Herculodge

The New Eton P'9111 Emergency Radio

Featured on page 95 of the May 2007 issue of Wired Magazine is a new Eton radio product, the P'9111 Emergency Radio, which is listed at $200. Featuring a hand crank to power it or NiMH cell battery, it has seven shortwave bands, an LED flashlight, and a built-in cell phone charger. I've only been able to find this radio in the magazine. It's not even showing up on the Eton Corp Website. I know nothing of the radio's performance features but from its look it is an analog radio. Cast in dark gray with a speaker covered over the radio like a small tennis racket, it's easily the most sleek, attractive emergency radio I've seen. Hopefully the web will provide more photos soon. I can only imagine that Eton chose Wired to promote this new radio by giving technophiles a teaser of their future product.

Update: I finally found a photo linked at Acquire Mag.  

Tolstoy Rails Against the Vanity of Life

Quoted from Albert Camus Notebooks  in which Camus quotes Tolstoy:

"The existence of death compels us to either give up life of our own free will, or to change our life in such a way as to give it a meaning that cannot be taken from it by death."

Erich Fromm's Brilliant Description of Self-Destruction

From Erich Fromm's Escape from Freedom (181-182):

It would seem that the amount of destructiveness to be found in individuals is proportionate to the amount to which expansiveness of life is curtailed. By this we do not refer to individual frustrations of this or that instinctive desire but to the thwarting of the whole life, the blockage of spontaneity of the growth and expression of man's sensuous, emotional, and intellectual capacities. Life has an inner dynamism of its own; it tends to grow, to be expressed, to be lived. It seems that if this tendency is thwarted the energy directed toward life undergoes a process of decomposition and changes into energies directed toward destruction. In other words: the drive for life and the drive for destruction are not mutually independent factors but are in a reversed interdependence. The more the drive toward life is thwarted, the stronger is the drive toward destruction; the more life is realized, the less is the strength of destructiveness. Destructiveness is the outcome of unlived life. Those individual and social conditions that make for suppression of life produce the passion for destruction that forms, so to speak, the reservoir from which the particular hostile tendencies--either against others or against oneself--are nourished.

Herculodge Meals

Meals for Lunch and Dinner: The secret is to make enough for 2 meals.

One: Garden Burger Caponata with spinach and white beans; of course one can do this without the caponata. A variation is a garden burger with a slice of light Havarti or some other cheese smothered in white kidney beans and fresh salsa.

Two: White beans and sliced soy dogs with spinach and low-sugar syrup to create a "pork and beans" flavor

Three: Vegetable egg white omelet with roasted peppers, onions and low-fat cheese

Four: Garden burger sandwich with peasant bread, humus, and peppercinis, perhaps even low-fat cheese  in place of humus

Five: Tin-foil grilled fish and vegetables on the barbecue with garlic, onions, white truffle oil or olive oil

Six: Zucchini sliced, seasoned, and smothered in bruschetta and covered with soy patties or crumble and Parmesan cheese.

Crystal Meth Spawns Demonic Creatures

Today Larry Mantle's AirTalk on 89.3 KPCC featured guests who warned about the scary manner in which crystal meth, "ice," or methamphetamine is a fast-growing malignancy eating away at the fiber of our country. Whether rural, suburb, or urban, crstyal meth has its claws in our society. There are thousands of families in this country who make crystal meth together. Grandparents, parents and children work in unison. Grandchildren get "eight balls" for birthday presents from their grandpa. Pit bulls patrol their meth labs. They're awake 24 hours a day committing crimes around the clock to feed their habit. They steal anything, including phone wire from telephone lines. They hack computers at night and steal mail to commit identity theft. Their pestilence is taking over everything and we don't have a clue as a way to go about stopping this cancer.

As I listened to the grotesque descriptions of these full-time criminal meth families, I was reminded of B monster movies full of mutants and ghouls. When I get the time to be even more depressed, I will watch Frontline's The Meth Epidemic, which can be seen free online.   

Radio Fitness Guru Jillian Michaels Lays Down the Law

KFI 640 AM fitness guru Jillian Michaels  gave a list of dangerous food containers and food chemicals as she said her new radio job has made her “paranoid.” Included as dangerous practices are using recycled plastic water bottles with the code numbers 3 and 7; microwaving Styrofoam, plastic and Tupperware (she says use Pyrex or ceramic); putting plastic and Tupperware in the dishwasher; ionizing radiation from the sun; ingesting artificial sweeteners like aspartame, which results in memory loss and auto-immune deficiencies; consuming hydrogenated vegetable oils; flavor enhancers in bread, specifically potassium bromide, which can be carcinogenic. Also no MSG, yellow food coloring (Yellow 3 and 5), sodium nitrate, toxic metals like mercury found in tuna, and fluoridated water, no unfiltered water, no non-organic berries, no pesticides, no sleep deprivation, no radon in the house, no unnatural carpet fibers, no toxic paint in the house; no toxic dry cleaners, no chemicals to get rid of pests, no nonorganic makeup. 

I’ve always had a bad feeling about the taste of plastic when I cook with it, so I’m off it. To add to my paranoia KFI 640 Dr. Dean Edell  says, in contradiction to Jillian Michaels, that anti-oxidants can actually be harmful to one’s health.

It’s a logical fallacy to say “everything kills you so I might as well give up.” While one can be extreme and paranoid, a few basic principles, such as not heating up plastic containers and being moderate with toxic foods, seems reasonable. If we go too far

I’m a crappy sleeper, getting 5-6.5 broken hours a night, so I’m screwed there. I doubt I’ll follow every rule but I won’t cook in plastic anymore. Nor will I heat plastic containers in the dishwasher. Regarding the other products, I’ll eat the bad ones rarely or in moderation. Go too far in living in a “pure” world and we’ll end up like the secluded nut-job in the highly underrated Todd Haynes film Safe.