DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

I felt so good about rescuing 21 lbs of tech trash from the landfill that I announced a collection at work. I volunteered to pay the shipping and recycling fees for everybody’s old diskettes, CDs, videotapes, etc. I was slightly anxious that I was committing to a big expense, but I felt strongly enough that this was the right thing to do that I decided it was worth blowing part of my meager music budget.

I asked a co-worker to set up a collection box. I announced the recycling drive at a staff meeting, and then via email the next day. Then I sent an email reminder to everyone three weeks later.

Today I went to the office to pick up the box. I felt like a lobsterman, reeling in the trap with anticipation… what obsolete treasures would I have collected? Original Win95 install disks? Quicken 1.0 floppies? Prodigy startup diskettes? (Do not tell me you don’t remember Prodigy.)

But all I got was two lousy toner cartridges. I think there’s about 20 people in the office, with 30 home computers between them, yet there was not a single old floppy to be found. Not a single coaster CD. Nary a videotape, ZIP disk, cassette, or inkjet cartridge.

I hope this means they’d all already found sane destinations for their expired media. They tend to be a pretty green group.

Or maybe I’m the only pack-rat in the bunch. I’m sure some people don’t save 15-year-old installation media. I always figured I might have some use for, say, six consecutive releases of Stuffit Deluxe, but in retrospect I can say I was incorrect. I barely have any use for brand new installation media.

In any case, I will need to come up with a better plan to rescue tech trash from people’s closets and garages before it hits the landfill. I’m sure there are tons of it out there, raw material going to waste.

Kim Severson’s article on the obesity crisis, Perils of portion distortion, contains the answer to a question that’s bothered me for most of my life. This answer will tell you something unpleasant about capitalism — something you might have already figured out if you ever stopped to think about it.

Let’s ease into it with some surprising test results:

Brian Wansink, a professor who founded the Food and Brand Lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign… took to a Chicago-area theater and handed 161 moviegoers coupons for free popcorn and a drink. One group was given fresh, hot popcorn in medium and large sizes. The other group received 14-day-old popcorn, also in medium and large buckets.

People who received the larger buckets, whether stale or fresh, ate up to 61 percent more popcorn than those who got the smaller buckets.

Quality makes no difference: if there’s more to eat, people will eat it, regardless of what it tastes like. Why am I repulsed by this? Because I do the same thing. I’ve gotten what appears to be 2-week-old popcorn at the local movie house. The staleness doesn’t stop me from eating the whole cubic yard of it. It’s as if I’m thinking “It’s going to get better, maybe farther toward the bottom.” Gad.

The popcorn study yielded another result: The fresh-popcorn subjects ate less than the stale-popcorn subjects. The researchers theorized that “given better-tasting food, people will still eat more if given more, but they’ll slow down sooner because they feel satisfied sooner.”

This theory is the key to the question I’ve been wondering about since I was old enough to eat packaged snacks (in America, this means age three). The question is: in any seasoned snack, why do 99% of the chips (or pretzels or whatever) taste so bland? You’ve probably had the experience of pawing through a bag of Doritos or whatever, looking for the chip with the extra-heavy coating of spices. Surely I can’t be the only one.

The insidious answer: if the food is lousy, people eat more! Eating more means buying more! Buying more means better profits! Ironically, in this diseased society, an inferior snack will outsell a good one. As my friend Terry used to say, “Chew on that while you eat your lunch.”

This is so loathsome I’ve had to italicize part of it:

Peter Meehan, head of Newman’s Own Organics… said food manufacturers walk a fine line when it comes to making snacks that satisfy, yet keep people coming back for more. He said it’s common practice for food manufacturers to pull back a little on flavorings in some foods so consumers will not be completely satisfied with a small amount.

“If you put too much coating or flavor on a chip, you say, ‘Hey — that’s good. I’m done. I’m satisfied.’ And so you don’t reach back into the bag for more.”

So, the concert was amazing. Three hours of Dream Theater is like six hours of any other band. The number of notes played is the same; Dream Theater is just a lot more efficient at performing them.

Three hours more than I ever attempt to hear in one sitting. I left feeling sated, but only if you have a sense of dramatic understatement. I wanted a second encore, but only because I wanted the band to feel that this audience, featuring me, deserved yet another 20 minutes of high-energy attack-rock. But I couldn’t actually take in any more music at that point.

We arrived at the Warfield about 15 minutes before showtime, to find 1000 people waiting to get in. The line snaked down to the corner, and halfway up the next block. I asked a member of the Warfield staff whether something had gone wrong — had the doors not opened on schedule an hour before, to allow these people inside? “It’s always like this,” he said, “every show.” I asked whether the crowd hadn’t arrived until later, causing a last-minute lineup. The guard corrected me: “People were here at 3pm.” As an explanation this only raised more questions, like “what sane person sits outside the club for five hours when all seats are reserved?” But we’d shuffled past the guard so I wasn’t able to ask.

The crowd was less homogenous than I expected. I thought there would be a lot of 20-something headbangers with tattoos, basically the raw ingredients for a mosh pit just waiting for amplified bass drums to kick them into flailing action. But the ages ranged from 14 to 60, and the mood from mellow to stoned. I didn’t expect to say this, but I fit right in. Everybody else was also a music geek.

The band was amazingly tight. Given the complexity of the music, this is a huge deal. I knew they could do this but still it was something to see it happen live.

My only complaint about the event is that the sound wasn’t great. I’ll admit that I’m relatively inexperienced with concert sound — maybe this was a world-class mix and I’m just too naive to appreciate it. Most of the nuances of the arrangements were lost in the sonic wash of guitar and keyboard. I knew the material well enough to hear in my head what I was supposed to be hearing in my ears, and the gap was large. The mix managed to reduce what I know to be utterly complex and musical and subtle to a beat-me-over-the-head redundant sameness, like “here’s a speed-metal thing again” and “oh, another guitar solo”, etc. Maybe live sound is never a match for the CD. I’m glad I have the CDs.

My favorite part of the show came in an improv section. The keyboard player and drummer played an extended call-and-response thing that I thought was incredibly cool. I have a long-time fondness for call-and-response; one of my favorite moments with my old band was trading fours with the guitarist during a Stevie Ray Vaughan tune, an improvised blues-rock duet for guitar and drums. We kicked ass, for those 16 bars anyway. Mike Portnoy and Jordan Rudess kicked a whole lot more ass, and for a lot longer than 16 bars. Their chops are undeniable.

23 years ago tonight I saw RUSH in concert. I was young… I had to get a ride to the arena from my parents. It was the first concert I’d ever seen. I have distinct memories of gaping at people smoking pot in the open! Oh, I was a sheltered youth, until the RUSH concert anyway.

(It was the Moving Pictures tour, BTW, with a set list that reads like a greatest-hits album.)

Tonight, as circumstance would have it, 23 years and 30 minutes since my first progressive-rock show, I’ll be seeing another one:

I can’t think of anything I might see tonight that would shock me… Pot smoking? De nada. Live tattooing? Kein Problem. Mosh-pit brawls? Ja, mon. 17 million notes being shredded to tiny bits onstage? OK, yes, that still blows my mind.

We’ve finally crossed over: on average, from noon to 6:00 PM on weekdays since our photovoltaic energy system was turned on, we’ve consumed zero watts of utilitily-company power. The 49998 figure below indicates that we’ve generated a surplus of 2 kWh. (The “zero point,” for obscure reasons, reads “50,000.”)

We still have a ways to go before we zero out the offpeak bank of kWh, currently at 581 kWh. But we have until next January to do so. And this effort will be greatly helped beginning in May, when PG&E’s summer rates take effect — after which we’ll be credited 3x for every kWh generated during peak hours as we’ll be charged for every offpeak kWh consumed. Yeah, it’s a math problem.

Based on performance to date, I believe we’re going to have a net surplus of energy by next January. PG&E won’t pay me for it, but I still get some benefit: every kWh I send into the grid means one less that has to be made from burning coal or natural gas. That means cleaner air for me. And you, too. (You’re welcome!)