Kablammo!

Kretek (clove) cigarettes are illegal in the United States of America, or at least they will be three months from today. Earlier today, the President signed the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act into law.

Some of the Act’s provisions, like requiring disclosure of all the ingredients in a pack of cigarettes, seem sound.

Others seem harmless. European smokers migrated from Marlboro “Light” and “Ultra Light” to “Gold” and “Silver” without a hitch. I don’t imagine banning terms like “Light” and “Mild” in the US will have much of a different result. And as for graphic warning labels, everyone already knows cigarettes are bad for them. I guess maybe a label might, somehow, keep a 14-year-old who was on the fence about smoking from starting. But it sure as shit isn’t going to get anybody to quit.

Still other provisions, though, seem somewhat ominous despite their ostensibly good intentions. Section 907(a)(1)(A) of the Act provides that (emphasis added):

Beginning 3 months after the date of enactment of the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, a cigarette or any of its component parts (including the tobacco, filter, or paper) shall not contain, as a constituent (including a smoke constituent) or additive, an artificial or natural flavor (other than tobacco or menthol) or an herb or spice, including strawberry, grape, orange, clove, cinnamon, pineapple, vanilla, coconut, licorice, cocoa, chocolate, cherry, or coffee, that is a characterizing flavor of the tobacco product or tobacco smoke.

I note that menthol is specifically exempted from the ban on flavors. I also note that Philip Morris, one of the largest tobacco producers, sells an awful lot of menthol cigarettes, has donated lavishly to the election campaigns of many Congresspersons, and apparently was a supporter of the Act. I also note that some smaller, foreign-owned tobacco companies, like Djarum, exclusively sell clove cigarettes. RJ Reynolds sells some flavored tobacco, notably in the Camel line, but none of the major domestic tobacco companies are anywhere near as deeply invested in flavored cigarettes as some of their foreign competition. I can’t help thinking that, maybe, the big US tobacco companies, well aware that there is no political will for an outright and total ban on tobacco in general, lobbied for and magnanimously agreed to what amounts to an outright and total ban on some of their niche competitors.

Section 906(d)(4)(A) provides that:

The Secretary shall—

(i) within 18 months after the date of enactment of the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, promulgate regulations regarding the sale and distribution of tobacco products that occur through means other than a direct, face-to-face exchange between a retailer and a consumer in order to prevent the sale and distribution of tobacco products to individuals who have not attained the minimum age established by applicable law for the purchase of such products, including requirements for age verification; and

(ii) within 2 years after such date of enactment, issue regulations to address the promotion and marketing of tobacco products that are sold or distributed through means other than a direct, face-to-face exchange between a retailer and a consumer in order to protect individuals who have not attained the minimum age established by applicable law for the purchase of such products.

I respect and applaud the desire to keep cigarettes out of kids’ hands. But I can’t help thinking that, maybe, the real reason to regulate remote sales of cigarettes has to do with tax revenue. New York State, for example, levies a fairly high tax on each pack of cigarettes sold. New York City adds another tax on top of that. The net result of those taxes is that smokers who can afford to do so tend to order cigarettes a few cartons at a time over the internet from vendors in different jurisdictions where smokes are cheaper. Banning non-face-to-face sales would “protect the children” while, conveniently, raising some states’ tax revenues.

Speaking of which. Does it bug anybody else that a lot of states are now rather heavily dependent on the revenue they make from taxing cigarettes? If everyone magically stopped smoking, in addition to the huge job loss that would result many states would instantly lose income streams they’ve come to rely on. Just as the tobacco companies’ own halfhearted stop-smoking campaigns ring hollow, so too do statements by many state actors.

Note that I’m not even a smoker. But I did used to enjoy a clove every now and again, and I will be rather sad to see them go. And I think it’s hypocritical for anyone to bemoan smoking while simultaneously exploiting people’s nicotine addictions to help out with a budget.

Dear Mr McCain:

Why do you hate science?

I will be going to a planetarium this week-end to spite you.

As defined in Roger Ebert’s Movie Glossary, Literati’s Law of Averages states:

When any character in a movie is reading a book, the page he is reading always will be in the exact center of the book.

Seldom has there been a more egregious example of this law, assuming it can be extended to television as well, than in the following stills from The Sopranos.

First, we have a close-up of the book Carmen Soprano is reading: a real-estate sales exam study book, clearly open to the first page of chapter 1.

The very next shot is a reverse-angle shot, showing Carmen holding the book. It’s been clearly established that she’s just started the book (see the picture above), yet the book is open to its exact center. Maybe it just has an extremely long table of contents, introduction, foreword, and so on?

It’s made all the more infuriating by this counterexample from another Sopranos episode. AJ is reading A People’s History of the United States and finding out about Christopher Columbus’s wacky adventures in enslaving and genociding the Arawaks. This is recounted at the very beginning of the book, as it happens, and AJ’s book is opened to the very beginning.

I guess it’s a function of having different directors for different episodes, but it’s kind of annoying that they got it right once and got it horribly, horribly wrong another time. (And for the record, the real estate example was the horribly wrong one.)

You can tell I’m back in school because the trash can in my kitchen is overflowing and includes a precarious stack of take-out containers. (I swear, I’ll get to it soon.) Also by my backpack crammed full of weighty tomes. This time, they’re on topics like civil procedure and torts rather than aerodynamics and solid mechanics, but they’re still just as dense, jargon-filled, and pricey. Good times.

Not even kidding, by the way. Thus far it has absolutely been good times. A bunch of reading already, but it’s actually been quite interesting. I am enjoying this.

In other news: I’m extremely unhappy with some aspects of my Very Expensive University’s IT setup. They maintain a “portal” providing access to a bunch of different things, like schoolwide announcements, class listings, assigned reading, syllabi, email, and so on. Even before I was enrolled, I was granted limited portal access as an admitted student. At that time, I created a username and password for the portal, which later served as my username and password for school email. As was my wont, I selected a password that was mixed-case, included numerals, and didn’t have any dictionary words in it—you know, a “good” password. So far, so good.

The problem arose when I attempted to log in to the school’s wireless internet connection. My http traffic was redirected, as expected, to a login page. I’d been assured that my portal credentials would serve as my WiFi credentials as well—but every time I tried to log in to WiFi, I was informed that my credentials were invalid. I checked and doublechecked them, and made sure they still allowed me to check my email at the dedicated email stations around the corner.

So I made my way over to the help desk and explained my problem. The helpful and friendly (and patient—I was far from the only person asking for help at the same time) operator asked for my VEU student ID, which I provided her. She typed some stuff into her computer and started copying information from her screen to a sticky note, which she proceeded to show me.

On the sticky note were written my username and my password. Even worse, it wasn’t actually the password I’d set for myself, since it had been converted to lowercase. It turns out the reason I couldn’t log in was that the WiFi authentication was expecting my password all in lowercase.

Can you get any further from best practices? Not just storing the passwords as cleartext, which is bad enough, but forcing them to lowercase. I can’t decide which upsets me more.

One of these days, or weeks or months or years, I’m going to remember that there are people who are more than willing to help me, and who don’t want me to fail horribly. And one of these days, it is to be hoped, I’ll let myself be helped before it’s too late—even if it means asking for help. I swear.

Note: I’m not too proud to ask for help, I just really really hate bothering or inconveniencing people. Which sometimes makes me end up inconveniencing people a thousand times worse down the road, when something eminently preventable spirals or festers or snowballs out of control.

So, yeah.

In other news, I saw The Tallest Man on Earth yesterday, and he put on a great show. He briefly forgot the words to one of his own songs, but these things happen. Plus, he covered for it pretty well, and it was a very friendly & appreciative crowd. Also, Mr on Earth himself is quite a friendly and good-natured guy. A+++, would see again.

Speaking of corn… Considering that the cows that provide the beef are fed a diet of corn and basically every other ingredient is sweetened with corn, you could argue that McDonald’s really serves cornburgers.

And speaking of speaking of corn, what a fortuitous billboard to drive past while having the above discussion:

????????
What is it supposed to mean? Is it some kind of puzzle where a picture of a Big Mac represents a certain value? Is it a rebus? I really can’t be sure.

The most obvious interpretation might be “100% beef”. But that would mean that “Big Mac” symbolizes zero. I doubt that suggesting McDonald’s’ flagship product equates to nothingness is what Ronald’s ad mavens had in mind.

Yet the only other plausible interpretation I could come up with [1] was “1% beef”, just outright ignoring the non-ASCII characters. [2] And that seems even more ridiculous, and even less like it would be the desired message.

But if it’s “100% beef”, it’s unclear what the percentage would be referring to. The only antecedent on the billboard itself is an entire Big Mac; buns, cheese, Thousand Island secret sauce, and all. Unless they’re making their bread out of beef these days, the overall beef percentage in a Big Mac is well below unity, regardless of whether you’re measuring by weight or volume.

…

A lot of these problems could have been avoided if they’d just used hamburger patties as zeroes, and put a huge Big Mac behind the text. Patties are a good deal rounder than entire burgers [3], so they’re a more straightforward stand-in for zeroes [4]; and equating a patty to zero wouldn’t be as belittling to the brand. Plus, the patties themselves are (or should be) an awful lot closer to 100% beef than the sandwiches as wholes.

Though now I’m tempted to try a proper hamburger sandwich (think “bread sandwich”, but with hamburgers rather than slices of bread).

* * *

[1] I’m assuming base 10 here. This billboard is from McDonald’s, after all, not Google.

[2] Is there a Unicode codepoint for “Big Mac”? How about “hamburger”?

[3] Were this a Wendy’s billboard, their square patties would present an entirely different set of problems. But that’s for a different discussion.

[4] Of course, zeroes usually aren’t perfectly round either, which I’ve been known to complain about in other advertisements. But no matter how you render your zeroes, they’re going to look more similar to hamburger patties than to hamburger sandwiches, so the point remains.

I thought that carton of ice cream looked a bit different from how I remembered. Take a look at this picture (new carton on top, old one on the bottom):

I’m disappointed in you, Breyer’s. You used to have integrity.

Song of the Moment: «Fratres (for 12 cellos)» — Arvo Pärt

I’ve never cared in the least about the NCAA tournament, and I’ve never followed college basketball. (I attended a few Princeton games years ago, but that’s mostly just because my dad is a huge fan of Pete Carril’s system.) So I wouldn’t have entered the office NCAA pool, except that my boss basically insisted on it.

Then UConn went and lost in the first round and blew everything to hell. Thanks a lot, Huskies.

Song of the Moment: «The Chokin’ Kind» — Joe Simon

On the bright side, I suppose I can rent a car now if I ever need to.

To make myself feel like a complete and utter failure (moreso than already—thanks, Celia ;) ), here is an idiotlist:

• Orson Welles was my age when he wrote, directed, produced, and starred in Citizen Kane, widely and correctly considered the best film ever. (It’s Terrific!)
• Paul McCartney was my age when he wrote “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” and he and his mates recorded Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, about which more need not be said.
• Albert Einstein was my age, and had my job, when he had his Annus Mirabilis, for which he was eventually awarded the Nobel Prize and repeatedly referenced on The Simpsons.
• Neil Young was my age when he released a solo album and an album with Crosby, Stills and Nash, in addition to touring with Crazy Horse (now available as an album as well).
• Ian Anderson was my age when J-Tull made Thick as a Brick.
• David Gilmour was my age when P-Floyd made Meddle.
• Georges-Pierre Seurat was my age when he began work on Un dimanche après-midi à l’Île de la Grande Jatte (A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte).
• Leandro Barbosa was my age (happy birthday, Leandro!) when he was the reigning holder of the NBA 6th Man Award, and a key player on the most exciting team in the league.
• Need I continue?

For the sake of fairness, however, here is a counterexamplelist:

• Eric Blair was my age when he was broke and unemployed, on the brink of eviction and starvation. He considered himself lucky to find a job washing dishes 80 hours a week, as he later described under an assumed name in Down and Out in Paris and London.
• Little help?

A not-so-recent-anymore article includes the following:

Music sales have slumped in recent years as more people have turned to file-sharing. The Recording Industry Association of America, which is not a party to the lawsuit, says record companies have brought more than 26,000 actions against people alleging they shared files in violation of copyrights.

I’m not going to address the merit of this lawsuit in particular, or the approach in general. There’s enough of that all over the internet already. Nor will I point out that, during the “recent years”, while “[m]usic sales have slumped”, DVD sales have exploded and RIAA labels have released fewer and arguably worse albums. There’s gotta be enough of that all over the internet as well.

No, my point is illustrated by this list of the past 10 or so albums I’ve purchased, along with the record label (if any) for each one:

• Elliott Brood — Tin Type (Weewerk)
• Holy Fuck — LP (XL Recordings)
• Husky Rescue — Ghost is Not Real (Catskills)
• Junior Senior — Hey Hey My My Yo Yo (Rykodisc)
• Manu Chao — La Radiolina (Nacional Records)
• Maserati — Inventions for the New Season (Temporary Residence)
• Menomena — Friend and Foe (Barsuk)
• Portugal. The Man — Church Mouth (Fearless Records)
• Radiohead — In Rainbows (?)
• Spoon — Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga (Merge Records)
• UNKLE — War Stories (Surrender All)

Green indicates an album is non-RIAA, red RIAA (post-purchase, I looked them up here). As you can see, that means one of the past ten CDs I’ve bought (or one of the past eleven albums I’ve bought) has been a release from an RIAA-affiliated label. I guess that means I’m so indie it hurts [1], but it also illustrates that, without even trying, you can nearly eliminate your support for the RIAA and still buy as many CDs as you did before. So while I don’t necessarily doubt that music sales in general have fallen, I have to wonder whether the fall is as big as it’s been made out to be. Articles tend to parrot RIAA talking points, and it’s not clear where they’re getting their numbers from. If their sales figures are only based on the sales figures from their member labels, then the vast majority of my purchases don’t count, and I know there are lots of people out there with tastes like mine (or, God forbid, even indier).

Incidentally, if not for downloads, I wouldn’t have spent actual money on any of those albums.

* * *

[1] Adam, if you’re reading this, you can consider this post an explicit recommendation to listen to all those albums listed above. Sorry this still isn’t a proper mp3blog, but at least it’s trending in that direction. In any case, all of those albums qualify as ‘best of new music’ in my book; other than the Elliott Brood, which came out in 2004; and the Junior Senior, which came out in 2005 but wasn’t released Stateside until this year. Though the US release of the Junior Senior album does come with an EP of all-new material—which is the entire reason I bought it, since I already had a copy that I got in Denmark this spring.

People I know:

• Bruce Greenspan
• Butterflynn
• Critical
• EstonianPunkCat
• Fire_Hazard
• Hille
• Manganese
• PBones
• Scarlett1304
• Spine Porridge
• Supachump
• SushiDeJaneiro
• Tomahagne
• Vaarikaisand
• WordToKyle
• Zepsub
• Zot

Things I read:

• badscience
• BillMon
• CommonDreams
• DailyKos
• Dan’s Data
• ebalogaalne
• Hullabaloo
• I, Cringely
• In These Times
• Ironic Sans
• Language Log
• Literal-Minded
• MediaMatters
• Paul Graham
• Salon
• Slacktivist
• The Economist
• The Gadflyer
• The Grauniad
• The Nation
• The Onion
• The Register
• The Superest
• Unclaimed Territory
• Wikipedia