February 2010 Archives

Looks like the folks at PETA are up to their old tricks again, and this time the focus of their attention-getting, issue-obscuring campaign is none other than media anti-darling Tiger Woods. Unless you've been hiding under a soundproof rock since Thanksgiving (lucky!), you'll recall that Woods is in hot water with his fans and endorsers due to the uncovering of his many extramarital affairs and alleged sex addiction. Well, the PETA people recall it too, and they came up with this billboard as a way to capitalize on the media frenzy:

The original plan was to display the billboard in Woods' neighborhood of Windermere, Florida. Ostensibly so that people will spay and neuter their pets, though if you ask me that message is lost in the sensationalist nature of the campaign (and was kind of a stretch to begin with - who calls their pet a "little tiger"?).

Well, there's been a change of plans. According to yesterday's LA Times blog, Woods' lawyers have put a stop to the billboard and a spokesperson for PETA says the campaign is "on hold at this time." Given PETA's history of legal issues and apologies when it comes to offending their audiences and using celebrity images without permission, one has to wonder if they knew this reaction was coming.

Now don't get me wrong - I'm all for spaying and neutering pets. But to equate the reproductive status of a house cat with the current Tiger Woods scandal is a little much in my opinion. A human being, whose actions have hurt his family as well as the women involved (and his fans, and his staff, and his endorsers, etc.) shouldn't be made an example for the pet owners of his community, and he shouldn't be neutered, either (though there are undoubtedly a few people out there who wish he would be). Honestly, is anything about this billboard actually prompting you to get your pets fixed? Or is the focus somewhere else? (Like on Tiger Woods and his sexploits, perhaps?)

Since PETA gets into hot water, well, just about every time they launch a campaign, I wouldn't be surprised if they knew this one would fail from the start and just ran with it for the media attention. And hey, I guess it worked. Kind of.

What do you think? Was this billboard too much?

[Image: New York Daily News]

On Wednesday, I wrote about how the United States was ranked the laziest nation in the world by the Daily Beast, based on calorie consumption and television habits. And let's face it: as a nation, we're in pretty bad shape, too. When three out of five adults are overweight or obese, there's clearly something wrong with our national exercise ethos.

But what if I told you that it may not be just an aversion to exercise that's causing our collective waistline to grow a little each year? According to new research on sitting, the amount of time we spend in chairs may be as big a culprit as anything. In fact, the study says, even if you exercise every day, you're likely to negate those efforts to stay in shape by the amount of time you spend sitting down. Even standing still provides more of a full-body workout than you might realize: you have to tense your leg muscles, keep your back erect, and use your shoulders to maintain balance. Sitting, meanwhile, is begging for atrophy.

What to do? We need to work, right? And this study is relevant mainly to those whose jobs require long hours at a desk.

The author Philip Roth writes standing up, in a cottage off of his main house in Connecticut. I've always thought of this quirk as a manifestation of Roth's extremely active mind, and a reason for the vitality of his prose. Now I wonder if it might also be the reason that, at 76, he's still churning out a novel every year and looks as spry as he did at 60.

While you may not have the option to stand while you work, you can still get more exercise at your desk than you might know. Just standing up and walking to the water cooler or stretching during the commercial breaks can make a big difference. And a few times a day, try to heed this advice from Mr. James Brown:

[Image: MrChrome from Wikimedia Commons]

You have to give Glenn Beck points for creative logic. In this clip from the Daily Kos, Jon Stewart of the Daily Show tries to make sense of Fox News's leading enfant terrible as Beck uses his "magic erasable truth board" to show how progressivism is a disease that's spreading across this country. Note Beck's distinction between "revolution" and "evolution." It's truly astounding. What's even more astounding is that to millions of Americans, Glenn Beck actually makes sense.

Naked Came the Manatee, maybe, but if only it had a warm winter coat.

2010's record cold streak has taken its toll on Florida's already endangered manatees. When temperatures drop below 68 degrees manatees must move to warm water refuges or face death. As of February 12, the below-normal temperatures and cold stress have claimed 167 manatees, according to records with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. "That doesn't include the ones that were too decomposed to tell if it was cold stress," Martina DeWit, a veterinarian at the Commission told News Journal Online. Not included in the numbers are newborn deaths and several dozen manatees that could not be recovered from the sea. Altogether, in just two months, almost as many manatees have died in Florida (301) as in all of last year (388).

According to News-Press, manatees, in search of warmer waters, are migrating to power plants and other warm-water areas across Florida. 897 manatees were spotted by John Reynolds of the Mote Marine Laboratory's Manatee Research Program, in the Florida Power & Light warm-water discharge on the Orange River. Florida's important coral reefs and fish are also having a hard time this winter. "We hope it gets warm soon," DeWit said last week. For the sake of the manatees, I'm sure we can all agree with her.

According to a rather unscientific study conducted by the Daily Beast, the United States is the laziest country in the world. It ranks first for calories consumed and time spent watching television, and third for "sports aversion" and Internet usage. In those latter categories, Americans are bested by Canadians, South Koreans, Turks, and Britons.

But being averse to sports and spending time online don't equate slothfulness, in my humble opinion. I don't like sports and I spend a lot of time on the Internet, but I'm not lazy. The Internet is a professional tool for millions of people -- I'm on it right now in order to write this post -- and not liking sports has nothing to do with how active a person might be. I know many runners, cyclists, yoga enthusiasts, and swimmers who would rather stare at the wall than watch a football game.

So let's focus on the first two categories, which the U.S. handily won: calories consumed per capita and time spent on the boob tube. These do equate slothfulness. Calories are energy, and if the energy is not used, it becomes dead weight. And unlike the Internet, TV can hardly be a platform for multi-tasking. When did you ever see someone "working" by watching TV? (Television critics don't count.)

This weekend, Michelle Obama pitched her plan to curb child obesity in the U.S. to the nation's governors. One in three children in this country are overweight or obese, she said, and in the Hispanic and African-American communities, the percentage is nearly half. To solve the nation's health problems, she said, we need to start with our nation's children.

No doubt, this is a crucial part of the puzzle. But what if our nation's kids see their parents and other adults gorging themselves on junk food and avoiding exercise like it'll give them cancer? The lessons will fall on deaf ears -- pleas of "do as I say, not as I do" notwithstanding.

The only way to fight this epidemic and shed the unfortunate distinction of being the laziest nation in the world, of course, is for us to change our habits. Kids learn by example, period. If we tell them one thing and do the other, they'll do what we say until they no longer have to and then do as we do. That is, we'll hold our gold medal in sloth for generations to come unless we make an effort, now, to lose it.

[Image: DailyBeast.com]

Later today, Bloom Energy, the clean energy start-up, will finally unveil its top secret refrigerator-sized unit: The Bloom Box. If all the hype is correct, the Bloom Box will potentially be the revolutionary fuel-cell system that green technologists have been waiting for for decades, the so-called "the Holy Grail of clean energy." Bloom Energy's idealistic CEO K.R. Sridhar, a 49-year-old scientist-turned entrepreneur, was on 60 Minutes this Sunday, talking about how he's like to see one in every home. The Bloom Box is a fuel-cell capable of running up to 100 homes and sells for $700,000 to $800,000, is powered wirelessly through fossil-fuel, bio-fuel, or even solar power. The company hopes to to roll out a smaller home version for about $3,000 a unit within the next five to ten years.

Google, eBay, FedEx, Staples and Walmart are among the first 20 customers that have signed on, giving the machine some hefty celebrity endorsements. eBay's CEO John Donahoe has said that Bloom Boxes were installed at their corporate campus months ago and the boxes already saved the company over $100,000 in electricity bills. "It's been very successful thus far. [The Bloom Boxes] have done what they said they would do," says Donahoe.The San Francisco Airport also has Bloom fuel cells, according to GreenTechMedia.

We at Kenneth Cole Productions are proud to be involved with several new initiatives in support of Haiti relief efforts.

The Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) has created a great T-shirt with proceeds benefiting the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund (CBHF). We're promoting and selling the T-shirt in select Kenneth Cole retail locations, at kennethcole.com, and we've also donated our iconic West Side Highway billboard to the cause. To launch the initiative, the CFDA has produced a PSA in which Kenneth has taken part. The PSA is being aired on YouTube, Fashionair.com, Taxi TV, Facebook and Twitter.

Additionally, in March we will be hosting a shoe drive for Haiti at our retail locations across the US in partnership with Soles4Souls.

It was just a matter of time until marketers got their hands on their real desired recruits -- kids. In some social media circles, there's no need to woo mom bloggers with free samples of the latest snack chip, instead kids are doing it on their own:

In some cases children as young as seven have been offered the chance to become "mini-marketeers" to plug brands by casually dropping them into postings and conversations on social networking sites.

They can earn the equivalent of £25 a week for their online banter -- sometimes promoting things that they may not even like. Among the products being pushed are soft drinks, including Sprite and Dr Pepper, Cheestrings and a Barbie-themed MP3 player. Record labels are also using the marketing technique to promote performers such as Lady Gaga.

In a time when First Lady Michelle Obama is campaigning to help our children get healthier, this targeting of kids should make us sit up and notice. It should also demonstrate that we can rid our schools of brand-name clothes and junk food and it just doesn't doesn't seem to matter. As we continue to debate the benefits of milk, our children are online being paid to talk up junk food. And I think we know that our kids don't need to be talked into the latest concoction from a chip company.

While I don't like that FLOTUS Obama is touting BMI as a way to keep track of our children's pot bellies, I do hope that within her campaign to keep our children healthy she pushes for every school to include media literacy as a part of their curriculum. I know that each time my daughter has a project that asks for her to flip through magazines for pictures to cut out, I hover over her like a hawk due to the images that live in between the covers.

It's not enough to talk about how chubby someone is or isn't, what their BMI (I call it a bullsh!t mass index, as evidenced by Kate Harding's BMI project) is or to restrict kids from the yumminess of peanut butter cups. Instead we need a wholesale reorganization of how school lunches are funded and to teach our kids how to sniff out the B.S. in marketing and commercials. We need to stop seeing physical education and recess as something only good, wealthy and/or smart kids get to engage in.

For the record, parents should keep all their "chubby" comments in their head, and marketers should keep kids out of their chip-pushing strategies.

Now let's get moving!

[Image: letsmove.gov]

The winners of the George Polk Awards in Journalism were announced last week, and they included a number of usual suspects: The New York Times, 60 Minutes, CNN, and other major media outlets.

But there was one surprise winner, and the recipient (or recipients) are unknown to the public (and even the givers of the award), for a graphic, violent video of the gruesome death of Neda Agha-Soltan, a 26-year-old Iranian woman who was slain during the post-election protests in Tehran last June. (Viewer discretion is advised.)

In this six-minute segment from NPR's "On the Media," the curator of the George Polk Awards, John Darnton, describes the video and explains why the Polk committee selected it for this distinction. He also discusses the nature of journalism today, in which anonymous and amateur writers, videographers, and anyone with a Twitter account can make as much of an impact as the vetted outlets of mainstream media.

The video has already become an iconic piece of Iranian history, and the young woman it portrays an unfortunate symbol of the protests that erupted following Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's reelection as President of Iran over his progressive challenger, Mir Hossein-Mousavi. Many Iranians believe that Ahmadinejad's victory was rigged, and that Hossein-Mousavi should have won the election. They also viewed Hossein-Mousavi as a harbinger of a brighter future for the troubled Middle Eastern country.

[Image: Screen-grab from YouTube, via NYTimes.com]

No matter our age, many women have questions about which birth control method to use. We might have started on the pill in our 20s, but considered switching to a non-hormonal method. We may have different needs now than we did when we first considered birth control, or we may be looking into our options for the first time. But how do we figure it out without spending all day at WebMD?

Well Planned Parenthood has a widget for that!

My Method is an interactive tool that provides personalized guidance in choosing a contraceptive method. It presents users with a series of questions related to birth control that help to clarify, through questions about temperament, lifestyle, and preferences, what kinds of birth control might be the most comfortable to use on a sustained and continuous basis. Using birth control consistently and accurately is key to avoiding unintended pregnancy. Users can then locate the nearest Planned Parenthood health center and talk to someone in person about the methods recommended to them.

There are also widgets for knowing if it's time to get a STD test or just to find a Planned Parenthood clinic. Most women I know had their first Pap smear or got their first pack of pills from a Planned Parenthood clinic. For some women, it's the only affordable health center in their area.

Whether or not you end up at one of their clinics, I think the information you can gain from the widgets is worth the click.

Last Thursday marked the start of the 2010 Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week, and though this season's spectacle may be just as big as ever, the carbon footprint won't be. For the first time in Fashion Week history, the folks at Bryant Park are striving for a net of zero carbon emissions for the week.

Fashionistas, don't panic: the events have offered no fewer trappings (elaborate stages, town cars, media frenzies, aerosol cans, etc.) than previous Fashion Weeks, even those that are decidedly unfriendly to the environment. Instead, IMG, which puts on Fashion Week, is buying carbon credits from other sustainable projects to offset the 948 tons of CO2 emissions it says the shows produce. This way, when a makeup artist squirts a model's hair with an aerosol can, or a designer leaves the car running between shows, a forestry project in California and several Idaho farms will get some extra funding for their ecological efforts.

"I think it's exciting to think that our runways and lights and shows are lighting up a dairy farm in Idaho," Fern Mallis, senior vice president of IMG, said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal last week. "It is the socially and politically conscious thing to do."

Now, critics might say that the socially and politically conscious thing to do here would be to cut the carbon emissions put out by Fashion Week instead of offsetting them. It's not as if Fashion Week would screech to a halt if the designers were encouraged to take the subway and the spectators were encouraged to drink water from reusable bottles. However, a step in the right direction is a step in the right direction, and I'm sure the sustainable projects in California and Idaho aren't complaining. Now if only IMG could figure out a way to offset that pesky blizzard...

[Image: The Wall Street Journal]

In May, a new documentary will hit the theaters that anyone with even the slightest interest in education should see. The Lottery will ruffle some feathers, but as an educator myself, I can attest to the truth of its message: a vast and failing system routinely fails our nation's children, and sets them up for failure themselves. In this scenario, we all lose.

I don't know about you, but I am a huge fan of podcasts. I listen to them in the car, at my computer, at the gym, and anywhere else I can get away with wearing headphones. While my tastes run the gamut from short stories to British observational humor, I look especially forward each week to Slate's Political Gabfest. It's an often funny, always informative round table discussion of the week's political happenings hosted by a crackerjack team of Slate contributors (usually David Plotz, John Dickerson, and Emily Bazelon).

If you're a Political Gabfest listener, you may already have heard that the Gabfest team is performing live and in person at The Bookstore Café on March 3rd. The description reads: "A month after the Senate shake-up, the Gabfest gang will talk about what's brewing in the White House, Congress, and the Supreme Court, take questions, and play a drinking game with you." Doesn't that sound like a great time? (Well, as long as the drinking game doesn't involve consuming that which is brewing in the White House.)

The show is sold out, but the good news is that Housing Works is auctioning off several pairs of tickets as a fundraising effort. Hooray!

Housing Works is an organization dedicated to the dual crises of AIDS and Homelessness. Since their founding in 1990, they have provided lifesaving services such as housing, medical and mental health care, meals, job training, drug treatment, HIV prevention education, and social support to more than 20,000 homeless and low-income New Yorkers living with HIV and AIDS. Not only are they doing great things, but they are also the nation's largest minority-controlled AIDS service organization.

I love that a podcast dedicated to keeping us informed on the political landscape is pairing up with such an action-based service organization. It's like the best of both worlds! To bid on one of the pairs of tickets up for auction, visit Shop Housing Works. Don't wait too long though, bidding closes on February 24th!

[Image: Shop Housing Works]

In an ideal world, Paul A. Volcker would have been named Treasury secretary. Paul Volcker is far more attuned to the economic populist rage building in America than Tim Geithner, the current Secretary, who appears to have the big financial institutions on his speed dial (No word yet if the American voter on Main Street has equal access).

Volcker, who was at the Fed in the 80s, was on Fareed Zakaria's GPS -- the smartest hour on television, by the way (video below). "If a big non-bank institution gets in trouble and threatens the whole system, there ought to be some authority that can step in, take over that organization and liquidate it or merge it -- not save it. It's called euthanasia, not a rescue," Volcker said on the show. Paul Volcker was appointed chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System by Jimmy Carter and served, honorably until August 11, 1987. And he still has some mileage left on him, Mr. President (hint hint).

Alexandra Penney has been photographing dolls for six years, and for most of that time she has depicted them living lives of great leisure. Decked out in fake Gucci, Louis Vuitton purses, and Hong Kong Birkins, her dolls enjoyed an opulent non-existence.

But then their creator/photographer lost her life savings to Bernie Madoff, and suddenly the "Age of Excess" no longer seemed a fitting theme for Penney's work.

Chronicling her life after Madoff for The Daily Beast in a series of essays titled "The Bag Lady Papers," which has just been released in book form, Penney began revising her afternoon photo work to fit her mood. Her once rich, exuberant dolls became depressed, and some even committed suicide. Whether or not you can relate to their economically-depressed plight, Penney's post-Madoff dolls, many depicted in stark black-and-white images, are on display through February 27th at the Galerie Haas & Fuchs in New York City.

[Image: Galerie Haas & Fuchs]

A short note from a friend asked for my attention over the weekend. Her son's preschool teacher returned to his homeland of Haiti to search for his parents. He found them, but that is just the first part of what appears to be a long journey through immigration bureaucracy.

Jean-Paul Coffy is currently with his parents at a hospital and somehow was able to get their passports reissued, but now he is awaiting judgment from the American government as to whether or not he can bring them to his adopted hometown of Chicago:

...he had an appointment scheduled for Thursday with the United States Consulate in Santo Domingo to apply for temporary visas to take them to Chicago. Another possibility would be humanitarian parole, a special temporary immigration category that is rarely granted.

His case will be particularly difficult, immigration experts say, because Mr. Coffy, while a legal resident with a green card, is not a United States citizen.

I'm sure that Coffy's story is merely one of thousands just like it. Sure, he's not a U.S. citizen, but if Coffy and other Haitians living in the USA have a home and the ability to help heal their loved ones here, we should let them. We seem to be all too willing to allow orphans across borders, but here we have two elderly people with a son that already supports them from his home in Chicago, and who can offer them safety and shelter during a difficult time. I hope that our government will allow the Coffy family to come home to Chicago where they can get the medical treatment they require and give Haiti time to heal itself as well.

You can keep up to date on the Coffy family at their blog, Help Coffy.

You may not have noticed, but a lot of Americans love beer. And what better time to love beer than now, with a seemingly endless number of microbrews to choose from every time you hit a supermarket or local bar?

Most Americans today live within 10 miles of a brewery. In my neighborhood, I am a 10-minute walk from no fewer than 10 bars that feature more than a dozen beers on draft, with names like "Arrogant Bastard Ale," "Smuttynose IPA," and "Magic Hat #9." Bodegas on every corner have even more options, and there's a craft brew pub and home brewers' supply store nearby. One local Whole Foods location even sells growlers now, handy beer jugs that an employee will fill directly from one of several in-store kegs for less than you'd pay for the bottled version.

Still, as bountiful as the options may be, and as flourishing as the microbrew market might seem, the odds of any small brewery surviving are pretty dismal. Even a major success like Dogfish Head Craft Brew Ales, whose founder was the subject of a New Yorker profile in 2008, only holds about 0.0002% of the American beer market. And the likes of household names like Sierra Nevada, Rogue, and Brooklyn Brewery aren't any more secure.

They're dwarfed by the triumvirate of American beer barons: Budweiser, Miller, and Coors. And now that Budweiser has been acquired by the Dutch company inBev, and Miller and Coors have merged, small breweries have to work even harder to stay afloat.

Beer Wars, a new documentary by Anat Baron, takes you inside the curious world of American brewing to provide a little insight into how that chicory amber ale, double-white, or coffee-chocolate stout made it from the drawing room to your appreciative lips. And true to Baron's ethos, it's now widely available for free viewing online. This whimsical, fascinating film will forever change the way you think of America's libation of choice. And it will most certainly make your next beer taste just a little better.

The Olympics may have built their legacy on amateur athletes, girl- and boy-next-door types who simply put in the time to become international superstars practically overnight. But for anyone who's ever watched the Games, which is most of us, we know it's not so simple.

Olympians are extraordinary. Their ability most likely transcends even that of the most competitive, athletic people you know. In my circle of competitive runners, the best -- and I'm talking about people who win local New York City races that draw more than 5,000 participants -- are still nowhere near Olympic level. In fact, one local runner is a former Olympian, from New Zealand, and though he's now 37 years old, every time I see him at a race I know it's a wrap. When John Henwood toes the line, he almost always wins the race.

So how do Olympians become Olympians? By never losing focus, suggests a recent segment from NPR, and knowing that the only thing that separates an event's holder of 4th place from the its winner is mental toughness.

Before the Games, however, some athletes have prepared themselves by thinking of every day as the Olympics. Even on the most solitary training day, they imagine thousands of spectators, media crews trailing their every move, and the pressure of their entire careers riding on that very instant.

Listening to the NPR broadcast yesterday while cooking dinner, I couldn't help but wonder how the Olympian psychology translates to everyday people, and everyday life. Are the most successful people in any field simply those who have the determination to be the best, and the mental toughness to make it happen?

Lady GaGa slogged away in some of New York's tiniest clubs for years before she exploded into the international spotlight. Writers like Stephen King and directors like Woody Allen produce work as if their lives depended on it, even though they're both wealthy enough to never have to work again. Almost every successful entrepreneur will tell you that for years, they barely slept while building their business.

Such discipline and drive seem to be the common denominator, though I wonder if those qualities are something anyone can acquire, or if they're inborn. Perhaps that's why we are so compelled by the Olympics: these are men and women, boys and girls, who provide an example of excellence, one that does not also require a healthy dose of luck (Lady GaGa) or a brilliant idea (entrepreneurship). They may be extraordinary, but they can also inspire us all to be extraordinary ourselves. And that's something worth striving for.

[Image: Olympic skier Lindsey Kildow-Vonn, photo by Arthur Mouratidis from Wikimedia Commons]

Ah Italy, a land of art, poplar trees, wine, and food. Not just any food, but a national cuisine that has been almost universally embraced, and in some ways, obliterated by garish interpretations of Italian classics by American restaurant chains.

But if imitation is a form of flattery, the Italians should feel very flattered indeed. So should Americans feel the same way now that the Italian agricultural minister, Luca Zaia, is sponsoring an all-Italian beef burger from McDonald's? Perhaps, but how do the Italians feel about it?

McDonald's will introduce its new McItaly burger this week at Rome's flagship restaurant, near the Spanish Steps, a famous landmark in a city that's full of landmarks. And to many Italians, this is tantamount to desecration.

McDonald's opening up shops in distant lands is nothing new. You can find them throughout the world, with menus that often reflect their host countries' cuisines. In Canada, you can get a McLobster Roll, Japan offers burgers between glutinous rice cakes instead of a bun, and because Hindus do not eat beef, Indian franchises offer a burger made of lamb and chicken meat.

But Italy has a history of being resistant to food from other lands. The Tuscan town of Lucca, a gorgeous Medieval city still encircled by a system of walls that were built in the 16th and 17th centuries for protection against the Florentine army, made international headlines last year for an uproar over some new kabob joints that have opened there in recent years. Luccan youth love the kabobs -- they're cheap, tasty, and new. Luccan elders, meanwhile, see them as destroying the Italian heritage.

When the Roman flagship McDonald's opened, in 1986, an Italian chef named Carlo Petrini was inspired to combat the fast food movement with one of his own: slow food. Now a celebrated antidote to our on-the-go lifestyle, slow food has joined the organic and whole foods movements to revolutionize the way many people eat.

"McDonald's speaks Italian," goes the advertising slogan for the McItaly burger, which Minister Zaia believes will "globalize the identity of Italian agriculture." But as Mr. Petrini argues, "Taste, like identity, has value only when there are differences."

[Image: AP]

Over the years, South Africa has experimented with gun amnesties to lower the rates of violent crime. South Africa has one of the world's highest rates of violent crime and in the run-up to the World Cup, the government is trying all sorts of hard and soft experiments to lower those statistics. The government has appealed to South Africans who are in possession of illegal firearms or ammunition to hand them over at the nearest police station. In 2005 nearly 80,000 firearms -- 33,000 illegal weapons and about 46,000 legal weapons -- were handed into authorities.

But that was then, this is now. A half a decade later, the South African parliament has passed another firearms amnesty bill. "This country, which has such a high level of violent crime, has too many guns in the hands of the citizens," President Jacob Zuma said at a rally recently outside Tzaneen in Limpopo. Weapons are destroyed six months after collection.

There was "Reach," a now-dusty old piece of film that James Cameron and Kathryn Bigelow would probably be happy to see vanish from the face of the Earth.

This short film/music video from 1988, for a song by actor Bill Paxton's short-lived (and pretty awful) rock band, Martini Ranch, was directed by Cameron and features Bigelow, then his girlfriend, as the sexy leader of a posse of sharp-shootin' gals in cowboy hats.

Judge Reinhold even makes an appearance, having grown up a bit since his breakout role in the 1982 classic Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

Granted, this may be a little out in left field for a blog about social issues, but it's fun nonetheless. And anything that draws attention to a prominent female director is, in my mind, worth the effort.

More than anything, though, it's just hard to believe while watching this that 22 years later, Cameron and Bigelow, now divorced, would be going head-to-head for nine different Academy Awards for their respective films, Avatar and The Hurt Locker. It's equally hard to believe, judging from this bit of celluloid, that Bill Paxton is actually a pretty good actor.

Have you ever wondered why we tend to describe our emotions in terms like "up," "down," "high," and "low"?

Such language has cemented itself so firmly in our vernacular that it's impossible to imagine any other terms being more descriptive. And new research suggests that such language could also serve as a prescription for the blues.

Two researchers from the Netherlands decided to put those terms to the test. In the first experiment, they asked 24 undergraduates to recount either positive or negative memories while moving marbles from one tray to another. The trays were stacked, with space in between them, and the scientists found that the students processed positive memories more efficiently when they were moving marbles from the lower tray to the upper, while moving the marbles in the opposite direction facilitated the recollection of negative memories.

In the second experiment, the students were asked neutral questions, like "What did you do yesterday?" and instructed to make either upward or downward gestures while recounting various events. They tended to recount positive events while gesturing up, and negative events while gesturing down.

Maybe all those yoga mantras are on to something after all.

[Image: Stephen Elwyn Roddick, from Wikimedia Commons]

When I was a kid, there was school and there was yard work. School, I was always told, was my job. Yard work, meanwhile, was an involuntary obligation imposed on me by my father, who every Saturday morning could be found pruning hedges, pulling weeds, and planting vegetables in the terraced gardens he built in the backyard. It was hot, difficult, hellish work.

But I obviously grew up in a house that had a yard, and now that I live in New York City, I think back often on those halcyon days of sweaty, back-breaking, dirt-smudged labor with great yearning. Oh, to spread mulch again. What could be better?

In cities across the country, gardening is finding its way into school curricula, and for the most part it's been lauded for teaching kids about healthy foods and where they come from. Indeed, this explosion in green thumb education is largely due to Michelle Obama's efforts to change the way American children eat through educational initiatives and, of course, her own organic garden on the White House lawn.

But at least one person argues that for many first-generation Americans, whose parents made great sacrifices to raise their children in a country where they wouldn't have to break their backs in menial agricultural jobs, such a curriculum is tantamount to a life sentence of hard labor.

In her review for the Atlantic of Thomas McNamee's new biography of Alice Waters, the famed owner of Chez Panisse in Berkeley and a champion of teaching kids about gardening in school, Caitlin Flanagan points out that the California school system is largely failing despite the flourishing gardening programs they offer.

And this, she suggests, will only reinforce the American version of a caste system. In other words, guess what happens when the state's hispanic students graduate from high school, practically illiterate, with only one skill set? Agriculture.

Flanagan's argument has some merit, but I wonder if it might lose steam the further from California you go. In New York, immigrants don't tend to work in agriculture; they drive cabs and work in restaurants, issue driver's licenses and clean buildings. For their kids to learn a thing or two about real food and where it comes from surely won't condemn them to lives of zero opportunity. It might simply teach them, and their classmates, that Cheetos and Gummi Bears aren't food at all.

[Image: NYTimes.com]

The late Brittany Murphy's husband, Simon Monjack, and her mother appeared on Larry King Live last week to try and set the record straight on Murphy's surprising, tragic death in December.

Murphy, just 32, was found dead in her home, and almost immediately speculation ran to drug overdose. Murphy, however, who was diabetic, claimed that she never abused drugs, and that even caffeine would "make her heart explode." Monjack assures the public that no drugs were found in Murphy's system, and with heart-wrenching emotion he relates the scene of his wife's untimely death.

Of course, some will say that Monjack and Murphy's mother are merely trying to protect her, but if that's the case, these two are pretty darn good actors.

There is a reported rise in people simply walking away from their mortgages. To me, that's pretty darn scary. And what's more, considering that the Obama-backed refinancing program isn't all it's chalked up to be, I can picture more people doing this. And why shouldn't they? Businesses do it without much repercussion. Well, the big stick in this picture is our credit history. Walk away from your mortgage and who knows what the future has for you?

The credit risk is high and akin to smashing a mirror on purpose -- back out of a mortgage and get yourself seven years of bad credit. There's also the theory that by walking away from your dream home that is underwater, you start to sink your neighbor's dream as well. That's a lot of guilt to manage.

On a recent NPR segment, a caller named Bill said he thought that paying one's mortgage was the morally correct thing to do. Brent White, law professor from the University of Arizona, responded, "I think this works to the advantage of lenders who actually understand that a contract is not a moral document, it's a legal document."

What I don't understand is how an abandoned business doesn't impact the value of my home, but a foreclosed condo does. The inequality in the economic landscape between businesses and individuals continues to grow and grow... At least in our awareness of the inequality anyway.

[Image: New York Times]

To say that the Internet has revolutionized modern life is like saying that refrigerators keep things cold. It's so obvious by now that even commenting on it seems dated, something that might have been interesting 10 years ago but is now simply taken as fact.

Of course, with every revolution come a few casualties. And in the age of 24-hour cybersurfing, second lives, and a website for just about every vice known to man, addiction specialists are starting to link compulsive Internet use to depression. And like other forms of depression, this uniquely modern form can be rather hard to diagnose.

Remember when the phrase "always on" entered the vernacular? In the late 1990s, it was a luxury to have quick and reliable Internet access in your home; today, it's practically viewed as a right to have it everywhere you go.

I spend several hours online every day; I have to for my work. But while I'm online, I'm not just working: I check email, play Scrabble, look up random topics, peruse old friends' Facebook photos, and absorb an enormous amount of information without seeming to retain much of it. When I get offline, I feel a wave of well-being wash over me. And what happens within 20 minutes? I find myself back online.

I suspect this describes most people I know, including those who work in offices where they are ostensibly "always at work." But are we depressed because of it? We may be, or maybe we spend so much time online because we're depressed. Like most chicken-or-the-egg questions, this is probably the wrong question to be asking. Better we should ask ourselves if our "second lives" are eclipsing our real lives, and if so, are we worse off for it?

Internet addiction and its psychological effects have been studied for years. Since 1995, the Center for Internet Addiction Recovery has been treating people for the affliction, whether self-diagnosed or determined by a doctor. Studies are conducted on Internet addiction every few years, suggesting that nothing we're seeing now is necessarily new. But with broadband, a limitless cyberspace, and handheld devices that make it all just a finger-tap away, Internet addiction may be getting a lot more serious. And it could well be making a lot of people depressed.

In 2007, MacKenzie Funk wrote an article for Harper's about her experience at a treatment facility for Internet addicts in China. There, patients were brought back to Earth after having all but lost their minds from a near-constant online existence. Many of them had stayed up for days at one of China's Internet cafes, glued to role-playing games and developing avatars through programs like Second Life, itself a subject of study by Internet addiction researchers.

And that was already three years ago. Are we, indeed, faced with an even greater problem today?

The efforts to help Haitians in the aftermath of the earthquake that tore apart their lives last month are too many to count, proof that when people want to band together and help those in need, anything is possible.

In addition to the major efforts, through groups like Partners in Health, the Red Cross, and Dine Out for Haiti, smaller benefits have been cropping up throughout the country to do their part in rebuilding a devastated country and its people.

On February 20th, New Yorkers will have the chance to run for Haitian relief, in a 4-mile foot race sponsored by the New York Road Runners Club. Though most NYRR races cost $20 for non-members and $17 for members, this one is $40 for everyone, reminding entrants that they're not just there to run a PR (personal record) or complete their first race. The NYRR has also made it possible to participate in the race without leaving your toasty bed, or even being in New York City, that Saturday morning: you join the field as a "virtual runner" for $30.

On February 8th, Chicago's Hope for Haiti -- not to be confused with the nonprofit organization Hope for Haiti or Hope for Haiti Now -- (I said the efforts were too many to count) will host a telethon/concert featuring the rapper Common, the Grammy Award-winning singer Tarrey Torae, and the gospel singers Donald Lawrence and Marvin Sapp.

Then, of course, there is the 20-song "Hope for Haiti Now" album, the first digital-only record to top the Billboard album charts, featuring songs by Jay-Z, Bruce Springsteen, Beyonce, and Justin Timberlake. And let's not forget the Quincy Jones-produced remake of "We Are the World" featuring a who's-who of the music world, including Kanye West, Celine Dion, Carlos Santana, Harry Connick Jr., and Barbara Streisand, among a few dozen others.

Such widespread devotion to a cause offers hope not just for Haiti, but for humanity as a whole. It proves that collective altruism is still possible, and that our species may not be so self-serving after all. If you know of other efforts to aid the relief effort where you live, please drop a comment so that others can join the cause.

[Image: Twitpic]

In anticipation of Barack Obama's first visit to China last fall, the country's state-run news agency, Xinhua, collected questions from its readers for the U.S. President. Among them, were these gems:

"You've got a nice figure. Had you thought about shooting commercials or movies or something like that if you didn't win the election?"

"How much wine can you drink for once? Will you play the Truth or Dare game after drinking?"

"Could you encourage American kids not to eat hamburgers all day long?"

"Can I discuss with you China's purchasing Hawaii with U.S. dollars?"

"Will you encourage Americans to marry Chinese people?"

Once my giggles subsided, I stumbled upon a few that made me stop and think. One, in particular, resonates with the current fracas over the Dalai Lama's imminent visit to the United States: "How would it make you feel if China treated Osama Bin Laden like the U.S. treats the Dalai Lama?"

Chinese officials warned President Obama that if he met with the Dalai Lama when the Tibetan spiritual leader visits Washington D.C. this week, as every president has since 1991, it would threaten to dismantle whatever progress has been made in building a positive relationship between the two superpower nations.

Obama refuted the warning and agreed to meet with the 74-year-old Buddhist monk, though he did cancel a meeting in October, presumably to appease Chinese government leaders. Many human rights groups, who see the Dalai Lama as a champion of peace and China as an oppressive tyranny, were outraged by that earlier choice.

This is a tough one, isn't it? Obama's decision to stick to his principles and anger the Chinese government could be potentially causing a major setback in foreign relations. This could be bad for a great many people, including human rights groups. But if he pandered to the wishes of the Chinese, he would be sending a message that, sometimes, might does equal right. It's not a choice I'd want to make, to say the least.

[Image: Bangkok Post]

Yesterday, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Adm. Mike Mullen, the US Military's top-ranking officer, called for an end to the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy that bans openly gay people from the armed services.

"No matter how I look at the issue," Mullen said, "I cannot escape being troubled by the fact that we have in place a policy which forces young men and women to lie about who they are in order to defend their fellow citizens."

Finally, someone is speaking some sense on this issue! Now if only those involved in the decision-making process besides Mullen (including vocal dissenter John McCain) would recognize the fact that forcing people into a strictly-enforced closet is no way to encourage them to serve their country. At least this is several steps in the right direction.

Via CBS Nightly News:

Right now, a little less than half of the United States does not think that gay people should have the right to get married. One thing that can help to change the minds of those who are against marriage equality is hearing the heart-breaking stories of same-sex couples who have suffered because they are not protected under the law. Kelly Glossip and Dennis Engelhard are one of those stories.

Engelhard, 49, a State Highway patrolman in Missouri, was hit and killed by a vehicle on Christmas Day while he was on the job investigating an accident. Glossip, his partner of 15 years with whom he shared a home, has absolutely no right to Engelhard's pension, which he otherwise would if the state law recognized their relationship.

According to the St. Louis' Fox 2 KTVI, the Highway Patrol has no comment except to say that Glossip does not qualify to receive Engelhard's pension because the two are not legally married.

Further research on the topic shows that the Highway Patrol told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that Engelhard "was not married and had no children."

Glossip, who is out of work due to back problems and relied on Engelhard as the main breadwinner in the family, now faces financial disaster. He is also responsible for a teenage son from a previous marriage.

"He was my true love and he always referred to me as his one and only true love and the man of his dreams," Glossip told Fox 2 KTVI. "We were hopelessly in love with each other."

Further adding to the pain of the situation, Backstoppers, a group that supports families of public safety workers killed while on the job, gave $5,000 to Engelhard's parents and not to Glossip, saying they did not know about the couple's relationship. Glossip said that his partner's parents are helping him with bills, though.

Missouri adopted a constitutional provision in 2004 that effectively banned same-sex marriage by stating that marriage in that state could legally only be between one man and one woman. Missouri will also not recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states. Jackson County and the cities of St. Louis, Kansas City, and Columbia allow couples to register as domestic partners, which offers extremely limited protections such as jail and hospital visitation.

It's beyond comprehension that while Glossip (or any person) is grieving for the loss of his spouse that he should also have to deal with blatant homophobia and the questioning of their relationship by the state in he lives and works. But we can only hope stories like this will continue to open minds to see the hurt that situations like this can cause.

What's the best way to become a best-selling author? You could rely on word of mouth, great press, or just dumb luck. But that's all so uncertain. Here's another idea: buy your own product en masse.

Sarah Palin showed us how by using $63,000 of her own money to buy copies of her political memoir, Going Rogue, through her political action committee, Sarah PAC. It's hard to say how many copies the former Alaska governor got for that amount, though. If she paid the full cover price, her supply would be just under 2,200. If she bought them all on Amazon, she could have gotten close to 5,000 copies. Also, it depends on how much sales tax she had to fork over, which may have been less than the standard rate for buying the books in bulk. And because she brokered the deal with her own publisher, HarperCollins, the company may have given her a special discount.

Regardless, we're talking about a lot of books. Apparently, Palin is using them as "fundraising donor fulfillment," along with $8,000 worth of brightly colored bookmarks made by a Nashville-based event planning firm.

This would help account for why Sarah PAC raised over $2 million in 2009 and ended the year with just $900,000 in the bank. Sarah PAC also spent $20,000 to send Palin's personal photographer along on her national book tour last fall. With that kind of funding, it's no wonder she's a bestseller.

For the past three weeks, hospitals in Florida have been treating critically injured Haitians as part of this country's swift response to the earthquake that all but destroyed much of Port-au-Prince on January 12th. Roughly 500 men, women, and children with missing limbs, spinal injuries, and severe bleeding caused by the disaster have so far been part of this effort.

And until the U.S. determines who'll foot the bill for all this medical care, they'll be the only ones. The United States has halted treatment of Haitians from the earthquake in a contentious dispute over who should bear responsibility for the exorbitant costs: the state of Florida, the Federal government, national charities, or the hospitals themselves. It goes without saying that the patients themselves can't afford to pay for it, since they're from one of the poorest countries on Earth and many of them have just lost everything they own.

Florida's governor, Charlie Crist, has reportedly estimated the bill to already be in the millions of dollars. Hospitals in southeast Florida, meanwhile, deny that they have refused or will refuse treatment to any earthquake victim who comes to them.

However true that may be, this tragedy has put a magnifying glass to our own health care crisis, exposing precisely how sick the system really is. What if the earthquake had occurred in Miami, instead of an island 700 miles off-shore? Would the powers that be still engage in this game of health care tag? Each party seems to be yelling, "Not it!" as soon as someone else suggests they absorb some of the cost, leading to the cessation of treatment for thousands more patients in need.

In the past month, I have had to visit more doctors than I've had to see in the past 10 years. First a fall down the subway stairs injured my wrist, then a trip on a root banged up my knee, and then I developed a mysterious inflammation in my left foot and had to get X-rays and an MRI scan. Each time I've had to shell out a co-pay, which isn't cheap, but I've never been more thankful -- or more aware -- of my health insurance coverage.

Each time I've checked in at a doctor's office, I've been asked, "Do you have insurance?" And each time I've thought, "It's amazing that that's even a question."

There isn't a soul alive who won't require medical care at some point in their lives. And while I realize how complicated the issue is, I keep coming back to this basic question: If we are truly a civilized society, shouldn't it be a top priority to provide care to anyone in their time of need? After all, we guarantee an education to every child in this country. Why should health care be any different?

[Image: Ariana Cubillos for the AP]

When Michael Douglas's son, Cameron, was arrested last summer for possession of crystal meth, the celebrity tabloids went nuts, speculating on what might happen to this high-profile player in the so-called "war on drugs."

While on house arrest, Douglas's girlfriend was caught attempting to deliver 20 bags of heroin to her boyfriend in the battery compartment of an electric toothbrush. Talk about tempting fate. Back in August, a few weeks after the arrest, Vanity Fair reported that some sources were predicting a minimum of 10 years for the 31-year old actor.

Last week, a sentence was decided, and that's exactly what he got. Ten years for selling "several pounds" of crystal meth over the past few years to buyers who have implicated Douglas to lessen charges against themselves, and also for attempting to use while under house arrest.

Anthony Papa, whose book 15 to Life: How I Painted My Way to Freedom recounts the author's own experience being jailed for delivering drugs to undercover police officers and his subsequent 12 years of hard time at the Sing Sing Correctional Institution, argues that sending Douglas to prison is going to cause more harm than good. Devoting resources to incarcerating drug offenders, rather than to treatment, he says, only diverts our attention, energy, and funds away from violent crime. As a result, he concludes, our "justice system" ensures no such thing.

Papa believes that no one benefits from Douglas doing 10 years, and that the sentence may even contribute to the drug problem in this country. Papa spoke with a friend of Douglas's, who said that Douglas had been an addict for several years, no doubt clouding his judgment and leading him to deal drugs to support his habit.

While I doubt that Papa would condone dealing meth, his argument points to the root of America's drug problem: merely trimming the rotten leaves of a diseased tree won't stop the tree from sprouting new ones, and potentially spreading its disease to other trees.

Two months ago, I may have agreed only in part with Papa. Crystal meth is a horrendous drug, wreaking havoc on this country like no other in the history of addictive substances. I'd have said that I agree that we need to devote more resources to treatment than imprisonment, but that dealing crystal meth is an especially damnable offense.

Then I read Nick Reding's book Methland, which details the extent to which crystal methamphetamine reflects a series of failings that reach all the way to the federal government, Big Pharma, and immigration policy.

No, Douglas is not innocent, and his offense should not be forgiven. But will sending him to prison do anything to stop more people from falling prey to a drug that more than 300,000 people try for the first time each year?

[Image: NYPost.com]