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Favorite song on David Shrigley's Worried Noodles: the one by Max Tundra. It's so weirdly brilliant! Strange like electronic music should be.
Favorite (well, only) album I own by Ben and Bruno: 100 Grim Reapers. This is ridiculously good!

UNICEF Kidz Er'where

As I was walking on campus, I saw what appeared to be a couple of kids in costume, trick or treating for UNICEF. There was a guardian supervising off in the distance, she seemed proud of the tikes. I could not resist their good costumes and positive attitudes of charity. They came up to me and I reached into my pocket and pulled out some change and gave it to them. Then another came up to me, "Trick or treat for UNICEF?" and I gave him some change too. After just two kids, I realized that I was now out of change as well as small bills. But I looked around and saw that there were actually tons of these UNICEF kids, all lined up in what appeared to be the exact same path I was headed in. I had given away all of my money, and the thought of having to explain to the upcoming kids that I gave all my money to that other kid dressed as an Ewok back there truly broke my heart. I mean, what kind of excuse is that? Would you buy that as a kid? (I know I wouldn't have: As a kid I generally held the belief that college kids were irresponsible, lazy, and disregarded oncoming traffic, since this is mostly what stuck out in my mind from listening to my parents talk). I wish I would have known that the little folks were going to be UNICEFing, I would have set aside a roll of quarters just for the occasion. By some miracle, I was able to get to my destination without breaking any UNICEF* hearts. The rest of the kids were always talking to someone else when I walked by. Christmas miracle? I would say more like a Halloween miracle, because after all, today is Halloween.

One of my students was dressed as a ninja. We had a test today, and when he came up to my desk to turn his test in, I pretended to karate chop him. At first he didn't get it, but a second later he laughed. I wonder if he forgot for a moment that he was dressed as a ninja.

*Next time you find yourself thinking that people are inherently evil and horrible, think of UNICEF trick or treaters. It reminds me that people really are all born good.

Life's Strange Song

It's Friday And I Will Do Whatever I Want

It's 3:30 on a Friday, the weekend has officially begun, and so I kick things off by eating Kit Kat and Reese's Peanut Butter Cups in bed while listening to "Ode to Tile" by Rob Crow. Thank you, Benjamin Franklin or whoever it was, for having the foresight to allow us these freedoms. Here is a video of how it went down:



A member of the focus group pointed out to me that this is vain. Ohhh. Yeah.

Caveman Blog: I Thought He Said Corn Nation

2-day 1 of my sutdents stoood up in class to make an announcement and said that there was going to be a presentation on campus about Corn Nation, inviting everyone to go to Corn Nation. Corn nation? That topic corn has been on my mind, I thought in my head. I just posted a weblog of it even! It turns out he said porn nation, which is something different, but the guy doing it has been on Ophrah's Winfrey show and everything. I saw some people with porn nation shirts, I guess that is what that is for. I would be weird about wearing a porn nation shirt because some people might think you were all about it. It (this announcement) happened in the big lecture section, not the drill section, he stood up in front of like 80 people or something. Just looked it up. Their main question is they are asking is "How is my exposure to porn and our hypersexual media effecting me and my relationships?" Ron Jeremy is there too, on their website. Now it's confusing. It says he is a recovering sex addict. So is the guy hosting this thing at IU. Sounds like it could be interesting. Nov. 1st, 7PM. That's when I normally have practice with my new band (tentatively named Prayer Breakfast, we play songs that are pretty "all-American") but I might go anyway. Anyway, I always thought that this guy, my student, was a really nice guy, and I think that he is very courage-ey for making this announcement.

Fields of American Sweetness

(I wrote this over the summer when I was in Mexico. I don't think I ever posted it, but I just saw some footage for the movie King Corn, which seems to cover a lot of the same issues discussed here, so I looked up the file in my computer and decided to put it up. I had been reading about King Corn for a while, and I am excited to see this documentary)

I used to deliver newspapers to a man who some people believe is one of the most evil people to have been in power for the past twenty years. More about that later.

Lately I have been trying lots of new foods. Being in Mexico City for a while, and me being who I am, I am anxious to try all of food products that are in the world around me. This ranges from going to restaurants to snooping around in grocery stores to challenging the sketchiest of street vendor food, I want to do it all. It’s not hard to find a snack in Mexico City. Food is everywhere, and I have started to notice that it kind of shows. Although there aren’t very many obese Mexicans as far as I have noticed, there do seem to be quite a few “husky” adults. Although I don’t have any facts or figures on this, I can’t help but think that this is in part due to the immense popularity of American-style fast food and junk food. I went to the zoo today (bad idea) and was not completely surprised to see droves of zoo-goers eating McDonald’s and Domino’s Pizza at the official zoo food court. I would never say that the traditional Mexican diet has been low in fat, because that is certainly not the case, but I would venture to say that it is not traditionally as high in fat or sugar as the fast food and snack food imports that they now enjoy. Fat and sugar are not the only problems with American style fast food, as we all know that the quality of this food and the processing that goes into is of equal concern.

All of this then reminded me of a book that I read a few summers ago while I was on a band tour in Europe. The book was called Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World, and it was interesting to read about the ills of the American diet while seeing how they do it in Europe. I was enjoying some of the best meals of my entire life, eating rich, sugary and delicious food, but I just didn’t see overweight people like I did in the United States. Interestingly, this book that I was reading provided a clue as to what was different about the American diet which contributes to dietary epidemic which exists in the United States.

One point (and it is a controversial one because it deals with race) that the book makes is that the reason for the epidemic of obesity among blacks and Hispanics in the United States is because blacks and Hispanics is because people of these races are genetically predisposed to diets in which food is not guaranteed to be available. The author calls this the “starvation gene” or “thrifty gene” and notes that in terms of evolution, the metabolisms of people of these ethnicities are trained to store calories as soon as they are available because there was not always enough food available at regular intervals. Historically speaking, white people’s metabolisms are more accustomed to having more calories available and to not using them. This is what the book says, anyway. This alone doesn’t completely explain why this seems to be a problem that exists for blacks and Hispanics in the United States and not in other parts of the world. The book, however, offers another important clue as to what makes the US diet so adversely different: A little ingredient known as high fructose corn syrup (HFCS). You’ve probably seen this ingredient in your favorite soda, or in a few other sweetened products that you have around the house. What is high fructose corn syrup? Is there really that much sweetness in corn? HFCS, it turns out, is one of the most unhealthy and prevalent ingredients out there in American food. So, you maybe you thought that soda contains sugar. It tastes sugary, it’s sweet, it can rot your teeth like sugar does. Well, soda used to contain sugar, until the secretary of agriculture of the United States, a man by the name of Earl Butz, aided the subsidization of corn production in the United States so that it could be turned into HFCS and offered to soft drink manufacturers as a cheaper alternative to cane sugar (which was largely imported from overseas). A higher demand for HFCS meant more money for American corn farmers. What could be wrong with that? Well, nothing, except that HFCS is way worse for the human body than any processed sugar ever was. In JAMA’s review of Fat Land, they put it this way: “Fructose is processed more rapidly and more efficiently than glucose; fructose catabolism leads to increased fatty acid synthesis and esterification and secretion of very low-density lipoprotein. Thus, we have ingested what can be viewed as fuel for a fat factory”. This also explains why type II diabetes (the acquired kind) is so prevalent in blacks and Hispanics who live in the United States. Not surprisingly, the conversion of the soft drink industry from sugar to HFCS corresponds with the sudden increase in cases of type II diabetes in the United States.

In my opinion, HFCS does not taste the same. It is not a mystery why Mexican Coca-Cola and kosher Coca-Cola (both of which are cane sugar-sweetened) go for extra monies on the black market, eBay, etc. in the US. Another interesting phenomenon is the popularity of Dublin Dr. Pepper from Dublin, Texas, which is a holdout to the original formulation that is still sweetened with cane sugar instead of HFCS. People in Texas seem to have a fanatical relationship with this soda, calling them simply “Dublins.” I’ve had one, and truth be told, you really can taste a difference. It’s no B.S. A can of HFCS-sweetened beverage just leaves me with a gross feeling.

Side note: (One of my favorite [although pretty unlikely] conspiracy theories has to do with the possibility that Coca-Cola’s disastrous switch to “new Coke” back in the 80’s was actually a way of masking the change in flavor from sugar to HFCS by temporarily removing original Coke from the market, and that they had intended to continue to produce “Coca-Cola Classic” all along, complete with supposed reports from Coke employees seeing “Classic” packaging in Coke factories even before New Coke was introduced to the market. I love this kind of conspiracy, but I kinda doubt it.)

So what’s the deal with delivering newspapers to an evil dude? Earl Butz used to be my neighbor, and I was his paper boy. He lived about a block away from us in West Lafayette, Indiana. My mother had told me that he used to be the secretary of agriculture, which when I was 10 years old or whatever didn’t seem like that big of a deal, but when his name came up in Fat Land, I was like “Well, how weird is that?” HFCS isn’t the only awesome ingredient that Mr. Butz had the distinction of introducing into the American diet. He is also responsible for bringing palm oil (another pretty cruddy ingredient) to a variety of snack foods (Bugles and low-quality chocolate [both chock full of palm oil] are delicious!).

But as is the case with most political arguments attacking the United States, the actions of our political leaders are ultimately the result of the total apathy of the people. In the case of horrible (in tastes as well as health) ingredients being introduced into our diets, Americans have been voting with their dollars, and for the most part, Americans have been voting “yes” for the garbage that the food industry has producing for us. How is the American diet different from the European diet? Many Americans simply don’t have a passion or even a real interest in the food that they eat. Americans are less and less involved in preparing their own foods, and therefore increasingly out of touch with what goes into the food they eat. Whether or not this apathy is a result of the fast food industry or whether the fast food industry came about as a result of America’s apathy about food is a circular argument: The fact remains, Americans eat bad food and continue to put up with it, because it's cheaper. Case in point: American cheese. First off, it’s not really cheese. Second, it is mostly oil and salt. Third, it’s not really orange. It’s colored that way with some crap called anatto. Our contribution to the world of cheese is such an embarrassment, symbolic of the many cases in which American "improvement" really just kind of blew it!

Anyway, you can check out some footage of the King Corn guys here. (P.s., is anyone else kind of weirded out by Xeni Jardin's delivery on Boing Boing TV?)

Also, I just remembered someone telling me that in Mexico, thanks to NAFTA, it's cheaper to buy American corn than it is to buy corn produced in Mexico. The price of US corn has a direct influence on the price of tortillas. Loco!

Redheaded Twins of Luck

Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday when I am done teaching my Japanese class on the 4th floor of the Geology Building, I walk to Woodburn Hall (home of the famously controversial mural depicting Indiana history which contains clansmen doing klanny things). Every time I make this walk I see two redheaded twins, brother and sister, walking together very closely, always laughing about something, kind of rolling their eyes about something, as if the class they just got out of was taught by an actual circus clown. They always seem to be in a really good mood, and they are always walking right next to each other. When twins of the same gender look alike, I simply think they look alike because they are supposed to look alike, after all they are twins. But I think that twins of different genders are way more interesting. They are interesting because they allow you to see what the true characteristics of gender are (it also always makes me wonder what I would look like if I had been born a girl, and then I inevitably think about how different my life would be if I had been a girl, then I inevitably think about what types of boys I would be into, and then it's just weird, I know). These twins that I always see, they just look so much alike despite being brother and sister. They both have short red hair, they both wear basically the same kinds of clothes, and they act like total BFF. Every time I see them, I kind of feel like it's a scene from a David Lynch movie or something. I literally see them every single time I make the walk from Geology to Memorial. I consider them to be a good luck charm, because they look so happy, and it touches my heart to see a brother and sister being such good friends. Are there other people who I also see every time I make this walk, but I don't recognize them because they aren't so twinny? Could be, but I don't think so. These twins are symbolic of something, I'm pretty sure.

I wish I could get a picture of them. Would it be weird to just get a snapshot one morning while they are walking? Um, yes. Of course. I won't do it. I guess it won't happen.

People I know who are twins:
Arnold Schwarzeneggar and Danny DeVito (well, I don't know them, but I saw their movie).
Jim Zespy has a twin brother named Jeff. Like Arnold and Danny, they do not look alike at all.
I guess that's it.

Famous twins in music:
It turns out that Kelley and Kim Deal are twins. I didn't know that.
Two of the three Bee-Gees are twins.
Matthey and Gunnar Nelson are twins. All this time I just thought they were brothers who looked a lot alike. Wow.
Those dudes from Blonde Redhead, of course.
The two sisters in Múm.

Famous twins from G.I. Joe:
Tomax and Xamot. When one gets hurt the other feels pain.

A World of You

Crappy scan, I know.

What Are The Odds?

The other night I was watching Stephen Colbert being interviewed on Larry King and he was talking about how a bunch of members of his family were killed in a plane crash when he was young, and Larry King asked him if that gave him a fear of flying, and Stephen Colbert replied saying that it made him less afraid of flying, because after all, what are the chances that airline tragedy would strike the same family twice?

I was thinking about that again today, and then I remembered my 8th grade math teacher, Mr. Hesser. Mr. Hesser was a big guy, he was the wrestling coach, and when he saw his beloved wrestlers walking down the hall, he would throw chalky erasers at them. This was kind of a big deal, because one wrestler in particular, Jimmy Gerovac, was pretty much always wearing black heavy metal shirts, and so a blast of chalkboard eraser dust represented a significant threat to his headbanger ethos.

Mr. Hesser had slicked hair and was always kind of sweaty. I remember thinking that he was a pretty good teacher, because he made math real, but he made math real by making fun of people who couldn't do math. Mr. Hesser (although he seemed to be kind of a country boy himself) in particular loved to make fun of dumb country folk and their inability to do math. He would talk about about how dumb country folk would actually hire him to come out and calculate how much grain would fit in their silos because they had no idea how to do it themselves. "I mean, anyone with an 8th grade education should know how to calculate the volume of a cylinder plus half a sphere of the same diameter, right?" Today, given about half and hour and the proper formulas, I think I could figure it out. I hope.

So what does this have to do with Stephen Colbert?

See, this one time, Mr. Hesser was making fun of dumb country people and he was talking about how most folks wouldn't buy lottery tickets at a gas station where someone has already won a bunch of money recently, because "ya know, what are the chances of someone winning in the same place?" he would say in an exaggerated drawl (on top of what I considered to be his already prominent Hoosier accent). He said they were stupid and superstitious because the chances of the next big lottery ticket being there are still as good as they would be anywhere else. When you roll a six on a die, what are the chances that you will roll a six again? One out of six. Same as the first time. The die doesn't remember where it was last. The chances of someone rolling a one and then a six are the same as someone rolling a six and then a six (1 in 36, right?). The chances of someone rolling three sixes in a row? The same as someone rolling, oh, say, a two, then a four and then a five. By this logic, Stephen Colbert is just as likely to die in a plane crash as anyone else, as each flight is a new roll of the die, unaware of previous statistics.

But. But. Here's the thing. According to this (pretty interesting), the average American's odds of dying in a plane crash in a lifetime are 1 in 5,051. So, if you think of it as a 5,051-sided die, then the odds of rolling the same number twice are 1 in 25,512,601. Pretty unlikely, right? But you can look at it two ways: The odds of one person dying in a plane crash are 1 in 5,051. The odds of a second related person dying also at a later point are still the same, but the odds that both things must happen are really low. But it's still just as likely to happen to a related person than it is to anyone else. The more I think about it, the more confused I become. Wait. This is kind of blowing my mind. Anyone care to step in? Am I totally wrong here?

I mean, his reaction to the question may have been a joke, I don't even know if his reaction was from the point of view of Stephen Colbert the person or Stephen Colbert the character (in which case, he might have been taking the anti-Hesser everyman's approach to probabilities for effect). If it's real, if thinking that way helps him fly the friendly skies, then that is ok. Regardless of the fact that it is statistically faulty logic, I think that there is something to be said for humans believing that a rare thing that has happened once will be even less likely to happen again. After something really bad has happened, I can recall saying to myself, "well, at least I can be pretty sure that things won't be that bad ever again" but it's actually not true! Luckily, the same rules apply for good things, so that's cool too, I guess.

OK mathletes. Prove to me that you aren't as dumb as the bumpkins Mr. Hesser made fun of:
There's a corn silo. It's 20 feet in diameter and perfectly cylindrical up until 35 feet, where it is topped by a half-sphere of the same diameter. How much corn (in square ft) can you fit in this darn thing? Show your work. First person to answer gets a prize. Super bonus points if you can tell me how much all that (dry) corn would weigh.

Scram, Shrimps