?

i pulled this from the very end of a NYT story that says the world's rich could easily end poverty if they could manage with a few less yachts and helicopters. not only does the story say that the rich could end poverty. it also says that they should, morally speaking. interesting:

For more than 30 years, I’ve been reading, writing and teaching about the ethical issue posed by the juxtaposition, on our planet, of great abundance and life-threatening poverty. Yet it was not until, in preparing this article, I calculated how much America’s Top 10 percent of income earners actually make that I fully understood how easy it would be for the world’s rich to eliminate, or virtually eliminate, global poverty. (It has actually become much easier over the last 30 years, as the rich have grown significantly richer.) I found the result astonishing. I double-checked the figures and asked a research assistant to check them as well. But they were right. Measured against our capacity, the Millennium Development Goals are indecently, shockingly modest. If we fail to achieve them — as on present indications we well might — we have no excuses. The target we should be setting for ourselves is not halving the proportion of people living in extreme poverty, and without enough to eat, but ensuring that no one, or virtually no one, needs to live in such degrading conditions. That is a worthy goal, and it is well within our reach.

Peter Singer is the Ira W. DeCamp professor of bioethics at the Center for Human Values at Princeton University.