The Weekly Meat

My 10 Favorite Online Videos

[Forgive the lighter fare this week. I'm sick, so are my kids, and work is on me like media flies on what now amounts to The Jackson Four.]

In no particular order:

All-Blacks Haka — New Zealand's All-Blacks rugby team does their ritual pre-match Maori Haka. Intimidating as hell.

George Laraque v. Raitis Ivanans — Three words: "Good luck, man."

Bobby Clarke scores his 1,000th career point — I specifically remember the moment earlier in this game when Reggie Leach (who had arguably the hardest shot in hockey) struck Clarke above the eye with a deadly slapshot. Clarke did not even go down to the ice. He simply shrugged slightly, as if shaking wet hair off his forehead, and the blood began pouring down his face. He personified both the mental and physical toughness that I still aspire to, and this clip highlights his perseverance.

Harlan McCraney, Presidential Speechalist — The best thing Andy Dick will ever do in his life. Hilarious.

Secretariat runs away with the Preaknesss — (~3:20 of the video) Secretariat demands hyperbole, and I will not disappoint: He was the greatest athlete of the 20th century, and the move he made in the furlong around his first turn at Pimlico in 1973 was the most perfect and inspiring thing I have ever seen.

Lazy Sunday — The video that launched a million videos and made YouTube (and later Hulu) a household name. Still brilliant.

Rob Hisey lacrosse-style shootout goal — Mike Legg did it first, and in an actual game; Sidney Crosby's done that too; Robbie Schremp does it better; but I saw the Hisey video first, and was blown away. Amazing dangling chops.

Tiger Woods Nike commercial — Tiger's parlor trick was just stunning when I first saw it, and is no less so today. It has spawned many imitations, some of which (Ronaldinho, Freestyle) are equally Nike and equally impressive.

Battle at Kruger — Lions and water buffalo and crocs, oh my! If you're one of the three people who hasn't actually seen this, it's worth eight and a half minutes of your life to be reminded that human beings are only one of hordes of thinking creatures on this old planet.

All your base are belong to us — The single most perfect example of the power of the Internet. Simple yet brilliant, geeky yet hip, global yet communal. A spot-on, time-sucking, poorly-translated, painstakingly-executed phenomenon.

15 Minutes

A few weeks ago, my wife AKL and I went to our first nursery school open house — shopping for something that might captivate young RLK more than Legos, and because she's that age. Little did I know, we'd both be captivated as much as the wee lass. But not, mind you, by the child/teacher ratio, or the sun-filled classroom, or the safe play spaces.

Upon entering the school building and at precisely the same moment, AKL and I noticed independently the presence of local/national "celebrity" parents for whom we have each harbored brief crushes in our day. AKL turned to me and said, sotto voce, "[Name of new it-boy writer] is over there in the corner." I smiled and said, "I'll see your [name of new it-boy writer] and raise you. Hello... [name of Grammy-nominated indie-rock starlet]."

The fact that AKL (who can be prone to such things) had never heard of [name of Grammy-nominated indie-rock starlet] notwithstanding, we were clearly not in nursery school Kansas anymore.

So, as we nodded to and chatted with the local celebs (nothing allows for painless social introduction more than the communal parenting of kids on a playground), it was not difficult to imagine becoming fast friends with these two touched by fame. Exchanging phone numbers, setting up play dates, becoming Facebook pals — because, "behind the music," we're all just folks.

I've met celebrities throughout the course of my life, and — maybe I just haven't met the right celebrities of enormous proportions — I'm rarely impressed, other than by the fact that they all tend to be no different from me but for the size of our royalty checks. (OK, I've never actually received a royalty check.)

I've palled around with the Dead Milkmen, whose drummer, Dean Clean, is a friend; at writers' conferences, I've tossed back drinks with William Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and scores of others far too drunk to appreciate my literary genius; I've chauffeured Kenny G around town (I had a choice between him and Michael Bolton — whom would you choose?). While working (restaurants and retail) back in my salad days, I served legendary jockey Angel Cordero, Jr., boxer Gerry Cooney, and Phillies' Hall-of-Famer Richie Ashburn. Through happenstance, I've wound up in the ring at "Smokin" Joe Frazier's gym, where I shook hands with the man himself (in a non-boxing capacity, I should clarify); met old-school wrestling great Gorilla Monsoon; had old Babs Bush sign a cast on my leg (little did I know at the time that her son could set back a country so far); shared a basketball court with the Harlem Globetrotters; and quite literally walked smack into Matt Dillon (he was looking the other way as well; we simultaneously grabbed each other's shoulder to steady ourselves and apologize, and as we each continued on our way, I kid you not, we both did an over-the-shoulder double-take — as if he said to himself, "Hey, that was just BK").

Celebrity is a funny thing. People have only the status we give them. But my god, we do give it away without a second thought. (Remind me again what Paris Hilton is famous for.) Channel surf during dinner time, and — without even nearing the high numbers in the cable TV lineup — there are a half dozen shows on simultaneously, tracking the movements and machinations of people I could neither pick out of a lineup nor identify by name, occupation, or relationship status. I'll admit I'm not the barometer of hip I once was, but face it — we have come to worship at the altar of half-wits and half-talents, most of whom are no better at what they do than we are at what we do. C'mon, I've been blogging for just over a year, and have already compiled a body of work as impressive as that of, say, Clay Aiken, or Kathy Griffin, or Sarah Palin.

Indeed, I've had small morsels of the 15 minutes of fame promised to me by Andy Warhol, and yes, it's nice. Several years ago, after I made the nightly news by doing nothing more than intently watching a hockey game, a slacker-than-thou clerk at the video store was impressed enough to not only deign to speak to me, but to admit she recognized me from the three seconds I was onscreen during the clip of the game recap.

In college, I played guitar badly and sang badly in a band, but still got plenty of compliments, and the occasional booty call. After seemingly every stage performance of an ad-lib comedy group I was in, I was approached at lunch the next day by one coed classmate or another and told, "You were great last night." She meant on stage, of course, but my friends made great hay of it — and so did I.

Being almost famous is somewhat fun; while, I imagine, being actually famous is great fun — but only briefly; and being super famous is stifling and fun only to those with far greater self esteem issues than yours truly. Yet fame is such a draw that nearly every single dirtbag perp on policeploitation shows like Cops sign waivers to allow themselves to be shown on national TV getting busted for crack, spousal abuse, naked driving, etcetera, without a second thought.

We allow ourselves to be filmed and seen and published under all kinds of circumstances — from waiting in line at the ATM; to posting home videos on YouTube for the world to see; to, yes, writing online weblogs of our personal views, opinions, lives.

 

My god, what is wrong with me? Do I really swim in the shallow end with all the fanboys, starfuckers, and wannabes? Am I willing to sell my soul for that brief moment in which actual celebrity is fun? When some other jaded 40-year-old blogger in boxers and a t-shirt (whoops, too much information) cynically points to me as the Paris-Hilton–head of the 2010s? And what will I tell my daughter when she asks if that's really daddy on TV, being interviewed by the policeman while the incessant reggae song plays? Or, for that matter, in her classroom, when it's parents' day at her new school?

Underdogs

I was born with a chip on my shoulder and a nose for the disenfranchised. It wasn't enough that I was Jewish. I also wanted to be Italian and black.

I'm from Philly. And if, while I was growing up, Chicago or LA was the "Second City," Philly was the fourth or fifth. We — like my current home of Boston — were a city of also-rans and underdogs. (At least Boston was until the local sports teams stahted getting wicked-good.)

In any case, I had a love for hockey — a fairly minor sport in the U.S. at the time, compared to the majors of baseball and football and basketball — and my hero was an average-sized diabetic guy named Bobby Clarke from the hardscrabble mining town of Flin Flon, Manitoba.

Clarkie captained the Flyers for seven seasons, and was an incredibly effective leader and fan favorite during his tenure — because we (as did his teammates) relate to the underdog, we speak their language, know their pain, and respect their struggle. And because an underdog works their ass off, they generally have our empathy and our support.

But this week's focus is not hockey. It's this: It's not a bad thing that the U.S. has fallen from our geopolitical (somewhat self-proclaimed) designation of alpha dog.

We've been at or near the top for a long time, in terms of GDP, education, quality exports, military might, international standing, etc. But for a variety of reasons, not least to do with our so-called leadership, we have lost our footing and stumbled badly. Here's the good news: It's precisely what we need. Because it's not just our stock market that needs to recalibrate itself, it's our whole country. And it's not just our leadership that's lacking, it's us.

The solution is about more than simply choking down some humble pie. It's about regaining the hunger, the work ethic, and the original ideas that once fueled the American Dream — and yes, the humility borne of eating bread sandwiches and beans for a while.

We have all gotten so fat and lazy — soft, both physically and mentally. We feel a sense of entitlement disproportional to our drive and our abilities. We have forgotten how to produce quality goods, and how to manage nearly anything effectively — particularly ourselves. We are needy without being giving and charitable, vehement without being right, self-righteous without being ethical. And we seem to think this is all our birthright.

As a nation, we strive to export democracy as if a global manifest destiny. We start wars we cannot win, fight them from afar, and leave them unfinished. Arguably, the last time we got ourselves out of a military action cleanly and on top was World War II. (And to achieve that, we caused the greatest humanitarian crisis the world has ever seen.)

To be sure, the U.S. is still a force to be reckoned with. But all is not as easy as, say, strapping on a flight suit and claiming "Mission Accomplished" anymore. I use a military reference, but our troubles have spread to all aspects of the new world order in which we find ourselves.

At the office, I joke that I have no desire to be a top-level executive in our company; rather I want to be an ex–top-level executive. Because when they go (as they have just last week, in fact), they leave with outsized, golden parachutes. And the suits get these obscenely generous parting gifts whether they have done a good job or not. Because in the U.S., once you attain a certain level on the ziggurat, there is no longer any accountability. Film directors get final cut, because who needs editors? Banks that have recently been bailed out are not actually required to put that money back into our failing economy, because why would Congress ever deign to stipulate that banks not simply hoard our tax dollars? And the Executive branch of government attempts to expand its powers at every turn, because who needs to be checked and balanced by the pesky Legislature and the Judiciary?

On the world stage, we do much the same — presuming our place high up the ziggurat, and with it, presuming that we need not be accountable. We try war crimes in The Hague, but not at home; invoke the Geneva Conventions when it's convenient. We press for free and fair elections elsewhere, but can barely hold them here.

We have certainly been mismanaged at both the national and international level, but it's a mistake to fault only those at the top. Yes, for example, our big banks may have sold millions of bad mortgages, but we're the ones who have been foolishly signing those notes, stretching us beyond our means. We celebrate the ordinary and elect Joe and Judy Sixpacks to high office, then turn an apathetic cheek to their folksy incompetence. (I've written about just this national acceptance of mediocrity before, but the horse is not yet dead, and it needs beating.)

There is a perfect global economic shit-storm brewing, and our impending election of a new president will play a key role in how and when and if we find our way out of the muck. But there are 300 million of us in these United States, and the turnaround of our country depends as much on us as it does on Barack Obama or John McCain. Indeed, our next president must help to restore our standing and our credibility in the world. But we will be the key to the new economy, and how we respond to adversity will determine how we will live. And it can only help in the long run that we see ourselves not as big dogs, but as underdogs.

Road Rage

Why is it that being even mildly affected by someone driving assholishly can cause us (OK, me) to say things I would be embarrassed to say with others in the car? To clarify, when I say "others," I don't just mean my wife and kids. I mean anyone.

Mind you, I'm not some fly-off-the-handle whack-job looking to tailgate said offenders or start a fight. But damn, I've got a filthy mouth when I'm pissed off — especially in the car.

And you know I'm not alone.

Tricky business this road rage. It is a selfish, bourgeois luxury, yes. It's about entitlement and it's about (admit it) not letting anyone else get one over on us. We beep and yell and gesticulate in an attempt not to be dissed.

So much hate, so little time. Be it people who talk on their cellphones while driving; SUVs; mufflers that amplify, rather than muffle; people who pretend to not see the upcoming merge; people who fall in line behind a responding ambulance; the list goes on. Of course, we ourselves are not blameless. I know I am sometimes that guy.

I have — in my days of youthful indiscretion, and among other things — eaten a Big Mac while driving. Alone. Meaning, no one to grab the wheel if I had spilled two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheeese, pickles, onions, on a sesame seed bun on myself and pulled a nutty into oncoming traffic. Eating a Big Mac is a sloppy, complicated business even under ideal, stationary circumstances. In a car it can be suicide. If not vehicular homicide.

In my defense, I have never eaten a Big Mac in heavy traffic. I have however, in my near quarter century of driving, cut my nails, read maps, written (notes for this post, in fact), nearly fallen asleep, and done things an attorney might advise me to neither confirm nor deny.

Currently, I drive to work four days a week over several of the northeast's worst commuting roads. I have seen horrible accidents and been in a bad one myself (while fully alert, engaged, and unencumbered; nonetheless...). And still, during the daily rush hour, I see drivers eating full-on two-handed meals, applying makeup, changing clothes, shaving, you name it.

And as long as those folks stay away, their actions shouldn't necessarily piss me off. Oh, but they do.

I don't give anyone the finger anymore — if I have half my wits about me. I give the peace sign (OK, sometimes the backwards peace sign), or squish their heads Kids in the Hall-style, between my thumb and forefinger. For those guys who especially deserve it, I reserve my new favorite hand gesture: I take my thumb and forefinger and place them a half inch apart, as if to say, "This right here, my assholic driving friend, this is the size of your penis."

And how is it that I allow myself to get so riled up? I think what happens is that when we're in a car, we (counterintuitively, I'd argue) see ourselves as being in a safe place. And this presumed haven — in which we have climate control, our favorite music, etc. — allows all our psychic junk to flood out when some discourteous, or just unlucky, stiff infringes on our buffer zone of personal space. Because those other jerks present to us a danger. They thumb their nose at the fact that we must all share the road, and within reason obey the laws of traffic and of common decency.

What often irritates me most about them are the same character traits that when I'm being honest irritate me about myself. Realizing this, of course, does not simply dispel my flashes of seething. The only thing which accomplishes that is the sight of a hothead driver being pulled over for speeding.

Now that is even more satisfying than receiving a certain type of hands-free sex while operating a motor vehicle.

Ahem. Or so I'm told.

See you out there on the roads. Just please, please, please — I beg of you — stay in your frickin' lane!

Conventions

As my Democrat friends gather this week in Denver to (one can only hope) glimpse our nation's future, it's important to look at the special art of Officious Gathering.

I once had the distinct pleasure to attend a technical conference for work that was sited, as it happened, adjacent to a conference for the owners and managers of workout gyms. The juxtaposition of the two groups could not have been any more clear or any more awkward; the effect was mesmerizing, as middle-aged cubicle-dwelling tech writer geeks were forced to rub elbows with no-less-geeky but far more buff fake-tanned fitness purveyors.

It highlighted the fact that conferences are a world unto themselves, and that they have become so pervasive it's difficult to imagine a time without them. There is much chatter about how the Internet has brought together disparate groups and allows us all to fly our particular brand of freak flag in a supportive environment — but in this case, it would seem we do that online backslapping only as a means to then convene in person.

Maybe 10 years ago, my friend Spider and I were rolling through the French Quarter when we spotted the first of many gaggles of Goths, hanging out in their pastiness, bruise-colored clothing, and black lipstick. When we stopped into a bar for a late afternoon beer, we encountered a table of about a dozen. I looked at Spider. "I have to go ask," I said. He nodded empathetically, and I pulled up a chair to their corner table.

They looked at me — the normal freak — suspiciously, but not unkindly. "I have to ask," I said. "It's just that there seem to be a lot of you folks around." The one who was clearly the leader nodded at me. "There's a convention," he said. "There are about 1200 of us in town for a convention."

It seemed odd to me that a conspicuously and so purposely outcast group would go to the trouble of orchestrating an Officious Gathering. It was somewhat off-putting, like hyper-organized anarchists setting up local bingo nights via their listserv.

These days, there are so many unconventional conventions that I wouldn't be surprised if there were conferences on organizing conferences. And the prospects of Comic-Con–style alliterative naming are endless, as there are surely all manner of Confidence Conferences (i.e., "self-help"), Condom-Makers, and Convent Conventions.

Consultants in certain industries find themselves serial convention goers, as they seek to drum up business. Every city worth its salt now has a shiny convention center of sorts. And whole industries have sprung up around the business of conventioneering itself, where big money is made supplying the millions of requisite (one-time use, mind you, so it's a killer product) plastic badges and badgeholders and lanyards and pins — not to mention the promotional SHWAG.

Oh, the SHWAG; let me count the ways. Ninety percent of it is crap. But it's free crap, and there's nothing we Americans like more than free crap. You've got your printed pins and pens, flashlight fobs and fleece, mugs and mouse pads. (In fact, if you've actually gone out and purchased a mouse pad in the past 10 years, you're a sucker with no business connections whatsoever.) At most conventions, you're given a SHWAG bag just so you can carry the rest of your SHWAG.

And whether Goths, consumer electronics, or Japanime — or the RNC and DNC — every convention has its requisite organizing committee and wanna-bes, full of frightening Kool-Aid drinking yahoos handing out registration materials.

Fanaticism in and of itself — whether religious or secular, Hollywood or hockey — can be a prickly thing, but when combined with the PTA-type do-gooder activism you see at these gatherings, it's downright scary.

Our two political conventions will be nothing short of revival meetings filled to bursting with Obamaites (and Hillary Holdouts) and McCainiacs seeking to anoint their own as the next Savior-in-Chief. You can recognize the laity as looking very similar to those who travel to Times Square on New Year's Eve, and to Boston's Esplanade for the July 4th fireworks. Not surprisingly, they even dress in much the same way, what with their über-Patriot hats and flags and flair and such.

Thank god very little political decision-making need be conducted at these pow-wows anymore, because it makes my skin crawl to think of my vote being cast or platform decided by an oligarch superdelegate wearing several yards of a couture designer's rendering of Old Glory — even if it turns out they're voting for the same guy I am. Maybe it's my Marxist (Groucho, not Karl) upbringing that "I don't want to belong to any club that would accept me as a member," or maybe I'm just disturbed when people instill in individuals the collective accrued reverence that I reserve for (admittedly) the Philadelphia Flyers.

Either way, it's convention time in Denver, and then in Minneapolis, where local night owls can sure be to find tables of garishly dressed conventionaires at hotel bars — still wearing their nametags, undoubtedly — slugging down boat drinks. By all means, beware of them. But beware too the men and women they cheer each night at the podiums. These political conventions have on occasion been sited directly adjacent to Con-Artist Conventions. And the two groups are often indistinguishable.

Otakon pics thanks to Dave D; DNC pic via the conference website.

The Long and Winding Tail

Internet Search, as we have been reminded recently, is a multi-billion dollar industry. It serves as our map for, and often our portal to, the Internet. And indeed, it is a brave new world that we Googlers inhabit.

Inherently, Search has a sharp “peak” and a long “tail” — meaning there are relatively few terms that people search for a lot (e.g., “Paris Hilton sex tape”), and loads of obscure things that are searched for far less often (e.g., “Brandon Wheat Kings 1978–79 roster”).

The world of the the sharp peak is filled with predictable pop culture and political nonsense. The world of the long tail on the other hand, can be a fascinating, if extremely dark, place.

Occasionally, thanks to this brilliant blogging software, I get to see a slice of what folks type into their laptops when they think no one is watching. Among other things, it allows one to see the links that folks click through to arrive on our pages. Some are indeed looking for The Weekly Meat, and then there are searches clearly related (tangentially at least) to some of my admittedly long-tail topics, such as "hockey player hand smells" and "coed hockey showers". But tossed in with the light fare and satisfied customers are bombshells like "how long would I have to stop eating to have a miscarriage?"

I don't imagine that person was in fact looking for this blog (in particular, this or this piece of information), but that's what they got. That search came via Google, at 3:05 pm on a Thursday afternoon, and I deflated when I later saw it, as I couldn't help but picture a supremely distressed and desperate high schooler, her natural language search in the form of a first-person question, with, perhaps, little idea that her predicament had been captured anywhere.

Despite a similar "vicodin abuse and miscarriage," most oddities are the result of a juxtaposition of words, often relating to the name of this blog. Like "meat art" (via Germany). Perhaps they were looking for something more along the lines of this or this but who's to say, really? Meat art is such a subjective thing. Me, I'm a sucker for those faux landscape. Meatscapes, if you will.

But I digress.

Search algorithms work best in tandem with the user's own skillful phrasing. But few of us know our Boolean logic or how to use quotation marks properly, so our "garbage in, garbage out" queries give us far more results than we need, with fewer substantive results. (But thankfully, more Weekly Meat.)

So, I'll continue to see and smile upon half-haikus like "the bone and meat of my index finger extremely painful" or "meat to me smells like hot death"or "wearing boxers in morning with female roommate". Salient concerns, all.

"Did Billy carter pee on a building ?" Despite this post, I didn't know, but it sure sounded like him. So I turned the tables and did some of my own searching. The answer I came up with seems to be no, not per se, though he had a purported predilection for such behavior.

And now, somewhere else on the Net, someone else is looking over their own website stats, and having a good laugh at my expense.

Spare Change

They're out there, in uniform, in the middle of busy intersections — ten- and twelve-year-old kids — scrambling between cars with their coffee tins, asking for donations. There's an adult or two around, and the tin cans say [SomeTown] Softball, or Cheerleading, or Track.

I'm sorry if these are your kids, or kids you know, but get real. Charity and good will is one thing, but when did we, as a society, have become such fat, lazy slobs as to think that we're each entitled to payment simply for being alive? And what the hell kind of adult oversees these "fund-raising" efforts? Why teach kids to spare for change, to beg — to be satisfied with living on the dole rather than working? If these adults don't have enough moxie to organize a simple car wash or bake sale, should they really be supervising kids at all?

Hey, here's a free idea. Maybe we could encourage those kids to become the writers and thinkers of the future by starting an empowerment project in which they write a newspaper, publish it, and sell it to us. Oh yeah, that's right . . . much smarter (and far more needy) people are already doing that successfully.

I grew up in a town a lot like the one in which I now live. Some folks were well-off, and some were not. But no one begged for money. They worked for it. Youth soccer teams made money the same way Smith Barney claimed to: they "EARNed it." There were car washes and bake sales and raffles. Donors got something for their trouble — and, more importantly, we kids learned the lessons of hard work. If we didn't sell enough raffle tickets or brownies, or wash enough cars, or find a sponsor, well then, we didn't get new uniforms.

A while back, AKL and I took a long bike ride on a hot, sunny day. On our way out of town, and again on our way back an hour or two later, we stopped and bought 25 cent cups of lemonade from a 7-year-old girl. She was new to the world of business, and had a little help from her mom, but that girl learned a few things that Saturday. She learned the necessity of simple math in the real world (two cups of lemonade times 25 cents, out of one dollar). Maybe her mom taught her what "overhead" is, maybe not. I know for certain she learned about the value of return customers, and what "tips" are. And she sold a lot of lemonade that day.

Seems simple enough. You want cash? You work for it.

We have become irresponsible with our money. We buy lottery tickets instead of groceries (because, surely we're all owed a big payday). And every day we open our mail boxes to more offers for another credit card we can't afford. Maybe we even get the new card to pay off the debt on an old one. And if we are fortunate enough to own a home, what do we do? We take out a home equity loan (because certainly, we deserve "free" money) to pay off our credit card debt.

But to what end? Credit is based on — often foolish — optimism: that life will be better tomorrow, belief in "the American dream," and the steadfast notion that we will one day soon have more money than we have now. Don't get me wrong, I have lived paycheck to paycheck, and I'm very fortunate to not live that way now. Yet too many of us live far beyond our means (and, of course, we're encouraged to at every turn).

It's time to rein it in. And our kids too. (There's simply no way I'm ever dressing up daughters RK and E-O in some goddamn uniform and asking them to go hassle shoppers heading into the grocery store.) Thank god our fearless leaders in Washington — like the supervisory team parents noted above — have our education and well-being in mind, and aren't leading us down a road paved in debt.

Yeah, thank god for that.

Meat Addiction

I had no clue when I named this blog that folks might stumble their way onto these pages by googling "meat addict" and the like. Apparently, it's an increasingly popular thing to search for. Not as popular as "Scarlett Johanssen" perhaps, but let's not digress.

The name of this site, plus my post on (cheese) addiction, plus Google's proprietary algorithms place me fairly high on the list of results for that particular search. Now, don't get me wrong (especially you meat addicts out there — I appreciate the hits), but meat addiction? Who knew?

Yet, enough folks are afflicted by, or curious about, such a thing as to search the internets for it, and some of those folks are in turn curious enough or desperate enough to click on The Weekly Meat for answers. Well, I'm flattered — albeit naively curious — and hey, I'm here to serve my constituency (even those just passing through). So I've put forth some research to get to the bottom of this burgeoning phenomenon.

First off: Is there such a thing?

I realize addiction can be a tricky thing. Clearly, the most pandemic of addictions seems to be that of booze — something the human body does not historically/biologically need to survive. But meat? Homo sapiens have depended on it for eons. True, in our post-industrialized global reality, we can now get by swimmingly (if not happily) on a meat-free diet. Or to generalize, if you're reading these words, it's a fair bet that you do not need to kill wild game for the sake of sustenance. Not that there's anything wrong with it, mind you — I appreciate game as much as the next guy. I'm just saying it's no longer essential to our survival as a species.

Maybe it's more a problem of psychological dependency. If one works at it long enough, I suppose we can become addicted to nearly anything. Videogames, crosswords, blogging. Watching hockey fight videos on YouTube. Whatever.

And where might meat addiction rank in the world of addictions? Might it threaten the addict's well-being more seriously than, say, heroin? Dubious, but as with all addictions, it's a matter of degrees. I mean, is the afflicted in the habit of sneaking meat at work? Running late for appointments, furiously slugging down mouthwash to cover the smell of Slim Jims? Not-so-discreetly surfing barbecue porn sites behind the spouse's back? Cutting out of the office early to head over to the local butcher shop? Suffering meat blackouts? The mind reels with possibilities.

Maybe there's another angle I'm missing.

Ah. Further searching shows that some of this business about meat addiction is to do with Big Meat (that is, the Industry, à la "Big Tobacco"). And on that score — though we might differ a bit on some details — I'd agree that yes, certainly we do have a meat problem in this country.

Our problem is this: The meat that we most often consume does not come from healthy stock. Rather, it comes from animals who live nearly their entire brief existence while penned together like the shrink-wrapped food product they will become; hopped up on drugs and hormones to keep them from dying, because they're being fattened up on "food" they were not physiologically meant to eat and that they cannot digest without said drugs; all while wallowing in their own excrement. (For much more on this, I highly recommend reading Michael Pollan's excellent book The Omnivore's Dilemma; or more briefly, this Time article; or even the politically correct CDC website.)

So, we have a problem. But are we "addicts"? Whether or not we eat too much of it, or whether we have a compulsive need to eat it, I'll leave up to the evangelists out there — or better yet, to you. Rather, what I'd argue is that "meat addiction" may be missing the point. For we are in denial of an addiction to something much bigger: We are addicted to cheap goods, and it is this addiction that feeds our meat troubles.

We have convinced ourselves that it is our American birthright to pay next-to-nothing for nearly all goods and services. Thus, we turn our backs on the reality that behind our $5 t-shirts, 50¢/liter soda, and $2/pound meat is sweat-shop labor, high-fructose corn syrup, and "Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations" (CAFOs).

And our $5 t-shirts, soda, and factory-farmed beef are slowly and methodically killing us as surely as heroin. The meat and soda are doing it medically, thanks to our country's #2 corn fetish (For an entertaining look at how and why, watch King Corn or Supersize Me or The Meatrix). Even the t-shirts are doing it culturally, (macro)economically, and spiritually.

Big Meat is a scourge, and it has been since the advent of, well, ice, which in combination with the railroads, allowed the shipping of meat. Upton Sinclair's The Jungle exposed horrifying slaughterhouse conditions over a hundred years ago, and effected fairly sweeping change, but not nearly enough. And the meat and farm lobbies have become exponentially stronger in recent years (amazing how the strength with which they argue is directly proportional to the damage they are causing), and once again, they are abetting the fouling of our food sources.

So, what to do? The answer, as with any addiction, is simple — if not easy. You want to start putting the Big Meat CAFOs out of business? Don't buy their products. Tell ADM, Cargill, Monsanto, et al. to go screw. Check out some of the great sustainability resources, find a local farm where they allow cows to eat the grass they were born to eat, join a meat CSA. The difference in taste and nutrition between CAFO and pastured beef is astounding.

"I would," you say, "I'd eat that way every day, but it's expensive."

And there's the rub. We are so far removed from our food sources that we have no appreciation for their true cost (neither monetarily; nor environmentally; nor ethically/morally). We spend far less on food than we used to. Further, our elected fat cats have so devalued both food and nutrition, that we don't seem to care to spend the money necessary to perhaps help us live longer. Instead, we subsidize the growth of more and more shit corn to feed our livestock. Crazy, when you consider how much we as a nation spend on the care of serious (and clearly related) health issues like diabetes, high cholesterol, heart disease, colon cancer, hip and knee replacements, etc.

Sure, the immediate situation is complicated too by the fact that our housing costs are so high (i.e., After rent/mortgage, who has money left over to eat well/righteously?). But housing costs have risen at a rate inversely proportional to food costs. Not directly, but the case could be made that we are willing to overpay for housing precisely because we underpay for food.

So where does all this leave us? I don't know, frankly. If I did, I like to think I'd have a more influential day job. But I do know this: I don't have to buy products that contain high-fructose corn syrup; I don't have to buy sick chicken eggs; I don't have to buy factory-farmed beef. I don't have to be an addict. I've got some say in this thing. And there's no need for me to start throwing meat on the fire of our national dependence. However much it might help bring traffic to this blog.

Feedlot photo via USDA. Turkeys photo by Scott Bauer, via the USDA.

BeezleBubba

This being the new year and all — and an important one, at that — let's start things off with a resolution: This time, let's please don't vote for another guy like the one currently in office. Not that I voted for him last time — or the time before that. But millions did. Not millions more than voted for his opponent in 2000, but still. OK, I'll stop. This is not to slam President Bush. OK, it is, but in a more specific way. And too, to slam the apathetic among us.

We live in a culture that celebrates and rewards — and yes, elects — mediocrity. Scores of corporate VPs and politicians get where they are not by succeeding, but by failing for so long and so consistently that they are eventually promoted to become someone else's problem; they actually fail upward. Forty years ago, education and writer Laurence Johnston Peter put forth his "Peter Principle," which states that "Employees within an organization will advance to their highest level of competence and then be promoted to and remain at a level at which they are incompetent." Well folks, guess what? The organization in question is our United States itself.

George Bush was elected precisely because of his mediocrity. Millions of Americans saw him as a likable, normal "Bubba" (to borrow from Bill Clinton's run) of a guy who spoke their nucular language. Just a regular Joe, clearing brush out on the back 40. His everyman-ness was (rightly so) the least spun aspect of his immaculately-manicured campaign.

And no, I'm not falling for Bush's well-honed "Aw shucks" demeanor when I call him an everyman. He's one of those guys who was born on third base, thinking he hit a triple. Most of us haven't had anywhere near his opportunities in life. (Hell, I'd love the chance to run a baseball team into the ground as quickly as he did [specifically, I'd like to do it to the Yankees].) But he's normal in his intellect, in his curiosity, his drive, his work ethic. He's just plain ordinary. Most of us are no different. Excepting, of course, the fact that —  well, uh — we're not the president.

But the fact remains that George W. Bush is the president — a failed symbol of our lazy desire for formulaic blockbusters and their paint-by-numbers sequels, and chain restaurants in which we can eat the same meal whether in Boston or Bismarck.

Those movies and the meals are never very good, but they are familiar. And what's most familiar to us politically is rich white guys. Granted, some of those rich white guys started off not so rich (see Clinton, Bill; Edwards, John; etc.), but we seem to fall for them just the same.

I voted for John Kerry last time around simply because he was there. But the guy's a complete stiff. And I don't mean he looks like he was carved from the same wood as George Washington's purported teeth, I mean that he's an out of touch rich white guy even among like-minded rich white guys.

In the 2000 election, George W. Bush painted himself as a good manager. A "decider." Said he surrounded himself with people who understood the issues he couldn't quite master himself. Well, anyone who read the modest Project for a New American Century manifesto his people wrote ten years ago should not have been the least bit surprised at the direction we headed under the Bush administration.

Well, now we're stuck with our current situation. And despite our desire for ordinariness, we no longer live in pedestrian times, and we simply cannot elect another pedestrian leader. We need someone who is extraordinary, not extra-ordinary. Electing an average Joe to the most powerful office in the world is irresponsible and reprehensible, and we can't get fooled again.

I don't necessarily care who we all vote for — as long as we do vote, and do so not simply for someone with whom we agree on critical issues, but for a candidate who has made the most of his or her opportunities in life (made more of those opportunities than you or I would have). Someone who sweats the details; excels under pressure; surrounds him or herself not just with smart people, but with smart people who own and listen to their conscience; and for god's sake, someone who does not take more vacation than we do.

Corporate Grass Roots

Two years ago, a co-worker brought me a draft of a letter to the Senior VPs of the large corporation for which we work in the cubicled salt mines. The letter was a plea for the cause of energy conservation within the company. We’re a multinational Silicon Valley software company of roughly 5,000; surely, we could be doing something — anything — to green up.

We cranked out a final copy of the letter and began asking colleagues to co-sign with us. It felt somewhat revolutionary (Sure, we work for The Man, and sure, he checks our email and peeks in our web browsing, but we're free-thinking individuals, dammit, not mindless proles...); we were earnest and enthusiastic and ready to take on the big guns with our well-honed rhetoric.

Thankfully, before we dashed off the letter to corporate, the local facilities manager — a seasoned DC lobbyist, and all for our cause — asked us to reconsider our actions. Somewhat chastened at first, we did, and instead wisely decided to form a small task force to see what we could do locally, with the long-range plan of using our presumed success as a proof of concept to sell the conservation argument up the ladder to corporate.

Even as I get older and  — ahem — more respectable, it bores me to do things slowly and methodically, but ultimately, we made the right choice. Sure, I'd love to see change happen through punk rock, bold art, and strong words, but change doesn't happen overnight, and no one likes to be shown up — especially those with initials in their job titles — and the letter, signed by 50 employees might have seemed a bit mutinous to our paycheck-endorsers. Sometimes, it’s simply not necessary to fight corporate city hall loudly, as morally empowering as it might feel at the time. In fact, if we had, we might have more easily forgotten our cause after getting a lip service response. Instead, we now have a hugely successful locally-grown initiative that is indeed the model of conservation we’d hoped for.

Thanks to buy-in from the site manager, and local facilities, IT, and business unit group heads, as well as excellent employee support, the initiative within months reached our initial goal of reducing the amount of electricity our site uses by 100,000 kilowatt hours (kW h), annualized, and we have since saved another 50,000 kW h per year.

At our site of approximately 300 employees, computers outnumber people nearly five to one, so clearly there was some (as the suits like to say) “low-hanging fruit” to be had. Thus, our biggest gains have been made not by changing expensive building systems like HV/AC, but by improving inefficiencies in our computing operations. We’ve given away unused equipment, shut down rarely-used equipment, set machines to power-savings mode, and asked fellow employees to forgo power-draining "screen savers" (that’s right, kids, it takes a lot of CPU power to draw those pretty multicolor 3D pipe designs and such) in favor of turning off their monitors when they leave for the night. Electricity rates vary, so cost savings are somewhat tough to estimate (certainly over $20,000 per year though), but in terms of usage, our simple housekeeping measures have so far conserved enough energy to power 18 average New England homes, yearly.

What’s more, we haven’t spent any corporate funds to achieve our substantial savings. We even convinced our vending machine contractor to install on our soda machines energy miser sensors, which power up a machine only when they detect motion (i.e., a customer), while maintaining beverage temperature as necessary.

In addition, we’ve greatly changed the way that we use the computing power we do have — not only centralizing data storage on robust servers, but sharing their processing power as well. We then access those servers not with power-hungry tower-style computers, but with laptops which, on the average, use one-quarter the power of most bigger, desktop CPUs.

We’ve continued to maintain, not increase, our energy usage, and to share information with other sites and encourage them to set up similar local initiatives, and have slowly — and successfully — been pushing energy awareness and savings up the chain of command. We’ve even been cited positively by corporate executive staff, when asked what we as a company are doing to green up.

Not bad for a few local folks with a chip on their collective shoulder and a hopeful eye toward change. Our grass-roots solution demanded that we change first — not simply talk the talk of revolution — and it ultimately proved far more effective than our initial demand for that same change in corporate. Our well-written and thoughtful letter to corporate would have been, essentially, an op-ed piece without a newspaper to print it and only a very small audience to read it.

The tendency in most large corporations is toward apathy and wastefulness, but it needn’t be. Sure, we’re all more thrifty at home than at work, but what a simple thing it is to turn off the lights when you're done in the copy room, or to police up computers left on in empty cubes. It’s no skin off my nose, and though I’d rather see executive pay come back in line with say, reality, wastefulness breeds more wastefulness, and it’d be nice if the suits had fewer excuses when it’s time for raises to be handed down to those of us toiling in the mines.