NO!

wine-in-a-glass, originally uploaded by eater_ny.

Really, do we need single serve wine in a glass.

While Waiting For That Corn Burger

Americans burned 16 million gallons of gas at Burger King drive through windows alone. No word on how much gas is wasted in all drive through windows.
Via Biomes Blog

Vegan Strip Club

I am not sure there is a big market for vegan food in strip clubs. This has to be classy they "put their meat on the pole not on the plate." Via Tree Hugger.

Diet Soda Bad

The New York Times is reporting that drinking just one can of diet soda a day is bad for you.

Researchers have found a correlation between drinking diet soda and metabolic syndrome — the collection of risk factors for cardiovascular disease and diabetes that include abdominal obesity, high cholesterol and blood glucose levels, and elevated blood pressure.

If you want to drink something with no sugar and no fat try regular soda. No seriously! Read the label. Major soda brands(coke, pepsi, Mt. lightning, Dr Thunder, etc.) do not have sugar or fat. I am not saying that high fructose corn syrup is good. I am saying that just because something does not have fat or sugar means it is good.

Distributors

I was hoping Costco would win this case. They are a good company. they treat their employees and customers so well it upsets Wall Street.

A federal appeals court Tuesday dealt Costco Wholesale Corp. a setback on whether the warehouse club operator could lower prices of beer and wine for its customers.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the Washington State Liquor Control Board could prohibit discounts, ban central warehousing of beer and wine by retailers, require wholesale distributors to charge uniform prices to all retailers and require a 10 percent markup.

I do not like distributors. In Maryland, a brewery, vineyard or distillery can not sell directly to a bar or restaurant. They have to sell to a Distributor. Who marks up the price and sells it. I see no real need for this middle man. I guess Costco wanted to cut him out too.

Solio

Jessica Gottlieb over at Celsias has an article about the solio solar charger. It reminds me of a hit piece sponsored by the coal nuclear power industry.

It is almost as if she had know idea what she was buying. She was stunned to find out it has attachments for other countries that the poor Gottlieb can not afford to got to. It clearly states these are part of what you get. Link. These are good features for people that travel. Great features for people that live in other countries.

I am going to assume Gottlieb bought the charger she linked to. It is simular to the one I own and use when I am backpacking. Here is what she says.

I mean it works, in that it does what it says it will do. It’ll charge your iPhone in about 6-8 hours, if you’re not using said iPhone during that time. By contrast the iPhone plugged into a cigarette lighter in the car charges in 25 minutes. The batteries will recharge in the Solio when it’s left in direct sunlight (again for 6-8 hours) so if you’re ready to take $70-$100 of electronics and leave it out in the elements you’ll be much happier, just make sure to avoid shade at all costs. If you plan to leave it in your kitchen window, prepare for disappointment.

It won’t charge in car windows and I don’t know why but I suspect it has something to do with tempered glass.

It is clear that Gottlieb loves the concept of solar power but does not understand how solar panels work. Solar panels have to be outside. How terribly inconvenient. Mine came with a suction cup so it could be hung outside a kitchen window.

You do not have to keep your electronic devise hooked up to the solio for 6-8 hours for it to charge. It has a battery. The battery when charged takes about 45 minutes to charge my ipod. The battery is the best feature of the solio. It holds a little more than two charges for my ipod.

I should mention that this is made to be outside in the elements. It is a solar panel and who ever heard of solar panels being installed inside. For some reason Gottlieb seems to think it is a bad idea to put it outside.

I am not saying that the solio is perfect. It works well as a solar charger. I suspect I appreciate it a bit more because there are no places to plug in when I am backpacking.

Update: I have found a pink Solio. It is the same one I have but with a different color. It is not the Solio that Gottlieb linked to.

The Story Of Stuff

Good stuff. Click here for whole movie and resources.

$400 Beer

Yes, someone is charging $400 for a beer. Beer drinkers know better. Unlike wine drinkers that are too busy posing as knowledgeable.

The product, costing 357 times more than Carlsberg's main Danish lager brand, has been developed to challenge luxury wines in the gourmet restaurant market and capitalize on rising individual wealth. Denmark, a country of 5.4 million, has 16 billionaires, according to a list published this month by Berlingske Nyhedsmagasin magazine. The number of billionaires worldwide rose 21 percent last year to 946, Forbes magazine said.

"We can feel that there's an increasing market for this type of product, as some of our customers order extremely expensive wines without blinking an eye," Lau Richter, restaurant chief at Noma, said by phone.

Carlsberg has produced 600 bottles of the 10.5 percent proof beer, each four-fifths of a pint. Another version costing just a bit more will be introduced next year and again in 2010, the company said.

I ain't buying it.

Got Milk With Hormones

PA came to its senses today. It will allow milk to be labeled hormone free, as long as, it states their is nothing wrong with the hormone additives. Here is Shira at unbossed.

Today we got good news. The Monsanto astroturf scheme to take away the rights of the citizens of Pennsylvania to know how their milk was produced lost . . . mostly. The Department of Agriculture issued a notice removing the gag rule, but with lots of caveats.

But more important than the milk labeling is what this this battle says about democracy and how fragile it is.

While the citizens of the Keystone State were caught up in the holidays, its status as a democracy hung in the balance. What may seem to be a trivial issue - what a milk label says - was the battleground. Here's what you may have missed.

Pennsylvanians discovered that their department of agriculture is a wholly owned subsidiary of Monsanto.[...]

If they are so proud of Posilac, then nothing is stopping the producers who use it from putting on their labels: Milk from cows injected with Posilac / rBST. But you don't see this honest "presence" label.

Why not?

Because they know that they will lose customers. So the true "absence labelers" are those who use Posilac and try to hide it by not revealing its use.

Wine

The more the wine costs, the more people enjoy it, a new study has found. This is not surprising in the least. People will talk themselves into all manner of things.

Researchers at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the California Institute of Technology found that because people expect wines that cost more to be of higher quality, they trick themselves into believing the wines provide a more pleasurable experience than less expensive ones.

Their study, published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, says that expectations of quality trigger activity in the medial orbitofrontal cortex, the part of the brain that registers pleasure. This happens even though the part of our brain that interprets taste is not affected.[...]

We have known for a long time that people's perceptions are affected by marketing, but now we know that the brain itself is modulated by price," said Baba Shiv, an associate professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and one of the authors of the study.

"Marketers are now going to think twice about reducing the price," Shiv said.

According to the study, if an experience is pleasurable, the brain will use it to help guide future choices. That conclusion has important implications for marketing that aims to influence perceptions of quality such as expert ratings, peer reviews, information about country of origin, store and brand names and repeated exposure to advertisements.

It reminded me of this study done in France about the objectivity of wine tasters.

In 2001, Frederic Brochet, of the University of Bordeaux, conducted two separate and very mischievous experiments. In the first test, Brochet invited 57 wine experts and asked them to give their impressions of what looked like two glasses of red and white wine. The wines were actually the same white wine, one of which had been tinted red with food coloring. But that didn't stop the experts from describing the "red" wine in language typically used to describe red wines. One expert praised its "jamminess," while another enjoyed its "crushed red fruit." Not a single one noticed it was actually a white wine.

The second test Brochet conducted was even more damning. He took a middling Bordeaux and served it in two different bottles. One bottle was a fancy grand-cru. The other bottle was an ordinary vin du table. Despite the fact that they were actually being served the exact same wine, the experts gave the differently labeled bottles nearly opposite ratings. The grand cru was "agreeable, woody, complex, balanced and rounded," while the vin du table was "weak, short, light, flat and faulty". Forty experts said the wine with the fancy label was worth drinking, while only 12 said the cheap wine was.

I do however believe that some wines are so bad that even experts can tell they are not to good. Like this prison wine. Really, you should read this one.

What Would Jesus Buy?

Morgan Spurlock has a new documentary out, What Would Jesus Buy? America spent 455 bilion dollars on the holidays last year.Tree Hugger has an interview.

TreeHugger: Reverend Billy is a very charismatic, intelligent guy, but he's pretty in your face. Does the way he’s perceived by some have the potential to distort the message? Do you worry that his overbearing style might turn some people off to the movement? Can you really expect people to take a guy who says, “Mickey Mouse is the Antichrist!” seriously?”

Morgan Spurlock: Well, so far, across the board, the reception to the film has been very positive. Whether somebody would say they are an activist group or a very “lefty” group or a very conservative group, or even with Christian audiences, the film has been very well received at Christian film festivals all across the country.

I think in the beginning, Billy can come off as a bit “in your face” and abrasive, but, I think as people listen to him and hear what he has to say, they realize that he’s really trying to use humor, he’s really trying to use this character to get people to think, and, hopefully, make people laugh a little bit. I think that, at the heart of what Billy does, it’s a very funny message that deals with a very serious issue in a way that somehow makes it accessible -- palatable -- to a lot of us.