I haven't updated good old Abandoned Baton Rouge in almost a month, but yesterday I finally visited a site I've been meaning to hit for ages: D-Jay's School of Beauty. Do check it out.
I also became an even more official Louisiana resident, of course to my dismay.
And now, it's that time again where I get all Unabomber/conspiracy theorist/back-to-nature/luddite/hippie on you while making complete sense, at least in my own mind.
So, awesome new Austinite Amy V Cooper forwarded me an article called Microwave Ovens: the Curse of Convenience. In my health-nutty mind, I knew that microwaves were No Damn Good and too much of them surely equaled cancer, like so many technologies seem to, but I didn't have any science to back that up. Admittedly I still don't, since I skimmed the sciencey parts of this article, but it was enough to have me swearing off the microwave for good. I've only been using the micro for heating up leftovers and the occasional thaw-out, but it looks like the old toaster oven's going to get more use now.
After the jump, I will beautifully dovetail this topic with a man I saw yesterday who I'd like to call Crazy Mc Crazerson.
Well, I did it--I'm going to have more writing to promote soon, so I grudgingly joined Facebook, as I knew I would this year, and it's already beckoning to me to fritter away all my time. I also knew that within my wedding-planning explorations would be plenty of free material, ripe for the pickin'. Obviously there's going to be a lot to heckle, so why not heckle it here? Here's the first three gems.
Thanks to the targeted ads on Facebook, where my engaged relationship status appears, I learned that there is now such a thing as a wedding loan. This particular one will help you finance up to a $25,000 wedding. All you have to do is ask your guests to invest in your wedding.
Last night I joined the hostesses of the grrrly rock show Valley Girl Intelligentsia on KLSU to talk about all my wacky career happenings and play some music. Back when I was on WSOU, a friend and I wanted to start a similar show
called Girl Germs since it was prime riot grrrl era and at the time the
station seriously only had like three women in their entire music
collection, but we never did, so bravo to these ladies.
I mentioned a few times that I felt like an old lady because I was struck by how much had changed since I've been on college radio, back in the 90s. Now you can just burn every song you want to play on your show onto a CD. Why, in my day we had record libraries where the DJs would get into written comment fights on the comment labels on the records and CDs (they were like precursors to blogs) and we played PSAs on these things called carts that looked just like 8-tracks, and we had tricks for playing damaged vinyl, and our old sound board looked like it should be on a rocket ship in a sci-fi movie from the '30s, and it had huge dials called potentiometers or "pots." And we didn't have no "Internets." We had a big old desktop computer with the AP news on it.
I had to admit, though, it was really convenient to be able to find a song on the Internet last night, burn it onto a CD, then play it the same night. So that was fun, and the ladies invited me to come back again.
In other radio nerd news, WFMU is holding their annual pledge drive marathon all this week and next. As my friend Tom Scharpling said about the station in the recent article about the fund drive in the New York Times, “This is the kind of place that shouldn’t exist but somehow does.” This one drive is how they make their entire operating budget for the year, and this unfortunately is one of those years where they need help more than ever. Tom raised $40,000 in one three-hour show Tuesday night (!!!) but they can use any help they can get, so if you have ever listened online or on terrestrial radio, you can pledge any amount by clicking the WFMU banner on the left side of this page under all my links.
Behold The Euro Chopper. It was a bonus that came with a purchase of Forever Sharp knives on Black Friday. I'd had one such chopper years ago, purchased for 9.99 at a kiosk in the Livingston Mall for my dad (but really for me).Today I used this new one for the first time (its retail value now supposedly $34.95). Well, I guess Europe really ain't what it used to be, because today was also the day the Euro Chopper broke. (Come to think of it, I think that's the same fate the first one met, only it served us a lot longer.)
Maybe I was too vigorous in my onion chopping, but more likely The Euro Chopper is a flimsy piece of crap, and one whose components will remain on the planet long after the maggots have trod through my brain, savoring all the delicious clever morsels. And all just to chop less than one onion, when I already had the Forever Sharp knife to perform the same task quite well.
If I ever go crazy, don't be surprised if it happens in a big-box store, set off by some ridiculous product like a box of Fast Franks, each hot dog pre-bunned and sealed in its own plastic that will never decompose.
This 20-minute web film by Annie Leonard, The Story of Stuff, breaks down the issues that combine to give me the fear whenever I find myself in a conventional supermarket or mall or big-box store. Basically, Annie explains how the current system of production and consumption is burning through the planet's resources, putting toxins in the air and into people, and wrecking lives, and all so that people can keep buying more and more crap that's designed to break or become obsolete, and keep tossing away what they have to make room for still more crap. Clearly it's a model that can't sustain itself forever. (I guess Annie wanted her message to be accessible to children, so her delivery is a bit too Romper Room, but we'll let that slide.)
