Hormones and latex for everyone!

I don't Drudge that often, simply because Matt Drudge is like Perez Hilton for people with jobs, brains, lives, whatever. When I do happen upon the Drudge report and its eye-piercing siren, though, it doesn't take long to find something incredibly stupid and sensationalist.

Consider this video linked on Drudge a few days ago: Nancy Pelosi insisting that birth control could help our economy in the long-term. Here's the exchange in question, which took place on one of those Sunday morning news shows that you don't watch because you're at church, somewhat ironically:

STEPHANOPOULOS: Hundreds of millions of dollars to expand family planning services. How is that stimulus?

PELOSI: Well, the family planning services reduce cost. They reduce cost. The states are in terrible fiscal budget crises now and part of what we do for children's health, education and some of those elements are to help the states meet their financial needs. One of those - one of the initiatives you mentioned, the contraception, will reduce costs to the states and to the federal government."

Guys are supposed to heed clear of this issue. It's a touchy subject, no doubt. SHAME ON YOU FOR BRINGING IT UP STEPHANOPOULOS. But now that it's out there, I may as well continue blogging about it, for the lulz and the comments.

Let me be about as clear as I possibly can, using both boldface and italics: Children are a burden on society. Every child that attends school is a costly and risky investment in America's future. Every mouth-to-feed that puts an American family on Medicaid or Welfare is drawing from your pockets. Every kid who flunks out or fails to contribute to the workforce is a enormous loss for the American economy. Take your high school class' dropouts, multiply by about 20,000, and you'll start to understand the enormity of what I'm scratching at.

Back in high school, I begrudgingly read Bill O'Reilly's book-of-the-moment, Who's Looking Out For You?. It was an incredibly insensitive assessment of the American people, with lots of glaring racism and old-farty complaints about how these aren't the "good ol' days" anymore. But Bill actually got one point to stick in my head pretty hard: Unplanned, unwanted children are depleting government programs. Of course, his point was that unwanted black children born out of wedlock were depleting government programs for the entitled, working white man. Racism by any other name? Yes. Remember that there are many white Americans milking the system, too, and they know how to navigate the system better than anyone else.

Now to my point: If we didn't live in a culture that demonized birth control and family planning and underfunded programs to get it into the right hands, maybe our country wouldn't be in such a rut right now. Maybe if we funded programs to actively cut down on the number of deserving welfare recipients, we could put the net gain toward something proactive and useful. And maybe if we encouraged people to plan their families according to their income and their future, half of America wouldn't be degrading into a poor, awful slum.

Maybe if these huge families didn't need huge places to live, America wouldn't be seeing a record number of defaulting mortgages. After all, that's the most simple explanation as to what broke the credit market last year. Yes, yes, the current crisis is a much more complex situation, but who's to say that the entire thing would have been a hiccup rather than a depression if families had been small, succinct, and not drawing from the great American coffers.

You can blame popular religion and the far-right for that one. After all, trailer parks are chocked full of redneck couples feeding their 12 children with the money withheld from your paycheck, simply because they didn't use condoms, birth control, or get a non-surgical abortion early into the pregnancy. Selfish, right? It's actually the Christian thing to do: Bring children into this world that you can't support, because the government will help you. And ironically, the far-right are the same ones calling for a reduction in welfare and social security. Genius.

I really wish someone would explain why Republican senators and their constituents refused to fund the family planning programs in the stimulus package passed this week. Obviously, Americans are pretty bad at family planning without help-- the average American family stands at 3.14 members yet we have over 6 million families and 33 million individuals living below the poverty line. Obviously, people are going to keep screwing and accidentally getting pregnant, whether or not you chose to believe that simple fact. And obviously, this isn't going to stop without government intervention. Our country cannot wait five-hundred years for private interests and churches to fix the problem.

It's a downward spiral that elicits memories of Idiocracy. As families start too young and grow too large to support, the majority of our country becomes stupider and stupider. And to end on a wacky, popular literary allusion: Atlas will be crushed by the weight of the world long before he even has a chance to shrug.

[DRUDGE FLASH 2009: PELOSI SAYS BIRTH CONTROL WILL HELP ECONOMY]

Who knew our mascot was such a flaming badass?

I like the author: He tantalizes me with images of our Owl mascot committing bloody murder with the T-shirt cannon. But the real video is almost as funny. Almost.

[Rice's owl mascot ejected -- yes, ejected -- by referee - The Dagger - NCAA Hoops - Rivals.com]

Little Big's: It's like they know me

So I guess my blog has been reduced to little more than a (supposedly) creative re-posting food news from the Houston Press, but fuck it, this is big news to me.

REEF's Owner + Burgers/Sliders + Late on the Weekends = LITTLE BIG'S

They're making shakes with Coffee and stuff, including a WHITE RUSSIAN SHAKE called THE DUDE. BB's, you're on notice.

[Houston - Eating Our Words - Little Big's Big Debut]

Japanese-Brazilian Fusion. In Houston. I'm not kidding.

Every time I hear fusion food described in conjunction with the phrase "Next Big Thing," I sort of imagine rich, uncultured obese restaurant entrepreneurs throwing darts at a board of countries, trying to decide which two uncanny places to fuse to create the NEXT BIG THING.

Not that Brazil and Japan are all that incompatible, foodwise. I mean, both countries are traditionally known for their high-quality beef products (Kobe yum yum) and their... no, wait, that's basically it. Their native fruits&veges aren't exactly polar opposites; both cultures have explored both the sweet and the savory.

I guess I have a hard time imaginating exactly how the hell you blend the feel of traditional Japanese with the feel traditional Brazilian fare. And that's the problem I have with all these fusion restaurants popping up around Houston-- it seems like an attack on our perceived lack of cultural identity. It's as if we Houstonians are willing to call this ridiculous combination the NEXT BIG THING just because we don't have a solidified identity of our own in this city. Or because we're dumb, and we'll fall for anything.

I for one will probably succumb to our homogenized cultural overlords, who will be serving sushi churrascaria style and dashing table-to-table barefoot on a floor covered in edamame beans and plantain peels.

[Houston - Eating Our Words - Japanese-Brazilian Fusion the Next Big Thing?]

Fighting terror with third-order differential equations

Hey, it's my friend Sean, mentioned in an article by that dastardly rag across the pond, the Register. It's all about a Rice project that uses statistical analysis of giant data sets to identify and predict terror events before they happen. Sexy stuff.

I figure this is a good way to get brownie points with Sean. I'll probably want them when he's working for the NSA, messing with his friends' credit history just because he can.

[Texas profs use AI news-ware to ID terror groups - The Register]

Tomorrow: A global-hunger themed restaurant

I think places like Heart Attack Grill are killing America.

Seriously. Every time a theme restaurant glibly makes a joke out of America's unhealthy lifestyle, some twisted deity points Cat 5 hurricanes toward the Gulf Coast and summons insurgencies in Afganistan and causes half the country to default on their respective mortgages. I saw that episode of the Boondocks-- I know what I'm talking about.

But it's hard to hate Heart Attack Grill: It's like Hooters with a clever excuse. Plus they have a fry bar. A fry bar. A vast selection of fries dashed with a variety of different seasonings for all-you-can-eat consumption. That's going in my Richie Rich dream bedroom, right next to the waterwall raining Baja Blast and the Madame Tussauds wax statue of Richard Nixon.

It just makes me sad that this place will probably, actually, seriously cause a few coronaries. Now that's honesty in advertising.

[In Videos: Heart Attack Grill | A Hamburger Today]

The music discovery process

Way earlier this year-- like, trendy earlier-- my friends tried to introduce me to Does It Offend You, Yeah? and their awesome debut LP. They're everything I ask for from a band: Electro, from Europe, and etc. Yet, it's taken me several months to finally give them a chance, fall in love, and throw "Dawn of the Dead" on repeat for hours on end. I find myself in these sorts of situations all the time. In fact, most of the bands that have made a huge impact on my life (Interpol, Bloc Party, and Justice, to name a few) sat around on my computer for months before I got around to listening and eventually obsessing.

I've been wondering if maybe my methodology for sampling new music is all wrong.

For as long as I can remember I've been slyly shifting between Pitchfork, last.fm, Pandora, and the other music blogs to pick up on new bands as soon as they blip on the radar. After listening to a new album once-around, I plug my initial reaction into a very complicated second-order differential equation. Then I decide whether it warrants another listen or should be shelved for further fermentation. Eventually, shelved albums get re-listened or cleared out during my periodic NEED MOAR SPACE TO STORE PORN purges.

And how do you listen to the new bands once they're in your music library? I tend to just throw the album into Winamp and listen to it straight-through and make my judgment. Some of my friends do this three albums at a time, on shuffle, in order to discover their favorite songs out of the new collection of albums. And some people just try each track one-at-a-time.

My process has worked wonders for bands like Animal Collective. Strawberry Jam was all the buzz when it landed on the 'sphere, and yet my intuition was to let the album slide because it was nothing but repetitive noise and nonsense. And so, it sat on my computer for months until someone (probably Cristina or another self-loathing Pitchfork reader like me) made a comment about the "Peacebone" video being incredibly trippy. I gave the album a second chance, decided that "Peacebone" was the only thing worth saving, and tossed the rest of the album to make room for scissoring redheads. And it worked for Fleet Foxes, too-- you don't see me talking about them too much.

Friends are definitely the most dependable way to find music you like. But I also get a pretty big kick out of finding bands myself and disseminating them upon the masses. So, masses, how do you get into new music? Is it all friend-driven, or are you at the aristocratic whims of the music blogs?

Domainz

Short version:
The site is now located at http://www.confusednation.com, just like it should be, and Kyle wasted like ten minutes writing an explanation that no one will read unless they're looking for jokes about themselves.

James Joyce Version:
Every year, around Christmastime, the domain name that I've hosted this blog on for eight big ones expires. And every year, I painfully decide that this chosen-on-a-whim domain needs to stick around, if for no other reason than shear posterity. After all, I have a lot of memories attached to this site. Or at the very least I have [8 years times 12 months/year times $14/month] worth of cash invested in its existence.

I thought this year would be different. Really. I thought I had finally come to peace with the fact that no one really minds adding ".blogspot" to the URL when it can save me some pocket change in the long run. After all, most people who visit this site use feedreaders to aggregate the content. And so, I watched as my domain host started sending me renewal notices back in November, and finally I got an e-mail that simply said "Domain expired on confusednation.com."

I didn't even flinch.

But when I returned home for Christmas, my friend Roy offhandedly mentioned how weird it was to type in the old site address and get an error back. That was actually all it took for me to race home, re-register the domain, transfer it to another registrar, and configure Blogger to use it.

And so now it's back here on http://www.confusednation.com, at least until next Christmas. I've also been mulling over the possibility of renaming (gasp!) my blog. If you've got any good ideas, you should totally throw them this-a-way.

Also, be on the lookout for my brother's blog, which should exist somewhere soon. He's actually an English major, which means he can't say things like "alot" and "there coming over for dinner tonight," and he probably has smarter things to write about than I do.

I expect to lose 20 friends before noon tomorrow

Burger King has unveiled the most awesome incentive to un-Facebook those kids you met at a music festival three years ago that have been stalking you from afar ever since.

It's called the Whopper Sacrifice application, and it's going to make you carefully consider if your online life is worth a couple dozen free burgers. All the application requires is that you pick ten of your Facebook friends and dump them in return for one free Whopper. Though unlike the normal ritual of booting someone from your online life, it notifies the people you remove that they've been traded for consumer goods. I figured I would stay one step ahead of the app.

So here's to you, those about to be sacrificed. Those random friends of my exes. Those hometown friends of friends. Those kids who went to my high school but were in my brother's class and I don't really know you but I guess you like to see my pictures. Those kids from my grade school classes who haven't seen me since I wore my hair spiky. And yes, even those employment recruiters who I friended just to see if I could find a job.

You've all brought me so much. Application invites, mostly. Some of you may have read my blog once or twice, in which case you're actually cooler than 70% of my close friends. But all&all this hasn't been a fulfilling relationship. So, I'm leaving you for processed flash-cooked meat and vegetable blend on a chewy wad of bread ass.

And to the Kyle Barnhart from Ottowa who got really high one night and decided to friend me: Don't worry, dude, we're friends until the end.

[Unfriend 10 People on Facebook, Get a Free Whopper | A Hamburger Today]

Late-night sushi? No thanks.

Katharine Shilcutt (the bimbo who stole the Houston Press food blog job that I wanted but didn't apply for and I actually love her but I love calling people bimbos even more) reports today on Eating Our Words that Crave Sushi is one step closer to opening a late-night raw roll retailer in Midtown Houston. And she's predicting windfalls for this trendy tuna tavern, based on nothing but its location and originality.

Uh, what?

I feel like I understand the late-night food industry pretty well, having been a connoisseur since before I started drinking heavily. Going to Waffle House at 3am used to be one of the only entertaining things for a kid to do back in Panama City Beach. Me and my friends would sit back and swap stupid stories while ignorant drunk rednecks would bring in their scantly-clad escorts and get into fights about things like F-150s and mud.

Since moving to Houston, I've navigated the late-night high seas like a stoned stalwart pirate of munchies. Like all Rice students, I started my love affair with the freshman year staples: House of Pies and Taco Cabana. Since then I've conquered all the places that matter. You know, BB's, Bibas, Katz's, Tacos a Go-Go, and etc. There are plenty.

The one trait all these places have in common is that they serve piles of hot, delicious food that caters oh-so-well to the inebriated taste palate. The drunken taste palate, of course, is driven by the basal need to kill something, fry it, and dip it in jalapeno ranch dressing. Cajuns, Greeks, Mexicans, and Jews New York-style delis all know how to do this really, really well. The Japanese, on the other hand, wrap cold fish in cold rice and cold seaweed and douse it in black salt water.

Sorry, Crave. I really am. But considering the decor and the price tag, I just don't see sushi being more than a passing fad in the world of Houston late-night food. Drunks crave fat and stoners crave quantity (of anything edible). Sushi provides neither. Even if this Crave place is initially successful, I have a feeling that Houstonians will be back to their late-night staples of gyros and chimichangas before you can say "I'm not driving."

[Houston - Eating Our Words - Craving a Sneak Preview?]

A bloggin' paradigm shift to give you goosebumps

I did it, kids. I removed the "share on Facebook" link from my Firefox toolbar and replaced it with a "post to blog" link. And besides buying a po-boy at Antone's before I got to work this morning, playing with my blogging tools was the highlight of a very boring, normal Tuesday.

And then I ran into this blog.

blogger beware: the goosebumps blog
[c/o Brent's Facebook Wall]

It's a cynical, systematic review of every Goosebumps book from your childhood, ever. It's fun to realize how many trashy, un-scary novella you bought back in the day. The site is hilarious on its own merit, sure, but the real fun is in the nostalgia.

What is our generation's common bond? Mass media. And there is no bastion of mass media rooted deeper in our childhood memories than the Goosebumps series-- unless you're me and you were totally into survival books like Hatchet during late elementary school. I read everything I could get my hands on back in 1996, I think, but I only actually remember reading Time magazine and JenniCam.com (which explains a lot). And yes, even a few Goosebumps.

I liked the one with the kids who turned out to be robots.