Food Fraud

After reading a brief but terrifying article online somewhere, I read "Real Food, Fake Food" by Larry Olmsted.  There was a queue of twenty-two people ahead of me at the local library requesting this book, so it was more than a month before I got my hands on it.  It was well-worth the wait.  I will never, ever order fish at a restaurant again.

Here are the useful takeaways if you don't have time to read the whole book.

Parmesan Cheese

• "Parmesan" is not a generic type of cheese, but a very specific name for the real thing, properly called Parmigiano-Reggiano, from Parma, Italy.  Growing up a food heathen, I had no idea.  It is known as the "King of Cheeses" for good reason, which none of us who are used to the horrible Kraft imitation product can appreciate.  
• Kraft "Parmesan" products typically contain 4% cellulose (wood pulp), and some other brands as much as 7.8%.
• Price point alone is no indication of authenticity; even fakes can cost a bundle.  High end restaurants are often as guilty as neighborhood grocery chains.
• If you want the real thing, the actual Parmesan from Parma which has been subject to incredibly strict quality controls, look for the full name "Parmigiano-Reggiano," the "Made in Italy" stamp, and the PDO seal (Protected Designation of Origin).  Another dead giveaway is the pin-dot pattern on the rind.  These are buffed off any wheels that fail to make the cut, like tattoos off a washed out gangster. 

Seafood

• Not for the faint of heart, seafood is the worst offender when it comes to food fraud.  Enforcement is almost non-existent, penalties are light, profits are huge.
• Oceana found fraud in 58% of retail outlets and 39% of restaurants in New York City alone, including 100% of sushi restaurants tested.  Think about that the next time you want to eat raw mystery fish.
• If you order white tuna, you are going to get something completely different 94% of the time.  Most commonly it is escolar, nicknamed "Ex-Lax fish" for the variety of unpleasant digestive effects it can have.  It has been documented to cause waves of food poisonings, has been banned in Japan, and was briefly banned by the FDA in the 1990s.  Now escolar is the best selling and most widely-served fish in the USA, despite the fact that almost no one has ever heard of it. 
• Forget grouper or red snapper.  Unless you see the whole fish with the head on, they are almost never real.
• The other most common impostor is Cambodian ponga, a Asian catfish which is usually farmed with dangerous farming practices, often using unapproved or banned antibiotics and other drugs.  You've probably encountered it wearing a name-tag which read "American catfish," or "sole," or "flouder," or "cod." 
• If you're pregnant, avoid fish altogether.  You have no way of knowing if your low-mercury fish is actually a high-mercury fish in disguise.  It happens a lot.
• In one of the worst examples of dangerous fish fraud, a couple in Chicago unwittingly poisoned themselves in 2007 with "monkfish" which turned out to be pufferfish.  Fortunately, they survived.
• Be very suspicious of unremarkable white fish fillets.  They could be almost anything.
• Transshipment to obscure the true country of origin is a widespread problem.  For instance, when seafood from China is banned, exports from neighboring countries like Thailand and Indonesia suddenly suspiciously increase.
• Thailand supplies the majority of the shrimp consumed in America, mostly from drug-laced shrimp farms, some of which are manned with slave labor acquired by human trafficking.  In many cases, these farms have been built at the complete expense of the mangrove habitat so important to those regions.
• Stick with domestic wild-caught shrimp.  It is the gold standard in the rest of the world, which is why so much of it is exported while we American idiots eat imported slave-produced crap shrimp from Thailand.
• Farmed salmon are routinely fed artificial dyes to make them pink, because they have not had the benefit of having krill in their diet.  This artificial color tends to leak out when you cook it.
• Fish farming is illegal in Alaska, so if you can verify Alaska as the true origin of any seafood product, you're getting the good stuff.
• If you order lobster, make sure it is a whole lobster.  Otherwise, your lobster roll or lobster linguine or lobster taco is more likely to contain "langostino," a large prawn (or sometimes a crab) the FDA quietly allowed to be called "langostino lobster" at the request of Rubio's Restaurants, Inc. in 2005.  Red Lobster and Long John Silver's gleefully jumped on that bandwagon, much to the chagrin of the Maine Lobster Promotion Council.  Worse, sometimes your "langostino lobster" is neither lobster nor even langostino, but cheap and overabundant Chinese crawfish which are subject to huge anti-dumping tariffs precisely because no one wants them.  A double-whammy.
• Scallops are often saturated with water and phosphates to make them bigger, whiter, and heavier, making them tasteless and sad.  The practice is so common that "dry scallops" sell for a higher price, but even they aren't completely "dry," only saturated up to the legal limit.  Look for scallops that are ivory, not white.
• Domestic catfish are the only ones that may legally be called catfish, and farmed domestic catfish is actually one of the safer fish options around.
• Look for third-party certifications, for instance the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) for wild-caught fish, and Global Aquaculture Alliance's Best Aquaculture Practices (BAP) for farmed.  Also good to see are the Gulf Wild seal and the Gulf of Maine Responsibly Harvested certification.  
• Buy American whenever possible.  This country actually has some of the highest standards of seafood production in the world.
• Order whole fish at restaurants, or don't order fish at all.  Restaurants routinely fake fish.
• Label terms like "fresh," "natural," and "organic" have no legal definition in this context.  "Sushi grade" and "sashimi grade" are equally meaningless. 
• The retail leaders in seafood accountability are Whole Foods and (less predictably) big box stores like Walmart, Costco, and BJ's.

Olive and Truffle Oils

• Olive oil is highly perishable, more like fruit juice than oil, with a very limited optimal shelf life.  The majority of the olive oil on the market is rancid.
• There are three grades of olive oil, extra virgin, virgin, and the dregs, also called "lamp oil."  Of course, all producers love to label their product "Extra Virgin" regardless of quality.
• The most common methods of olive oil fraud are diluting it with other oils (such as sunflower or soybean), or diluting it with lower grade olive oils (usually chemically refined, which negates the touted health benefits).  Often peanut oil is used, an obvious problem for people with allergies. 
• Carryover, the practice of diluting fresh extra virgin oil with the previous year's (now rancid) "extra virgin" oil, is widespread.
• Spain, not Italy, is currently the worlds largest olive oil producer.
• While very good olive oil is made in Italy, the majority of "Italian" extra virgin olive oil we see in this country is bad.  Italy has a hard time making enough of the good stuff to supply its own domestic demand, but Italian exporters saw an opportunity to exploit the country's reputation for quality.  They regularly buy up large quantities of inferior olive oil from many different countries so they can bottle it, stamp "Product of Italy" on it, and sell it to Americans who don't know any better.  Leave it on the shelf.
• You get real extra virgin olive oil in restaurants less than half of the time.
• Pompeian brand is bad news; it almost always fails quality checks.
• "100% Extra Virgin" means nothing.  There is almost no enforcement of quality checks.
• The USDA's standards for extra virgin olive oil are more permissive than they should be, but the majority of available brands still fail when tested.
• California has the strictest quality standards in the US, so Californian olive oils are a better bet than most.
• Don't ever buy plain "olive oil" unless you plan on oiling your bicycle with it.  It is that "lamp oil" which has been chemically refined to make it barely edible and mixed with very small amounts of virgin or extra virgin oil.  Steer clear of "Pure Olive Oil;" it doth protest too much, if you know what I mean.
• Australia currently leads the world in extra virgin olive oil quality standards, and has banned confusing terms like "premium," "super," "light," and "pure."  
• "Cold-pressed" or "first cold press" are more often than not meaningless phrases to pretty up the bottle.  The majority of olives are processed by centrifuge today.
• Regarding truffle oil, the only thing to say about it is that it is always completely fake.  There is no real truffle oil, not only because it would be prohibitively expensive, but because the truffle flavor doesn't carry well into oil.  It's every bit as genuine as artificial vanilla flavor.  Just leave it.

Some real food comes from some very distinct places and are subject to rigorous standards, especially if they are named after that place.  These labels are your friends.

Kobe Beef

• There is almost no genuine Kobe beef anywhere in the USA.  The USDA banned all import of Japanese beef in 2001 due to concerns about mad cow disease.  The ban was lifted in 2006, reinstated in 2010, lifted in 2012.  Even though the ban is lifted, only a minuscule amount of the genuine article is imported each year, and then only to a very select few high-end restaurants, NEVER to individual consumers.  Despite this, alleged Kobe beef seems to be everywhere.
• Real Kobe beef is so saturated with fat that it is only served in tiny portions, and resembles butter more than steak.  Real Kobe beef would NEVER be made into steaks, burgers, sliders, or hot dogs because they would be gross.  Don't pay extra for common domestic beef masquerading as Kobe.
• Wagyu beef is trickier, with a very wobbly definition everywhere but in Japan.  Could be good, could be crap.

Champagne

• Real Champagne comes from Champagne, France, and nowhere else.  The traditional quality standards give new meaning to the word rigid.  Everything else is just sparkling wine and not worth a Champagne price tag.
• There is no such thing as a red Champagne.
• Real Champagne gets bubbles from natural fermentation in the bottle, not from injected carbon dioxide.
• In 2006, the USA finally granted some legal protection to region-specific wines which had a long and inglorious tradition of counterfeiting in America, including (among others) Champagne, port, Burgundy, Chablis, sherry, sauternes, and Madeira.  The catch was that all the offending wineries which preexisted the agreement were grandfathered in.  So, nothing really changed.
• Korbel is probably one of the worst offenders, and their product isn't great.  Don't buy it.

Imitation Cheese

• If you want good domestic cheese, look for the ones that aren't pretending to be cheese specific to somewhere else.  That list includes but is not limited to Parmesan, Gruyere, Emmental (Swiss), feta, Asiago, Meunster (the real thing is Munster), provolone, fontina, and Gorgonzola.  There have been some long legal battles fought over these names, fought on this end mostly by Kraft.  No surprise there.
• Any real cheese should only have a few ingredients, mainly milk, salt, and rennet, maybe some enzymes and spices.  The rest are probably more accurately "cheese products."

Grass-fed Beef

• The only thing beef requires to be called "grass-fed" is to be fed grass at least once during its lifetime.  Even feedlot cattle eat grass at least once when they are very young.
• It has been common practice for a long time to "finish" otherwise completely grass-fed cattle on grain before market, negating many of the health benefits.
• Look for the "100% Grass Fed" label, one of the few the USDA still enforces, requiring an optional process verification.  It means all grass all the time.
• The label "Natural" can be put on even the worst example of feedlot beef because it refers to the minimal processing, not the quality of the animal.  The term "naturally raised," however, has been defined by the USDA to mean no antibiotics, no growth promotants, and no feeding of animal byproducts, but not necessarily completely grass-fed. 
• The terms "pasture raised," "pasture finished," "no additives," "no animal by-products," "free range," "free roaming," "green fed," "humane," and "pesticide free" are not defined or enforced, and are often false.
• Buy bison when you can.  That market hasn't been exploited yet.  There are no such thing as bison feed lots.

Miscellaneous

• Honey is often fake, often adulterated, sometimes toxic, and often transshipped from suspect countries.
• Some honeys are left with pollen in, others are ultra-filtered.  Incidentally, ultra-filtering removes the pollen which is the only thing that can identify the honey's origin.  
• A lot of extremely suspect Chinese honey is ultra-filtered and transshipped through places like India.  Chinese honey is often heavily cut with corn syrup.  Sometimes, the bees are fed corn syrup.  Often it is contaminated with drugs like chloramphenicol, which can lead to a potentially fatal bone marrow disorder.  Chinese honey is specifically banned for import into the USA because of its abysmal quality, but it gets in anyhow, just like Chinese seafood.
• The FDA created voluntary grades for honey, Grade A, Grade B, and Grade C.  Because they are voluntary and completely unenforced, they mean nothing.  What admit that it's Grade C when you can get away with calling it Grade A?
• Manuka honey, made exclusively in New Zealand, is rarely real when you encounter it in the rest of the world. 
• Avoid supermarket brand honey and buy local.
• Coffee has problems, but I don't drink it, so I didn't pay much attention.
• Most fruit juice is mostly apple juice no matter what the flavor, and most of the apple juice in America comes from contaminated Chinese apple juice concentrates. 
• Many juice additives are not required to be disclosed on the label.  For orange juice, this can include lemon juice, high-fructose corn syrup, mandarin juice, grapefruit juice, paprika extract, and beet sugar.  Apple juice has a long list as well.
• Supermarket tomatoes have been bred for durability in shipping, not for flavor.  They are picked green and gassed with ethylene to "ripen" them for sale.  What I did not know is that the ethylene triggers only a reddening response, not any actual ripening.  As a country, we're used to eating red green tomatoes.  Look for vine ripened local tomatoes or grow your own.
• Ethylene gassing is also used to allow bananas to ship safely.  While the practice isn't exactly unhealthy, we would apparently be blown away by the flavor of a tree-ripened banana.
• Maple syrup shares many of the same problems as honey.  Most maple flavored products don't contain any maple syrup at all, but apparently some combination of high-fructose corn syrup and/or maltodextrin, fenugreek and anise.

Be ye warned.

SHOP HERE: Zingerman's mail order.  It's the good stuff.

The Inversion of Victim-Blaming

This rant has been building for a while, but I'll try to keep it brief.

My husband shared an article with me this morning from National Review about another incident of overblown outrage over the suggestion that rapists roam at large on college campuses.  I thought that was just an established fact at this point.  Apparently a warning emailed to students about a rash of drugged drinks and the suggestion that all female students spare the time and effort to take some precautions was "unacceptable" and an example of "rape culture."

Somehow the possibility that women should have to consider and guard against the possibility of rape has become insulting.  It is not victim-blaming to suggest that women do bear some responsibility for their own safety.  That includes planning, taking precautions, and being aware of your surroundings.  If that equals rape culture, then rape culture has been around since the dawn of time and isn't going anywhere.  Might as well adapt to it.

These outraged students need to remember what real rape culture and real victim-blaming look like, a time when it was considered impossible to rape any woman who could be proved to have venereal disease, because that was proof positive that she was just a slut.  See the documentary "Girl 27" for more on that.

I was listening to NPR the other day, and the topic was domestic violence and what we as a society can do about it.  One caller dared to suggest that women do in fact bear some responsibility to avoid attaching themselves to obviously violent and abusive men.  He was immediately dismissed as a victim-blamer and completely disregarded.

The world is a dangerous place.  No amount of public awareness this side of Utopia is going to make the ancient social ills of mankind vanish into the ether.  Rapists gonna rape.  The suggestion that all women are helpless floozies who must be protected by society at large against their own carelessness is insulting and infantilizing.

That said, the apparently outrageous email which sparked this debate is actually full of good basic advice.  Watch out for your friends, watch your drink, keep your wits about you.  The idea of "the integrity of your cup" is not a joke; my husband tells me it is common advice in the military to just get a new drink if you went to the bathroom and didn't bring it with you.  Don't trust anyone else to have your immediate safety as his first priority.  That is your job.

Crisis of Faith

I am not having one, but I don't seem to be much help to those people who are.  That makes me incredibly restless and itchy, so this is just an outlet for the maelstrom of disjointed thoughts swirling around in my head.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I have never had a crisis of faith.  Maybe it's my phlegmatic nature, but working on the assumption that Catholicism is indeed the one true faith informed by a just, omnipotent and omniscient God, I assume that there is a reasonable answer for every question, and we can find it if we look hard enough.  Likewise, whatever crap happens to me in the life must have an equally compelling reason, and it isn't necessary for me to know.  That is not part of my job to work out.  That is why I am not God.

Many times the first thing I hear is the tired old question, "Why do bad things happen to good people?"  It just saps the life out of me, because it has been asked and answered so many times before.  Deep down, it's usually a case of the tough getting going when the going got tough.  They hadn't really thought about it before and went through life on spiritual cruise control until suddenly something horrible happened in their lives, and now they have to reinvent the theological wheel.  Their prayers weren't answered to their satisfaction; God wasn't there for them; they didn't get their miracle.  Clearly God isn't worth their time.

What helped me most during the dark times was putting things in perspective.  The worst suffering in our lives is probably peanuts compared to the suffering of someone else.  There is always someone with a more compelling tragedy.  Getting pissy and angry with God is completely pointless, because He is the best and sometimes only comfort.  The crucifixion should be reminder enough.

"But now I'm thinking for myself," they say.  Are they really thinking, or are they just angry and feeling sorry for themselves?  I congratulate them if they are able to intuit what we have gained over thousands of years of collective study.  They come to the prideful conclusion that they don't have to take this supposed abuse from a tyrannical deity, that they are taking a stand for the little man, a stand against all the injustice of the world.

Even if God was an arbitrary tyrant, what would this little hunger strike accomplish?  He doesn't need our approval of His management of the universe.  Deciding to ignore Him doesn't make Him go away.  If we are angry enough to deny His existence, who are we angry at now?  If we acknowledge His existence but don't like Him, we can either just come to terms with Him because there is no getting around it, or we can invent the God we like and live a happy fantasy.

There are some hard questions which must be asked.  Are we rejecting everything we ever thought we knew and believed about God because we suddenly know better, or because we are angry and emotional?  Are we too proud to admit we were wrong?  Are we getting some perverse enjoyment out of the mistaken romance of our own "Non serviam," or the feeling of self-righteous victimhood?  Are we just too lazy to give the matter serious thought anymore?

In any case, imagining God to be a capricious abuser who enjoys inflicting suffering on us, that the crucifixion was no more than a case of divine one-upmanship to stem the tide of human complaints, must be a very bitter and lonely place to be.

There is no need to stay there.

Thoroughly Disenchanted

I used to imagine I would enjoy pregnancy.  I was going to scrupulously take my vitamins and eat lots of wholesome fruit and veggies.  It was going to be fun and exciting.

Well, I officially hate it.  It has been nothing but miserable and traumatic ALL FIVE TIMES.  I thought the worst was finally over, but we had a spectacular relapse on Tuesday, and I've been vomiting six times daily ever since.  I essentially starved until noon yesterday just to make it stop, and it seems like today will be the same.  I try to take my vitamins, but they tend to make me sick.  Food makes me sick, water makes me sick, being hungry and thirsty makes me sick.  All things being equal, I'd rather vomit on an empty stomach than otherwise, so I just don't eat or drink at all.  Fruit makes me sick.  Vegetables make me sick.  Juice makes me sick.  The smell of my shampoo makes me sick.  Showers make me sick, but not showering also makes me sick.  Brushing my teeth makes me sick.  My own pulse makes me sick.  The only thing that seems to stay down is salty corn puffs, but they give me high blood pressure, which is also undesirable.  There is no winning.

I did not sign up for this.  I was willing to be sliced and diced and stapled back together again.  I was willing to risk miscarriage and uterine rupture.  I was willing to be fussed over and violated by extra tests and shots and whatnot.  I was NOT willing to be desperately sick for three to six months.  The plan was that the Zofran would work and I would be semi-independent and at least able to eat properly.  That failed spectacularly, so now I am essentially a shut-in.  I'm lucky if I get off the couch.  The dog has started giving me long earnest looks, wondering if napping all day and going to bed early is going to be the rest of our lives.  I can barely make my own food, and now even that seems like a wasted effort.  If I am going out, especially to church, I have to starve myself first so that I know any vomit that happens can fit into a paper cup I keep in my purse.  The only thing that can make this situation any worse is the onset of autumn hay fever, which occasionally gives me chronic bloody nose, and always makes vomiting a truly epic experience of sinus pressure.  I'd be chugging liquid Tylenol to cope with the headaches if I thought I could keep it down.

I know other women have it worse than I do, and I've heard of some risking liver and kidney failure just to have children.  More power to them, but I am done.  I hate going to bed at night, and I hate waking up in the morning.  If I could finish this experience in an induced coma, I would.  Once this kid is out, one way or another, I hope to never, ever, ever, EVER experience this misery again.

Pardon me, I feel like I have to go throw up.

The Paw Project

I am aware that cat de-clawing is not the greatest tragedy in the world, but I watched the movie anyway just to be better informed.  I was shocked by how uninformed I actually was.

De-clawing does not mean simply trimming a cat's nails, or even surgically removing them at the root.  Cat claws grow directly out of the last bone in the toe, so that entire bone is removed.  This results in severed tendons, abnormally short toes, and often chronic infection as the nail attempts to grow back inside the toe.  De-clawed cats are often more insecure, resort to biting, and have difficulty using the litter box because of the pain in their feet.

Proponents of de-clawing are often veterinarians who make $1,000+ per hour for the procedure, and well-intentioned people who believe a de-clawed cat is more likely to find a home.  They are usually unaware of exactly what the procedure entails, and shelters report that de-clawed cats are often abandoned as a result of the behavioral problems caused by the de-clawing.  

My libertarian mind is on the fence about whether or not I'd want to see de-clawing outlawed, but I'm certainly in favor of spreading awareness.  Clearly cat owners are not going to get unbiased information from their vets, so they should get it from somewhere.  De-clawing is a barbaric practice that can cause a lifetime of pain and complications.  It is also completely unnecessary when there are alternatives like claw sheaths available. 

See the movie.  It's streaming on Netflix and YouTube.  Or, make a donation at www.pawproject.org and they might send you a copy.

Life Happens

Contrary to all indications to the contrary, the blog has not died.

Christmas was so swamped with projects and commissions that we didn't even decorate, which is a first for me.  The only thing we did put out was the Advent wreath, and it's still out.

After all the chaos died down, we realized I had accidently turned up pregnant.  January crawled by in a haze of relentless morning (and noon and evening) sickness, finally resolving itself in one distinct bleeding episode and two weeks of blood tests and cryptic ultrasounds.  Eventually it was determined that I had miscarried very early but that the placenta was alive and well and determined to make me sick indefinitely.  A D&C was successfully completed yesterday afternoon.

That is basically what has been consuming our lives.  My OBGYN group wants to finally do some follow-up to try to pinpoint what the problem is, but frankly I can't be bothered to care anymore.  I really don't care.  If I could have my way, I would never be pregnant again.  I'll humor the doctors for a while, but if they want me to do months and months of charting and testing and injections and procedures, I'm going to beg off.  I'm not going to cross state lines; I'm not going to invest excessive amounts of time or money.  I refuse to let the best years of my life be consumed by wasted efforts to make my decrepit reproductive system function normally.  Life is too short for that much pointless vomit.  Hope is dead.  Hope makes us miserable.  We're done.  We've accepted it.  Now, let's adopt some kids and get on with our lives.  Finito.

Florian Casimir
January, 2014
5-6 weeks

Obamapocolypse Now

I hope all the Sandra Flukes of the world can rest easy knowing they enjoy free birth control at the expense of a young boy with a life-threatening milk allergy who can now barely afford his EpiPens, the family of ten who now live on ramen noodles with limited utilities in a futile attempt to afford medical supplies for their two children with Type 1 Diabetes, the self-employed chiropractor who can no longer afford his home and had to move his family of five into a friend's house, the families who are proactively quitting their jobs and declaring bankruptcy to qualify for Medicaid rather than face even more devastating financial ruin, the small business owners who are closing their doors because their healthcare plans will now negate their profits, the single mothers who now must work two part-time jobs because government regulations slashed their hours, and the doctors who are seeking early retirement or considering leaving the country because they feel the new government standards of limited care violate the Hippocratic Oath.

What a wonderful enlightened world we live in.  Many thanks to Matt Walsh for putting this compilation together.  People need to be aware of the real human cost.  For some reason, the Affordable Car Act has left millions of Americans out of work, out of money, out of options, and still unable to afford what used to be basic healthcare.

It used to be an option to just do without what you cannot afford.  Now if we try to do without, we are fined for our trouble.  They will get you either way.  Unless you actually quit trying to make ends meet, give up attempting to maintain a legitimate income, you will be hounded for everything you have.  I've been saying for a while that the real collapse won't come until the average American realizes he has nothing left to lose.  This could very well be the final ruin of the middle-class.

In the words of Emily from Iowa:

Recently our 2 year-old daughter had an ear infection. Went to the doc, got a prescription for an antibiotic. Went to the pharmacy to fill said prescription. I was expecting it to cost around 5 dollars because that’s what it cost the last time we had it filled. Wrong. It now costs 75 dollars. I paid 75 dollars for an antibiotic that used to cost us 5 dollars. When I asked the pharmacist, “Why the huge increase?” She replied, “Obamacare. And this is just the beginning.”

For more stories which will be detrimental to your blood-pressure, follow the link to The Matt Walsh Blog.  I read each and every one.  We're still covered by military health insurance, and I dread the day we'll have to face off with Obamacare.  With any luck, maybe we could join one of those religious co-ops if they're still exempt.  Shoot, at this point I'm considering settling in on welfare in an attempt to pull the whole edifice down sooner.  If we all give up at once, maybe we could just burn this administration to the ground and start from scratch.

This is one of the very few things that can make me stop and think, "Thank God we don't have kids."

America is essentially dead.  What on earth do we have now?

• The Matt Walsh Blog : The Definitive Guide to How Obamacare is Destroying American Lives

• Also, if you aren't put off by a bit of crude humor, see what Jon Stewart had to say about the unqualified disaster that was just the Obamacare website.  I love a dark and cynical laugh now and then.

Type-Casting

We were celebrating the beginning of our mutual vacation last night with a longer than normal marathon of "CSI: NY," which resembles "Bones" and "Law and Order: Special Victims Unit" enough to be much less annoying than "CSI: Miami."  Anyhow, it seems we watched one episode too many, and we ended up going to bed depressed.

The episode in question featured a plot device I've seen before, the mentally unstable housewife who has failed to have children of her own and resorts to stealing them out of other pregnant women.

Why do I always have to be type-cast as the crazy person?  Is the public perception of women like me really becoming so suspicious?  We've all noticed the growing tendency of the populace at large to assume all veterans are ticking PTSD time-bombs.  Apparently aspiring mothers who are for whatever reason unable to produce like normal women are supposed to develop a dangerous and slightly psychotic obsession with getting a child, any child from anywhere.

Which isn't to say it hasn't happened, and just goes to show the depth of feeling and strength of the instincts involved.  I am all for bringing miscarriage back into the social consciousness, because no matter how early or how physically painless it might be, it still messes us up emotionally.  We might be less stereotypically crazy if we weren't so repressed.

I've mentioned it before, but secret first trimesters should not be socially mandatory.  Why did that become the norm?  Is it just to spare our friends and neighbors the awkwardness of hearing about miscarriage and not knowing what to say?  It might be awkward for them, but it's life-changing for me, so they can just deal with it.  Real friends will want to know what's going on in our lives regardless, good or bad.

Maybe we just need some kind of acknowledgement that there may be something other than a pastel-colored paradise on the other side of a positive pregnancy test.  Maybe it will be nothing but emergency rooms, IVs and blood tests.  Maybe it will be days on end of sitting as still as possible and praying there won't be any bleeding.  Maybe it will be chronic disappointment and a special colander under the bathroom sink.  Maybe you'll end up right back where you started with nothing to show for it but a ragged scar, hospital invoices and a bottle of oxycodone.  We aren't allowed to even mention it, because somehow it's considered bad taste.  But, seriously, every woman should consider the possibility and have a plan so she won't be broadsided the way we were the first time.

If we'd had a plan, maybe we would have been coherent enough to ask for Alexis' body rather than letting him/her be thrown out with the medical waste.  Maybe we would have known about conditional baptism in case of miscarriage.  Maybe we would not have felt so completely alone and defective.

This last time we were joking darkly that we'd only really start freaking out if the unthinkable happened and we actually ended up with an infant.  We were just starting to get hopeful when it all fell apart, and then we wondered why we had ever expected anything different.  I received my soulless paperwork diagnosing miscarriage in the mail the same day as the congratulatory pastel packet from Johns Hopkins covered pictures with happy pregnant women.  The former went into the medical file, the latter into the shredder.  For a brief shining moment, I was a member of the happily pregnant club, but once I inevitably miscarry I'm supposed to retire quietly to grieve in the privacy of my own home so as not to rain on anybody else's pregnancy parade.

That could just be my perception, but it's hard to shake.  Fortunately many of my friends, not all of whom have experienced miscarriage for themselves, manage to not be obnoxious to me while they are pregnant.  Better, they don't seem to mind me talking about it.  It needs to be talked about.

When I was sending our wedding invitations, I did not imagine that almost four years later we would still be living the extended honeymoon phase, pet-parents to a toy poodle.  This was not the plan.  If anything, I have learned to have alternative plans, or at least to expect the unexpected and plan for the unplanned.

Alexis Constans

25 June 2010

13 weeks

David Edward, Jr.

6-8 March 2011

24 weeks

Celestine Michel

13 August 2013

6 weeks

My Business, Nipped In the Bud

Just for the record, if congress passes this Internet Sales Tax bill, I will be officially shutting down whatever official bits of my business I have been able to construct.

I was willing to jump through all these hoops and wait all this time and pay these fees for one state.  I will never do it for fifty.  I keep hearing about all these tiny "brick and mortar" stores who feel disadvantaged because they're losing business to the internet.  Tough beans; that's the free market.  Maybe these little brick and mortar shops should get websites.  At the most basic level, it doesn't take much to set up an Ebay store.  In fact, it takes almost no effort at all.  Sorry, no sympathy.

In the meantime, the solution seems to be to let all fifty states charge sales tax on internet transactions.  When you have a license to collect and hold sales tax, you have to file every month regardless of whether you owe anything.  Imagine little Etsy stores being required to file with FIFTY different offices EVERY MONTH.  It's a paperwork nightmare.  Never mind the fiscal imbalance in time, manpower, and record-keeping required to collect chump change from thousands of individuals each month.  Can you imagine, as an infinitesimally small business owner, being audited by some random state for those $3 you allegedly owe?  What a pain in the butt.

Apparently the states will be required to provide software that will be embedded in every American retail website to calculate these taxes.  Is every state going to embed it's own program?  Is it going to be some strange conglomerate?  Will these websites appreciate having strange code embedded in their design?  We've all seen how slick and efficient government websites can be (*sarcasm*).  It seems to me that if they want to collect sales tax on all online transactions, the onus should be on them to collect it from their own citizens who are doing the buying.  But they would, of course, have to come up with some invasive and inconvenient way to doing that as well, so there really is no great alternative.

I sent my form letter to all my elected officials (though I elected none of them), proposing Ebay's solution.  The idea is to exempt from these new internet sales taxes all sellers who generate less than $10 million in income each year.  The popular statistic is that Amazon does $10 million every ninety minutes.  Or maybe we could just pay a flat rate percentage income tax across the board and do away with this pesky sales tax altogether.  But nobody asked me.

I suppose the last option for me would be to exclusively attend craft fairs within the state.  What a lovely way to squelch free enterprise.

Food Fraud

Ok, this obviously has me mad enough to stop what I'm doing and blog.  I could rant and quote, but I think the video does a good job of summing it up.  (I've been catching up on my Nightline.)

Like stems in your ground black pepper?  How about lawn grass in your tea bags?  Do you think your 100% lemon juice isn't just sugar water?  Is your pure extra virgin olive oil actually what it claims to be?  Soybean oil is a pet peeve of mine, and I've been trying very diligently to avoid it, so it really burns me up that they deliberately put it in my olive oil.  I think I'll go back to buying the expensive obscure option, along with whole lemons and peppercorns.

Oh, and I'm throwing out our generic brand paprika.

Whoop-dee-do

Why the heck is everything Obama does automatically "historic?"  Technically, everything every president ever did is historic, but so what?  Are we going to hear about Obama eating a historic sandwich while on a historic vacation during his historic second term?  How about his historic mismanagement, his historic debts?

There's a reason why I don't watch the news.  The talking heads make me want to throw things.

Starting a Business (Or Not), Part II

So, the search for real people was an abject failure.  Well, we found the people all right, but they were of absolutely no use.  Once we drove across town, found a place to park, practically undressed, subjected ourselves to radiation, endured the pat down AND found the office in question, we were told that they "don't actually do that here."  In an attempt to be helpful (and while admitting some measure of ignorance of the process), they gave us a crappy (but ready to hand) xerox copy of Mapquest instructions to the office that "might" be able to help.  That office would then call the office we were currently occupying before sending us out to yet another office, etc., etc., etc.  I didn't care to bounce around occupied territory for the remainder of my day, so we drove home in a huff.

Now I can either try calling these same unhelpful and not terribly knowledgeable people, or I could just continue puzzling it out for myself and machine-gun some applications into the outer darkness in no particular order.

Seriously, it's no wonder personal initiative is dying in this country.

Realities of Obamacare

The unintentional effects of Obamacare are starting to rattle my workplace, and those apolitical creatures who usually take no notice of such things are having a rude awakening.

Here's the breakdown of the situation.  Almost all of us in the store are part-time.  That isn't a problem.  As part-timers, we regularly work anywhere between 20 to even 40 hours a week (when payroll is good).  If we have time to spare, we pick up shifts for other people or stay a little later than scheduled as the need arises.

Obamacare will now put a stop to that, as of February 1.  The way the government sees it, these evil retail companies are taking advantage of us by giving part-timers full-time employment without full-time benefits.  To some degree, I see their point.  At my previous job, I was working 40 hours solid every week with no benefits.  So, in an effort to put a stop to this shameless exploitation of the American worker, it has been decreed that no part-time employee will be permitted to work more than 30 hours a week or the company will be subjected to a $161 fine per team member per hour.

THE HOPE:  This will force these greedy corporations to create more full-time positions and everyone will have benefits and be happy and prosperous.

THE REALITY:  The company only has so many full-time positions that it can afford.  Rather than create any new ones, the solution will be to simply hire more part-timers to fill the shifts its current workforce will no longer be able to cover.  AND, in an effort to absolutely avoid those crushing fines for accidental overwork, the company policy has changed to reflect a maximum of 25 hours per week per employee.

Hours are being cut across the board.  Some of my coworkers who rely on those extra hours to make ends meet have begun looking for second jobs or entirely new jobs.  In the end, people will have to work the same number of hours as part-time employees but now juggle two different jobs.  Nobody is happy.

Thanks for nothing, federales.

Vocabulary Lesson

Mr. President, the word of the day is the·sau·rus.

While we're at it, let's drag out some other goodies the English lexicon has to offer, such as in·sip·id, ba·nal, dis·in·gen·u·ous, and con·de·scend·ing.

         In a word, em·bar·rass·ing.

Welcome To the Fake World

It's no wonder people don't seem to have a firm grasp of reality.  This whole culture of American consumerism is permeated with rank artificiality.  I spent eight hours at work yesterday unboxing more fake candles than I have ever seen in one place before.  I promised myself years ago that I would never own a plastic battery-powered candle.  "Flickers like a real candle!"  Not it doesn't; it flickers like a faulty lightbulb!

We have fake smells, fake flavors, fake fur, fake leather, fake flowers, fake trees, fake fingernails, fake diamonds, fake sunlight, whole fake lives in fake computer-generated worlds with fake friends and fake money.  Even real money is fake now.  Did you know quarters and dimes used to be made of silver?  Maybe you did, but lots of other people don't.  Almost everything real in our lives seems to have been replaced by a cheaper, more convenient plastic imitation.

I think it's high time we got back to the nitty-gritty.  Burn real candles this holiday season, and set the table with real flowers once in a while.  I don't care whether you buy a prepared arrangement or pick some dandelions out of the backyard.  It will be worth it, I promise.

Too Much Hanky-Panky In the Workplace

Seriously, I work at a retail store.  I was there all night . . . with two other women . . . in different corners of the building.  You would think there would be no better environment for intense concentration and productivity.  But I reckoned without the music being piped in through the speaker system.

Personally, I prefer to have music while I work.  It usually keeps me awake and makes the time pass more pleasantly.  But, as of yesterday, they've started throwing in a few Christmas tunes with the regular pop assortment.  I don't mind Christmas music, and I have been known to play it out of season while working on Christmas projects.  A little Adeste Fidelis or First Noel gives me warm fuzzy feelings.  However, there are several selections I absolutely detest (Jingle Bell Rock, Run Run Rudolph, By Gosh By Golly, Frosty the Snowman, to name just a few), and unfortunately that seems to be all the store is going to play.  Just to make it ten times worse, they only play the jazzed-up modern covers, which frankly sound more ridiculous than the originals.

BUT, I will listen to Frosty all day long if I could tune out the "adult themed" carols.  I know practically all songs are love songs, and they usually aren't singing about having some cocoa and watching TV.  But if I have to hear the "extra sexy" version of Baby, It's Cold Outside every work day for the next six weeks, I may have to start slapping people.  It's like being trapped in a closet with two people getting hot and heavy on the other side of the door.  You don't want to listen, but you don't have much choice.  Besides that, the whole premise of the song is one selfish bastard trying to get what he wants in spite of his lady friend's better judgment (after quite possibly slipping her a rufie), and that bothers me.

Maybe I'm over-thinking it, but it made it very difficult to work.  It didn't help that the woman's voice sounded vaguely like a case of tinnitus.  I'm trying to count holes in the pegboard to set planograms, and I had to start counting out loud.  Reprieve was brief, as the musical canoodlers were soon followed by THREE (count them) different versions of Merry Christmas, Baby, which to me sounds a lot like "Thanks, babe, for buying me all this expensive stuff (and probably providing other services), and letting me crash on your couch, because I'm probably a deadbeat leach." That also bothered me.

But, the coup de grace, and probably a new low for the whole genre of Christmas music, was Backdoor Santa.  Basically, in almost as many words, this guy who considers himself some kind of sex god goes sneaking around through backdoors "when the other boys are out" pleasuring all the women of the neighborhood who love it so much they call him "Backdoor Santa."  Oh, and he bribes the children of these households with loose change to leave him and mom alone.  The sleeze meter was maxed out.

This is as fabric store!  Little old ladies shop here!  Who picks out this music, and what's wrong with them?!

Hello! This Is Reality Calling . . .

Wednesday I was trapped for an hour in the waiting room of the Hyundai dealership while my car was serviced.  The widescreen TV was of course tuned to MSNBC.  It was a long hour.

There aren't any liberals in my house.  There really isn't any liberal media in my house.  I know they're out there, but watching their programming was like stepping through the looking glass.  Are they serious?

This isn't a political race, it's a schoolyard war.  The commentary amounted to little more than "Hey, stupid!" and "Yeah, your mama!"  Maybe the conservative networks are the same way these days.  I don't really watch any of it.  The whole democratic process has become a farce.  People are either slaves of the media zombies or have no idea what is really going on.  And the two are not mutually exclusive.

I found myself sitting there feeling sour and thinking, "Yeah, well we'll just see how all your precious government programs fare when hyperinflation strikes and the currency implodes.  Suckers!"  For a second, I was actually hoping the crash would happen sooner rather than later just so we could have a big "TOLD YOU SO!"  Not very Christian, I know.  Sorry.

But, seriously, it's coming!  The party is over.  We have bigger problems than tax hikes or free condoms.  Don't like it?  Shut up and take a number.

The "Soggy Fish Sandwich" Theory

I know it's been around for a long time, but I've never actually heard it at my church before.  After a long trial period at this parish, we finally heard heresy from the pulpit, or rather from the center aisle, since the priest in question doesn't seem to like preaching from the pulpit.

Father Mike didn't actually say that Jesus did not in fact multiply loaves and fishes, but he implied that "commentators" say the real miracle "might have been" inspiring the people to all share their packed lunches like good socialists.

At my family's home parish, the FSSP priest described this theory of the miracle as Jesus simply guilting each member of the crowd into pulling out "the soggy fish sandwich" he had been carrying around in his pocket, a description which apparently originated with Fr. Benedict Groeschel.  He also went on to explain in no uncertain terms that "this is a heretical understanding of this gospel."

This episode is apparently a big deal, as it appears in all four Gospels.  Obviously a remarkable miracle occurred.  Could it really have been just about sharing?  This isn't Sesame Street.

Think about it.  The priest today apparently accepted as fact that idea that nobody would set out on a pilgrimage without packing food.  But would any of them have packed enough for more than three days in the wilderness?  Even if they did, was there any real need to share?  If each had enough food for himself, everyone would have just eaten his own food.  What's so miraculous about sitting down on a hillside and having lunch?  Would you really want to swap for someone else's tuna salad if you had your own?  Alternatively, were the people holding out for a free lunch despite having enough food?  It seems like the modernists have backed themselves into a bad Semitic stereotype if the jaw-dropping miracle in question was simply teaching Jews to share.

CB - Round-up

Can't we just accept the fact that thousands of people were in the wilderness with Jesus for several days, their food reserves had run out, and that Jesus as the omnipotent Son of God worked a miracle worth recording for posterity?  It certainly makes the most sense, and it would spare us these driveling homilies fit only for toddlers.

The Gaffe Heard 'Round the World

Just Google "somebody else made that happen," and a host of goodies will turn up.

Buckle Up

He always says it better than I can.