Sample Reality

Caution Remixed, Flight XYZ#123

Poetry from Row 16A on US Airways #952 (the trip home)

Poetry from Row 11A on US Airways #730

Memory is not a Document (Ronald Reagan Lives on in our hearts and envelopes)

Today for the first time I had the pleasure of mailing Ronald Reagan’s face through the U.S. postal system. Three times, in fact. Appropriately enough, the stamped envelopes contained rebate forms for my 2004 TurboTax software. Very supply-side economics. Let the rebates come trickling on down!

Reagan—who was arguably an amnesiac even before he had Alzheimer’s—makes for an odd stamp. I was reminded of one of the sidebars in Douglas Coupland’s Generation X: Memory is not a document.

Meaning, it’s not permanent. It’s not evidence. It’s not even there. Reagan exemplified this. The whole thing is very Pynchonesque. A Reagan stamp, that is. Like there’s this vast underground postal empire giving these stamps a meaning that exists above their actual 37 cent value. W.A.S.T.E.

I remember in the early nineties when the Elvis stamp came out, there was a debate whether it should depict the young hip rocker Elvis or the older sequined Elvis (younger won out). If we had a debate about the Reagan stamp, what would the two alternative versions be? Obviously the presidential version. But what about the young homoerotic Kings Row Drake “Where’s the rest of me?” McHugh? Which would be more appropriate?

Mark Sample Identity Theft Watch

As if I didn’t already have a problem with my absurdly generic name, I’m discovering that there are other “Mark Sample’s” out there.

So, for the record, the following Mark Sample’s are not me:

1. Mark Sample (Monroe Community College)
2. Mark Sample (Texas Christian University)
3. Mark Sample (Stanly Community College)
4. Mark Sample (game developer)

The following Mark Sample’s are me, or at least alternative personalities of me:

1. Mark Sample (George Mason University)
2. Mark Sample (University of Pennsylvania) (where I was a graduate student)
3. Mark Sample (Georgetown University) (home to a research project I work with)

Cognitive Dissonance Moment of the Day

I’m a huge fan of Lost—airplane crashes, polar bears, a non-Hodgkins-lymphoma-free Jack, aka Charlie Salinger—I mean, what’s not to like? So somebody suggested I check out Alias, another show by the creator of Lost, J.J. Abrams.

Months, I guess, later I finally watch the first episode of the first season of Alias. And here’s where the cog dis kicks in: as Sidney (Jennifer Garner) is telling her fiancee about her secret life in the CIA, Cat Stevens’s song “Trouble” begins playing on the soundtrack.

I’m sorry, but there’s only one set of visual images that I could ever possibly associate with “Trouble” and that’s Harold’s last fake suicide in Harold and Maude as he drives his jaguar hearse over a cliff, escaping from the car at the last moment. It’s one of the most poignant cinematic moments from the seventies.

And here the song is, hijacked for a spy story, bearing no relation to the narrative, the characters, or anything else on my television screen for that matter.

Trouble, oh trouble, can’t you see, you’re eating my heart away and there’s nothing much left of me. Except secret agents and double-lives and lipstick GPS units.

Who’s Your Pope?

This just in—a new pope has been chosen. White smoke around 12:15 Eastern Time says it all. Except, who the guy is.

Is it the conservative Joseph Ratzinger from Germany, or somebody else, some dark horse candidate?

Whoever it is, I’m actually a bit disappointed. The cardinals just started the conclave yesterday. And already they’ve chosen a successor to PJPII? Already? Where’s the suspense? The media build up? The commercial breaks? The days and days of sleepless uncertainty? Jeez, what a let down.

Milk, It Does the Corporation Good

There’s a disturbing article today in Salon on Horizon Farms, a nationwide producer and distributer of organic milk. Turns out “organic” doesn’t actually mean the Horizon’s dairy cows are raised in a humane manner. Sure, they aren’t injected with antibiotics and bovine growth hormones, but neither are they allowed to graze in open pasturelands like the happy cow on the Horizon carton. (Actually, I guess that cow is flying across the world, she’s so happy.)

Horizon cows are fed a diet of starchy grains (rather than grass, which is what a cows stomach is designed to digest). This carbo-loading leads to much greater milk production, but weakens the cow’s health, primarily its digestive system.

Even more disturbing to me though, is the corporate nature of Horizon, a company which comes across as some earthy crunchy local farm. That feel-good image couldn’t be further from the truth.

Horizon is owned by White Wave. And White Wave, in turn, is a division of the dairy giant Dean Foods. Dean Foods also owns Borden, Pet, Country Fresh, and a host of other dairy lines. The company is the country’s leading milk producer, and its revenue last year was in the ballpark of nearly $11 billion.

Of course, Horizon is the only organic milk my local supermarket carries, and I’ve been forking out huge amounts of cash for it for years, thinking I’ve been a good little consumer, supporting some anonymous, honest, farm family out in the middle of Iowa.

So I’ve been thinking I got to find some place that sells Stonyfield Farms organic milk. They’ve been in the yogurt business for years and they’re branching out to plain old organic milk.

These folks aren’t some part of some huge corporate conglomeration. This is me thinking, and this is me thinking wrong again.

Despite Stonyfield’s pastoral story of starting out “in 1983 with 7 cows”, the company is now 85% owned by the ginormous European corporation Groupe Danone (who sells Dannon yogurt in this country).

Welcome to Planet Starbucks. Welcome to the Archer-Daniel-Midlands National Historic Pasture. Welcome to the Dean Foods Corporate Milkman’s Baby.

Starbucks Delocator

From Boing Boing via Stay Free, news of the Starbucks Delocator, a database which offers up the nearest non-Starbucks coffeehouse or cafe near any given location. My own local hangout—Summit Coffee—wasn’t in the database yet, so I’ve added it. You have to love Summit—I wrote most of my dissertatation there it seems.

Again, that’s the Starbucks Delocator. Get the google on and add a link to the Starbucks Delocator on your own blog.