Showing posts with label The Drugs Talking. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Drugs Talking. Show all posts
Monday, May 13
Wednesday, January 16
Dopes
SO I've got local teevee news on this morning, and suddenly there's a 1990s hipster on the screen explaining to me that "Mom" "didn't like Starbucks dark-roast coffee" so "he" "bought her some new Starbucks Blonde Roast" and "now" she loves Starbucks coffee.
If you were to sit on my couch, and for some reason think to check, you'd notice that there's nothing nearby one might hurl at the teevee screen sufficient to cause real damage. This is by design. My Poor Wife's, not mine.
Where do we begin? Starbucks is a paragon of the Après-Reagan economy, a huge, manipulative chain and creator of low-paying jobs. Unless you confuse lingo with expertise there is nothing in a Starbucks operation which suggests a better, fuller, quicker, or more nuanced experience, or more intelligence than a dozen average locally-owned coffee shops could bring you in any medium-sized American city. It's a suburban, strip-mall marketing program in urban threads, disguised as a bistro. It succeeded because it found the right time to combine America's love of coffee and froufrou ice cream flavors. It succeeded because it found the capital to put a store on every corner, and because it did a good job of creating and protecting a brand. A brand that has fuck-all to do with coffee, or anything, really. Starbucks sucks.
Maybe you love it. More power to ya. If Starbucks happens to do what you like, and you don't mind overpaying for it, drastically, then at least it's convenient. And I've made but three brave excursions into one, so I'm not the last word on product.
I do, however, happen to know chicory from Kenya AA, and I'd like to take another look at that fine cross-section of American advertising sprung on me this morning. Mom doesn't like Starbucks dark roast. Because Mom isn't a hipster, though she did raise one, so he'll give her a break, and show a little kindness. As will Starbucks which, of course, wasn't at fault for the previous three decades of incinerated coffee, oh no. Burned coffee is real; all the hipsters say so. But they're big enough ($8.2 billion) to deign to throw grandma there some love.
Now, never mind, make that Nevermind, that this is a corporate global megalith assuming a virtue, either from necessity (a slowly awakening and rapidly aging client base that may've discovered the coffee at MickeyD's is at least as good), or from the smell of Mom's coin purse; they tell me that in the Advertising game falseness is sometimes encouraged. No, listen: I've got no idea how old Mom is, but, since presumably she's no older than I, I need to ask where she's been going for lighter-roasted coffee for the past three decades. In fact, unless she's actually been patronizing a real coffee shop, and was savvy enough to know the difference between roasts (yes, some geriatrics retain that ability well past their fortieth birthdays!), that Starbucks roast couldn't possibly have surprised her; until you add cinnamon, nougat, and a can of whipped cream, Starbucks coffee is precisely the coffee Mom finds elsewhere. The great expanse of commerically-available cuppa out there is dominated by coffee brewed on the percolator-era template, in which Dark and Strong substitute for Flavorful and Full-Bodied. This is merely the non-semi-alcoholic version of mass-produced American beer, which has convinced generations that fine ale needs to be consumed at roughly the temperature where carbon dioxide sublimates. It substitutes sensation for taste, and hopes you'll be too snockered by the initial assault to ask questions, or even form words.
It's far more likely you can control the output of a commercial roasting operation than you can get every hash-house waitress in the country to brew a fresh pot regularly, or get every hard-pressed local heroic entrepreneur to train people, and pay to keep materials clean. Hell, as we've noted here before, particularly in connection to that notoriously misreported lawsuit, McArnold's Home Office apparently (still) confuses brewing and serving temperatures, for whatever reason, probably Simple and Pure Evil.
I'm not unaware of the concept of "espresso". I merely point out that this is, or was, before marketing trumped everything, one end of a spectrum. Insisting that all coffee is supposed to taste like that is the equivalent of opening a wine store and selling nothing but one of those California zinfandels that's 14% alcohol and should only be drunk while wearing a HANS device.
I went online this morning to find that commercial, and instead found this. From a foodie. Ladies and gentlemen, the Defense rests:
A nation which, we're informed, doesn't understand that "real" coffee tastes like the crap that Paula Forbes doesn't know any better than. Which brings us to Lance Armstrong, triathlete and former Michelob pitchman.
That Armstrong was a notorious grifter, drug cheat, and strong-arm man was so clearly understood at the time that the question isn't whether he comes clean to whatever global media hack lands the interview, or even what he might wind up saying under oath. The two questions still remaining concerning Lance Armstrong: which officials did he pay off, and how much? Lance Armstrong "admitting" he doped should be of zero interest to anyone.
Oh, and how long does Phil Liggett keep his job? Liggett is the dean of cycling journalists. Liggett stood by Armstrong long after that was tenable. That's his right. Doing so by claiming that the twenty or so witnesses who eventually came forward did so for personal enrichment was, too, but that bill has come due.
It's interesting, provided one can keep his gorge in place, to note the sort of comments that have flown around Armstrong in recent years from his die-hard fellators. The first was the passive-aggressive "Who cares about cycling?" As though Lance Armstrong became famous for riding a bike, rather than famous for beating cancer, then riding a bike. Most people in America are utterly indifferent to professional cycling; most of the rest actively despise it. Armstrong was a hotshot rider at an early age. He could have made a comfortable living in Europe. Might even have won the Tour. That he won it multiple times, in a slick, Hollywood fairy-tale fashion, isn't a tribute to his cycling prowess; it's a tribute to what the money he attracted could and did buy.
The second, more recent, has been to insist that Armstrong's victories came over a group of competitors who have basically been accused, convicted, or admitted cheating themselves, so it all comes out in the wash.*
I suppose it should flabbergast me that there are people out there who believe "Everyone connected with this enterprise deserves to do hard time" is an argument for letting everyone go, and keep his ill-gotten gains into the bargain. Except I spend too much time paying attention to American politics.
[Oh, things are looking up, though. Phil Liggett assures us that the last two Tour winners were clean.]
_______________
* Cf. "Ty Cobb was an ugly racist, so we must give every cheater a free pass into the Hall."
If you were to sit on my couch, and for some reason think to check, you'd notice that there's nothing nearby one might hurl at the teevee screen sufficient to cause real damage. This is by design. My Poor Wife's, not mine.
Where do we begin? Starbucks is a paragon of the Après-Reagan economy, a huge, manipulative chain and creator of low-paying jobs. Unless you confuse lingo with expertise there is nothing in a Starbucks operation which suggests a better, fuller, quicker, or more nuanced experience, or more intelligence than a dozen average locally-owned coffee shops could bring you in any medium-sized American city. It's a suburban, strip-mall marketing program in urban threads, disguised as a bistro. It succeeded because it found the right time to combine America's love of coffee and froufrou ice cream flavors. It succeeded because it found the capital to put a store on every corner, and because it did a good job of creating and protecting a brand. A brand that has fuck-all to do with coffee, or anything, really. Starbucks sucks.
Maybe you love it. More power to ya. If Starbucks happens to do what you like, and you don't mind overpaying for it, drastically, then at least it's convenient. And I've made but three brave excursions into one, so I'm not the last word on product.
I do, however, happen to know chicory from Kenya AA, and I'd like to take another look at that fine cross-section of American advertising sprung on me this morning. Mom doesn't like Starbucks dark roast. Because Mom isn't a hipster, though she did raise one, so he'll give her a break, and show a little kindness. As will Starbucks which, of course, wasn't at fault for the previous three decades of incinerated coffee, oh no. Burned coffee is real; all the hipsters say so. But they're big enough ($8.2 billion) to deign to throw grandma there some love.
Now, never mind, make that Nevermind, that this is a corporate global megalith assuming a virtue, either from necessity (a slowly awakening and rapidly aging client base that may've discovered the coffee at MickeyD's is at least as good), or from the smell of Mom's coin purse; they tell me that in the Advertising game falseness is sometimes encouraged. No, listen: I've got no idea how old Mom is, but, since presumably she's no older than I, I need to ask where she's been going for lighter-roasted coffee for the past three decades. In fact, unless she's actually been patronizing a real coffee shop, and was savvy enough to know the difference between roasts (yes, some geriatrics retain that ability well past their fortieth birthdays!), that Starbucks roast couldn't possibly have surprised her; until you add cinnamon, nougat, and a can of whipped cream, Starbucks coffee is precisely the coffee Mom finds elsewhere. The great expanse of commerically-available cuppa out there is dominated by coffee brewed on the percolator-era template, in which Dark and Strong substitute for Flavorful and Full-Bodied. This is merely the non-semi-alcoholic version of mass-produced American beer, which has convinced generations that fine ale needs to be consumed at roughly the temperature where carbon dioxide sublimates. It substitutes sensation for taste, and hopes you'll be too snockered by the initial assault to ask questions, or even form words.
It's far more likely you can control the output of a commercial roasting operation than you can get every hash-house waitress in the country to brew a fresh pot regularly, or get every hard-pressed local heroic entrepreneur to train people, and pay to keep materials clean. Hell, as we've noted here before, particularly in connection to that notoriously misreported lawsuit, McArnold's Home Office apparently (still) confuses brewing and serving temperatures, for whatever reason, probably Simple and Pure Evil.
I'm not unaware of the concept of "espresso". I merely point out that this is, or was, before marketing trumped everything, one end of a spectrum. Insisting that all coffee is supposed to taste like that is the equivalent of opening a wine store and selling nothing but one of those California zinfandels that's 14% alcohol and should only be drunk while wearing a HANS device.
I went online this morning to find that commercial, and instead found this. From a foodie. Ladies and gentlemen, the Defense rests:
A nation which, we're informed, doesn't understand that "real" coffee tastes like the crap that Paula Forbes doesn't know any better than. Which brings us to Lance Armstrong, triathlete and former Michelob pitchman.
That Armstrong was a notorious grifter, drug cheat, and strong-arm man was so clearly understood at the time that the question isn't whether he comes clean to whatever global media hack lands the interview, or even what he might wind up saying under oath. The two questions still remaining concerning Lance Armstrong: which officials did he pay off, and how much? Lance Armstrong "admitting" he doped should be of zero interest to anyone.
Oh, and how long does Phil Liggett keep his job? Liggett is the dean of cycling journalists. Liggett stood by Armstrong long after that was tenable. That's his right. Doing so by claiming that the twenty or so witnesses who eventually came forward did so for personal enrichment was, too, but that bill has come due.
It's interesting, provided one can keep his gorge in place, to note the sort of comments that have flown around Armstrong in recent years from his die-hard fellators. The first was the passive-aggressive "Who cares about cycling?" As though Lance Armstrong became famous for riding a bike, rather than famous for beating cancer, then riding a bike. Most people in America are utterly indifferent to professional cycling; most of the rest actively despise it. Armstrong was a hotshot rider at an early age. He could have made a comfortable living in Europe. Might even have won the Tour. That he won it multiple times, in a slick, Hollywood fairy-tale fashion, isn't a tribute to his cycling prowess; it's a tribute to what the money he attracted could and did buy.
The second, more recent, has been to insist that Armstrong's victories came over a group of competitors who have basically been accused, convicted, or admitted cheating themselves, so it all comes out in the wash.*
I suppose it should flabbergast me that there are people out there who believe "Everyone connected with this enterprise deserves to do hard time" is an argument for letting everyone go, and keep his ill-gotten gains into the bargain. Except I spend too much time paying attention to American politics.
[Oh, things are looking up, though. Phil Liggett assures us that the last two Tour winners were clean.]
_______________
* Cf. "Ty Cobb was an ugly racist, so we must give every cheater a free pass into the Hall."
Friday, June 25
Friday Olio: The Dextromethorphan Edition
• Maybe You Could Just Stop Lying: My guess is that the relative calm on the Right over the McChrystal McFiring has much to do with the injection of Warrior Saint "Faintin' Dave" Petraeus into the story, who cannot and will not be opposed by Congressional Republicans (and while we're thinking of it, couldn't we solve many of the worst aspects of hyperpartisanship in this country by assuaging the Big Daddy anxieties of the Right? Like the Dalai Lama is the reincarnation of every other Dalai Lama, couldn't we just bruit it about that the President is George Washington, George Mason, or George S. Patton?), and more than a little to do with the fact that the savvier among them don't want that stinking albatross back around their own necks. Most of the What Passes for Sane voices from that direction have allowed as how McChrystal had to go, even though Obama hasn't nuked the Taliban the way George W. Bush did, or would've by now, certainly. But then, God help me, there's Lt. Col. Brooks, who thinks the real problem is, y'know, Vietnam, and the Culture of Small People Thinking They Need To Know Details An' Stuff:
But McChrystal, like everyone else, kvetched. And having apparently missed the last 50 years of cultural history, he did so on the record, in front of a reporter. And this reporter, being a product of the culture of exposure, made the kvetching the center of his magazine profile.
McChrystal graduated from West Point in 1976. Which means that over his entire fucking career he's somehow missed his employer's overarching concern with how it's portrayed in The Media, from the Powell Doctrine to the embedding of compliant photo-op seekers and happy little stovepipers. Just one of those unfortunate things that the guy earns four stars but misses all those memos.
(Say the same for Looey Bird Brooks: all those weekend philosophy confabs fine-tuning the details of Man's Basic Imperfectability, and, somehow, still, no one who rises to the Top can be an asshole. How convenient.)
• Maybe You Could Just Stop Lying To Yourself: Christ, speaking of military geniuses, faux-Classicist Victor Davis Tiberius Molliculus Hanson lectures the President on the swift retribution accorded "overweening arrogance"?
• Maybe You Could Just Stop: Jonah Goldberg:
Head to the local big-box electronics store and buy yourself: a Panasonic home theater system ($500), an Insignia 50-inch plasma HDTV ($700), an Apple 8GB iPod Touch ($175), a Sony 3-D Blu-ray disc player ($219), a Sony 300-CD changer ($209), a Garmin portable GPS ($139), a Sony 14.1-megapixel digital camera ($200), a Dell Inspiron laptop computer ($450), and a TiVo high-definition digital video recorder ($300)….
The average American worker needs to work 152 hours to earn that much money.
In 1964, however, the average American worker could buy one pricey stereo from Radio Shack after working 152 hours. My colleague at the American Enterprise Institute, Mark Perry, a University of Michigan economist, crunched the numbers.
And again, the really big difference between Now and Then is that nowadays a large percentage of illiterates can read.
• Maybe You Should Just Turn Off The Teevee and Get Some Rest: Bad enough that for the entire blessed week what non-weather-related news could be squeezed into the scant ninety minutes the locals give themselves each evening included a daily mantra that Congress had not voted to extend unemployment benefits. (We should note here that for local teleprompter readers Unemployment is generally considered One of Those Things Everyone Agrees Is Bad, despite the positive effect it has on the Domestic Help market.) And this mis-direction of blame by metonym was compounded, Wednesday, by someone sticking a microphone in front of the corpse of Kindly Grampa Lugar, so he could assure everyone that the Tricky Budgetary Questions involved (no need for you folks to interrupt the milkin' for details!) would surely be solved so that "Congress" could do the Right Thing. This, of course, came about sixteen hours before he and his "Democratic" colleague Evan Bayh voted Nay. Despite what I've said about David Brooks, as a practical matter we really do need to hold people in the higher income brackets to a much lower standard, and it's not like you're supposed to believe these people really care about unemployment unless it's their own, anymore than we're supposed to believe they'd feel some professional obligation to inform the Increasingly Unwashed that it was in fact their Gilt Masters in the Imperial Senate who were cutting off the bologna money, lest we have to mothball a carrier or something important.
But then there was a 5.0 quake in someplace called "Canada", and the tremors were felt in Indiana, which was news, but needed to be handed over to the Channel 8 Chief Meteorologist for the technical explanations an' stuff. And he reported that the last quake to be felt here was a 5.4. "So only a little stronger," he said.
Right. Assuming you think fourfold is "only a little". It's a logarithmic scale. We might compare earlier in the week, when our two-decimal-point advantage over Ohio's unemployment rate was (again) evidence of Mitch Daniels' enormous economic brainpower.
But McChrystal, like everyone else, kvetched. And having apparently missed the last 50 years of cultural history, he did so on the record, in front of a reporter. And this reporter, being a product of the culture of exposure, made the kvetching the center of his magazine profile.
McChrystal graduated from West Point in 1976. Which means that over his entire fucking career he's somehow missed his employer's overarching concern with how it's portrayed in The Media, from the Powell Doctrine to the embedding of compliant photo-op seekers and happy little stovepipers. Just one of those unfortunate things that the guy earns four stars but misses all those memos.
(Say the same for Looey Bird Brooks: all those weekend philosophy confabs fine-tuning the details of Man's Basic Imperfectability, and, somehow, still, no one who rises to the Top can be an asshole. How convenient.)
• Maybe You Could Just Stop Lying To Yourself: Christ, speaking of military geniuses, faux-Classicist Victor Davis Tiberius Molliculus Hanson lectures the President on the swift retribution accorded "overweening arrogance"?
• Maybe You Could Just Stop: Jonah Goldberg:
Head to the local big-box electronics store and buy yourself: a Panasonic home theater system ($500), an Insignia 50-inch plasma HDTV ($700), an Apple 8GB iPod Touch ($175), a Sony 3-D Blu-ray disc player ($219), a Sony 300-CD changer ($209), a Garmin portable GPS ($139), a Sony 14.1-megapixel digital camera ($200), a Dell Inspiron laptop computer ($450), and a TiVo high-definition digital video recorder ($300)….
The average American worker needs to work 152 hours to earn that much money.
In 1964, however, the average American worker could buy one pricey stereo from Radio Shack after working 152 hours. My colleague at the American Enterprise Institute, Mark Perry, a University of Michigan economist, crunched the numbers.
And again, the really big difference between Now and Then is that nowadays a large percentage of illiterates can read.
• Maybe You Should Just Turn Off The Teevee and Get Some Rest: Bad enough that for the entire blessed week what non-weather-related news could be squeezed into the scant ninety minutes the locals give themselves each evening included a daily mantra that Congress had not voted to extend unemployment benefits. (We should note here that for local teleprompter readers Unemployment is generally considered One of Those Things Everyone Agrees Is Bad, despite the positive effect it has on the Domestic Help market.) And this mis-direction of blame by metonym was compounded, Wednesday, by someone sticking a microphone in front of the corpse of Kindly Grampa Lugar, so he could assure everyone that the Tricky Budgetary Questions involved (no need for you folks to interrupt the milkin' for details!) would surely be solved so that "Congress" could do the Right Thing. This, of course, came about sixteen hours before he and his "Democratic" colleague Evan Bayh voted Nay. Despite what I've said about David Brooks, as a practical matter we really do need to hold people in the higher income brackets to a much lower standard, and it's not like you're supposed to believe these people really care about unemployment unless it's their own, anymore than we're supposed to believe they'd feel some professional obligation to inform the Increasingly Unwashed that it was in fact their Gilt Masters in the Imperial Senate who were cutting off the bologna money, lest we have to mothball a carrier or something important.
But then there was a 5.0 quake in someplace called "Canada", and the tremors were felt in Indiana, which was news, but needed to be handed over to the Channel 8 Chief Meteorologist for the technical explanations an' stuff. And he reported that the last quake to be felt here was a 5.4. "So only a little stronger," he said.
Right. Assuming you think fourfold is "only a little". It's a logarithmic scale. We might compare earlier in the week, when our two-decimal-point advantage over Ohio's unemployment rate was (again) evidence of Mitch Daniels' enormous economic brainpower.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)