Category: No Politics Friday

There is a lot of buzz about the Super Bowl commercials run by various automakers this year.
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I did not watch much of the game and the few I've watched online have been underwhelming. It's hard to get excited when you remember that ads used to look like this:

Or if you want to up the Gee Golly-ness a few hundred percent, you can always enjoy the Jam Handy produced GM instructional videos of similar vintage. If nothing else, watch the first minute of Part 2 to see the boss's locker room oration:

People of my age are left to wonder if the Fifties were actually anything like these contemporary media suggest – implying that everyone in America was on strong psychoactive stimulants for an entire decade – or if the Hollywood version of 1950s America was simply an elaborate cover. Either way, I am both amused and terrified of this stuff.

By the way, Jam Handy was an Olympic medal winner in 1904 – and quite possibly insane, judging by the films he left behind.

As little as the weather excites me as a topic of conversation – especially in the form of hundreds of "OMG snow!!1!!" Facebook updates – I have to admit as a native Chicagoan that this is pretty stunning:

Lake Shore Drive reduced to a parking lot of abandoned cars is one of those things we would expect to see only in the midst of the apocalypse or after the Commie A-bombs started raining down. Still, it is worth noting that by Thursday morning LSD (and most of the rest of Chicago) was open to traffic.
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Compare this to the Blizzard of '77 in western New York and southern Ontario, which shut down Buffalo – Buffalo! – for nearly two full weeks. Snow was piled up to traffic lights and power lines in some areas and cleanup crews needed to use metal detectors to find cars buried under 30 foot drifts of rock-hard snow. I mean, that's some crazy crap.

So despite my general distaste for weather related chit-chat, today's topic is "Holy crap I thought we were going to die and we ended up having to eat Steve from Accounts Payable" weather tales.

Sound off in the comments. If at least one of you hasn't been through a category 4 hurricane, a tsunami, or the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius I'm going to be surprised.
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And disappointed.

Because "no politics" doesn't always mean that Fridays will be full of funny.

Frontline has been knocking it out of the park this season and I just got around to watching "Facing Death", a highly recommended look at patients and families in intensive care units making decisions about using advanced technology to prolong the lives of patients with no hope of recovery. We see respirators in comatose stroke victims, cancer patients in their final days, and $250,000 bone marrow transplants that buy terminal patients a week or so (at best) of poor quality life.

It is easy for the home viewer to watch these patients and think "Give it up, man." The doctors in this hospital are remarkably frank, as I imagine most doctors in those situations prefer to be. They let patients know in no uncertain terms that additional, intensive, and often expensive treatments are not likely to prolong life and offer no hope of recovery. At best, it buys a small amount of time that might be spent heavily sedated, comatose, or in agonizing pain. The family members who refuse to take their 90 year old mother off the respirator seem delusional to us. We would all like to think that we would be more rational in the same circumstances. Call me skeptical.

Is any of this worth it? Do doctors need to do an even better job of telling people "Look, this half-million dollar liver transplant is going to buy you a week or two and then you are going to die anyway" or are they already too eager to talk patients they consider terminal or hopeless out of treatment? When doctors do advise radical procedures to terminal patients, are they doing it to "practice"/experiment or do they actually think that it will offer meaningful benefits? This must be a very hard line for health care providers to toe. I can imagine cold, emotionless doctors who write off patients with terminal diseases at the drop of a hat, potentially denying treatments that might provide legitimate benefits. I can also imagine doctors who are unrealistically optimistic, insisting on throwing the kitchen sink at every patient no matter how hopeless. There is no easy way to balance those concerns.

People die in hospitals much more often today than ever before. We see this as progress, a sign of the broadening of access to advanced medical care. It is fair to question, though, what is accomplished by spending limited resources and obscene amounts of money to treat people who are barely alive and aren't going to get better. Shouldn't the patients tell the doctor "No more"? Shouldn't the next of kin face reality and take Mom off the heart-lung-dialysis machine after months without improvement?

From a moral or practical standpoint it is a slam dunk. Resources are better spent on patients who might actually improve with treatment, and literal billions of dollars are spent on mechanical life extending interventions that serve no real purpose. I have reservations nonetheless.

My opinion stems not from a religious or moral principle but from a sense of caution. Until we are in that position ourselves, none of us can say definitively how we will react and what we would want – for ourselves or our kin. Who really knows what happens when we reach the end? Anyone who still has meaningful levels of brain activity has some kind of quality of life. Maybe the last day is when we have the vision / dream that explains the meaning of life. Maybe one more day with the family, even if unable to move or speak, is worth any amount of money. Maybe the small amount of extra time is enough for people to figure things out and make peace with what is happening to them.

Before you grab the pitchforks, let me reiterate that I do recognize practicality as an issue. People who are brain dead should not be sustained. Bone marrow and organs should be directed toward younger, healthier patients who might actually recover.

Doctors and patients do need to do a better job of saying "There is no hope for improvement. Further treatment beyond making you comfortable is futile.

" Some people can't let go and waste hundreds of thousands of dollars and man-hours seeking a miracle recovery up to the very last minute. Nonetheless, never having been in that position (directly or as the family member making decisions on a dying person's behalf – I've been pretty damn lucky so far) I am hesitant to argue too strongly against end-of-life medical expenses. Sure, the 30% of all healthcare costs spent in the last year of life could be seen as "waste". Maybe it is. Maybe doctors should tell terminal patients to do what humans have been doing for thousands of years – go home, go to bed, and wait for the end. But at the same time, we have to recognize that we are making some mighty big assumptions based on how little we collectively know about what happens at the end and what value, if any, is derived from buying small increments of additional time at great cost.

Isn't science great? It's out there every day finding ways to cure diseases, feed the hungry, help the environment, and make the inconveniences of modern life a little less inconvenient. Without the scientific advances of the last century our average lifespan would be 25 years shorter and mankind would still be spending the vast majority of its human capital trying not to starve to death every winter. Every day the billions of dollars funneled into scientific research and development yield new rewards to humanity.
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New Mexico State University's chili breeding program has created a new "extra large, medium hot jalapeno pepper precisely optimized for jalapeno poppers." The NuMex Jalmundo will change the menus at bowling alleys forever.

The peppers, created at NMSU's Chile Pepper Institute, are a hybrid of bell pepper and jalapeno.
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The bell pepper provided a larger interior cavity, perfect for stuffing with cheese and then frying. The Jalmundo has a heat level of 17,000 Scoville Heat Units, about double the average jalapeno pepper, but still well below the 1,359,000 of the Naga Viper.
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As for the name, Paul Bosland — the co-founder of the nonprofit Chile Pepper Institute — explained…the name Jalmundo is a contraction of jalapeno and the Spanish word for world (mundo), implying that it is as big as the world.

Well, now that we've settled that…

Look, I know a number of things to be true:

1. Southerners generally cannot drive for shit even in the most pristine road and weather conditions.
2. It doesn't snow much in the South.
3. When #2 is not true, everything shuts down and few people attempt to drive.
4. There are no plows or salt trucks in most of the South.

Combined, these facts mean that very few people in a place like Georgia have any experience driving in typical Midwestern/Northeastern winter conditions. I would not expect anyone here to be good at it per se. But for the love of all that is holy, come on, people. Most aspects of winter driving require only a basic understanding of the laws of physics.

Wait. Maybe that's the problem.

In any event, in future "Snowpocalypses" please try to bear a few key pieces of information in mind or, failing that, to consult this website liberally on your mobile device (not whilst driving, of course).

The Basic Premise: Snow and ice reduce traction. Logically, then, the most dangerous parts of driving in ice and snow are accelerating and decelerating.

Your goal is to maintain a nice, reasonable, consistent speed. You can drive in relative safety in snow, solid ice, slush, or freezing rain as long as you remember three things:

1) Slow down. Your F-250 King Cab 4×4 does not make you invincible. Your BMW X5 is not a yuppie snow plow. You can't go 20 over the limit on ice. As for all of you speeding along in your broke-ass 1994 Chevy Lumina on bald summer tires, as much as I would like your experiment to run its course and for you to be removed from the gene pool, I have no intention of being taken with you. All that said…

2) Speed the hell up. Listen to me. Listen as hard as you can. DRIVING 10 MPH IS NOT SAFE. In snow or in any other conditions. It is in fact terribly dangerous. What is wrong with you people? You are not driving through a Cambodian minefield with a collection of Faberge Eggs balanced carefully on your hood. It's just snow. Yes, driving really fast is dangerous. But if you ride your brake, everyone has to slam on the brakes when they come upon you or the massive line of cars forming right on your bumper.

Plus…

3) You cannot ride the brake up an icy incline. Physics. Basic goddamn physics, kids. I saw no fewer than five cars stuck on inclines on Monday, each spinning its wheels like a coked-up teenager. Listen very carefully. If you do not give it some gas while going UP a hill, you are going to lose speed. Eventually you will lose so much speed that you will stop moving. Then when you decide to punch the gas, you will spin your wheels.
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Why? Because you are on fucking ice, "Son." Your car will just slide off in some non-forward direction.
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When you reach the ditch or the big pile of snow on the side of the road, you will be stuck. Or you will hit the car behind or next to you. Physics, people. Incline. No traction. Speed up.

I am glad we had this talk. Next week I will cover merging into moving highway traffic, parallel parking, and other mysterious skills of the Midwestern Yankee.

(Note: NPF is being observed on Thursday so that the coveted 2010 CotY Award can be given out on Friday, Dec. 31)

Friend and reader Pauline V. brought to my attention something so disturbing that I cannot help but share it. She discovered, under circumstances about which I desire to know absolutely nothing, that there is a "Fantasies" section (warning: there are no pictures, but it is definitely "adult" content) on Tonya Harding's official website. Again, I do not want to know how or why she discovered this. Plausible deniability. The important thing is that we collectively come to the realization that anyone on the planet with an internet connection can read 1607 user-generated works of fiction about engaging in a variety of sexual activities with the disgraced Olympian, amateur wedding night video star, and female boxer.

Sadly, the "Rejected Fantasies" link is no longer functional. To think that one could submit something that fails to qualify as one of the 1607 best Tonya Harding sex fantasy stories on the internet is…disturbing. But the internet is all about disturbing. It is approximately 5% useful (or inoffensively useless) information and 95% demented, horrible shit. As much as I love and take full advantage of the internet, I hate the way that it forces us to be so keenly aware of all of the crazy and stupid in the world.

Prior to the internet, the world community of people who want to write amateur porn about Tonya Harding would have been unable to come together to indulge their mutual interest. Since the anonymity afforded by the internet is essential to getting people to participate in creepy shit, it's not like this could have been done pre-internet in a magazine or something. So without the internet the rest of us could have lived our entire lives blissfully unaware of the fact that anything like this exists in the world.

Yes, I've focused on a rather esoteric and silly example here. But the internet is constantly forcing us to be aware of every creepy-ass fetish, hobby, interest, and opinion our fellow humans have. This is the downside of this amazing tool for communicating and sharing information – we get our news instantaneously and can chat with friends across the globe, but we must accept the occasional forced recognition of the existence of things like "furries", Ukranian mail order bride services, and the parade of horrors that is Craigslist.

It is both fitting and logical, I suppose, that a resource offering literally a world of information would end up providing us with a little too much information on a regular basis. I can tell that some of you are skeptical, but I can guarantee that you are a happier person right now than you will be after you watch 45 seconds of this:

"And God wept" is the next line, I believe.

Three things that are pretty to look at in a very similar way.

1) At long last I got around to watching the Edward Burtynsky documentary Manufactured Landscapes. I can't recommend it highly enough. The movie begins with a 10 minute long panning shot of a Chinese factory that appears to be about a mile long and in which nearly every iron on Earth is made. It goes uphill from there. Despite taking place almost entirely in China, the footage from the "breaking yards" for old ships in Chittagong, Bangladesh. The film is a refreshing reminder of how overblown the "China's taking over the world" rhetoric is. Sure, it's a big country with growing political, economic, and military power. It also has problems that are staggering in both number and magnitude, and it will be a minor miracle if they have any potable water in 20 years let alone dominion over the western world.

2) The Daily Mail has a magnificent set of previously unseen photos of Niagara Falls…dry as a bone. In the same year that American astronauts first landed on the Moon, the Army Corps of Engineers diverted the flow around the falls for several months to clean up the remnants of two massive rock slides. "Eerily calm" doesn't begin to describe it. Wicked video of the flow coming to a halt is available as well.

3) In honor of Voyager 1 – still transmitting after 33 years and from 10 billion miles away – reaching an astronomical milestone as the first man-made object to reach the heliopause, check out this sweet-ass gallery of photos taken by V1 and its sibling Voyager 2. It includes what I believe is the single most incredible image from the era of interplanetary explanation – the sulfur dioxide plume of a volcano in mid-eruption on Io:

Shit, dude.

I am not proud of this, but one of the few things I actually watch on TV with any semblance of regularity is the Bravo show Tabatha's Salon Takeover. Like many reality shows, it consists of a star (Tabatha Coffey, a bizarre looking, severe Brit) teaching Basic Adult Skills 101 to a bunch of complete idiots. Isn't that what most reality shows really boil down to? Whether they're about weight loss, finding a job, kicking booze, finding a date, or running a hair salon it all plays out identically. There are a bunch of adults who are failing at something because they are emotionally about 14 years old. The host/star saves the day by introducing them to revolutionary concepts that most people should have learned before they started to grow hair in funny places.

Salon Takeover is amusing in part because (again, as is common for this television genre) each episode is remarkably similar. How much you want to watch it basically boils down to how much you enjoy the host's personality. In every episode Tabatha teaches the owner of a failing salon business how to turn things around. Her advice consists – in its entirety, episode after episode – of the following revolutionary ideas:

1) The boss should fire or discipline employees who don't show up to work or are terrible employees
2) Someone should clean the salon, preferably daily (note: this has never occurred to a single person on this show)
3) Someone should take out the trash
4) Employees should come to work every day at their scheduled time
5) Employees should not drink hard liquor at work
6) The owner should in some way keep track of the business's revenue and expenses. Perhaps on a spreadsheet.
7) Employees should not swear at clients or talk loudly about their recent anal 3-way while clients are present
8) Employees should not steal money or equipment from the salon

That's it. And the owners are routinely amazed at how their business improves. None of this ever occurred to them, or for some reason they couldn't implement these wild ideas. Basically, Tabatha is a big, odd-looking prop with lots of British witticisms who teaches people how to act like something resembling an adult.

Here's the interesting part. There is a "How much financial trouble are you in?" segment in the introduction of each episode. Week after week the owners report being hundreds of thousands – sometimes close to a million – dollars in debt. And no matter how many times I see this, I ask the same question every time: is it really that easy to get a bank loan for half a million bucks? I mean, do banks really give out six- to seven-figure small business loans to people who look, sound, and like Jerry Springer contestants and can't do 8th grade math?
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People with no collateral, education, or experience running a business? Is "I worked in a salon for a few years" really a good enough argument for a loan officer?
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If these knuckleheads – Can I repeat one more time that some of them do not realize that they should keep an accounting of money coming in and out of the business? – can walk into a bank and walk out with half a million bucks to open a salon (or whatever), what in the hell am I doing? What in the hell are any of us doing? Why don't we all just go sign up for our 0,000?

If these mouthbreathers can get a loan, anyone can. And not you, I, nor anyone else could possibly be worse at running a business than any of these people. Hell, I wouldn't even need the rescue from Tabatha. I already know that a service oriented business should be cleaned. And that we shouldn't drink hard liquor at work.

What am I missing? If it's really that easy, then fuck this. I'm opening a bar. You know what will be on the menu.

This is hardly recent news, but I just found out that the U.S. Coast Guard no longer uses Morse code. Apparently its use in communicating with ships at sea ended in 1995. The USCG was actually one of the last holdouts, with many other nations and organizations abandoning it earlier. Like all historically important technology that becomes outdated, there was considerable emotion displayed when it passed from the scene. The USCG's last Morse code dispatch (read the full text here) sadly acknowledged that satellite and GPS-based technologies obsoleted Morse code but their cold precision lacked the romance of a lone radio operator communicating by dots and dashes. It ended: "What hath God wrought?" and the sadness of the operators is apparent throughout. The French Navy was in an even more lyrical mood, signing off for good with "Calling all. This is our last cry before our eternal silence.

" Damn.

It is not hard to understand the sadness of people who devote a substantial portion of their careers to a technology that becomes obsolete.
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There is also a melancholy aspect to tossing a technology that played such an important historical role onto the trash heap as soon as it is improved upon. Email and the GPS are undoubtedly more convenient and helpful than letter-writing or Morse code, but it's a shame that we so quickly forget that people did just fine for a couple hundred years with only pen, paper, and the mailman.

This train of thought led me to the state of communication technology today and the realization that, although my mind can't comprehend the details, in 30 years we will be looking back on Droids and 4G iPhones with the same kind of nostalgia for primitive technologies. I certainly don't mean that they are primitive today, but history suggests that what we consider cutting-edge today will quickly be surpassed until we reach some sort of singularity.

But as much as I know that smartphones and other recent developments will become outmoded, I can't begin to wrap my head around how. What will be the next great leap forward in communication technology? We already have nearly instantaneous access to any bit of information on the planet from mobile devices and we can communicate to any corner of the globe instantaneously by text, voice, video, and so on. How can we improve upon this? To some extent this is a silly question, because any of us who knew with certainty what is to be the Next Big Thing would be busy inventing it, investing in it, and getting rich. But even in the broadest conceptual terms, even assuming technologies that do not currently exist, I lack the imagination to foresee how we can improve upon instant access to the sum of all human knowledge. Much as there are no physical frontiers remaining in the world, it seems to me that we are quickly reaching the point at which electronic and technological frontiers have also been exhausted.

But I'm sure people say the same thing with every new development.

Like everyone who failed to comprehend how technology could get more advanced than the telegraph, the radio, and then television, I am certain that time will prove me wrong.

What do you think our next Great Leap Forward will be? I'm stumped.