Category: Consuming

Oh, in addition to literature, I consumed some of the local products in Belize. Many of them, like the local beer and rum (Traveller’s One Barrel being the finest and of course not available in the US) and fish and chicken, were quite delicious. In the spirit of JBZ’s most recent Tastings review, I offer you the following:

Rendezvous Estates 2004 Chardonnay, Belize. It has been said that anyone can make a decent white wine. After all, you just chill it well and the off flavors disappear. Not so: the flavors of rancid nuts, plastic, and oil permeate this beverage at any temperature, even mixed with soda water or ginger ale. I hope, for the sake of everyone drinking this, that our bottle was just a case of truly disastrous handling, contamination, or heat stroke, but I doubt it.

Mr. P’s Cashew Wine: Cashew Wine is actually made from the cashew apple, the pseudofruit of the cashew tree. Cashews, see, have the fruity outside, then a second layer which is toxic, then the inner nut, which is yummy. The apple can be made into a wine which is just too nasty to drink. But I bought some and tried it. It tastes like a combination of week-old sesame-seed oil, turpentine, and sugar. The really unpardonable factor, however, is that at only 10% alcohol by volume, it can’t justify its off flavors the way cachaza and moonshine do. It’s just plain nasty.

Stupid drinks for stupid people. Like the rest of us, I guess. Like everyone. Born to lose.

We are all failures and in the long run we are all dead.

Dirty shirts for dirty people. Or museum-quality shirts for museum-quality people.

Also, once again it’s time for the annual stupid business for stupid people awards.

This Magazine (yes, that’s the name of the magazine, “this magazine”) has a neat little explanation of why the ideology of “anti-consumerism” is such a failure: it’s not an ideology, it’s a fashion statement.

Brands are useful to me. They are blocks of meaning which I can use to navigate the material world. I can assemble them to communicate with others (“I’m a badass!” “I’m a young professional!”).

Maybe my couch is “just a couch” and maybe it’s the symbol of all my aspirations for comfort and luxury. Maybe it’s lumpy and just stained and uncomfortable and I want something I can work from when it’s snowy out and I am so not tromping to the office in knee-deep slush.

Yeah, I’m afraid of the rat race. I’m afraid of dying and having my obituary explain that I was the author of such classics as “Product Marketing Statement” and “Installation and Administrator’s Guide.” I’m afraid of wasting the fruits of my labor on shiny things that won’t make me happy.

I still want a motorcycle though. Triumph Bonneville, of course. It’s shiny and tells people that I’m a badass, yet sophisticated.

Courtesy of John Fleck, a pointer to an article in which Dan Gillmor comments on the California Housing Bubble. Now, my parents were living in CA in the sixties and decided that buying a house was a risky investment. Their little bungalow that they rented for, oh, fifty dollars a month, and could have bought for a pittance, became a $1M teardown, and is now a $5-10M gated palace you can’t drive near. But it’s hard to make that kind of judgement in advance: nobody knew then that San Diego would become anything more than a pretty little Navy backwater. After all, there’s plenty of sunshine all over the country.

People want to live in desireable parts of the world. Manhattan, California, Boston, Northwestern DC. But the fact is, if Tokyo, with all its limited space, can have a crash, anyone can have a crash.

Look at it this way: it doesn’t have to be worthless to be overvalued. Lots of people still live in Tokyo, and lots of people still want to live in Tokyo. It’s still insanely expensive to live there. It’s just not as expensive as it was in 1998.

Or take Gold for example. It’s valuable. Everybody loves gold. There is an increasing demand for it as increasing numbers of people in the world want shiny things. Is it worth $500 per ounce? Or $400? It can be overvalued even if its intrinsic value is high and will continue to rise.

As my own experiences have taught me all too well, love and real estate tend to drive people to totally irrational economic decisions.

Muscle: gyms cope with overcrowding during January and February. Message to new-years-resolutioners: give the hell up. I want my treadmill back.

Money: Greenspan tires of Bush economic policy and constant deficits. Message to Republicans: quit writing checks my ass is going to have to cash.

Sony admits that its media arm crippled its electronics arm by, well, forcing it to ship DRM-crippled products. I saw that one coming, although a little to late to profit from it, I’m afraid.

I’ve got some shirts on order from Threadless, which is also in charge of OMG Clothing (slogan-oriented t-shirts). Then I remembered Preshrunk.info, the t-shirt blog. And there, I came across things like 80s tees — which also inclues an anti-80s section with a shirt that says “Retro Sucks” in a big fat retro font. My personal favorite right now is Sharp as Toast with its Propaganda Panda. Or maybe Tiny Factory, which has some great designs and funny political things too. I had to restrain myself– but I am now sure that my t-shirt idea from a year or so back was brilliant, and if I had only followed through, I would have a very expensive and time-consuming hobby on my hands.

This is a serious resource on housing markets and the potential for a market bubble. I mean, I post the occasional link, but this is like, several essays and newsfeeds and what else who knows.

Links to: The Fed plays down a house-bubble, and on the other hand mortgage requests are down. Most notable, the ever-gloomy Stephen Roach points out that the US savings rate is approximately zero, and that “if it feels like a bubble, acts like a bubble, and looks like a bubble…”

I just like the feeling that someone is going to get hurt. I think it’s what drives people to tune in to American Idol.

The conspiracy theorists in the tax-denial movement remind me a lot of the right winger nutters, like, say, Phillys Shclafly (did I spell that right?) who was opposed to the equal rights amendment because paying fair wages to women would cause communism. Or something like that. Her logic wasn’t clear but it had something to do with free day-care for young children being socialist, unlike free education for kids over six, which is to be expected.

Anyway, “The Hearts of Men” told me a lot about what economic policy should be to achieve fair and just wages for women, and explained that the early-20th-century ideals of the “family wage” and the male breadwinner are basically gone, or at the very least can’t be relied on as instruments of social policy any more (if they ever were reliable). But it didn’t tell me anything about the nature of committed relationships or how to keep a man or anything like that.