Joey: You're reading another true crime novel? How can you read all that crap? You're so morbid.
Meg: I'm not morbid.
Joey: You're pretty morbid.
Meg: Okay, I'm a little morbid, but not in any debilitating way.
Joey:.... The only way to be morbid in a "debilitating way" is to be actually dead.

Mary KreetsMotts!

Today is that special day when we celebrate the great martyr, and patron saint of poop: Mary KreetsMotts. In honor of this special day, here's a little history lesson for the kids:

In the year 1873 Mary was a missionary in Germany when she received the "divine call." The Lord spoke to Mary and gave her an important task. So she went on the holy mission to "bring the word of god to those savage brutes."

Mary humbly took up the task and promptly left for Africa. She braved jungle and beast along with her well-paid guide, Mimbutu. They carved a mighty swath through veldt and mountains to reach their goal.

Monkeys.

You see, Mary believed with all her heart that God wanted to convert the monkeys of Africa. Apparently, God felt that conversion efforts among human populations were begininning to see the effects of the law of diminishing returns and He was looking for other markets.

On December 25th of that year Mary found a nice, healthy family of about eighteen monkeys who welcomed her with open arms and offered her and Mimbutu all the fruit and nuts they could gather. Mary thought this was the perfect place to begin her work. Here's where things turn a bit sour for Mary.

Ms. KreetsMotts pulled out all the stops with a fire and brimstone rant that would put Jerry Falwell to shame. She extolled the virtues of heaven and salvation and roared the dangers of hell and eternal damnation. She talked of sin and the devil, and she talked of God and the angels. By the end she had run down the whole pulpit checklist. The monkeys sat in rapt attention until Mary was finished.

A long pause followed Mary's final words. The monkeys seemed to digest her mighty tirade for a time. Then one solitary monkey slowly stood. He calmly, and without ceremony reached a hand behind his back and seemed to be making a face of deep concentration. I imagine Ms. KreetsMotts took this to be a good sign. The look passed and he brought his hand back around to the front. It was no longer empty.

I think we can all see what came next. The monkey began to fling poo at poor Ms. KreetsMotts and her companion, Mimbutu. Quickly his whole monke family joined in the fray. Neither ever saw it coming. Neither were seen alive again.

So, now every December 25th we all rejoice in Mary's selfless and silly sacrifice and reflect on joy and happiness and good will towards men. But not monkeys. No good will for them.

It's customary for celebrants to say "Mary KreetsMotts" to each other in passing and shower their friends and family in gifts which symbolize poor Mary's shower of poo.

So, I say to you, my friends:

Mary KreetsMotts!

I've been ranting and raving about the dangers of TRANS FATS for months now. Those that see me regularly have heard it first hand. For those of you living in Far Off Lands, here's a little science lesson for you.

I've been eating very well lately, so today I splurged a little with my lunch and had a large peanut butter cookie. After I ate it I noticed that it had three ingredients containing "partially hydrogenated oils" which consist mostly of trans fats. That made me regret my splurge.

Once upon a time the food industry figured out that "partially hydrogenated" oils have a longer shelf-life than butter and are even cheaper to make .
Among the rich food-makers there was much rejoicing. Huzzah! But, sadly, among the faceless masses there was poison being fed to us all on a grand scale.

All trans fats are made using very similar means, but here's a little play-by-play on how margerine is made from the book NOURISHING TRADITIONS by Sally Fallon:

First they take vegetable oil, soy, corn or cottonseed, of a cheap quality. The oil may be already rancid from the extraction process. Then they mix it with tiny metal particles, usually nickel oxide, a toxic substance, and then they subject the mixture to hydrogen in a high pressure high temperature reactor. Next, in order to remove the unappetizing odor of the mixture and give it a better consistancy, soap-like emulsifiers and starch are squeezed in, and the oil is, yet again, subjected to high temperatures like steam cleaning. The resulting mixture is an unattractive grey color. In order to make the hydrogenated solid oil mixture look like butter, the original gray is removed by adding bleach and coal tar dyes. Finally, strong flavors are mixed in to make it taste like butter. And this mixture is compressed into tubs or blocks which the consumer buys as margarine.

Mmmmmm. Slap that on some toast, eh?

Turns out two prominent medical research entities in America (CENTER FOR SCIENCE IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST and the INSTITUTE OF MEDICINE) had discovered in 1994 that the fats formed in the above process are bad for you in any amount. I will repeat and clarify, in case you missed it. The only safe and healthy amount you should eat is zero. Nada. None.

The initial findings were presented a decade ago. Since then studies have shown trans fats to be linked to and/or contrubutors of diabetes 1 and 2, heart disease, stroke, and even a few forms of cancer.

Last year Denmark passed laws greatly decreasing the legal amount of it in their foods. Two weeks ago Canada outright banned it and appointed a taskforce to help fiure out better alternatives for it's industry. In America we just passed a law that requires "trans fat" be added to all Nutrition facts labels, but the catch is there is no Recommended Daily Allowance, and they refuse to set one, because they can't "Recommend" that you eat any. This is the only legal food ingredient in America with such status.

So what is stopping us? Well, here's the short list:

Oreos, Twinkies, Chips Ahoy, Dunkin Donuts, Krispie Kreme, McDonalds, Jack In The Box, Marie Calledars, Lays, cookies, pizzas, KFC, cakes, danishes, peanut butter, pies, french fries, crackers, buns, breads, cereals, granola bars etc. etc. ALMOST EVERY PROCESSED FOOD YOU CAN BUY!

But, kudos go to PepsiCo, who dropped hydrogenated oils in favor of other means making their Doritoes, Tostitos, and Cheetos safe once again.

My advice is to avoid buying foods that list "hydrogenated" anything. You may find it a little harder to shop, but you'll find you're eating better, probably feeling better, and living longer.

I said, Hot Damn, I love my work!

I'm in the middle of going through music for Barefoot In The Park and I am loving it. In fact, I'm loving it a little too much. I'm spending more time on each song than I should.

But, it's hard not to with this music. The period is the early sixties, 1960-1964 to be exact. This era is filled with songs so woven into our minds, our souls and our culture that anyone of them has as much a right to the title "National Anthem" as does the star-spangled banner.

These are songs that strike a chord deep inside us, and that is exactly why they have stood the test of time for nearly a half century now.

These are songs that we are so intimately familiar with that as we hear them they seem not to resonate from the speakers but from our own memories. We know each note by rote. Every twangy guitar solo, every throaty, crooning wail of the vocals.

From those first, thumping drumbeats at the beginning of Roy Orbison's "Oh, Pretty Woman" we know exactly what's coming. And that bit at the end when he leaves you in suspense, leaves you wondering if she'll really come back is never a surprise, but never any less fun either.

God, I love this.

You would think that two people that do the same job in a competitive market wouldn't be so supportive of each other. You'd think it would be a little cut-throat.

Not me and my baby.

Meg and I are both talented sound designers. We are each talented in different ways, so we tend to work well together. but most of the time we work solo. And sometimes one of us has to turn down work because we're too busy otherwise. Today I start work on my latest paying sound design gig: Neil Simon's Barefoot In The Park.

I was referred by Meg.

That ring was the best career investment I ever made.

That was a joke by the way.

Sort of.

Oh, You!

That silly PRESIDENT OF ZIMBABWE is at it again, folks.

This great man who publicly backed the ethnic cleansing of his country in 2000 and oversaw the displacement and even outright murder of thousands of white farmers in his land has now taken further steps to protect his people.

He's officially banned a specific kind of international aid group. Guess which kind. I bet you can! Go on, guess!

That's right, he's banned all HUMAN RIGHTS ORGANIZATIONS. Hip hip, huzzah!

Let's hear it for progress, eh? I mean who needs a pesky thing like individual rights getting in the way of "governance issues" right? That's what the world needs, more leaders like Mr Mugabe who can take charge and tell us all what's good for us, especially when it's probably not. Good for us, I mean.

Hey, wait a minute! Why does that sound so familiar? Hmmmm.....

All sarcasm aside, if we (meaning the United States as an international political entity) are so interested in policing the world and ridding it of "evil regimes" as the current administration would like us to believe, then how come we didn't lift a finger to stop the "etnic cleansing" of Zimbabwe in 2000? And equally important; why is NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC the only major news source that reported on the massacre of 2000? I bet many of you reading this had never even heard about it.

A couple days ago I listed a bunch of stuff on EBAY that I didn't want nor had any use for.

One of these things was a perfectly legal and fully licensed copy of Microsoft Word 2000 that came with a computer I bought in 2000. This version is the full version on a CD with a certificate of authenticity.

I very explicitly put all that info and more into the listing, because I know that Ebay sellers can be shady sometimes and sell pirated copies of stuff. I wanted it to be VERY clear that this was the real deal. I even put the certificate in the picture so that users could see it was legit.

In the first day it sold at my "Buy It Now" Price, and that was that... or so I thought.

Yesterday I got a message from an agency calling themselves the Microsoft NetSafe Team. They operate under the auspices that they are protecting Ebay buyers from the shady people I mentioned, but the fact is they operate to protect Microsoft's "intellectual property." The message states that I am in violation of copyright law and lots of blah blah blah, and the long and short of it is, my listing was removed from Ebay.

I had already been paid, and the package was in the mail, so I wasn't really upset, but I responded anyway. I wanted to assure them that they had it wrong and they need to have human beings doublecheck the data that their automatic searches yield up.

Turns out that I was, in fact, violating a law. Turns out that Microsoft has VERY specific licensing that states that any copy of their software that comes bundled with a computer system is ONLY legal to be used with that system. Any other use and/or distribution is a violation of their licensing agreement that I apparently agreed to when buying the system.

Think about this people. How insidious is that? That CD that I bought with my money is essentially NOT mine after I bought it. Microsoft's license makes it their own de facto property, even after I paid for it. Not only am I never allowed to sell it used, but I am legally not even allowed to install it on any other computer that I will ever own.
WHAT?!?! How and why are they able to get away with this? Can somebody answer me that?

I bought the f**ker! It is mine. If I have no use for an outdated program I should be able to sell it like any other CD that I don't want.

It's times like these that I hope for the biblical plagues of Egypt to teach corporations like Microsoft a lesson.

"Let my software go!"