DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Suffering from a sort of existential torpidity, an emotional exhaustion brought on by a temporary failure to cope with modern society’s demands to do more, more, more, we broke down and sought refuge in common broadcast entertainment: we subscribed to cable television.

Comcast offered a special rate on the Starz! premium package, which if memory serves would eventually (after the special rate expired) cost about $90 per month. $90/month to watch a couple of movies?! Hello, NetFlix! We never planned to keep the service for very long, so we signed up and briefly looked forward to having dozens of movies per day to enjoy.

Starz! isn’t one channel, but 13, some of which have separate East and West Coast feeds. We ended up getting about 18 channels that showed something appealing at least once in a while. The Starz! website displays a grid of the day’s content; I checked it frequently in eager anticipation.

It didn’t last. I don’t know if the problem is Starz! or cable TV in general, but 98% of the content is crap. You’d think that with 18 channels of movies running 24 hours/day, there would nearly always be something good on. This is definitely not the case.

I admit that we taped a pile of movies. Some of them will even be worth watching. The rest were taped in desperation — “hey, here’s one we’ve actually heard of; better tape it!” $90/month?!

After a few weeks, we’d run out of tape, and Starz! had run out of content. Scanning the next week’s grid, I found literally nothing worth two hours of my time. I called Comcast to cancel the service.

The sales rep tried hard to retain my business. And she offered me a deal I couldn’t refuse — I could downgrade to basic cable and pay less per month than if I cancelled the TV feed entirely. The TV service includes a $14 discount against the Internet service, and the price tag for basic is $12, so in essence Comcast is paying me $24/year to receive a TV feed I don’t want. I guess they get some small value out of artificially inflating their subscriber counts. Or maybe they know that every American human will, if given the opportunity, watch television at least sometimes. They may even be right.

If I find myself actually watching, though, I’ll gladly pay $24/year to stop. I’d sooner babysit your kids than watch television. Or better yet, I’ll set your kids down in front of the TV and spend the evening doing something worthwhile, like, I don’t know, picking my ass. Seriously.

I guess the best thing about having Starz! for a month is that I saw the last 15 minutes of Ang Lee’s Hulk, thereby saving myself the 123 other minutes it would have someday taken me to watch the whole thing. That is just about the dumbest climax I have ever seen. Nick Nolte, what were you thinking?

What I now wish I’d done is fill a couple tapes of FoodTV shows. It didn’t occur to me until the day after I cancelled.

Mr. Carroll fires off a few mind bombs in his rant on packaging. It’s difficult and unfair to excerpt, but in an effort to save you some time (Note: average debris.com visit length = 75 dissatisfied seconds) (I just made that up) I’ll show the passage that grabbed me:

Let’s consume pointless packaging! Great karma. In theory, within three decades or so, all the trend arrows will meet at the top of the graph, and one- third of the world will have everything and two-thirds of the world will have nothing.

That won’t happen, of course. They’ll murder us in our beds first.

The Chronicle’s Food section ran an unusual story today about a magic peanut elixir. (I didn’t even know peanuts needed elixing.)

I had to try it. I rushed to San Francisco, parked on Divisadero just south of Haight, and looked around wildly for teeming crowds of high-energy peanut-milk faithful, surrounded by cast-off wheelchairs and crutches, radiant with positive vibes in spite of their ratty alternative clothing (this is Haight St. after all). I found no such throng. I couldn’t even find the cafe; I had to pull out my laptop to look up the address. I was right across the street from the place.

I walked inside. There were two other people there — the owners. Given today’s press, I thought sure the place would be filled. If you can’t find a miracle on Haight Street, or at least a dime bag, where can you?

But one wall inside the cafe did indeed feature a dozen written testimonials to the miracles of peanut milk. The praise is honest and heartfelt.

I don’t have AIDS, baldness, or rickets — not yet, anyway — so I wasn’t sure whether I’d notice any immediate benefit. But I ordered up a tall peanut smoothie (peanut milk, apples, bananas) and awaited my personal miracle. It arrived with a little paper cap on the straw.

Amy Moon said her peanut smoothie was “delicious.” I can’t say I agree. I’ve had some nasty smoothies — all from my own kitchen, like spinach/kale, which in what would have been a true medical miracle very nearly brought my stomach out my mouth — and this compares favorably. I finished it. I’m not sure I’d want another one, though. I can’t say “I wouldn’t cross the street for one of those,” because I already had. You get the idea.

And then I drove straight to Amoeba Records and bought a CD.

Hey, wait a second — I got out of Amoeba with only one CD?! I’m cured! I’m cured!

The Environmental Working Group released a report entitled Rocket Fuel Contamination in California Milk.

Milk from cows raised in some parts of California may expose infants and children to more of a toxic rocket fuel chemical than is considered safe by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)…
In the first study to look for perchlorate in California supermarket milk, EWG found perchlorate in almost every sample tested — 31 out of 32 samples purchased from grocery stores in Los Angeles and Orange counties.

So in addition to cookies and peanut butter sandwiches, milk now also goes great with lettuce.

Check out Greg Gaylord’s “snare gallery” of 33 different handmade snare drums. Half of the pages contain source info on the wood, tuning characteristics, and a player’s report on resonance, sensitivity, and frequency response.

Excerpts from the report on the Platymiscum Yucatanum (Granadillo) snare:

Plenty of high crack, supported with strong mid and low frequencies. Has a full, rich, warm presence. A drier sounding drum with a more defined fundamental in the sweetspot (center) of the drum… The Granadillo went to a really low head tension, just above “no tension,” and went as tight as Maple before choking… Has a more “forgiving,” consistent cross stick sound with a half-inch movement in stick location… “The Maple sounds like a snare drum, the Granadillo sounds like an instrument.”

OK, so where do I sign?

While you’re at it, put me down for a Cherry drum too. (“Rim shots are loud and cutting with a ‘bite your head off’ attitude about them.” Who wouldn’t want that?)