Rachel Ray = Terrorist?

Yesterday Dunkin’ Donuts pulled a commercial featuring Rachel Ray wearing a black and white scarf that they thought could be portraying her as a terrorist sympathizer.   Dunkin’ Donuts, really?  Really?  They were afraid that the ignorant American public would confuse her scarf with a keffiyeh, a symbol for murderous jihad.  See for yourself.  I think the ad makes it clear that Dunkin’ Donuts is declaring a jihad against rational Americans, not to mention a jihad against good tasting coffee (but I think that just might be a west coast bias…).

An iced coffee kind of Friday

It’s telling that my happiness index is proportionately related to my consumption of iced coffee and whether or not the office is closing early today. Fortunately, both are positive.

- Awesome New Republic is back! I didn’t even know they broke up, but Stereogum has the scoop:

…around the time we broke up, we were starting to get into a lot of physical fights, beating and cutting each other up, throwing drums at heads, running over feet with trucks, forcibly vomiting on pedal boards…it got pretty ugly.

Sounds disturbing. Glad things are better. Check out Stereogum for a leaked track and some more details on the cleverly-named forthcoming album, Rational Geographic.

- Joe Biden shoots from the hip. That’s why I wish he hadn’t had to bow out of the race for the nomination:

… [Biden] chastised Republican nominee-to-be John McCain for his recent attempt to paint Barack Obama as a patsy by saying that Hamas and Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega favored the Democrat.

“What the hell is that?” he says now, in obvious disgust.

[via a mediocre Boston Globe article]

 - Joan Acocella has a great essay in this week’s New Yorker on a physical sickness as close to being cured as the common cold: the hangover.

Kingsley Amis, who was, in his own words, one of the foremost drunks of his time, and who wrote three books on drinking, described … the opening of Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” with the hero discovering that he has been changed into a bug, as the best literary representation of a hangover.

- Sorry, Apple TV. The Roku gets my blessing.

- Mike Fro wonders, why does Hulu advertise for big box stores, cruises and other shit that is irrelevant to their target demographic? Kmart was the recent misappropriator of ad dollars:

Again, they don’t understand their audience, do they really think that people with families (it was about buying outdoor play equipment for kids and family activities) are watching rated R movies on hulu??  I bet they won’t catch on for another year or so, until the lower people in the advertising departments of these  companies to get promotions.

Hopefully one day I’m one of the lower folks in Hulu’s advertising department

Punch Trunk

Behold, a Chuck Jones cartoon that everyone has seen but no one can ever seem to find. My favorite scene is the elephant in the birdbath:

 

Please observe the stereotypical representations of the Irish drunk (red hair) and Freudian therapy (“It all started when father wouldn’t take me to the circus…”). Also, I think every character except the elephant has a cigarette in its mouth at some point.

Unrelated, the sky was ominous in my neighborhood last night:

 

People are paying $7,500 for Geo Metros

Maybe not that one, but the Geo Metro is making a huge comeback. So huge that people are paying up to seven times the Kelly Blue Book Value on eBay. Why? Because it gets 58 mpg when outfitted with a 3-cylinder engine and a 5-speed manual. Bonus for the truly ecologically minded – buying used means the car has zero “carbon debt.” The Prius doesn’t burn off its carbon debt until it hits 50,000 miles or so.  

Has the world gone nuts for the Geo Metro? [Automobile magazine blog]

The whole carbon debt thing is explained eloquently by Wired:

Because there are about 113,000 BTUs of energy in a gallon of gasoline, the Prius has consumed the equivalent of 1,000 gallons of gasoline before it reaches the showroom. Think of it as a carbon debt — one you won’t pay off until the Prius has turned over 46,000 miles or so.

Say goodbye (again) to plastic bags

A recent law passed in San Francisco places a ban on plastic bags being given away by chain pharmacies (eg Walgreens & Rite Aid). This comes on the heels of the recently inacted ban on plastic bags in grocery stores. This story has begun to sweep the country & world with additional cities jumping on to help reduce waste. Such cities include Oakland, CA: Portland, Or; New Haven, Ct; London, England; and Paris, France.