DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

I’m a big fan of miracle food products. Sometimes they’re engineered, like Synergy, and sometimes they’re natural, like golden organic flax seeds. What makes them miraculous is the nutritional punch they pack: they fill a niche that is otherwise likely to go empty. They prolong life and promote good health. They fight crime and cure male pattern baldness. They have no points and no fees. They stick their dismounts.

Flax seeds, for example, are rich in Omega-3 fatty acids, important in preventing heart disease if you happen to be an Inuit tribesman. You can only get Omega-3s from flax seeds or cold-water fish such as whale, seal, and salmon. It’s easier to grill fish than flax seeds, but any more, fish (including salmon) comes with a side-order of mercury.

Synergy is is a powdered food supplement made of grass, fungus, and mold. There are a number of other sources for these important foods — for example, if you eat a piece of blubber left over from last week’s Omega-3-rich whale-fry, you’ll have the fungus and mold food groups covered. But you’d be missing out on those critical grass juices.

(I’m still waiting for the Synergy Co. to come out with a “cud bar.”)

Our latest miraculous food discovery is virgin coconut oil. It comes in a clear glass jar and looks like nothing so much as lard. Imagine scooping lard into a smoothie — wait, that’s probably an Atkins recipe.

The melting point for coconut fat is 76° F, so on warm days the jar of lard transforms into a translucent, lumpy, milky goo that resembles snot, e.g. if you’d just tossed back a lard smoothie. Mmmm, lung butter.

Coconut oil is high in saturated fats, a class of foods largely absent from my normal food intake. I’m supplementing them here in an attempt at a balanced diet.

Funny story in this Guitar.com interview with Mark Snyder, guitar tech for John Petrucci.

We tried many things to try and get that clean sound really pristine. It was extremely difficult. I would ask [Petrucci] to turn down his guitar a bit and then the clean dried up but, then he wasn’t getting the tone he wanted. He didn’t want to do that. He wanted to have the guitar full up. We tried a million different things. In the end, I built a box which was a guitar volume control, [but] he didn’t know that. We plugged the guitar into this box. All it had was a pot on it and the output. I had the numbers reversed. You turned up a little bit, it was virtually like turning your guitar signal down just a hair. He loved it. He was like, “It solved it!. The magic box!”.

The (unofficial) Google weblog published the full text of the Playboy interview that has kinked Google’s IPO. Apparently the entire interview has been appended to the SEC documentation and is therefore public domain.

See also the photos (and some lusty banner ads) in the Playboy site’s free preview of the article.

Check out this ominous pull quote from the homepage of LATimes.com (do copy editors get bonuses for this sort of thing?):

In the summer furnace of the Grand Canyon, hikers and runners try to avoid lugging a heavy piece of equipment: water. But those who skimp on it pay with their lives.

The headline (as seen on the front page) is equally menacing: Drink or die.

The story is disheartening: two healthy adults began a 27-mile trail run along an unmaintained path in the Grand Canyon, carrying about 1/6 as much water as they needed. 24 hours later, one of the two people, having spent an afternoon curled up in the shade and a night alone on the trail, stumbled into a USGS employee who was able to provide water. His trail-running companion was dead.

When I climbed Pike’s Peak last year, I carried 3 liters of water. I was climbing into cooler weather, and I knew I could refill at the 5- and 12.5-mile points — and I carried more than twice as much water as the woman whose body was airlifted out of the Grand Canyon. But then I wasn’t trying to run up the trail; my goal was to simply finish. The time was irrelevant.

I saw trail runners on the Barr Trail. Gangly ectomorphs wearing skimpy shorts, they’d fly by at a sprint, with a small bottle of water in one hand (weight-balanced by the stopwatch strapped to the opposite wrist). I’d like to think they’d carry more water were they descending 5000 feet into a 120° F river valley. To do anything else, especially at the Grand Canyon, doesn’t seem sane.

There’s a decent interview with Craig’s List founder Craig Newmark in yesterday’s Chron, telling the history of what is, in my experience, the best community website in the world. (As a recruiting tool, Craig’s List smokes HotJobs, Monster, Dice, etc.)

It’s really just a living proof of Metcalf’s Law. There’s nothing technically wonderful about craigslist.org; it’s a low-tech bulletin-board / classified ads system, with a UI straight out of 1998. The value is in the reach. Post an ad there, and you’re practically guaranteed a response.

The Chron interview didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know, but it’s reassuring somehow to see that the personality of the website matches that of its founder, which I’m sure is entirely by design.