DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

You know you’re getting old when a software product celebrates a 10-year anniversary… and you remember installing the first version.

DragThing is a launcher app for the Mac. It came out in 1995, and I remember it well. It wasn’t freeware or shareware, but “cool-stuff-ware” — the documentation requested that users send something cool to the author. As it happened, I had two boxes of something cool in my garage, namely the last 200 copies of the JAR CD.

I’ve been paying cash to upgrade DragThing ever since, from System 7.5 through 8.0, 9, 10.1 through 10.3.9… so far. I own three licenses. Oh, and one more thing: “Dock Schmock.”

James, congratulations on 10 successful years. Hey, if that old JAR CD is getting thin, let me know. I have 199 copies left in the garage.

According to the Chronicle:

The last 58.5 million acres of untouched national forests, which President Clinton had set aside for protection, were opened to possible logging, mining and other commercial uses by the Bush administration on Thursday.

The Heritage Forsts Campaign team is at the front lines of this battle. Their homepage summarizes the news:

The Bush Administration has declared that it is repealing the Roadless Area Conservation Rule.

The repeal, announced by the Administration at a press teleconference with Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey, ends years of speculation over the fate of a policy that protected millions of acres of national forests. It effectively ends all protection for these forests and should be considered a huge victory for the timber and mining industries.

Much of the food we buy at Trader Joe’s is sold in bulk, by weight. For example: 16 oz. of organic granola costs $2.29. I got to wondering what the overall cost of food is, per pound. We know how much we spend on groceries, so I was thinking that if we could translate that to a weight, our weekly shopping task might be easier. For example, we wouldn’t need to go to all the tedium of making shopping lists. Rather, we could just pick up 97 pounds of food. Maybe some day in the future, groceries could be ordered this way via phone: “Hi, Mr. McGlynn. Another 97 lbs of food this week? We’ll have that delivered this afternoon.”

So I put all the groceries on the scale and added them up. Our 97 lbs of food cost me $147, or about $1.50 per pound.

I’m sure there are regional differences, but I’m sure there are dietary differences too. For example, we paid $3.29 for 3 oz. of proscuitto. If you had a jones for proscuitto, your groceries would cost you a lot more than $1.50/lb.

The other end of the food-cost spectrum is populated by healthy, or at least dense, choices like organic tofu (87¢/lb). Then again, a pound of organic raw almond butter set me back $7.99, which sort of blows this theory. Also: I’m not very fond of tofu.

Still, I’m picturing drive-through grocery stores. I’d drive there in a pickup truck, position the bed below a chute and enter a pound weight and my ATM pin into the keypad. With a loud thump, 97 lbs. of groceries would drop into the bed. This could be a great time-saver.

One of the area’s aging hippies approached me in the checkout line, gave a playful tug on my son’s foot, and confided with twinkling eyes, “My ‘little one’ just turned 33!” He wore denim overalls, and his grey-white hair was pulled back in a rough ponytail. I’d hate to draw too many parallels between my life and a Bruce Willis movie, but I thought: minus the beard, that’s me in 2038.

“If you ever doubt you have what it takes,” he went on, “know that you do. Or else you wouldn’t have been given a gift like this!”

And I said, “What, the frozen asparagus?”

Would you like a little mercury with that fish oil? Environmental Defense surveyed 54 vendors of fish-oil and Omega-3 supplements to determine whether the products had been purified according to the strictest available standards.

There’s no smoking gun or scandal here — the red flags indicate that the vendor didn’t respond. In most cases it’s likely a sign of clerical inefficiency rather than contaminated fish oil.