The desert is not what Douglas Coupland had me expecting

As I type this, James has gone to Starbucks, and is going to bring me back a coffee. He's the greatest. That said, I HAVE done my initial experimentation with coffee-making on this trip, and I've done OK. Amy pointed out that I've really grown as a person in Las Vegas, what with the making of my own coffee and such. I even used the COFFEE MACHINE. And then I left it on for about 14 hours.

The house we've rented is covered with a thin film of nerd-detrius: pizza boxes, wet towels (from the hot tub), giant two-foot-tall margarita glasses, the plastic wrap from DVD packages, laptop charging cables, phone charging cables, and Nerf guns. I love that my friends are some of the only people in the world who go to Target on their first day in a foreign city and purchase a small Nerf arsenal.

I'm having a great trip. Las Vegas itself has almost nothing to do with it, though. We could be anywhere with every imaginable fast-food restaurant (as a Canadian, I have serious fast food envy, especially when it comes to In-N-Out Burger) and outlet malls (I bought something from Banana Republic, and I'm having the accompanying identity crisis) and cable and Target (for DVDs) and a shark exhibit. And actual waving palm trees. And fake pirate ships.

Actually the more I think about the more I realize that Las Vegas is a larger, more high-budget version of West Edmonton Mall. I feel kind of at home.

Fun with capitalism! Give $10 to the something store and they'll send you... something. It's a shopping surprise!

But, Orange!

The Home Outfitters opposite my library is in the process of closing. Everything in the store is marked down 50-70% off prices that were already on sale. So, that is pretty cheap. I have gone a couple times on my breaks and have managed to buy a set of orange pillowcases, a set of lobster-shaped hors d'oeurves spreaders (which only cost $1.50 fortunately, because I am probably going to break off the knife parts and then glue the lobsters on to other things) and a set of orange curtains. Yeah. I get lucky when stores go out of business, because I get to buy all the orange goods at deep discounts. Anyway.

The thing about this store is this: yes. Things are cheap there. Yes, there are products to be had, especially if you like orange. But the behaviour of shoppers, and the atmosphere in general, are wayyyyy out of proportion to the coolness of the event. People are rummaging madly through shelves of curtain panels as if they're looking for the vaccine to some deadly disease. I saw an old woman buying a cart of seemingly endless Christmas decorations, presumably all for $1--so much glitter, plastic, and probably lead paint. There are staff in the store, ensconsed in towers made of empty boxes and giant ceramic vases with gold vines painted on them, trying to sort to keep up with the constant stream of customers moving everything around. There are items abandoned mid-aisle, jettisoned, as if the person who had planned to buy them was overwhelmed (by SAVINGS) and just freaked out. There are women pushing strollers full of clocks and plastic storage bins. Earlier in the week, the couple in front of me were buying a giant, bright pink cart containing the apparatus for making cotton candy. Today, the three people in front of me in line were buying a Christmas-themed welcome mat and something called "Coffee-to-go!" There was a couple in the other line, and although they were speaking an Asian language, I'm pretty sure this is what they were saying:

Woman: Look at this shiny red tealight holder in the shape of a star!
Husband: It is so ugly.
Woman: But it is only $1!
Husband: But if we buy it, it will then become ours.
Woman: Put it in the cart.

In other words, the general atmosphere of shopping mayhem somehow compels people to buy things that they would CLEARLY never otherwise buy.* It was surreal. And I felt like a moron for taking part in it, for buying into the crowds of people behaving irrationally=awesome sale mentality. Stupid capitalism--you always get me with your bargains!

*I don't think this description includes me, however. Orange linens and lobster-shaped hors d'oeurves spreaders are EXACTLY the kind of thing I would otherwise buy.

Unforseen advantages; also, the environmental sustainability of drug users

An Alderman in Chicago is trying to convince the city council to ban tiny plastic bags used for selling drugs. The Health Committee chairman adds, ""We need to use every measure that we possibly can to stop [drug addiction] because it is destroying our kids." I admire the "thinking outside the box" that clearly went on here, but there remains one fundamental problem:

1. This will not, in any way, prevent drug dealers from selling drugs.

HOWEVER, this could still be an advantage as it might encourage drug dealers to use more environmentally friendly means to distribute their products. After all, plastic never disintegrates, and I bet the majority of crack cocaine addicts aren't recycling theirs (and indeed, may not even know what day to put out their recycling for curbside pick-up). This could be an opportunity for some creative re-use, or at least use of more sustainable materials! Possible alternatives to tiny plastic bags: packets made of aluminum foil or paper; the little plastic cases that those tiny memory chips for digital cameras come in; small Tupperware containers (these could be re-used as they are dishwasher-safe); tiny sachets made from salvaged industrial fabric (once emptied of heroin, these could be filled with potpourri and used as drawer/closet fresheners!); film cannisters.

Think about it.
I am filing this one under: "Great ideas."

As my dad likes to say: "We've upped our standards. Up yours."

I know I've said it a million times before, but I heart This American Life. I can only think of about four reasons I wish I was American, and one of them is so I could listen to public radio. So today, feeling Christmassy, I donated some money to them to help pay for the $150,000 bill they had for bandwidth last year--a result of the fact that you can listen to every episode online for free or subscribe to the free podcast on iTunes. I really like giving away money. It makes me feel like I am subverting capitalism. Like, yeah, I'll work for money, but then I'll just GIVE IT AWAY. Ha! Put that in your free-market pipe and smoke it!

I'm having some friends over for dinner tonight, and I'm cooking beer-basted boar ribs. For real. In my slow-cooker. I got up super-early and put all the "mats" into the slow-cooker, and hopefully when I get home dinner will be there, like a Christmas miracle. I found the recipe online, but I added a bottle of beer so I could say they were "beer-basted." An endless series of jokes about my cooking skill (330, baby!) and the "well fed" bonus will ensue. I'm looking forward to it. Studies suggest gamers like hanging out with other gamers--it makes them feel less awkward.

I've just discovered summize, a website that acts as a kind of meta-reviewer, consolidating reviews from across the blogipelago. So, for example, I type in "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" (the new Barbara Kingsolver book about food that I bought in hardcover and I am saving to read over Christmas holidays) and it produces this handy little graphic:


That little colour graph suggests that this book is going to be as exciting and fabulous as I think it is! The only problem with this mode of evaluating potential entertainment products is that, based on my experience with all consuming, other people are not nearly critical enough for my tastes. The internet needs to raise the bar.

PS. I have a surprisingly large number of posts tagged capitalism.

My friend Parker made this movie a long time ago. It is awesome, and now, it is on YouTube, along with the rest of the output of Western civilization.

I have long been a fan of threadless (in fact I am wearing a threadless shirt AT THIS VERY MOMENT!), but I had never heard of uneetee, which operates on a similar premise, that is, capitalism. I want to order shirts now.

why you should not make people choose between God and coffee.

Starbucks markets more 'anti-God' coffee cups. On this issue, I am torn between my principles: (a) defending people's freedom of expression (b) believing that those Starbucks "the way I see it" cups are deeply stupid

Yesterday I saw a truck on my street delivering some furniture from SOFALAIR. This is absolutely not a joke. Where do you go to buy a sofa? THE SOFALAIR! Where sofas that have escaped from other people's homes go to hide out, write manifestoes about sofa rights, and possibly be sat on by super-villains.

From BoingBoing: Homeowner Holdouts. People who refused to sell their homes so the land could be redeveloped. Inspired by the current news story of a Chinese woman whose house is now inaccessible, in the middle of a building site.

Sometimes I have to ask myself, "what's the freaking point?"

and the answer is, THERE IS NO FREAKING POINT.

The coffee place in my neighbourhood--"my neighbourhood coffee place," if you will--is never open in the mornings when I got to school. What is the point of a coffee place that is not open in the mornings, ie., the most important time for coffee, and also, co-incidentally, the time that people are on their way to school/work? I will tell you. There is no point, to any of it. I am not trying to be a downer when I saw this, BUT LIFE DOES NOT MAKE ANY SENSE.

Further proof of my "The world does not make any sense" claim: Lorne Gunter. Not only does he constantly behave like an ignorant baby-animal-killing conservative idealogue, but he also never gets me coffee. He's Canada's answer to "jerk."

Oh yeah...

I was trudging through the melty snow tonight on a side-street on Edmonton's south side when I encountered two boys selling lemonade. It was about 2 degrees outside. I had to reward their bizarrely optimistic business sense by buying some lemonade, which I then obligingly drank. Even though, honestly, it wasn't exactly a lemonade kind of moment.