Posting will be light over the next few days due to the holiday. We’re heading south for family time with potential surprise appearances by renegade cousins. There should be much vegetarian food all around and considerable amounts of couch and porch sitting, along with football watching, culminating in the Iron Bowl on Friday.

We’ll be back Monday with a full slate of posts to help wake you from your Thanksgiving stupor. As always, we at Toxic Culture are giving thanks for you, our reader(s) who may or may not be coming to this blog because you think that Facebook sucks or you are looking for information on Madagascar. Whatever brings you into our world, we are thankful for your attention, your comments, and your continued support and enthusiasm.

See ya’ soon!

There’s a fantastic video here about tar sands oil extraction. Sounds boring, but it’s actually crucial. This video stands out not just because it’s about an important issue, but also because of how impressed I was with the production values. If we have any shot at motivating people to change the world, it’s going to be because of smart and creative people making videos like this one. It’s catchy and informative without being too data heavy. It inspired me to learn more and to consider ways that I could get involved. The bold among you might want to peep this PDF study. Kudos to Agit-Pop Communications for their work.

Editor’s Note: This is a piece I wrote for a magazine that (I guess) folded. They never ran it. Kate, who accompanied me on this trip to Europe some time ago, was asking me about it recently. Without reading it, she suggested I stick it on the blog. I hope the links still work. Here it is.

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There’s a music show on the flatscreen in the student center coffee shop at the University of Ljubljana. It’s called MCM Top. A dude in the video looks a little like John Mayer and is playing a piano, singing in English while a bald, tough-looking, chain-wearing guy is leaning on the piano and rapping. He looks a little like one of the guys from Onyx. “All men die,” the white guy warbles.

I’m in Slovenia, watching music videos targeted at college students. I understand virtually none of the words (aside from the plaintiff reflections on mortality of Floppy-Haired Piano Guy), but the non-verbal video conventions are universal: the camera angles, the rapping into the microphone hanging from the ceiling in “the studio,” the angst.

I was nearing the end of a trip that began in Amsterdam, had taken me to the highest (geographic) point in Europe, and now to this weird, semi-Russian-seeming country, home of a guy named Jure Kosir — a world class skier who won a bonze medal at the ‘94 Olympics. In addition to specializing in the Slalom and Giant Slalom, he is a rapper. He evidently once told the media that his music is called “slalom beat.” He was the 1994 Sportsman of the Year in Slovenia.

The goal of the Euro Trip was certainly not explicitly to seek out all of the hip-hop I could find as I bounced across a continent. But one of my parameters was to be aware of any detectable iterations of something that started at Sedgwick Avenue house parties hosted by Clive Campbell (DJ Kool Herc) or on Kingston sound systems. I would simply keep my eyes and ears open and document these traces, should they cross my path.

The trip starts on an auspicious note in this regard when, while sitting at the airport in Atlanta waiting for our flight to Germany, we realize that we’ll be sharing a flight with Akon. To our boundless delight, the mothers of a traveling “under 15” soccer team have been informed by their children of Akon’s presence and celebrity status. Though none of them have likely ever heard any of Akon’s music, much less seen this video for “The Ghetto,” there is considerable and prolonged commotion as the (literal) soccer moms gather and fawn and coo and pass around a number of cell phones and cameras as their children pose with Akon. One of them actually makes the “fan yourself with your hand” motion that she had probably seen from some old British Invasion video footage. Unsurprisingly, Akon vanishes — after sheepishly and charmingly agreeing to pose for an incalculable volume of photos, many of which were no doubt posted to Facebook by the time our flight left Atlanta.

Amsterdam – Holland

They say that there’s something special about the light in Amsterdam. To be sure, the colors are damn fine. A kaleidoscope of near-neon street tulips is able to pierce through the most rainy and overcast of days, not to mention the bright, blaring street paintings. But there’s something about the sound in Amsterdam too, particularly when there’s a massive street march coming around the corner, people holding four enormous trash-bag-covered speakers up on poles, blasting “Our House” by Madness.

You see, Amsterdam is undergoing some undulation, some “squatters’ rights” shit that is every bit as much “Fuck Tha’ Police” as 417th “Greatest Song of All Time” according to Rolling Stone. In America, hip-hop activism has taken the form of, um, volunteering for the Obama campaign or something. Puffy’s “Vote or Die” campaign from 2004 has become, “Hey, did anybody happen to watch me in Raisin in the Sun?” Russell Simmons and Benjamin Chavis may throw a mean “red carpet and cocktail hour” before their Fifth Annual Action Awards, but in Amsterdam’s youth politics, there is a serious and quite literal “to the streets” component.

In what we encountered in a random encounter on the streets of Amsterdam, there was a real amount of attention being paid to what constitutes public space and a there was a serious pack of people willing to put their bodies on the asphalt. Sure, so maybe they’re playing British two-tone ska instead of Lyrics Born. But there’s more to revolution than a soundtrack, right? Then again, perhaps it’s not really all that fair to compare an encounter with a protest march in Amsterdam with Step Up 2: The Streets or Dipset.

And as one of my favorite bloggers, Joey, reminds us:

Hip-hop culture is far from monolithic, evidenced by failing record sales and a booming interwebs presence. Individual artists and sub-genres can be closely followed online, with fans cherry-picking songs, entire albums, and blog posts while dispensing with more varied platforms like the old rap video shows that made every Tribe fan a Snoop and Dre fan, as well. Further, the ascension of the largely vapid but nonetheless engaging southern styles from Atlanta and Houston seems to have been facilitated by a prevailing sentiment that if the music just sounds good and gets people dancing, then that’s enough. While megastars like Jay-Z still combine weightier music with pop appeal and a spot within the rap-game zeitgeist, it appears as though music not primarily made for the party set has grown increasingly marginalized in lieu of more generic and easily produced offerings from the Youngs and Lils of the word. And the business models followed, the signals sought when searching for what will become a hit record–those appear to stem in some part from the success that the Dip Set enjoyed.

But, I digress.

Amsterdam has a lot of things that rappers seem to like talking about: prostitutes and high quality weed. However, there doesn’t appear to be a lot of live hip-hop percolating, at least in the more heavily-touristed areas of town. Then again, more than 80 percent of The Netherlands is Dutch, and it appears from even a casual perusal of their television channels and pop culture offerings that these people still get a big kick out of actual, honest-to-God, blackface Al-Jolson-style humor. I can only imagine what they’d think about Tyler Perry or Flavor of Love.

We did get excited when we saw a poster for a party at a club called Club Latido, but when we looked at the list of DJs I can’t say that I was stunned to see that one was called “House Negro.”

In Transit

Our much-regretted departure from Amsterdam is marked by a strange aborted seduction scene on the overnight train to Switzerland. It is a story of young Americans in Europe, drunk German anti-Semitism, Jesus, and, of course, hip-hop.

An attractive young man sits alone in the dining car as the European night train hurtles through the dark. An attractive young woman enters the car. Their eyes meet and, this being a train from Amsterdam, we suspect that we might be about to watch a classic, cinema-style train hookup. Suddenly, another young guy enters the dining car wearing a hilarious knit cap with ear flaps that says “AMSTERDAM” in huge letters. He also sees the woman sitting alone. Who’ll be the one to invite her over? Or maybe she’ll make a play of her own.

The first guy takes the plunge. He nurses his beer and eventually summons the nerve to invite her over to his table. His first words make it clear that he’s an American. Turns out, so is she. He’s from Philly. She’s from Houston. The Knit Cap Guy is uber-pissed that he didn’t have the nerve to talk to her first. He decides to pout.

As Philly Guy and Houston Girl get to know each other, Knit Cap Guy starts pounding truly heroic amounts of booze from the dining car bar. He glares at the Americans chatting happily while he guzzles mini bottle after mini bottle of vodka, later switching to wine.

This goes on for almost an hour before Knit Cap Guy staggers out, presumably to pass out. It is at this point that Houston Girl punches a train-tunnel-sized hole in Philly Guy’s hopes of train sex. She announces that she is a Mormon and begins what is a clearly well-practiced dissertation on her beliefs, sprinkling in a variety of Bible quotations. He tries to banter with her about theology, but he is clearly bummed as he watches his hopes incinerate with every minute that her zealous tirade continues. We’re doing our best not to laugh out loud as she expounds on her various theories about Jesus.

Suddenly, the wasted dude reappears, knit cap now slightly askew. He plops down next to them, clearly drunk enough to attempt to muster the courage he needs to woo this lady back to his sleeper bunk. He slurs badly, announcing that he is from Munich. He didn’t overhear her religious disclosure or any of the subsequent conversation, but even if he had, it isn’t clear that, at least in this state, he’d know what a Mormon was, even if she explained it in mind-melting detail – and it’s quite clear that that’s the only way she knows how to explain it.

So, with palpable desperation to stop talking about The Good Book, the Philly guy asks the wasted German about what kind of music he likes. Of course, the German says he is into hip-hop.

The Philly Guy is delighted. The first name he drops is Grandmaster Flash. He claims to be “old school” and further name drops Tupac, Wyclef and Bone Thugs as among his favorites. He says that hip-hop has gotten “too commercial.” The German chimes in that he likes 50 Cent. The Mormon, realizing that nobody has spoken to her in several minutes, chimes in and says she does too. The Philly guy says without hesitation that 50 and Snoop have “sold out.” The German adds that he likes The Game. The Philly guy considers for a moment and says he likes The Game more than he likes 50 Cent. The German, gripping the table so that he doesn’t slide onto the floor, says he also likes house music.

But the eavesdropping thrill wouldn’t have been complete without the German expounding on his life story as the music conversation stalls out. He explains his appearance on the train as a result of the fact that he was driven out of Amsterdam after having lived there for 14 years. He says he was driven out by “the Jews.” As my eyes widen with that special blend of shock, horror and delight, he says that Germans and Jews “just don’t go together.” I wish I were making this up.

Switzerland

We arrive in Basel, one of the nicest European cities you could conjure. And after three days and multiple cities bouncing around the nation, it’s safe to say that Switzerland isn’t just full of polite white people, it’s also (for various reasons) not the type of nation that brings to mind the words “hip-hop.” As far as that goes, the Swiss make the Dutch look like the backstage scene at an M.O.P. concert.

While one poster promises that DJ Jazzy Jeff and MixMaster Mike are playing at a Basel club, there is simply nothing, no matter how much Gwen Stefani yodels, hip-hop about the Alps.

Sure, sure. I understand that they’re trying. I’d certainly damn sure never say that there is no artistic or cultural value to the blinged-out dairy cow on the cover of Swiss Rap Compilation, Volume 1 by Faya Records. Check out Lyrikal Kartel. Check out Obe from Geneva. They play shows! The Swiss do bring something to the global table – and by table, I mean the metaphorical table that graces the room at the hip-hop version of the Security Council in the Global Village of the Hip-Hop Universe (or is it the Hip-Hop Galaxy or Federation?)

While in a tiny college town called Fribourg, I purchase a copy of Planete Rap, “Le Mag de L’emission Number 1 du Rap et RnB.” On one hand, a Google search turns up such videos as this one. On the other, this is a magazine published in March of ‘08 that claims to be “on the cutting edge of hip-hop” and has devoted nearly 10 pages to Michael Jackson. While I appreciate the 25th anniversary of Thriller as much as anyone and recognize the incredible groundbreaking influence of The King of Pop (not to mention the Quincy Jones production on Thriller), the fact remains that this guy is also Mr. Jefferson, the plastic ghost who lives in Bahrain. Even if he influenced almost everyone who makes hip-hop music, 10 pages seems a little excessive. [Ed Note: Obviously this was written before Michael died, back in a time where we once thought that it was possible to overdo news about him. Oh wait.]

This French language publication also features and interviews with M. Pokora (who evidently collaborates with both Timbaland and Ricky Martin) and Lea Castel, who is 19-years-old and appears to be a blonde, piano-playing, Winona Ryder lookalike. Check out her “I-play-piano-and-sing-while-you-rap” duet here. Evidently, soulful piano rap is a hot song format in Europe.

Usher and Mariah each get a full page and the magazine comes with two massive posters in it, reminding me that there was once a time that people purchased magazines that had posters in them. No matter how many hip-hop Websites there are, it is only the magazine format that can provide me with two massive pieces of paper: one with M. Pakora on one side and Sheryfa Luna on the other, one with Lea Castel one one side and an advertisement for Urban Peace 2 on the other. Urban Peace 2, for those of you who’ll be in the area, will be in October of 2008 at Stade France and will feature Booba and Kenzah Farah, who, according to her Wikipedia page, is a French Algerian R&B singer who is considered to be “the first Internet success story in the history of the French music industry.” Obviously.

Venice

Our goal is to change trains in Venice, hopping immediately onto the train to Ljubljana. Evidently, the train we needed was permanently cancelled, so we have a number of hours to wander around the reeking canals of Venice before it’s time for our newly-booked train (no refund).

We come across a poster for C.S.O. Rivolta. They appear to be a pretty good sized crew who, on their MySpace page at least, pass the mic as they rhyme over a GZA-inspired piano riff. Not too bad, although we didn’t know it at the time. We did notice that the poster advertising their upcoming show features a number of handguns, which, to my understanding, are much harder to get in Europe than they are in the U.S. Inexplicably, the second song on their MySpace page is Iggy Pop’s “Lust for Life.” Not a cover. Just that song, for a total of two songs: one of them rhyming and one from the soundtrack to the movie “Trainspotting.”

Also of note: David Hilliard of the Black Panther Party is giving a talk in Venice. The posters advertising his talk are all around town. They show that classic picture of Huey Newton sitting in that wicker chair, holding a gun and a spear. Good to see that Hilliard is at least still telling the masses about the Panthers, whereas Bobby Seale is selling barbecue sauce.

Slovenia

Finally, we arrive. Slovenia is in the rotating position of being “the president” of the EU this year. More importantly, a couple of NBA players come from Slovenia: Rasho Nesterovic and Primoz Brezec, a 7 footer from Slovenia who plays for the Toronto Raptors. Brezec, in particular, is worth mentioning because is the source of a number of amusing anecdotes, many of them hip-hop themed and collected here. You see, Brezec seems to fancy himself a sort of Eastern European gangsta-type, keeping it real for Postojna.

We encounter this mindset to some degree during our time in Slovenia. Gone are the familiar cognates of Amsterdam and Switzerland, where if you stare at some sentences for long enough, you might be able to pick out a couple of words and figure out what’s going on. This place is Russian-style, with lots of weird punctuation and long words. Correspondingly, the dudes at the night clubs are pretty Eastern Bloc. We’re talking silk shirts open just a button or two too many, gold chains, and, yes, hair gel. As night club scenes go, it’s pretty rough: women in probably-expensive plastic pants and lots of angry staring from the dudes.

The DJs at both levels of the club we went to were playing electronic music, with only hints of hip-hop thrown in. The upper level DJ plays light and airy dance music, while the basement club is for the “serious shit,” where the DJ is playing dark and extremely heavy trance and house. Unfortunately, he is also a show-off in the typical Euro-DJ fashion and constantly makes the crowd stand around and wait while he tries to string songs together in some kind of orgasmic crescendo. The effect is really annoying.

Other than that, not a lot of music crosses our paths on that given night in Ljubljana. In fact, there’s not a ton of hip-hop leaking out into the streets in general, aside from the name of one of the chains of gas stations.

Still, even though we went to some of the whitest nations in Europe, to paraphrase the great George Clinton, we’re all One World Under a Groove. Even if they are expressing it a little differently in some corners of the globe, the influence of hip-hop can’t be denied.

I have long been a fan of Bill McKibben. I first got into him back in college when I came across his book The Age of Missing Information. Very smart man. Writes about complex issues in a style easy to understand.

It was thus that I was happy to see that he has a new piece in The Washington Post about one of the topics he loves: global warming.

Turns out that he compares Obama to Mohamed Nasheed, who is the leader of Maldives, a tiny nation comprised of 1,200 islands. And Nasheed comes off looking better. Nasheed is forced by necessity to care about global warming because it threatens the existence of his nation. Obama, on the other hand, must juggle industry concerns with worry about his political future as he navigates corporate support on everything from health care to economic policy. Not to mention the upcoming Congressional fight over Waxman-Markey and Kerry-Boxer (more on the Senate battle here).

Now, if you’re like me and you subscribe to the New York Review of Books, you can log in and read this piece from McKibben, written from Malé, the capital city of Maldives. (I’m never sure whether to call it Maldives or the Maldives. Kind of like Ukraine, which a friend from there insists should never be called the Ukraine.)

But you don’t have to be a subscriber to read his review of Thomas Friedman’s book here. The review is particularly great because it starts off as high praise for Friedman before gently slamming him to Earth for his weak sauce and lame optimism.

McKibben is among the best of our public intellectuals on this civilization-threatening issue. He is bold enough to say things like “trying to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius and atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide to 450 parts per million is no longer a viable goal” and he has been a driving force behind the 350 movement that I blogged about before. We need more Bill McKibbens (and Mohamed Nasheeds) in this world — especially if we care about having a world to pass on to future generations.

Instead of actual blogging, here is an awesome “robots destroying the Earth” video made by a guy who I have never heard of but is sure to be famous soon. Enjoy! Hat tip: Will.

I’ve been carping about carbon offsets for what seems like years here at Toxic Culture, and was happy to see that “green tourism company” Responsible Travel has canceled its carbon offsets program for flights. Turns out that offsets don’t work to actually offset emissions (again we are told the awful story of Coldplay’s “carbon neutral tour” and its wake of thousands of dead mango trees) and may actually encourage people to travel more. We were particularly appalled to learn that one London-Los Angeles flight produces more CO2 per person than is produced by the average British commuter in a year.

But nevermind the commuters – turns out that if you added up all road and air travel emissions in the US for a year, that would still be exceeded by the carbon emissions from Indonesia’s peatlands. Those emissions, in turn, are the same as the combined emissions of Germany, Britain and Canada.  That’s right – Indonesian peatlands. Check out this article from the Washington Post on the subject. What struck me, along with the massiveness of their total emissions, was the way the story illustrated the sticky economics of trying to reduce global warming. There’s the Indonesian worker who can make twice in a day burning peat than he can make putting out fires; the villagers who oppose logging and palm oil plants but are afraid they will lose their jobs if they act up; the failure of Kyoto’s “global carbon market” to do anything about the problem – it’s a catastrophe, and all the yogurt cartons you piously recycle (if you live in a city where recycling is even available) will never even come close to offsetting even .00000000000001% of the emissions from the burning peatlands.

Not depressed enough yet? Comes now more terrible-but-unsurprising news from the United Nations Population Fund. Disproportionately, the impacts (4 to 6 degrees centigrade warmer by 2100) of global warming are and will fall on poor women in the majority world. They are more actively involved in food production than men and since they are usually tied to families, they are less likely to be able to migrate (as will become increasingly necessary in the New Climate).

The market’s at work in these circumstances for sure. Those who can afford it buy their way out of the psychological effects of guilt, displacing responsibility on those who can’t ante quite as much. Purchasing power is a beautiful thing. Pass the palm oil!

Shoes: They slide on, laces or velcro, hugging the parts of your body the very furthest away from your complex sensory organs. Your feet? If they work properly, you may not think about them at all, other than an occasional check to make sure that the nails are trimmed and that no odorous goo is accumulating in the weathered crevices.

Yet, there are a lot of people who spend a lot of time thinking about their feet. And I don’t mean marathon runners or those who fret about “toe cleavage.” And there are also a lot of people who think about your feet, even if you don’t have plantar fasciitis.

I have written before about Nike’s hilarious and absurd “Indian shoes” and how corporations can engage in eugenic-style biological determinism in order to create ethnic consumer identities. Fun stuff. But the corporate interest in creating customers is pretty obvious. What is also interesting is how people have taken shoes to become flourishes associated with their own identities. They don’t need a shoe-selling corporation to cause them to think about shoes. They just do it. Shoes. Uh Muh Gaw.

Now, I don’t know enough about Carrie Bradshaw and women’s fashion to talk about the python heeled Proenza Schouler. But I did read this super depressing piece in the Village Voice about the “Mayor of Sneakerdom.” It’s about a grown man who has 1,400 pairs of sneakers and the culture that surrounds the shoe collecting scene. People wait in lines for limited edition new shoes that are coming out. They trade them and sell them. They seal them in bags and don’t wear them. The “Mayor” estimates that his shoe collection is worth $300,000.

This article was not a shock to me. I have some familiarity with this scene by virtue of my time hanging out around Hip-Hop culture. The range of shoe fetishists there goes from actually impressive artistic creativity on the part of those who produce custom-made sneakers to mere industry whoring. And again, this is nothing new. There’s a famous story about the time that a shoe company exec saw Run DMC in concert and saw thousands of kids holding their shoes aloft during a performance of “My Adidas.” The link between Hip-Hop and commercialism was altered forever with Run DMC’s $1.5 million deal with Adidas in 1986, and the war between art and commerce has been welded to the soul of  Hip-Hop ever since.

But it’s still a little weird since the main things I want to know about shoes is, “Were they made in a sweatshop?” and “How much computing power do they have?“

I own a pair of the Adbuster Black Spots, but leafing through the pages of the numerous “shoe blogs” that are out there makes me want to take the advice of this gentleman (and this one) and just go barefoot.

When I was growing up, I loved everything about the NBC mini-series V. I loved that Marc Singer was in it because The Beastmaster was awesome (to elementary school aged me). And the special effects seemed awesome at the time. The lasers were especially great. And the music ruled. The fact that it was in short supply as a TV product, first a mini series and then another mini-series and then a short-lived series, made it even more awesome. This was the age before every TV show was always already online and in DVD boxed set form. And it was about Nazis. And you didn’t have to be some kind of fancy English major to appreciate that fact. There was an actual Holocaust survivor in the series pointing out how the aliens were like the Nazis. I think it was my first experience understanding that you could refer to historical events with a cool fictional story about aliens.

Lots of people feel this way. Almost an entire generation of sci-fi nerds my age grew up lusting after that show. So of course, like everything else anyone even vaguely fondly remembers from earlier decades of TV and movies, it must be remade. And it has been. ABC has decided to take control of the “V franchise.” So? We watched.

What has been produced is the first work of science fiction to incorporate the worldview of Orly Taitz and the anti-Obama “birther” and teabag movement. Seriously. We were not the only people who had this reaction. From Slate:

More than a few journalists and bloggers have remarked that it’s possible to read V as an allegory hostile to President Obama and sympathetic with the birthers and other nutcases who believe him to be a wolf in sheep’s clothing. The charismatic Visitors load up their “bandwagon” by “spreading hope.” In using their sophisticated iguana technology to provide free medical services, they promise “universal health care.” Indeed, if the show is to have the symbolic import that we expect from a science-fiction story, this is the only possible way to read V as a coherent text. The only problem with this analysis lies in its generous presupposition that the text is, in fact, coherent.

The Washington Post tried to get V’s writers to cop to the political angle on the series, to little avail. Salon nodded to this angle but got more traction jabbing at the bad execution of the “resistance” subplot.

We were pretty shocked by what we saw when we finally sat down to see the first two episodes. Outsiders have taken over. They are not from Kenya. They are not Muslims. But you think of those things. They come with the promise of Hope and Unity. They make friends and influence people who are blind to their true motives. They get in through the youth. Those youth! Because there’s nothing more that rebellious motorcycle-riding adolescent boys like better than the promise of a spiffy uniform. Especially if the uniform is given to them by a hot emaciated alien chick.

There is actually a line in one of the first two episodes about how the Visitors have begun to heal humans, leading to a scene where a journalist confronts the leader of the aliens about their promise of “universal health care.” This is a key scene in a plot thread about how some journalist guy (Fox News) must decide whether access to power justifies refusing to “ask the hard questions.” He tells it like it is!

Another plotline follows an FBI agent as she makes connections between the aliens and terrorist sleeper cells. You see, the aliens have been here for years preparing. They are lying in wait. They are Al-Qaida. They are Obama. Obama is Al-Qaida. The resistance (themselves tagged as a “sleeper cell” by the FBI – ah, the ironing!) wants to fight and meets in a secret warehouse. Their leader gives a speech about resisting the control of the aliens that sounds straight out of a tea party. He gets killed. The priest and the FBI lady escape somehow. Evidently the priest is also a MMA expert. And the aliens have spy droids, but fight with knives (not cool lasers).

The resistance groups are the tea partiers. They protest those damn aliens. One episode ends with the FBI agent musing, “They are arming themselves with the most powerful weapon out there. Devotion.” Faith is the enemy on the new V. Even the renegade priest finds himself at odds with his faithful colleague, who is content to follow the Vatican’s lead rather than think for himself.

Meanwhile, the black lead is a traitor – an alien who hates the aliens. In other words, he is Michael Steele, bravely refusing to stay “loyal” like the others. He’s played by Morris Chestnut, who I loved as Ricky in Boyz N the Hood, but who evidently flushed his career down the toilet by making something called Two Can Play That Game and a sequel to the movie Anaconda.

The Vs will torture to find out about the resistance. We were disappointed not to see waterboarding. All we got was some kind of holographic snake table, which was frankly stupid-looking and seemed to double as the “resurrection table” when (spolier alert!!) the FBI agent’s secret alien partner isn’t dead and wakes up at the end of the second episode.

There are plenty of other reasons why the show is horrible: the list of “everyone who has ever contacted the FBI about aliens” that FBI lady somehow “swiped” from the top secret government task force; the awful Mulder-Scully ripoffs; the gaping vacuum of space where the chemistry between the FBI agent and the priest is supposed to be; etc. Then there’s the “I’m lying to my boss at the FBI about my missing partner” absurdity. It doesn’t even hew to minimal plot standards, and made us very thankful that we don’t watch its sister crime solving shows like CSI, etc.

Watching the show will make you confront your demons. You get to this point in watching it where its badness begins to wash over you as a matter of course, as a “what-did-you-expect” dumbening. And then you are really in for it; your intellectual immune system is compromised, and you are ripe for an alien takeover far worse than anything portrayed in this treacly pseudo-nostalgic mess of a program.

It is a Friday. That means many of us are fixing to have our Designated Days Off From Regular “Gainful” Employment. Here is some reading for that occasion. But remember: To be ludic is not to be ludicrous. To be ludic is not to be quaaludic. Don’t be a “tiresome debater” always pushing your problem of freedom vs. necessity.

Maybe you’re an avatar of necessity; you are a concupiscent cornicopian. In this case, perhaps you will say that you must work to purchase the objects appropriate to your gender. Or perhaps you shrug all that off; you are a DIY diva – a pioneer of pointless punctuation and absurd alliteration. In this case, you may say that you simply have to put off happy hour so that you can be penuried enough to acquire some of the goods on this site. Only then will people fully appreciate your quirk.

So get back to work already.

Comes now the news that the federal nanny state wants to stick its probing tentacles into Alabama yet again. First it was the stimulus money, what with trying to help solve our crippling financial problems. And now they want to mess with our food products.

I’m talking oysters here people. I’m talking regional traditions of wholesome goodness being thwarted by fat cats in D.C. who know nothing of the slimy delight of a raw oyster. From the New York Times:

Two-thirds of the nation’s oysters are harvested from the Gulf Coast and about 40 percent of them are harvested during warm months. Half of Gulf Coast oysters are eaten raw, but they are largely eaten in the South. Many upscale seafood restaurants north of the Mason-Dixon line refuse to carry Gulf Coast oysters.

What’s the problem?

Eating shellfish raw is risky since they can be infected with both viral and bacterial contaminants. The bacteria Vibrio vulnificus is commonly present in oysters, but warm water can lead the bacteria to grow rapidly, so the riskiest oysters come from the Gulf of Mexico during the summer months.

Well la-de-freaking-da. How many people die of this? Answer? 15 people a year. Are the deaths horrible? Yes. The description of the guy in the NYT article with his blackened and blistered skin made me want to puke. But there’s a reason why we don’t make social policy with our queasy stomachs. We prefer to use rational risk assessments. And we don’t kill an entire industry and hundreds of years of “how to eat tasty food” just because a tiny handful of people out there have some kind of wacked out body chemistry.

5,700 Americans died last year from food-related illnesses. Do you see us banning peanuts or meat? Compared to 15 people dying from oysters, that’s practically a food Holocaust.

There are already warnings about oysters. If you have AIDS or your immune system doesn’t work, maybe you shouldn’t eat them. Also, if you are blind, you shouldn’t drive a motorcycle. Those things don’t mean that the government should come in and regulate with a sledgehammer, putting people out of business and confining the rest of us to eat rubbery pieces of shit while wearing our federally-mandated safety helmets and rubber teeth protectors (for those out there who might have a hidden dental stress fracture but don’t know it).

More articles about the freakout in Alabama’s seafood industry can be found here and here (Landrieu and Sessions together at last!). But my concern isn’t even the economic one, or the fact that you can take any side of any debate and still call yourself a “scientist.” It’s merely that a simple (marginally risky) pleasure is soon to be forbidden to all of us simply because a few people died. I’m not taking a stand against any and all food regulations, nor is this a Libertarian rant about why the guv’mint ought not to be paying for roads and nuclear weapons. But when 15 corpses a year merit gutting an entire culinary tradition (and fundamentally unique experience) for the rest of us, it makes you want to wade into the debate about skateboarding and seat belts and gun control. We deserve beauty queens slurping oysters, damn it.

Just chalk it up as a continuation of our nation’s slide towards weakness and nanny state governance, where it’s fine to dump toxic chemicals in the water and invade multiple overseas nations, but God forbid a fraction of the few of us out there who still care about living might want to taste a raw oyster or go hang gliding or any number of other “dangerous recreations.” Thank goodness the government is here to keep us safe from ourselves.

On Saturday morning we woke up and bounced into the living room excited to watch, of all things, the House health care debate on CSPAN. It was a good spectacle at first, as women lined up on the Democratic side for unanimous consent to revise & extend their remarks, or some such parliamentary procedure thing.

It was hard to miss the messaging on the Democratic side – the idea seemed to be to get a bunch of women up to talk about how the bill would support the health of women in a variety of ways. It’s no single-payer by a long shot, but the bill will increase access to health care for a lot of people (men and women), and go a long way to helping people with treatable and preventable conditions as well as reducing medical cost-related bankruptcies.

Of course, there are plenty of people who are now saying that the bill passed the House only by selling out the health of women, or at least their reproductive freedom. And probably they’re right – that is what the bill did. The Stupak-Pitts amendment means that insurance plans receiving new federal subsidies to keep costs down (for families making less that $88,000 per year) will also not be able to cover abortions. So those plans can continue at a higher cost to their customers, or they can drop abortion coverage to be eligible to participate in the health case exchange.

The result will likely be (if the plan passes with the Stupak amendment, something that’s now questionable in the Senate) a decrease in access to abortions among middle class women. William Saletan has a good explanation over at Slate, and he asks the provocative question: If this is the cost of health care reform, are we willing to pay it?

Abortion’s been a hollow right for many, many women for a long time – at least since the passage of the Hyde Amendment, which banned federal funding for abortions and ensured that poor women would have a good chance of staying that way as long as they kept getting pregnant. Abortions are expensive, after all. Combine the financial barriers and geographic and social barriers (if you live in some states, odds are you won’t be able to get an abortion simply because the clinic will be too far away from you, and if you’re poor you might not be able to reach it anyway because of the lack of public transportation), and we’re left with a right without access for millions of American women.

This is not a reason to decrease access even further – just an observation about the long decline in reproductive freedom that we’ve been experiencing in this country ever since Roe tried to carve abortion rights, MacGyver-like, out of a handful of Amendments and some rubber cement.

There are a lot of people that want to see an end to the current bill on the grounds that it restricts access to abortion. I think there’s a lot to hate about this bill, including reduced access to abortion. But at the same time it’s worth considering whether it will do more harm than good if the bill passes. Lack of health insurance kills people. Lots of them. Others lives are ruined, sometimes forever, because of medical bankruptcies or preventable illnesses – all things that will be reduced after passage of the bill. Lack of access to abortion also ruins lives, but there are a lot more people whose lives will be improved with access to health care here than whose lives will be hurt by lack of access to abortion. And again, this bill only bans health plans for paying for abortions if they want to compete in the exchanges. Rich women who can pay for their own abortions will still be able to do so.

It would be great if the Stupak Amendment galvanized people interested in maintaining reproductive freedoms. If these rights were so easy to sell out, that’s a failure of the movement and a failure of advocates who haven’t been able to sell reproductive freedom as essential. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be so many pro-life Democrats acting as swing votes on critical health care legislation. We’ve been willing to roll far too long on rights without access, which are of course not rights at all, but privileges for the few. Just like health care. It should also be considered a matter of right in this country rather than a privilege that comes, for example, with working a certain kind of job or having a certain amount of money.

The danger is that reproductive rights will trump expanded health care access because health care is not seen as a right. This is a classic divide and conquer type strategy that the left should avoid at all costs.

The deal is objectionable, but so is the failure to expand health care.

Because work has been work lately, I feel like I have been a bit slack on the blogging front. As such, you, the reader, now get a reward that involves minimal effort on my part. A burst of random!

1. Fort Hood killings:

Fort Hood is in Killen, which is represented in the Texas House by the delightfully-Texan-named Jimmie Don Aycock, who replaced Suzanna Hupp, who, as a result of surviving the infamous Luby’s massacre, became one of nation’s leading gun enthusiasts and defender of concealed weapons law. Guns!

Also, how insane is it that the dude who did the shooting was the dude who talked to other troubled service members about their problems? Wow. Would have liked to have heard some of those sessions.

2. On the military theme, get your military debate on! Might just save some lives.

3. And as far as that goes, you know I can’t help but link to any article with the headline, “Armageddon in Alabama.” Good national piece on the crisis in Birmingham (written before the mayor was convicted on 60 felony counts).

4. If that’s all too heavy and bumming you out, might I suggest that you begin watching (or re-watching for some of you nerds out there), the Disney Medfield College movies. Yes, that’s right. I’m talking about starting here and working your way through the variety of movies that feature this fictional school.

Afterwards, you can order yourself a custom-made bobblehead of you or a favorite stalking victim loved one.

I grew up in a house where Chicago sports were on the television often. Baseball was the first religion, north side only. But second to the Cubs were probably the Bulls. Sure, the Bears were good. We certainly owned a copy of the original Super Bowl Shuffle on VHS. But the Bulls were on the TV pretty often. Dynasty and all. My brother and I grew up liking Jordan and Pippen, just as so many did.

But as I got older, I started to look back on the career of Jordan: “The Greatest to Have Ever Played.”

I learned about his famous comment about why he doesn’t get involved in politics, when his endorsement could have cost Jesse Helms an election: “Republicans buy sneakers too.”

I learned about how Nike shoes are made. I learned about Jordan’s image construction, the giant machine of global mega-capitalism, branding. I learned back stories about Jordan on the Dream Team and his affinity for gambling — essentially, all of the things that kids didn’t learn about their sports idols back in previous generations before there were billions of dollars at stake and round-the-clock news cycles.

We learned about his divorce from Juanita and how he was terrible as a front office GM. And most recently, there was the uproar over his cringe-worthy Hall of Fame induction speech, which was not gracious and was, in fact, was described by Bill Simmons as “an off-the-cuff, uncomfortable, petty, biting, rambling, vindictive, score-settling speech during what’s meant to be nothing more than a celebration.”

But what prompted me to post about Jordan was not any of this. It was news about one of his children, to whom he pointed during the aforementioned atrocity of a speech and said, “I wouldn’t want to be you.”

No, not Jeffrey Jordan, who quit hoops at U of Illinois and now is coming back to the team (just like Dad did in the pros!).

Jordan’s other son, Marcus, is a freshman in college at the University of Central Florida. And he also plays hoops. And since his dad sells Nike shoes, Marcus has refused to abide by the school’s contract with Adidas. He wore his dad’s brand onto the court, causing Adidas to cancel a lucrative contract with the school. So much for what the rest of the team was wearing. So much for the best interests of the program or the school. It’s all about the brand. It’s all about corporate loyalty.

True Jordan.

I’m sure only the most naive among us believe that there’s such a thing as “truth in advertising.” There are, of course, many truths in advertising, including all the ones we construct to explain our relationships to products and the reasons we buy them or not. But advertising is about persuasion, and persuasion has a complicated relationship to truth, at least as conventionally understood. Who among us really believes that tiny animated bubbles with personalities (and, one assumes, hopes and dreams) are among the “Scrubbing Bubbles”? And if we did, why would we feel comfortable putting them into a can or down the drain rather than, say, releasing them into the wild or studying them for Science?

There’s a whole strand of advertising that purports to get asymptotically closer to the truth – Burger King is a good example, with their Whopper Virgins campaign and that silly lie detector ad they did recently. What makes those ads work is an open admission that most ads lie – they try to get beyond that by saying to the consumer: “Yes, yes, but this is really real.”

Product naming skates around this strand. You want to convey the idea of the thing and its aspirational brand-type qualities, but don’t want to get into a situation where you can be sued for making claims you can’t deliver on. But if the FTC doesn’t push back, the sky is the limit. I’ve always thought that the people behind the highly misleading Freecreditreport dot com campaign should have gotten some heat from the FTC. The name (and the evilly invasive commercials with the slacker band guys) makes it seem that you’re getting a free credit report. Which credit report you are, in fact, legally entitled to receive once a year from the big three credit vampires monitoring agencies. The site actually tries to sell you a “credit reporting” package that is expensive and unnecessary. Only now is the FTC moving to try and force some more regulations on that site. We’ll see how that goes.

Sometimes names are designed to produce trust by trading on another established brand. This is how we got the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. Most people think that Good Housekeeping has an evaluation process to get the seal. But actually any product that advertises in the magazine gets the seal (as long as it passes tests in this lab,  the magazine will give you a refund within two years if a product proves defective – many exceptions, typically, apply). It’s nothing like the vetting process over at Consumer Reports. In September, Paul Smalera wrote a great article about a new Good Housekeeping venture called the “Green Seal” that is even more troubling. The new seal will still be pay to play, like the old one. And there is no word on the standards of sustainability that will be used. Will it be enough to be “natural?” How about “nontoxic” or “organic”? None of these words has anything necessarily to do with the relative environmental goodness of a product. Bottled water can be all three of these things, but that doesn’t mean it’s better for the environment than tap water.

T. S. Eliot was right – the naming of things is a difficult matter.

So only now has ICANN decided to allow Internet addresses that use scripts other than Latin. It’s pointless to ask what took them so long, since the answer is obviously some combination of tech-topian faith in the irrelevancy of the culturally specific and the inertial drag of the lingua franca (no, not this Lingua Franca. Or this one, which I still miss.). I’ve been thinking about the early days of the Internets a lot recently, spurred partially by the recent death of Geocities and a friend’s link to this wonderful archive of “Page Under Construction” graphics (and then I found the “Please Mail Me” page – wow)

I think it’s sad that Geocities is gone. I know that blogs (especially standardized platforms like this here WordPress thing) have largely replaced the DIY websites that Geocities represented, and I know that Geocities sites were basically crap, but I hate so much the loss of those musings and webrings, oversharing and overanimation. The idea that this whole outpouring of humanness would just be deleted is too much to bear – it’s certainly not burning the Library of Alexandria, but is certainly worse than burning the downtown Montgomery library. At least the stuff there is replaceable and catalogued somewhere.

Enter the Archive Team, who staged an amazing initiative to store Geocities (Also check out their Deathwatch list.). You can read about the details of the project here, but I think the best part is that they took seriously the imperative of saving cat graphics and flashing Jesuses without regard to their cultural contribution. As if that were the purpose of archiving. Archiving is not the same as choosing a personal art collection. We don’t need archivists to be gatekeepers for the remainder of human history; we need archivists to help us store as much as possible so future minds can make different senses of our weird history.

In commemoration, then, this graphic of Ralph eating paste will live forever here until WordPress closes down, or we get a C&D from the copyright holder. Either way.

Crappy American economy got you down? Recession turning into depression?

Well mope no more, because the hot new growth industry of the next decade is here for you. Step into the fast-paced and exciting world of Passion Parties, where women help women investigate sensual aides while improving their erotic lives. As a side benefit, you (the coordinator of said parties) make a hefty profit in this classic pyramid scheme. Move over Madoff! The lack of sexual fulfillment of women is at an all time high (er, not that I would have any reason to think that or anything … cough). That creates a steady boom market for that batch of ladies who can’t get on the Internets and buy their own vibrators and sex ointments.

If you’ll just send$149 to Las Vegas-based privately held company, Passion Parties, Inc., you’ll get a Holiday Party-to-Go Passion Pac.

Includes: Bullet, Jelly Osaki, Velvet Curve, Progressor, Blossom Bliss, G-Spot Creme, Soft & Silky Shaving Creme-Plumeria, Alluring Body Lotion-Green Tea, Pure Satisfaction Unisex Enhancement Gel, Revelation Lubricant, Spice Lubricating Massage Lotion, Tasty Temptation Strawberry Massage Candle, Gigi, Pure Instinct Roll-on, Tickling Trio, Nipple Nibblers-Strawberry, Love Is In The Air Catalogs (25), Let’s Play Catalogs (25), It’s the Most Passionate Time of the Year Brochures (25), Tote Bag, Hostess Rewards Brochures (25), Customer Order Forms (50), You Can Have It All Brochures (25), New Passion Consultant Training Collection.

That’s right. Pure Satisfaction Unisex Enhancement Gel. Hawt.

But what’s great here is how this is being promoted as feminist capitalism:

You will feel proud that at Passion Parties, we believe that each and every woman can reach her individual potential, and that is why we support the philosophy of “women helping women.”

Well, only within certain limits:

Our products assist loving couples to enhance their sexual relationship, thus making “Every Day Valentine’s Day.” We stress monogamy, safe sex and the importance of keeping a relationship exciting.

It’s kind of depressing to see that people you went to high school with are getting sucked into these sorts of things as their “business.” Another friend has gotten into this weirdness, which wonderfully blends hilarious and depressing. I guess it’s better than going overseas to kill strangers for the government, but you hate to think that there are all these women out there who are likely losing money by buying into this “business plan.” Then again, maybe these folks are making plenty of money and helping women break out of sexual and social prisons by forming gender-based ties of solidarity and discussing topics that still in many places are rather taboo (even if selling crap ultimately lies at the heart of the gathering).

Maybe those Nipple Nibblers-Strawberry are worth a second look. Anybody want to come over?

Please?

Noun. Pronounced \ˈshä-d^ən-ˌfroi-də\, meaning enjoyment obtained from the troubles of others. Lisa Simpson teaches us the word in the episode “When Flanders Failed“:

Lisa: Dad, do you know what schadenfreude is?
Homer: No, I do not know what shaden-frawde is. Please tell me, because I’m dying to know.
Lisa: It’s a German term for “shameful joy,” taking pleasure in the suffering of others.
Homer: Oh, come on, Lisa. I’m just glad to see him fall flat on his butt. He’s usually all happy and comfortable, and surrounded by loved ones, and it makes me feel. … What’s the opposite of that shameful joy thing of yours?
Lisa: Sour grapes.
Homer: Boy, those Germans have a word for everything.

Here at Toxic Culture, schadenfreude’s not just a noun. It’s also a pastime. We’ve been reveling in it recently what with Birmingham Mayor Larry “Do Something” Langford’s conviction on 60 bribery counts (he’s not the Mayor anymore, and awaiting a sentence that could be as long as 805 years), and the sad-but-hilarious exchanges between Sarah Palin and soon-to-be-Playgirl-model Levi Johnston.

Since we love Halloween and recently went to the best haunted house in the state, it was absolutely vital when flipping channels during a NFL commercial break on Sunday, that I stop on some NBC programming called “Halloween on Ice.”

The subject of things “on ice” is pretty much an endless source of hilarity. It’s truly the end of the celebrity chain. Where the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles started as a bloody black and white edgy kung fu comic about ninjas and radiation, that tale ends with a Macy’s Thanksgiving float and actors in foam turtle suits wearing ice skates and singing in front of kids waving $15 glow sticks. And it’s true of any item you put “on ice.” Whether you are talking about Lion King or He-Man on skates (you must click on that one), or the classic Ice Capades, things are just more pathetic and hilarious when you slap it onto an ice rink.

So here we have Halloween on Ice, sponsored by an apple sauce company. Kids are interested because (I guess) there are people dressed up like a vampire or a mummy. Mom can say “wow” when they do a lutz or whatever (first performed in 1913!). And Dad can look at the boobs of the witch and try to remember when it was that Nancy Kerrigan was in the Olympics and gosh wasn’t it sad when that hillbilly smashed her in the knee that once.

Now, the applesauce company (mushin’ up apples since 1907!) has decided to sponsor all sorts of figure skating events. Not sure if they lock up washed up Olympians under contract or what. But if you liked Halloween on Ice, there’ll soon be the Brian Boitano Skating Spectacular and Kristi Yamaguchi Friends and Family! But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Halloween on Ice is coming to you live from from the Qwest Center in awesome Omaha, Nebraska. And it doesn’t look even close to sold out.

This thing runs for two whole hours, from 3-5. Needless to say, I didn’t tune in for the whole thing, but can only comment on clips. The first thing I noticed was the jammin’ music by Mannheim Steamroller! All members of the band were wearing costumes and playing amid cheesy props (like cobwebs and ghost-shaped sheets). Let me just say here that I hate Mannheim Steamroller. I hate the Christmas music that made them famous. I hate their secular jams. It’s canned Disney music — synth-heavy, faux-classical music for people for whom Rush is too edgy. If you are into that sort of electro-prog crap that you can play around your parents, Mike Oldfield might be more up your alley.

Anyway, the fact that they were wearing zombie makeup didn’t make the Steamroller suck any less.

Add to it, a dude in all black with a Fu Manchu skating around and doing super fancy little hand gestures at the audience. Throw in some dry ice to add a little fog on the rink. What’s that? The evil wizard is Canadian Olympic silver medalist Elvis Stojko? Zzzzz.

Oooh! A mummy came out to some synth-Egyptian music. The announcer comes on. “Why don’t mummies take vacation? They’re afraid they’ll unwind.” Then the skater/mummy threw a roll of toilet paper into the crowd and started skating around. Oooo!

To get a further feel for the atrocities, click here and watch this YouTube video of an ice skater doing the Monster Mash at one of the previous year’s incarnations of this eye-gouger. See? It’s cute because he skates like a Frankenstein!

Evidently, there is a market for this shit. Nancy Kerrigan is selling her 2004 Halloween on Ice show on Amazon here. And evidently, these former champions are hard up enough for the cash to keep doing the events. And I guess it’s cool that they get to keep getting paid for “entertaining people” doing what they love, which is more than you can say for Olympic pole vaulters or even swimmers.

So here’s to you legion of ice skating enthusiasts. May you always land your triple axles and may your televised events long be sponsored by our nation’s leading sellers of fruit mush.

This is the second part of two posts. Read the first one here.

A few weeks ago I received a 2,500+ word email from the person behind J.L. Hudson. Turns out his name is David Theodoropoulos, and most of his comments (and any number of other interesting things) are available on his website (there is also an anti-Theodoropoulos website, much less populated, available here - I love that Theodoropoulos links to his “anti” site from his own website…is it also a matter of how his ideas are taken by his peers that there are no comments on the “anti” site?). The highlights of the email are as follows:

NAPPRA is an end-run around “Option 1,” otherwise known as the “white list,” or universal screening. The white list concept has already been adopted in Australia and New Zealand, and seems to mean that all “exotic” (non-native) species would have to be pre-approved for importation through a variety of tests. Right now, importation is relatively unrestricted unless the plant you are trying to import is on a “black list.” Recently, the USDA leveraged additional restrictions requiring all imported seeds to be accompanied by a “phytosanitary certificate” – the best I can figure out is that this certificate shows the seeds are free of weeds. But NAPPRA and the white list are both moves that would shift the burden of proof on importation. NAPPRA creates a new category (“Not Approved Pending Pest Risk Assessment”) that would basically put a hold on some imports while their risk is assessed. It is not a white list. The white list was originally proposed by Bruce Babbit when he was the chair of the National Invasive Species Council. The major argument against the white list seems to be that it risks corporatizing species – the kinds of testing that would be required to get “clean listed” would be very expensive and only affordable by major corporations. One proposal that has been floated is, evidently, to give the patent rights for the form of life to the corporation that bankrolls its testing; additionally, it has been proposed that the tester gain immunity if the species in fact becomes invasive. Theodoropoulos argues that NAPPRA (which is not quite a white list, in that will “initially list taxa of plants for planting that, to our knowledge, have not yet been imported into the United States but present a potential risk”) is the “camel’s nose in the tent” of the white list – note the word “initially” there.

The USDA’s evidence is bad. Theodoropoulos says that the three pests cited as reasons for the NAPPRA would not be stopped by it (briefly, citrus longhorned beetle came on maple trees but maple trees were already present here; Asian longhorned beetles are on untreated wood products not covered by NAPPRA; and Ralstonia solanacearum race 3 biovar 2 was found on geraniums which were already present in the US).

Exotic species aren’t so bad. Here’s where it gets a little strange. I had always thought (maybe reflexively, although I’d certainly read a bunch about invasive species for debate preparation) that exotic species were bad. Like, really bad. There’s all kinds of information across the Internets about this. Evidently the USDA’s main source for the costs of invasive species is a 2000 paper by Pimentel, et al. (it can be downloaded here, as well as any number of similar papers). The best part of Theodoropoulos’ email is his critique of their cost estimate, which I quote here for all the cat lovers among us:

In order to justify NAPPRA, the USDA cites Pimentel et al. (2000) as their primary source for the costs to society of non-indigenous species. This paper has been shown to be pseudoscientific and an example of serious misrepresentation  many of the “costs” are grossly over-inflated and have no actual economic basis whatsoever. For example, economic loss from cats is placed at $17 billion, fully 12% of the total, yet this figure is derived through completely speculative estimates of the number of birds killed by pet and feral cats, then valuing each bird at $30 through a contorted and unjustifiable logic involving birdwatchers, hunters, EPA fines, and the costs of rearing birds by ornithologists for release. This figure is a “value” essentially picked out of the air and entirely outside of actual economic costs – no actual money was spent or lost on account of cat predation on birds. The estimate also did not account for economic savings provided by the number of “pest” birds like starlings taken by cats, nor was any accounting made of the tremendous economic gains from rodent control (the original reason for the long association between cats and man), nor of the value of the cats based on dollars spent acquiring, feeding, and providing veterinary care for pet cats. No estimate of any differential in predation rates between cats and missing native predators was included. While cats are not plants, it is important to note this as an example of the poor quality of Pimentel et al.’s data and reasoning, as well as the professional misconduct that this represents. If the USDA is citing this sort of misinformation to justify NAPPRA, this demonstrates a level of scientific incompetence that should disqualify the Department from making any determinations under NAPPRA.

There is no doubt that some invasive species, like the much-maligned zebra mussel, are bad, right? Not so fast, says Theodoropoulos. He claims that zebra mussels have improved water quality and clarity in the Great Lakes, leading to improved fish populations and decreased eutrophication. When you add in the argument that there’s no such thing as an “exotic” species, things begin to seem a lot more complicated.

We can’t determine what species will be “invasive.” Theodoropoulos points out that we simply do not have good methods for risk assessment – we can’t even assess what species may become “invasive,” since “invasiveness” is by definition a relationship between any number of other plants, animals, etc. in an ecosystem. As an example, consider the humble asparagus fern (not a “fern” at all, as it turns out). It is widely used all over the US but considered to be highly invasive in Florida – presumably because of climate conditions. This casts some doubt on the reliability of the “risk assessment” part of NAPPRA, especially as it related to stopping invasive species.

When researching this post, I found the website for the Center for Invasive Species and Ecosystem Health – interesting for any number of reasons, but mostly because I

Vinca...seems harmless, right?

was able to find and name all of the horrible vines that continue to infest our yard despite repeated diggings and prunings and burnings. Without fail, the recommendations for getting rid of these things involve combinations of pesticides I’ve never heard of and don’t particularly want to purchase.

Take the vinca major on the right (it’s periwinkle to some). It’s commonly sold in nurseries, and would not be held by NAPPRA, or white listed, or anything, since it’s already here. In our climate it is highly invasive. In New Mexico it is happily contained, makes some nice flowers, and that’s about it. I hate that it strangles our tomatoes and won’t go away, but I’m not about to go buy a bunch of pesticides to pour on it. We eat stuff that comes out of that soil, after all.

After all this, I’m not sure I have an opinion on NAPPRA. It doesn’t seem especially well conceived, and I do know that the US has fairly stringent laws regarding control of noxious weeds that should solve much of the problem. I am very sympathetic to the work done by J.L. Hudson and others trying to preserve global biodiversity by encouraging propagation of rare and endangered species. In particular, I am appalled at the idea of patenting those species, especially as a payoff for dubious-at-best risk assessment. I wish there was more of a moral to this story – especially for those of you who have struggled through to the end of this long post. Myself, I’m taking away the idea that even issues that seem obvious (“exotic species are bad”) are more complicated than they seem, and that their solutions may create other problems. Also I’m thinking about what I’m going to plant in the spring.

This all started when I decided to read Michael Pollan’s book Second Nature during a recent trip to the beach. It’s a book about gardening, and this year’s pretty much failed gardening efforts (tomatoes not so good, only a handful of cucumbers, misjudged flower plantings, but scads and scads of basil) inspired me to read up on the subject. I found myself really captivated by Pollan’s essay on gardening catalogs. He talks about the different ways the major catalogs seem to represent different class positions and expectations about what flowers, gardens, and gardening is for:

After you’ve read a dozen or so catalogs, you start to realize that the differences between them are not so much in the varieties of plants and seeds they offer, for there is a great deal of overlap, as in the distinctive way each of them chooses to imagine the garden. Among other things, a garden is a form of self-expression, and we page through the various catalogs looking for the elements of a vocabulary that suits us, that can give body to our wishes. From White Flower Farm or Wayside Gardens we can have a perennial border that fairly bristles with class distinctions, floral testimony to our sophistication from Harris or Park or Gurney’s we can order a middle-class garden that proudly announces to the neighbors our family’s enterprise, independence, and togetherness; from Johnny’s Selected Seeds we can get a garden that reflects our environmental consciousness; and from Seeds Blum or J.L. Hudson one that proclaims our political convictions, in particular our zeal to protect the planet’s diversity from the depredations of big business. (p. 206)

I was interested. I ordered all the major catalogs immediately, despite lacking the disposable income to experiment with ordering plants by mail, no matter how lovely they are promised to be. One of the first to arrive was the J.L. Hudson catalog (the website itself is worth a visit), which was just as weird and wonderful as I thought it might be – it is a small-type catalog without much in the way of illustrations but liberally sprinkled with quotations from Emma Goldman and William Burroughs and full of plants I’ve never heard of but found myself wanting to order just to see if I could get them to grow.

J.L. Hudson sells seeds from two lists. First, there is the “Reserved Access List.” To order seeds from this list, you have to agree to the Reserved Access terms, which basically include agreeing not to complain when you can’t get the seeds to germinate (plants on this list seem to be difficult to germinate and rare or endangered)  and agreeing to propagate and share the seed where possible without trying to make or enforce intellectual property claims on the seeds or plants. Also, from this list there are no refunds or replacements. The other list is regular, and does not contain these caveats. From the bulk of the non-reserved catalog, you can order any number of plants from the mundane to the highly unusual. We’ve got our eye on some watermelons for next year.

The proprietor of J.L. Hudson makes it clear that you cannot call him. But his site does spell out, in sometimes excruciating detail, everything you need to know to place an order. If you choose to complain about the service they offer, you might want to make sure you have your story straight, as these exchanges demonstrate.

I was so compelled by the strangeness of the seed bank that I agreed to be on their mailing list. Which is how I learned about the NAPPRA. That law establishes a category of plants for planting whose importation is Not Authorized Pending Pest Risk Analysis (NAPPRA). I’m going to break this post up into two parts, because what I learned about the white list, NAPPRA, and the debate about invasive species deserves a whole different post. In the meantime, may I suggest that anyone remotely interested in gardening spend some time poking around the Hudson seedbank?