Letter to Lipton

(Lipton Tea is GOOD for you?)

Don' t know what's up with my food kick lately, but I had to send this little comment to Lipton:

"Hello,

I was in a local store the other day and saw something that looked great. Green Tea with Citrus from Lipton. I bought a whole case because I like tea and know the benefits of drinking it.

Put it in the fridge and opened one to drink. My taste buds were immediately greeted by the tongue coating, throat drying nastiness of High Fructose Corn Syrup... The lowest grade of sweetener you can buy. The healthy promise of antioxidants was nullified by Lipton's cost consciousness. Why not use Fructose or Cane Sugar or even NO sweetener at all? Aren’t your consumer’s worth more than the cheapest sweetener?

Well... Lipton got my money this time; shame on Lipton. But, going forward I'll be looking harder through Lipton's veil of health in the guise of fancy wording and packaging. I WON'T be buying anything with HFCS in it. Perhaps enough Americans will wake up and do the same and maybe then manufacturers will respect us enough to use higher quality ingredients. "

Let's see what they have to say in response.

***UPDATE***

Well... Here's their lame, canned reply:

"Hi Steve,

Thanks for writing!

Many factors are considered during development of each product include taste,
texture, nutritional value, ability to retain flavor and quality, as well as
consumer convenience in usage and preparation.

Lipton uses only those ingredients needed to provide desired flavor,
appearance, consistency and nutritional value to its food products, and then to
maintain those qualities during storage and use.

In order to produce good-tasting foods, Lipton also makes use of latest
research to select ingredients that provide desired qualities. Our research
staff continues to review existing products and develop new ones. This ongoing
program provides Unilever consumers with products of only highest quality and
value. We will certainly report comments to Research and Marketing staffs.

Thanks for your interest in our products!
Your friends at Lipton"

Funny how friendly their reply was. "Hi buddy! Yeah nutritional value blah blah. Thanks sweetheart! Love ya!" I expected something with a little more substance in response to my message, which was:

"I was in a local store the other day and saw something that looked great.
Green Tea with Citrus from Lipton. I bought a whole case because I like
tea and know the benefits of drinking it.

Put it in the fridge and opened one to drink. My tastebuds were
immediately greeted by the tongue coating, throat drying nastyness of High
Fructose Corn Syrup... The lowest grade of sweetener you can buy. The
healthy promise of antioxidants were nullified by Lipton's cost
consciousness. Why not use Fructose or Cane Sugar or even NO sweetener at
all? Arn't your consumers worth more than the cheapest sweetener?

Well... Lipton got my money this time; shame on Lipton. But, going
forward I'll be looking harder through Lipton's vail of health in the
guise of fancy wording and packaging. I WON'T be buying anything with
HFCS in it. Perhaps enough Americans will wake up and do the same and
maybe then manufacturers will respect us enough to use higher quality
ingredients."

Which translates into "You dirty cheap bastards! What are you trying to do?! KILL ME! Hiding a gun in a bouquet of flowers. You should be ashamed of yourselves!"

Well, poop on 'em! I'm not spending money on that crap again.

Multi-national corps care for Europeans more than they do Americans.

(Nabisco - More effective at defeating homeland security than the Taliban)

Check out this piece on Transfats and Oreo. Proof again that as long as Americans don't complain about being fed Transfats and High Fructose Corn Syrup, they'll keep spoon feeding it to us.

Corporate Cookies - Newsweek Society - MSNBC.com: "Maybe this wasn't Watergate, but I had caught Kraft in a creamy white lie: It's not difficult at all to get Oreos without partially hydrogenated soybean oil (which was invented 100 years ago as a candle wax but worked so good as a fat substitute that Proctor and Gamble called it Crisco and sold it to housewives)."

In summary... Kraft (Nabisco) was saying they couldn't produce Transfat free Oreos... but they do already in Europe. Why??? Because Europeans won't stand for big corps feeding them the lowest forms of food. How long will it take for us to thrust out our palms against them and say "No more!"? One day we will look back on these times like we now look back at the old black-lung coal miners and say "How could they not know that all that coal dust was killing them?"... How could we not know that this crappy "food" is killing us?

***UPDATE***
Oh... thought it might be helpful to let you know what Transfats do. Here's what Gersh says:

"trans-fats, those pernicious frankenlipids that not only
clog your arteries, but actually help lower your "good" cholesterol at the same time. Trans-fats like partially hydrogenated soybean oil are so omnipresent in the American diet that even the government eventually noticed it and, starting next year, food producers like Kraft will be
forced to reveal on the nutritional label how many grams of trans-fats are in each serving."

Git yer grub on! THE WORLD'S BEST GRUBBERIES!

I've dug up a checklist of places you need to eat at before you check out. Pulled it from Netscape Travel and you can see the original write up here. Most of them were in Europe and I find it VERY hard to believe that NONE of them were in Japan. Oh well, without further adieu:

The top 20 places to eat in the world:

1. The Fat Duck Bray, Berkshire, England
2. El Bulli, Montjoi, Spain
3. The French Laundry, Yountville, California
4. Tetsuya's, Sydney
5. Gordon Ramsay, London
6. Pierre Gagnaire, Paris
7. Per Se, New York
8. Tom Aikens, London
9. Jean Georges, New York
10. St. John, London
11. Le Louis XV, Monte Carlo
12. Chez Panisse, Berkeley, California
13. Charlie Trotter, Chicago
14. Gramercy Tavern, New York
15. Guy Savoy, Paris
16. Restaurant Alain Ducasse, Paris
17. The Gallery at Sketch, London
18. The Waterside Inn Bray, Berkshire, England
19. Nobu, London

I've eaten at exactly ZERO of these places. It would be hard for me to spend $187 for a dinner of sardine on toast sorbet, snail porridge or bacon and egg ice cream. It's like Jelly Belly made a restaurant or something. I'd settle for the $50 hamburger and an iced tea. I'd put the other $130 sumthin' bucks down as a downpayment on my cholesterol meds.

Blinded by the light

(Fireproof, Bat shaped lense cover sold seperately)

Saw a blog bragging about a 10 Million Candlepower Spotlight. Well, it ain't got NOTHIN' on this mutha. FIFTEEN MILLION CANDLES BABY! That's only about 3-5 million candles short of a helicopter search light... BRIGHTER than some light houses! This is as powerful as portable gets. I'm almost thinking about getting one to mount on the Helix (scooter). Oncoming traffic would think it was a close encounters moment. Get YOURS here for just $70.

(Note to self... Make a rotating platform that holds two of these for a cheap DIY SkyTracker so friends know where the backyard BBQ party is.)

Anyway. I'm just a sucka for extremes and THIS my friends is extreme. Kinda like the temp here in Austin... Supposed to hit 98 degrees tomorrow. Blah.

Only in Austin

Saw this under Garage Sales on CraigsList...

Don't want to be blacklisted, so I took the mirrored version down.

BevNET.com - BevNET.COM's View: First Take on Coke Zero

Just had to republish this little piece from BevNet. These guys/gals are THE drink-ninjas and they write so eloquently.



BevNET.com - BevNET.COM's View: First Take on Coke Zero: "BevNET.COM's View: First Take on Coke Zero

Posted: 6/17/2005 10:03:30 AM

Some debuts are too important for just a review....

There’s a lot of debate in the BevNET offices about this Coke line extension, mostly relating to the overall quality of Coke itself. That’s because in terms of its flavor profile, Coke’s little cabal of taste technicians has come up with a beverage that, despite its lack of sugar or, in Coke’s lamentable case, high-fructose corn syrup, still tastes a great deal like its flagship brand: it’s got that key spicy, almost cinnamon-like taste that helped drive Coca-Cola Classic to the head of the soft drink channel. As an added bonus, Coca-Cola Zero doesn’t feature the creepy high-fructose throat coating, tongue-drying action that has plagued the product for the last two decades.

Depending on one’s level of Coke addiction, Zero is better – and certainly more accurate in terms of presenting a no-calorie version of its forefather – than Coke’s other giant product, Diet Coke, although there’s still that giveaway undertone of artificiality in Zero’s aftertaste. That artificiality presents itself in the same way as it does in Diet Coke – as a watery, overly sweet, chemical finish – but it’s not as strong in Zero, because the trademark spice notes drown out and nullify much of the Aspartame/Ace-K blend’s negative qualities.

In other words, in Zero, Coke has come out with something that’s a much better diet version of its core product than Diet Coke.

And that leads us back to the root of the debate here, which is, what’s so great about that? It’s a good version of Coke Classic, an over-hyped brand whose flavor is no longer what it was because of the company’s switch to HFCS, one whose focus on marketing “Coke Moments” has become so ubiquitous as to sprit those moments of any emotional heft, turning them into self-parody. And that begs the question -- in terms of product development, and in terms of re-energizing the Coca-Cola Company itself, is this the best they could do?

Because absent the cultural significance of Coke Classic, this just isn’t that great.

BevNET reviews a lot of sodas, diet and non-diet, and in terms of taste, a great many of them beat Coke Classic any day and twice on a hot one; the companies who make them don’t have the marketing heft of Coke, and because of the distribution practices of Big Cola, they are never likely to garner the followings they deserve. And like Coke Classic, Zero suffers in comparison to the taste of those sodas, as it does in its white and black labels, which look like the printers at the factory ran low on red ink.

But in conducting our reviews, BevNET also looks at marketability, and at the accuracy of a diet drink in representing the flavor of its predecessor. And in that respect, in Zero, Coke has likely come up with a winner. Except, that is, for the label, which is a colorless version of an established piece of iconography. That’s probably as good an analogy as any for the Coca-Cola Company itself, but we predict big sales for Zero nevertheless.

Source: BevNET.com Staff"

Reflections on my trip to Mexico

(Hundreds and Hundreds of tiny houses)

One thing that made an impression on me, was a little village we ran into just outside of Monterrey. Not sure what the name of the area was, but it was a miner's village. They had just put up hundreds of homes for the mining familys. Each was about $20k US and smaller than my living room & kitchen put together. Here families of 2 or 10 might live, elbow to elbow. I think it made such an impact because we just finished buying a house here in Austin. When we were shopping, we had to find a place that was close to shopping and parks and stuff. These houses were close to dirt (see bottom pictures)

Here is a shot of the front of three houses. No, I'm not using a wide lense. We estimated each to be about 500 square feet. We actually went into one. It was as spacious as a large tent. Very easy to furnish.


Here is the housing complex across the street.

(the fancy two stories)

And you have to zoom-in to this photo to see what I'm talking about when I say HUNDREDS.

(It was like a military barracks)


(click image to make your house seem big)

Discover new music: Architecture In Helsinki

(Good music doesn't look like Britney Spears)

Checked out Architecture In Helsinki yesterday at Waterloo Records. First time I'd ever heard them... or even heard OF them. I dug the sound. Pretty refreshing. Kiiiiinda like They-might-be-giant-talking-heads covering a non-existant Ween cover of Len's "Steal my Sunshine". Eh, that's a bad example... Talented bunch of kids. They played brass, synths, drums, guitars and sang in teensy falsettos. What was sweet, was that they sounded almost exactly like their CD. Great live gig.

Later that night they rocked Emo's (missed that cause I was in the ER, but that's another story). Anyway. I suggest you peep their site and see what you think. A friend of mine said they were too "Sesame Streetish", but I dig their latest album "In Case We Die". Listen to the track "It's 5!". Good fun and great music for the attention deficient

The OTHER blog in my life.

(Dub-Ya sent me a photo for all my friends who have been complaining about "updates".)


I've been a bloggin' two timer lately. Part of it is just life... work... kid... preggo wife (a VERY lovely one by the way)... and the OTHER blog. It's The Scooter Scoop. I describe it as this, and you can quote me here...

"The latest, greatest scooter news available online in the USA!"

Why don't you go peep it out and see. Scooters are fun, affordable and help YOU get the chicks... unless your a girl or like dudes... then they will help you get the dudes... Whateva... They rock!

tell yer friends to go to thescooterscoop.blogspot.com

-steve

R2D2 and Scott-3PO... testing...testing 

well... I guess I can. w00t.

test to see if i can send images from behind a VPN

Updated Teddy Ruxpin tells stories from digital cartridges - Jun. 16, 2005

Updated Teddy Ruxpin tells stories from digital cartridges - Jun. 16, 2005: "NEW YORK (CNN) - Teddy Ruxpin, the animated stuffed animal popular in the 1980s, is returning to stores in September after being updated with digital technology.

The new version of the toy, which moves its eyes and mouth while singing and telling children's stories, contains audio and animation data on digital cartridges. When launched 20 years ago, the bear operated on analog cassette tapes."

Hrm... Moves its eyes... and mouth... while singing and telling stories. Just like it did back in 1985. Exciting. You would think 20 years later we'd be closer to a Super-Toy TEDDY like they had in A.I.

Prank phone call heaven!

(Mmm...Soundboards)

Go here for more soundboards than you can shake a stick at. Unless you've got good stamina, then you could shake a stick at all of them, but it will leave you huffin' and puffin'.

I especially like the Home Simpson one. Call yer granny and see what she thinks about them.

PS> The "Ultimate Star Wars Soundboard" is kinda wack. I mean, listen to Vader's classic "I find your lack of faith distrubing" quote. It's pitched up. He sounds less like Darth Vader the Evil Dark Lord of the Sith and more like Bill Gates the Pasty White Lord of the Geek.

*snicker snicker* Guy thinks he can call UFOs!

(You can learn a lot from crazy people)

I think Confucius said it best... "Never underestimate the power of crazy people".
Was that Confucius? Hrm... Maybe Leroy told me that down at the bus station... Anyway,
Think about it... Think of all the crazy people who have changed the world in the past. They're still doing it today.

I was walking the "Haha" isle of my local ebaumsworld and found this little video clip. It's fun to smugly watch someone "makin' a foo" of himself and then have that guy turn around and put his foot in your self-righteous ass.

That very thing happened to me and the reporter in this clip. Peep it out. It's FUN!

***UPDATE*** I'm not a a follower of Prophet Yahweh. Even if it's a magic trick, it's pretty cool. You know what though... There's been a bunch of "UFO" reports going around lately. How about that one in AZ? Maybe the aliens got an agreement with Steve Spielberg to help him promote War of the Worlds.

Sony customer $ervice

(That little ring in the upper left saved me over a hundred bucks!)

I'm a big Sony fan. All my cameras are Sony. I enjoy the interoperability of many of their accessories... My still camera's wide angle lens for instance. I paid over a hundred sumthin' bucks for that lens in the lower left hand corner. It seems that there would be a way to use it on my video camera as well and if anyone would know the answer, it would be SONY! Here's what transpired:

Customer

Is there a way I can use my VCL-MHG07 Wide Conversion lens with my Handycam DCR-TRV530? Thanks!

Response (Daniel)

Thank you for contacting us with your inquiry regarding a Sony Camcorder Accessory. The VCL-MHG07 Wide Conversion lens is not compatible with the DCR-TRV530 camcorder. I suggest that you opt for the VCL-MHG07A 52mm High Grade 0.7X Wide Angle Lens. This is the compatible wide conversion lens with the DCR-TRV530 camcorder. The VCL-MHG07A wide-angle lens allows you to capture impressive results of that wide-angle shot without sacrificing a single detail. Please click on the following link to view and place an order for the VCL-MHG07A wide-angle lens online at SonyStyle.com: http://www.sonystyle.com/is-bin/INTERSHOP.enfinity/eCS/Store/en/-/USD/SY_DisplayProductInformation-Start?ProductSKU=VCLMHG07A Please feel free to contact the Sony Style team for further assistance.

So what we end up with is Sony trying to sell me ANOTHER $120 lens. What's the difference? The letter "A" and supplied converters for 37 mm and 58 mm lenses. I instead opted for the ebay approach. I found a 37mm step-up for $1.85 + $1.75 shipping. Works like a charm.

Couldn't Sony have given me an option? Like "Well, you could buy the 'A' lens or just go pick up a $2.00 step-up converter... It's all good!".

Let the blog be my voice! A voice big enough for Sony to hear! Change your ways good sir, change your ways!

ZIGVIEW - They are one step closer!

Intro 2020: "ZIGVIEW simply attaches to the eyepiece of your SLR camera where the viewfinder image is captured by a CMOS sensor built into the Zigview and relayed in real time to a 1.9 inch/TFT colour display for easy viewing at any angle."

So... What I've been waiting for is the following:
Take this thing:

and marry it via bluetooth to this thing


Just imagine how great your candid shots would come out if it appeared that you weren't even paying attention to your subject. You could look ANYWHERE and still be able to look through your camera's view finder. You could shoot pictures over walls, around corners and still have the view finder right in front of your eyes. Sweet eh? Of course, you'd have to loose the wires (that's what the bluetooth is for). It would prolly help to have the HMD (head mounted display) be a little less conspicuous. Someone tell Intro 2020 to "hook that up". I won't need any money... just a sample to play around with. ;)

Alrighty then... I'm back!

(We find your lack of geekiness disturrrbing)

Great to be back in to good 'ole Austin. I'm trying to dig myself out from under the pile of work that has amassed in my e-mail inbox over the last week. Hope to have something worthwhile to post tonight.