Let's hear it for The Register, which for the second time this week is feeding me material on how evil the Internet is. And this time, it's proper Research.
The latest piece, published in the Journal of Adolescent Health, shows a significant positive correlation between teenagers who make heavy use of the Internet, and those who show violent and aggressive behaviour in real life.
Now, anyone who's been online for more than half an hour must surely have noticed that there's a high proportion of jerks, and I've seen a great many explanations of this advanced over the years. Maybe it's harder to avoid such people online; maybe the anonymity of the 'net makes people more confident and less considerate; maybe it's because we're not accustomed to mixing with so many teenagers; maybe it's a small proportion of users making a large volume of noise; maybe it's simply the shared culture of a "place" with a population historically weighted towards adolescent males.
But this research suggests - although all of those things may still be true - it's not just a perception. There really is a higher concentration of yobs out here in cyberspace.
Media coverage of the finding is fairly clearly divided into two camps. In the blue corner, we have those such as FOX News, who have no reservations about citing the study as evidence that the Internet is turning our teens into sociopathic thugs. In the red corner, the likes of El Reg argue that causality could work the other way - it's possible that thuggish kids are simply more drawn to spend excessive amounts of time online. (To do it justice, FOX does acknowledge that possibility - but it's buried half-way down the story, while the opposite explanation is in the headline.)
Intuitively, to me, the second explanation looks likelier. Show a bully a medium in which they can inflict fear and offence with minimal risk, and my bet is they'll gravitate to it like the British government to a database. It'll fascinate them, seeing how much they can do, what they can get away with, until some idiot leaves it on a train...
The original paper preserves a studied neutrality on this point. But it does suggest that "preventive programs for aggressive behaviors should pay attention to Internet addiction among adolescents." Which just goes to show, it is possible to convert science into policy recommendations without, necessarily, getting into a shouting match about it.
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Naked communism
There's a story in this week's Economist about the Chinese government trying to stimulate demand by getting its rural peasants to buy consumer electronics. It's not working very well, partly because it's the Chinese government doing it (who couldn't organise a piss-up in a sake distillery), and partly because this is The Economist, where a socialist initiative can't, ever, really work. But what can't be denied is that tens of thousands of households are getting their first TVs ever.
Amid the "sky is falling", apocalyptic analyses of the coming Fairly Great Depression, one thought keeps occurring to me: all - yes, all - of this doom-mongering is coming from a very narrow sector of humanity. Specifically, rich people.
Look at it this way. If we're to be thrown out of our homes and begging on the streets, then who exactly is going to be living in our houses? If we're all to be starving, then who specifically is going to be eating that food that the farmers are still producing, because let's face it, what else are they going to do with their land? If we're all to be poor, then who's going to be using this computer that I'm typing on now, or the iPod in my pocket? Are all these things going to lie about unused, simply because everyone has 50% less money?
Are they hell.
No, what's going on is a redistribution of wealth - away from (some) rich people, towards (some) poorer people. (And towards other rich people, of course, who have - as always - deftly cut themselves in on the deal.) And the complaints, loud as they are, are coming from people who are the losers in this transaction.
To be sure there'll be less production for a time, particularly of luxury goods like the aforementioned iPod. But there will still be a lot of goods in the world. Houses aren't going anywhere. Food production isn't drying up. I don't know what's in your wardrobe, but I'm reasonably confident that the clothes in mine today will keep me from nakedness for the next couple of years at least, even if they're not quite the cutting edge of fashion.
It is, of course, a messy system. Many really poor people are suffering even more than they normally do; and many of those losing out think themselves poor, being guilty of nothing worse than judging themselves by the standards of their peers and neighbours. It's happening that way because we, the modestly rich, have spent the last 50 years fighting tooth and claw against the shift happening gradually - thus making it inevitable that it should happen suddenly. (And now we're fighting to slow it down - that's what the huge government deficits in Western countries amount to. They don't make the countries any richer, but they do space the pain out over several years, rather than applying it all at once.)
But on the whole, on average, we are witnessing a net shift in wealth away from the rich and towards the poor. That's what happens when prices drop.
As in any uneven transaction, the losers complain much louder than the winners. And the rich have a louder voice anyway. Which is why the media is screaming economic armageddon, and why I'm not going to be invited onto any chat shows to talk about my theory.
Yes, there will be a lot of unemployed people. That's bad because unemployed people are less productive, their skills deteriorate, and they tend to be more isolated, with all the physical and mental health consequences of that lifestyle. But there's still about as much food, just as many houses, in the world as there was last year. So if more people are starving and begging in the streets, it's because we've chosen to put them there.
Why would we choose to do that?
Well, historically, it's because we love wealth. Specifically, we love what Galbraith called the chimera of "wealth without work" - the idea that someday we'll be rich ourselves. And while most of us keep our aspirations modest - we hope to retire sometime in our 60s, and live the remainder of our lives in reasonable quiet - a large minority want better. They want to retire earlier, be richer, live higher and faster and longer.
Most of us fall for this illusion at some point in our lives. My sister-in-law, Sarah, is a fine example. She has no ideas that amount to creating much wealth, but she aims to buy houses and live off the rents - an all-too-common dream here in New Zealand. And of course, that's a dream that can only work if a majority of people are willing to pay their rents. That is to say, they're too poor to buy their own homes (because house prices are astronomical), and too cowed to not pay, or to complain too loudly about the condition of their housing (because living in a slum is better than living nowhere).
And it's that mass hallucination, that dream of wealth without work, that has brought us to our present pass - as it did in 1929, and will do so time and again until we admit that we have already beaten scarcity - in the Western world at least, there is plenty to go around - if only we can bring ourselves to share it fairly.
There are three ways we could emerge from this - let's call it a "downturn".
One, the usual answer through recent recessions, is business as usual. Let the misery fall where it may, most of us will be okay, and eventually the economy will be back to what we've been trained to think of as "normal", and we can get back to our private dreams of wealth.
Two, we could - as we did in the 1930s - redefine the bottom of our economic scale to make poverty less terrible. The Great Depression gave us the idea of the "welfare state" - the notion that the state should guarantee a minimum level of welfare for its people. In the long term that configuration proved to be unstable - as generations went by people grew greedier, and increasingly resented "paying for others" to enjoy things, such as health care, that they wanted for themselves. But even so, it gave us an impressive 79 years between critical economic collapses.
Three, we could stop pussyfooting about socialism and embrace it properly. We could accept that there's no shortcut to retirement. We could accept that we're not going to inherit or save much wealth from anywhere. We could agree that "rich" is a four-letter word, that ambition is a bad master, that enough is enough.
But I don't think we're ready for that yet. Maybe next time.
Amid the "sky is falling", apocalyptic analyses of the coming Fairly Great Depression, one thought keeps occurring to me: all - yes, all - of this doom-mongering is coming from a very narrow sector of humanity. Specifically, rich people.
Look at it this way. If we're to be thrown out of our homes and begging on the streets, then who exactly is going to be living in our houses? If we're all to be starving, then who specifically is going to be eating that food that the farmers are still producing, because let's face it, what else are they going to do with their land? If we're all to be poor, then who's going to be using this computer that I'm typing on now, or the iPod in my pocket? Are all these things going to lie about unused, simply because everyone has 50% less money?
Are they hell.
No, what's going on is a redistribution of wealth - away from (some) rich people, towards (some) poorer people. (And towards other rich people, of course, who have - as always - deftly cut themselves in on the deal.) And the complaints, loud as they are, are coming from people who are the losers in this transaction.
To be sure there'll be less production for a time, particularly of luxury goods like the aforementioned iPod. But there will still be a lot of goods in the world. Houses aren't going anywhere. Food production isn't drying up. I don't know what's in your wardrobe, but I'm reasonably confident that the clothes in mine today will keep me from nakedness for the next couple of years at least, even if they're not quite the cutting edge of fashion.
It is, of course, a messy system. Many really poor people are suffering even more than they normally do; and many of those losing out think themselves poor, being guilty of nothing worse than judging themselves by the standards of their peers and neighbours. It's happening that way because we, the modestly rich, have spent the last 50 years fighting tooth and claw against the shift happening gradually - thus making it inevitable that it should happen suddenly. (And now we're fighting to slow it down - that's what the huge government deficits in Western countries amount to. They don't make the countries any richer, but they do space the pain out over several years, rather than applying it all at once.)
But on the whole, on average, we are witnessing a net shift in wealth away from the rich and towards the poor. That's what happens when prices drop.
As in any uneven transaction, the losers complain much louder than the winners. And the rich have a louder voice anyway. Which is why the media is screaming economic armageddon, and why I'm not going to be invited onto any chat shows to talk about my theory.
Yes, there will be a lot of unemployed people. That's bad because unemployed people are less productive, their skills deteriorate, and they tend to be more isolated, with all the physical and mental health consequences of that lifestyle. But there's still about as much food, just as many houses, in the world as there was last year. So if more people are starving and begging in the streets, it's because we've chosen to put them there.
Why would we choose to do that?
Well, historically, it's because we love wealth. Specifically, we love what Galbraith called the chimera of "wealth without work" - the idea that someday we'll be rich ourselves. And while most of us keep our aspirations modest - we hope to retire sometime in our 60s, and live the remainder of our lives in reasonable quiet - a large minority want better. They want to retire earlier, be richer, live higher and faster and longer.
Most of us fall for this illusion at some point in our lives. My sister-in-law, Sarah, is a fine example. She has no ideas that amount to creating much wealth, but she aims to buy houses and live off the rents - an all-too-common dream here in New Zealand. And of course, that's a dream that can only work if a majority of people are willing to pay their rents. That is to say, they're too poor to buy their own homes (because house prices are astronomical), and too cowed to not pay, or to complain too loudly about the condition of their housing (because living in a slum is better than living nowhere).
And it's that mass hallucination, that dream of wealth without work, that has brought us to our present pass - as it did in 1929, and will do so time and again until we admit that we have already beaten scarcity - in the Western world at least, there is plenty to go around - if only we can bring ourselves to share it fairly.
There are three ways we could emerge from this - let's call it a "downturn".
One, the usual answer through recent recessions, is business as usual. Let the misery fall where it may, most of us will be okay, and eventually the economy will be back to what we've been trained to think of as "normal", and we can get back to our private dreams of wealth.
Two, we could - as we did in the 1930s - redefine the bottom of our economic scale to make poverty less terrible. The Great Depression gave us the idea of the "welfare state" - the notion that the state should guarantee a minimum level of welfare for its people. In the long term that configuration proved to be unstable - as generations went by people grew greedier, and increasingly resented "paying for others" to enjoy things, such as health care, that they wanted for themselves. But even so, it gave us an impressive 79 years between critical economic collapses.
Three, we could stop pussyfooting about socialism and embrace it properly. We could accept that there's no shortcut to retirement. We could accept that we're not going to inherit or save much wealth from anywhere. We could agree that "rich" is a four-letter word, that ambition is a bad master, that enough is enough.
But I don't think we're ready for that yet. Maybe next time.
Monday, February 23, 2009
How the Internet will kill you
Spending too much time online, apparently, causes high blood pressure. Also heart disease, cancer, dementia, sleep deprivation, diabetes, and Dr House's favourite: lupus.
This story comes to us from Biologist, the strictly non-sensationalist journal of the British Institute of Biology, via El Reg. I'm torn, for a response, between "you're making it up as you go along" and "well, duh."
I think this conflict arises from the outrageously wide remit of the paper. It's as if the author were briefed to look at all the studies linking health effects to either online behaviour or social interaction of any sort, to find all the possible biological connections between "getting ill" and "spending too much time typing away at a lonely screen", and then write a paragraph on each one. There's no coherence to it.
In fact it looks very like dozens of articles I published in my time on a similar journal, although of course "social networking" hadn't been invented then. (And in justice to myself: if they were this bad, I'd generally send them back to the author and tell him to try again. I was a better editor than this.)
In short: the part I can both understand and believe says that (a) if you spend a lot of your time and energy "socialising" online, you don't spend as much time and energy meeting people physically; and (b) spending time physically with other people, preferably in groups, is important for health.
This much seems (to me) obvious. What's not so obvious is the detailed process by which loneliness translates into illness. The paper touches on the usual culprits - stress, depression, lack of confidants, and so forth - but also covers a wide range of biological mechanisms. Sadly, it doesn't provide enough information on any of these for me to understand what it's talking about.
Take the discussion of leucocytes and cytokines, for instance. Citing "Recent research at the UCLA School of Medicine", it seems to be saying that social interaction increases the efficiency of our immune systems. In other words, not only do we share germs with other people, but also immunities to germs that they've previously been exposed to. To me that seems far-fetched, but I don't know enough to argue it either way.
"Regular religious group participation", it says intriguingly but uninformatively, "is a significant predictor of elevated IL-6 [interleukin-6] levels and lower subsequent 12-year mortality." So there you go. It's not the power of prayer, it's the power of churchgoing; it doesn't matter what god you worship, so long as you do it with others.
What makes this paper frustrating, for me, is the shopping-list feel. The authors make no attempt to conceal the fact that they started out from what (you might think) should have been their conclusion - that online life increases physical isolation, which is bad - and gathered evidence only in support of that belief. They make no attempt to develop arguments from one point to another, nor to explore alternative explanations of any of their "findings", nor to explore the full implications of what they did find, or otherwise present any kind of balanced picture. So although I'm inclined to believe that they're probably right, for limited values of "right", I'm left frustrated and dissatisfied.
And now, instead of heading down to the pub to bore the earlobes off some poor sap in real life, I'm blogging about it. That'll show 'em.
This story comes to us from Biologist, the strictly non-sensationalist journal of the British Institute of Biology, via El Reg. I'm torn, for a response, between "you're making it up as you go along" and "well, duh."
I think this conflict arises from the outrageously wide remit of the paper. It's as if the author were briefed to look at all the studies linking health effects to either online behaviour or social interaction of any sort, to find all the possible biological connections between "getting ill" and "spending too much time typing away at a lonely screen", and then write a paragraph on each one. There's no coherence to it.
In fact it looks very like dozens of articles I published in my time on a similar journal, although of course "social networking" hadn't been invented then. (And in justice to myself: if they were this bad, I'd generally send them back to the author and tell him to try again. I was a better editor than this.)
In short: the part I can both understand and believe says that (a) if you spend a lot of your time and energy "socialising" online, you don't spend as much time and energy meeting people physically; and (b) spending time physically with other people, preferably in groups, is important for health.
This much seems (to me) obvious. What's not so obvious is the detailed process by which loneliness translates into illness. The paper touches on the usual culprits - stress, depression, lack of confidants, and so forth - but also covers a wide range of biological mechanisms. Sadly, it doesn't provide enough information on any of these for me to understand what it's talking about.
Take the discussion of leucocytes and cytokines, for instance. Citing "Recent research at the UCLA School of Medicine", it seems to be saying that social interaction increases the efficiency of our immune systems. In other words, not only do we share germs with other people, but also immunities to germs that they've previously been exposed to. To me that seems far-fetched, but I don't know enough to argue it either way.
"Regular religious group participation", it says intriguingly but uninformatively, "is a significant predictor of elevated IL-6 [interleukin-6] levels and lower subsequent 12-year mortality." So there you go. It's not the power of prayer, it's the power of churchgoing; it doesn't matter what god you worship, so long as you do it with others.
What makes this paper frustrating, for me, is the shopping-list feel. The authors make no attempt to conceal the fact that they started out from what (you might think) should have been their conclusion - that online life increases physical isolation, which is bad - and gathered evidence only in support of that belief. They make no attempt to develop arguments from one point to another, nor to explore alternative explanations of any of their "findings", nor to explore the full implications of what they did find, or otherwise present any kind of balanced picture. So although I'm inclined to believe that they're probably right, for limited values of "right", I'm left frustrated and dissatisfied.
And now, instead of heading down to the pub to bore the earlobes off some poor sap in real life, I'm blogging about it. That'll show 'em.
House hunting, week (enough)
We're getting better at house hunting. I mean, we haven't yet reached the point where we can go to the right place and sit in a hide and the perfect house just comes up and eats grains out of our hands, but we've definitely improved from our early lumbering attempts to chase them down across the open savannah. Of the seven places we saw this weekend, three are quite livable, and one of those is (probably) surprisingly cheap.
But we still make mistakes.
One place we almost missed, on Sunday, by not double-checking the address. Two open homes at the same time within ten houses of each other - what are the odds? Still, we wasted most of the timeslot looking round the wrong place - an architectural embarrassment crammed into not enough land behind some rustic takeaway shops. Emerging into the sunlight, Susan leafed again through the details we'd printed out. "Did you see a fireplace?", she asked innocently.
Our real objective was a short dash up the road, which we reached just in time to find the agent politely bidding her last visitors farewell. But we were in no mood to take hints. Charging in like a SWAT team, we breezed through the house in three minutes flat. It was worth seeing.
Other highlights:
Nestled on the southern slopes of One Tree Hill is the bustling suburb of Royal Oak. The house on Turama Road is astonishingly ugly, has very little land, and is in urgent need of a new kitchen and bathroom - but surprisingly roomy on the inside, and cheap. Worth considering.
1/87 Te Kawa Road is a pleasant enough house, but as usual some idiot has attached a massive deck covering more than half the garden. What's left is a vertiginous patch of ferocious vegetation that looks like it's stolen from the set of an Indiana Jones movie.
Our second visit to a house we saw last week in the rain. In sunlight, the problems became more obvious - most notably, the fact that the master bedroom faces onto a fairly noisy road. Still, there's such a thing as double glazing.
One place where road noise is not an issue is 305 West Tamaki Road. As we made our way down the rugged driveway, my strong impression was that the cicadas were starting something. Here, the soothing summer accompaniment to lazy days outside was transformed into something more like a civil defence siren. If a tsunami ever does strike this part of the coast, let's hope it happens at night.
The house itself was very pleasant - 1970s construction (I'm guessing), with a few issues around uneven floors, but good sized rooms and garden.
The cicadas followed us all day, right across to the tail end of Mt Eden Road, where the house we'd come to see had conveniently been sold to save us the trouble of looking around it. So thoughtful.
All in all, our hit rate has improved markedly. We chose to call it a successful weekend.
But we still make mistakes.
One place we almost missed, on Sunday, by not double-checking the address. Two open homes at the same time within ten houses of each other - what are the odds? Still, we wasted most of the timeslot looking round the wrong place - an architectural embarrassment crammed into not enough land behind some rustic takeaway shops. Emerging into the sunlight, Susan leafed again through the details we'd printed out. "Did you see a fireplace?", she asked innocently.
Our real objective was a short dash up the road, which we reached just in time to find the agent politely bidding her last visitors farewell. But we were in no mood to take hints. Charging in like a SWAT team, we breezed through the house in three minutes flat. It was worth seeing.
Other highlights:
Nestled on the southern slopes of One Tree Hill is the bustling suburb of Royal Oak. The house on Turama Road is astonishingly ugly, has very little land, and is in urgent need of a new kitchen and bathroom - but surprisingly roomy on the inside, and cheap. Worth considering.
1/87 Te Kawa Road is a pleasant enough house, but as usual some idiot has attached a massive deck covering more than half the garden. What's left is a vertiginous patch of ferocious vegetation that looks like it's stolen from the set of an Indiana Jones movie.
Our second visit to a house we saw last week in the rain. In sunlight, the problems became more obvious - most notably, the fact that the master bedroom faces onto a fairly noisy road. Still, there's such a thing as double glazing.
One place where road noise is not an issue is 305 West Tamaki Road. As we made our way down the rugged driveway, my strong impression was that the cicadas were starting something. Here, the soothing summer accompaniment to lazy days outside was transformed into something more like a civil defence siren. If a tsunami ever does strike this part of the coast, let's hope it happens at night.
The house itself was very pleasant - 1970s construction (I'm guessing), with a few issues around uneven floors, but good sized rooms and garden.
The cicadas followed us all day, right across to the tail end of Mt Eden Road, where the house we'd come to see had conveniently been sold to save us the trouble of looking around it. So thoughtful.
All in all, our hit rate has improved markedly. We chose to call it a successful weekend.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
The road to hell is paved with - Cosmo surveys?
Here's one for the gender warriors: men and women - or at least observant Roman Catholic men and women - "sin differently", according to a shiny new report from the Vatican.
It's a bizarre survey, conducted by Fr Roberto Busa, a 95-year-old Jesuit priest, and based on data from an undisclosed (to me, at least) sample of confessions. Apparently, men tend to enjoy lust, gluttony and sloth, while women are more likely to indulge in pride, envy and anger.
Note that the stereotypically macho vice of "wrath" makes the top three for women, but not for men - although without quantitative data we can't really deduce anything about it. "Greed", also called "covetousness" or "avarice", appears to be firmly at the bottom of the pile.
"Sloth" is an interesting sin, and one of my personal favourites. According to one view, it's the inverse of "avarice" - you're unlikely to make much money while sitting about on your backside. On the other hand, what's the point of making money, beyond bare survival needs, if not in anticipation of enjoying some sloth at a later date?
I haven't been able to find if this kind of survey has ever been done before. The Vatican's official theory is that, while environments and circumstances change, basic human nature is constant, so they might argue that these findings would never greatly change. But really I find it hard to believe they'd be that naïve. In harder times, surely avarice would be more popular.
(I do want to know more about Fr Busa's sample. Was it purely local, around Rome, or nationwide, or wider? Was it weighted towards any particular groups, such as religious communities? But I can't find this data. The original publication, in the Vatican's weekly L'Osservatore Romano, doesn't seem to be available online, and none of the summaries I've found goes into that kind of detail.)
Also not mentioned are the "new sins" published last year, listed as "environmental pollution, genetic manipulation, obscene wealth, infliction of poverty, drug trafficking, morally debatable experiments, and violation of the fundamental rights of human nature." I'd love to know how often men and women confess to each of those.
It's a bizarre survey, conducted by Fr Roberto Busa, a 95-year-old Jesuit priest, and based on data from an undisclosed (to me, at least) sample of confessions. Apparently, men tend to enjoy lust, gluttony and sloth, while women are more likely to indulge in pride, envy and anger.
Note that the stereotypically macho vice of "wrath" makes the top three for women, but not for men - although without quantitative data we can't really deduce anything about it. "Greed", also called "covetousness" or "avarice", appears to be firmly at the bottom of the pile.
"Sloth" is an interesting sin, and one of my personal favourites. According to one view, it's the inverse of "avarice" - you're unlikely to make much money while sitting about on your backside. On the other hand, what's the point of making money, beyond bare survival needs, if not in anticipation of enjoying some sloth at a later date?
I haven't been able to find if this kind of survey has ever been done before. The Vatican's official theory is that, while environments and circumstances change, basic human nature is constant, so they might argue that these findings would never greatly change. But really I find it hard to believe they'd be that naïve. In harder times, surely avarice would be more popular.
(I do want to know more about Fr Busa's sample. Was it purely local, around Rome, or nationwide, or wider? Was it weighted towards any particular groups, such as religious communities? But I can't find this data. The original publication, in the Vatican's weekly L'Osservatore Romano, doesn't seem to be available online, and none of the summaries I've found goes into that kind of detail.)
Also not mentioned are the "new sins" published last year, listed as "environmental pollution, genetic manipulation, obscene wealth, infliction of poverty, drug trafficking, morally debatable experiments, and violation of the fundamental rights of human nature." I'd love to know how often men and women confess to each of those.
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Pulp non-fiction
One of the many things I miss, from home, is freshly squeezed orange juice.
Not, I should explain, juice freshly squeezed from an actual orange. That's way too much like hard work, even without the mess. What I'm talking about is bottles of orange juice untreated in any way - not reconstituted, not pasteurised, sans preservatives or any other ungodly treatment visited upon its natural pulpy goodness. Typically, it has a shelf life of about a week.
It's a universal pick-me-up: a drink whose natural sugar levels give an instant boost, no matter how tired or run-down or hung-over I am, without the inevitable subsequent carb-crash of a soft drink; whose liquid rehydrates my tissues; whose vitamins I can practically feel hunting down and beating into submission all those nasty free radicals unleashed by whatever good times I've had lately.
(I am aware that certain scientists, sponsored by I-know-not-whom-but-I-have-my-suspicions, claim that there is no health benefit to "freshly squeezed" orange juice. Those scientists are idiots, as indeed is anyone who thinks that "benefits" can be measured by lab equipment. They should try drinking it.)
Given that the UK is not exactly famous for its orange groves, the fact that you can get this stuff, year-round, in any decent British supermarket is a testament to their phenomenal logistical abilities. But one quickly gets used to such luxuries.
New Zealand supermarkets, I regret to say, are not in the same league. Sometimes I wonder if they're even playing the same sport.
The "pure squeezed" juice we encounter here, in our weekly shopping, is from two suppliers: McCoy's, a French-owned brand that basically sells soft drinks and reconstituted juice, with "squeezed" juice added to the product line pretty much as an afterthought; and Charlie's [warning: website will screw with your browser window and, if you're not careful, play offensive music at you], a brand whose idea of "honest squeezed orange juice" includes pasteurisation and "added Vitamin C".
Both of these products are a feeble, whispering shadow of the drink I've been hankering for. Compared with the mulish kick of Tesco's or Sainsbury's own brands, they're about as stimulating as a prod with a dry sponge.
So imagine my unbridled joy when, a couple of weeks ago now, I discovered a new brand on the shelves of New World. A brand whose "Best Before" date, instead of months ahead, was less than ten days away. We instantly bought three litres of the stuff.
And imagine my dismay when I read, last weekend, that it's a "limited edition", only available for twelve weeks. Which, by my reckoning, should end in late April.
The best I can hope for is that it'll be such a smash hit, others will see the market niche and move whatever parts of heaven and earth are necessary to fill it. I've been doing my part, putting it away faster than a Pennsylvanian judge. Come May, we'll see if it's been enough.
Not, I should explain, juice freshly squeezed from an actual orange. That's way too much like hard work, even without the mess. What I'm talking about is bottles of orange juice untreated in any way - not reconstituted, not pasteurised, sans preservatives or any other ungodly treatment visited upon its natural pulpy goodness. Typically, it has a shelf life of about a week.
It's a universal pick-me-up: a drink whose natural sugar levels give an instant boost, no matter how tired or run-down or hung-over I am, without the inevitable subsequent carb-crash of a soft drink; whose liquid rehydrates my tissues; whose vitamins I can practically feel hunting down and beating into submission all those nasty free radicals unleashed by whatever good times I've had lately.
(I am aware that certain scientists, sponsored by I-know-not-whom-but-I-have-my-suspicions, claim that there is no health benefit to "freshly squeezed" orange juice. Those scientists are idiots, as indeed is anyone who thinks that "benefits" can be measured by lab equipment. They should try drinking it.)
Given that the UK is not exactly famous for its orange groves, the fact that you can get this stuff, year-round, in any decent British supermarket is a testament to their phenomenal logistical abilities. But one quickly gets used to such luxuries.
New Zealand supermarkets, I regret to say, are not in the same league. Sometimes I wonder if they're even playing the same sport.
The "pure squeezed" juice we encounter here, in our weekly shopping, is from two suppliers: McCoy's, a French-owned brand that basically sells soft drinks and reconstituted juice, with "squeezed" juice added to the product line pretty much as an afterthought; and Charlie's [warning: website will screw with your browser window and, if you're not careful, play offensive music at you], a brand whose idea of "honest squeezed orange juice" includes pasteurisation and "added Vitamin C".
Both of these products are a feeble, whispering shadow of the drink I've been hankering for. Compared with the mulish kick of Tesco's or Sainsbury's own brands, they're about as stimulating as a prod with a dry sponge.
So imagine my unbridled joy when, a couple of weeks ago now, I discovered a new brand on the shelves of New World. A brand whose "Best Before" date, instead of months ahead, was less than ten days away. We instantly bought three litres of the stuff.
And imagine my dismay when I read, last weekend, that it's a "limited edition", only available for twelve weeks. Which, by my reckoning, should end in late April.
The best I can hope for is that it'll be such a smash hit, others will see the market niche and move whatever parts of heaven and earth are necessary to fill it. I've been doing my part, putting it away faster than a Pennsylvanian judge. Come May, we'll see if it's been enough.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
So much to rant about
... so little time. Perhaps I should just stop looking at news entirely.
Two judges in Pennsylvania admit to taking bribes to increase the sentences imposed on young offenders. The bribes came from the penal contractors who get paid to keep the kids locked up. To me this suggests that it may be unwise to encourage private industry to make profits from crime. That's a lesson we might try applying to the insurance and security industries.
Amazon bans sales of a ghastly Japanese videogame in which you get to play a sexual predator who kidnaps, tortures and rapes women. Of course Amazon is perfectly right to censor anything it doesn't like, so long as it doesn't try to hide what it's doing. Well done Amazon. The Git Award here goes to British Labour MP Keith Vaz, who pontificated: "It is intolerable that anyone would purchase a game that simulates the criminal offence of rape... I do not see how this can be allowed." (Note the passive voice there: "... can be allowed." Translation: "I don't want to censor anything, perish the thought, but what can I do, I'm driven by an irresistible compulsion...".)
Octuplets' mother's publicists quit after receiving death threats. I don't even know who to be maddest at in this story: the publicist for general spinelessness, the malicious fuckwits who've been sending death threats, the police who show no interest in tracking down said fuckwits and kicking them hard and repeatedly in the stomach, or the mother who hired a freakin' publicist because she had eight babies.
Seriously: where exactly did we go wrong?
Two judges in Pennsylvania admit to taking bribes to increase the sentences imposed on young offenders. The bribes came from the penal contractors who get paid to keep the kids locked up. To me this suggests that it may be unwise to encourage private industry to make profits from crime. That's a lesson we might try applying to the insurance and security industries.
Amazon bans sales of a ghastly Japanese videogame in which you get to play a sexual predator who kidnaps, tortures and rapes women. Of course Amazon is perfectly right to censor anything it doesn't like, so long as it doesn't try to hide what it's doing. Well done Amazon. The Git Award here goes to British Labour MP Keith Vaz, who pontificated: "It is intolerable that anyone would purchase a game that simulates the criminal offence of rape... I do not see how this can be allowed." (Note the passive voice there: "... can be allowed." Translation: "I don't want to censor anything, perish the thought, but what can I do, I'm driven by an irresistible compulsion...".)
Octuplets' mother's publicists quit after receiving death threats. I don't even know who to be maddest at in this story: the publicist for general spinelessness, the malicious fuckwits who've been sending death threats, the police who show no interest in tracking down said fuckwits and kicking them hard and repeatedly in the stomach, or the mother who hired a freakin' publicist because she had eight babies.
Seriously: where exactly did we go wrong?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)