DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

We already knew that the patent system is fucked, but this is just sad.

Clear Channel … announced that it had acquired a U.S. patent covering a system of creating digital recordings of live performances. Essentially, the patent’s “Event Recording System” is a convoluted and fairly vague description of off-the-shelf stuff you could pick up at any Guitar Center…
Clear Channel has interpreted this patent to infer that it now owns the exclusive rights to all live performance recordings sold at any venue on the day of show, thus creating a virtual monopoly on the process.

Here’s the patent: U.S. Patent #6,614,729: System and method of creating digital recordings of live performances

(Hearty thanks to Chuck for keeping us in mind as he’s killing company time reading Mix Magazine)

Foodies and fans of Kitchen Confidential should check out a pair of articles in today’s Chronicle food section:

• Economics of running a restaurant: Tireless chefs do double duty as bean counters
• From soup to nuts in saga of one S.F. dining hot spot

The amount of work restaurant owners do for tiny profit margins (roughly 4%) is astounding.

As deeply skeptical as I am, I occasionally exhibit a weakness for mysticism — I would really like to believe there’s more to this world than increasingly-toxic air and armored passenger vehicles and food products so unhealthy that even our government, not exactly impressing the world with its foresight or eptitude (that’s the opposite of ineptitude), has announced that they are unsafe to eat in any amount.

My belief that there’s more is rarely rewarded, but I like to believe it anyway.

So, recently when I had an afternoon free and five bucks to spend, I caught a matinee showing of What the bleep do we know?, aka What tHe→ #$*! Dθ ωΣ (k)Π0w!?, or something like that. The filmmakers spent a pile of money on special effects for this movie, including the title. (All those crazy Greek letters cost a lot extra, like the screensaver in the Matrix.)

The movie is a docudrama. There’s a plot, sort of. There’s a message… sort of. As Ruthe Stein writes in the Chron,

It’s partially a ponderous documentary featuring interviews with what’s described as “14 top scientists and mystics,” none of whom are identified until the end, so you don’t know whether the talking head spouting off about the meaning of life has an advanced degree in physics or mysticism.

As if the inscrutable woman in purple robes nattering about “divinity, reincarnation, and manifestation” might be mistaken for the head of the Physics department at Yale. (I could practically smell the incense.)

I struggled. I wanted to believe the New Age-y revelations, because I think there are things we don’t understand. But some of the movie’s claims clipped my bullshit meter. Sample: water stored in a jar with nice words taped to the outside formed beautiful crystals when frozen, whereas water in a jar with mean words — if I remember this right — looked like one of those nasty goobers spit out by the old men in the park.

Society has made astounding discoveries, many of which would be indistinguishable from magic by anyone from an earlier time. Imagine explaining to your great-great-grandfather how multiple-audio-track surround-sound concert videos are stored on DVD. Imagine describing an MRI to a physician from 200 years ago — he’d probably put a leech on your neck to treat your delusions.

The point is, I’m willing to believe that 100 years from now people will accept as commonplace truths things that today we treat with derision. Maybe some of those future commonplace truths are getting their first public coverage in this movie.

(Ironically, it’s arguably because of recent amazing advancements in technology that we are so stubbornly unwilling to believe in New Age claims: machines can see brainwaves, but people can’t see auras. Unless it’s got a microchip and an LCD display, our society seems to think, it can’t possibly be real.)

My favorite part of the film described a physiological basis for personality types. Some people are consistently cheerful, while others are consistently depressed; some are angry, some seem to invite bad luck and suffering. The movie posits that people become addicted to their own brain chemistry, ensuring that the chemical triggers for a particular set of emotions have a superabundance of receptors within the body’s cells. In essence, some people feel angry all the time because they’ve developed an immense sensitivity to the chemicals that trigger aggression. This concept was illustrated with pudgy animated cartoon neurotransmitters. Well, it was more effective than it sounds.

That some of its claims fall flat shouldn’t ruin this film more than minor plot holes ruin any other flawed-yet-essentially-good movie. I decided to treat this film as a buffet of ideas, from which I can handpick the lessons that have some meaning for me.

Even so, this is a movie that will make people in the Midwest roll their eyes at the entire west coast of their home country while exclaiming, “They believe what?”” while simultaneously choking down a Grilled Bacon Sourdough Burger with jumbo curly fries and a Diet Coke.

Not that that’s a bad thing.

Patronize these links, man:

• Movie Site
• IMDB

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.