Here’s another reason why income over a couple hundred grand should be subject to a 90% tax:
According to a Reuters news report, former stripper Tawny Peaks is auctioning off one of her 69HH breast implants on www.ebay.com. No, you don’t get to remove it yourself. She already had them removed six years ago when she decided to retire and become a soccer mom to her three kids (I’m resisting the obvious soccer ball jokes here). The implants were just gathering dust in her closet until she had the brainstorm to auction one of them off (she’s keeping the other one for sentimental reasons).
The auction ends on Saturday, and as I write this on Thursday evening, there are already dozens of bids, and the price is up to $16,766!!
OK, Tawny is going to autograph it, and there is some historical jurisprudencial value given its involvment in a1998 lawsuit wherein a patron of the strip club where she worked claimed he had suffered whiplash when she swung it and its twin in his face, but still….$16, 766?!
Yes, it’s funny, but it also really angers me. Some people have just too damn much money and too damn little sense. If you’ve got twenty thousand bucks in disposable income lying around, do something good with it. Help your friends, donate it to a worthy cause, even just save it for your retirement. Hell, give it to me…
I don’t even want to imagine the depraved acts this dude has planned for his $16,000 ex-stripper’s used Frankentit. But guess what? He is only an extreme example what seems to be an entire subculture.
When I did a “breast implant” Ebay search to find the particular auction mentioned in the news report, imagine my surprise to find that there are a lot of them going under the gavel. None of them have the heft nor the notoriety of Tawny’s, so they’re only pulling in bids up to fifty dollars.
Says the description for one: “smooth 450cc silicone breast implant. intact and in mint condition. NOT for human or animal insertion. Makes excellent paper weight or novelty.” Oh no…no animal insertions, please.
One other auction at least touts their 300cc model as having more practical uses: “You can stick it in the freezer and it acts like an ice pack or you can use it as a wrist rest for your computer mouse, it also makes a great frisbee as long as someone besides your doggie is there to catch it. Also can be heated and used on sore areas.” Sure, and maybe it’ll even be covered by your medical insurance.
If you want to blow your college tuition, here's the direct link to Tawny's auction, but remember, you only have until Saturday, March 6, 2:32pm Pacific Standard Time.
Thursday, March 03, 2005
Tuesday, March 01, 2005
And Baby Makes Me
I see from yesterday’s New York Times that Fairchild Publications will be launching a new magazine for “affluent parents who want sophisticated things for their children.” It will be called Cookie, which to me is quite apropos in that it conjures up images of just the sort of bratty, over-indulged cookie-demanding spawn that affluent, self-absorbed, status-obsessed parents tend to raise.
Its editorial goal will be to “bring you the best—and only the best—of everything you want for bringing up baby.” You can read the word “best” as most expensive or prestigious. Mary Berner, president of Fairchild, makes no effort to hide the fact that this magazine has no reason to exist except as an advertising vehicle for luxury parenting gear: “There’s a lot of product out there that is looking for a sophisticated audience.” She further explains that makers of high-end children’s fashion and accessories don’t like advertising in the existing mass-market parenting magazines—readership of those rags are evidently too unsophisticated, not to mention income-challenged, to appreciate real luxury. Until now, they have been forced to try and reach their affluent target audience by advertising in publications like Vanity Fair, which hasn’t been too effective, since most VF readers are more interested in Leonardo DiCaprio’s love life or the latest scandalous legal trial than they are the in the well-being of their children. But now there will be a magazine specifically tailored for their advertisements.
Editor Pilar Guzman calls the magazine a “mom treat” to help busy but picky women make the best choices (translation: women who want the best for their children as long as they can buy it and not have to be bothered researching or thinking too much or being too involved in the decision, and as long as other parents can tell at a glance how expensive it is so they’ll know that you are a good parent). But if Fairchild thinks it will be just moms reading Cookie, then I suspect they are ignoring a big part of their audience.
Dads are hot for status parenting gear too, we see from an article in The Wall Street Journal on February 24: “Dad’s New Wheels are on the Stroller.” It seems strollers are overtaking sports cars in the wheeled virility-enhancing department. Testosterone-drunk dads are roaring down sidewalks and through shopping malls pushing their Sport Utility Ironman strollers from Bob Trailer, Inc.. Yep, pushing your baby in one of these $300 babies, with 16 inch composite polymer wheels, fine-tune tracking adjustment and 3-inch suspension system will “make curbs, uneven sidewalks, supermarket aisles and unpaved trails a breeze to navigate.” Nobody will dare call you ‘Mr. Mom’ when you’re behind the wheels of one of these.
Cookie. Look for it on your newsstands in November.
Its editorial goal will be to “bring you the best—and only the best—of everything you want for bringing up baby.” You can read the word “best” as most expensive or prestigious. Mary Berner, president of Fairchild, makes no effort to hide the fact that this magazine has no reason to exist except as an advertising vehicle for luxury parenting gear: “There’s a lot of product out there that is looking for a sophisticated audience.” She further explains that makers of high-end children’s fashion and accessories don’t like advertising in the existing mass-market parenting magazines—readership of those rags are evidently too unsophisticated, not to mention income-challenged, to appreciate real luxury. Until now, they have been forced to try and reach their affluent target audience by advertising in publications like Vanity Fair, which hasn’t been too effective, since most VF readers are more interested in Leonardo DiCaprio’s love life or the latest scandalous legal trial than they are the in the well-being of their children. But now there will be a magazine specifically tailored for their advertisements.
Editor Pilar Guzman calls the magazine a “mom treat” to help busy but picky women make the best choices (translation: women who want the best for their children as long as they can buy it and not have to be bothered researching or thinking too much or being too involved in the decision, and as long as other parents can tell at a glance how expensive it is so they’ll know that you are a good parent). But if Fairchild thinks it will be just moms reading Cookie, then I suspect they are ignoring a big part of their audience.
Dads are hot for status parenting gear too, we see from an article in The Wall Street Journal on February 24: “Dad’s New Wheels are on the Stroller.” It seems strollers are overtaking sports cars in the wheeled virility-enhancing department. Testosterone-drunk dads are roaring down sidewalks and through shopping malls pushing their Sport Utility Ironman strollers from Bob Trailer, Inc.. Yep, pushing your baby in one of these $300 babies, with 16 inch composite polymer wheels, fine-tune tracking adjustment and 3-inch suspension system will “make curbs, uneven sidewalks, supermarket aisles and unpaved trails a breeze to navigate.” Nobody will dare call you ‘Mr. Mom’ when you’re behind the wheels of one of these.
Cookie. Look for it on your newsstands in November.
Monday, February 28, 2005
Ruminating on Organic Milk
Every penny we spend has multiple and often contradictory real-world repercussions, and it can make you crazy trying to sort out whether your buying habits are screwing up the world or helping to make it a better place.
It was milk that got me thinking the other day. There was an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer about local organic dairy farmers. They work hard to adhere to strict organic guidelines requiring cows to graze on open organic pasture. The official organic guidelines, however, are not so strict: large corporate dairies in the western states get away with calling their milk ‘organic’ just by giving their herd organic feed, even though the cows live a miserable life, penned up in close quarters and rarely if ever actually put to pasture. The local farmers see this as cheating, and as damaging the reputation of the organic label for milk.
Funny thing is, the DebtorsPrison household probably buys less milk than ordinary households. Although Mrs. DebtorsPrison has a glass now and then, I can’t drink the stuff straight—don’t like the taste or texture and it makes me gag. I do use it on the cold cereal I breakfast on a few times each week, use it in cooking, have some hot chocolate occasionally. So far, I have not paid the premium price for organic milk.
Still, I try and take these things into consideration in everything I buy. I do most of my food shopping at Whole Foods Supermarket. It costs somewhat more, but I like knowing that I am minimizing the amount of chemically-enhanced fake food I put into my body, and I like that my buying habits show these ‘Foodenstein’ multinationals that I reject their products.
The milk I buy at Whole Foods is not organic, but it is at least free of recombinant Bovine Growth Hormones (rBGH). Now, the corporate food industry is spending plenty of bucks to convince you that this stuff is harmless—see, for example, the Milk is Milk website put up by the agribusiness-funded Center for Global Food Issues (there’s even a blog!), but don’t you believe it. The European Union bans the import of US meat containing rBGH, given the ample evidence that it is not only highly carcinogenic, but that due to the environmental contamination produced by industrial farming, low levels of rBGH show up in our drinking water and may be a factor in both the increasing early onset of puberty in girls and in the slowly falling sperm level counts in men.
Whole Foods does offer organic milk, but it costs about twice as much as the non-organic stuff, which so far has kept me from buying it. As much as I’d love to buy only the best and the purest, the sad fact is in DebtorsPrison America, shitty food often costs less, and when you have low income and large debts, you have to choose your battles carefully. But perhaps organic milk is one more modest step I can take.
And even there you have to make choices. Is there really a difference between organic milk from cows grazed in open pasture versus penned cows fed organic grain? Here’s the scoop according to Organic Valley Farms: grass-fed, open-pastured cows are healthier, the farming practices are more environmentally sustainable, and the milk is healthier too, richer in such heart-healthy and cancer-fighting compounds as Vitamin E, Beta-Carotene, Omega-3 fats and Conjugated Linoleic Acid (sounds awful, but it’s all good for you).
So maybe the extra buck or two per week for pasture-fed organic milk is a worthwhile addition to my rage-against-the-machine shopping basket. As I said at the outset: every penny we spend has real-world repercussions.
It was milk that got me thinking the other day. There was an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer about local organic dairy farmers. They work hard to adhere to strict organic guidelines requiring cows to graze on open organic pasture. The official organic guidelines, however, are not so strict: large corporate dairies in the western states get away with calling their milk ‘organic’ just by giving their herd organic feed, even though the cows live a miserable life, penned up in close quarters and rarely if ever actually put to pasture. The local farmers see this as cheating, and as damaging the reputation of the organic label for milk.
Funny thing is, the DebtorsPrison household probably buys less milk than ordinary households. Although Mrs. DebtorsPrison has a glass now and then, I can’t drink the stuff straight—don’t like the taste or texture and it makes me gag. I do use it on the cold cereal I breakfast on a few times each week, use it in cooking, have some hot chocolate occasionally. So far, I have not paid the premium price for organic milk.
Still, I try and take these things into consideration in everything I buy. I do most of my food shopping at Whole Foods Supermarket. It costs somewhat more, but I like knowing that I am minimizing the amount of chemically-enhanced fake food I put into my body, and I like that my buying habits show these ‘Foodenstein’ multinationals that I reject their products.
The milk I buy at Whole Foods is not organic, but it is at least free of recombinant Bovine Growth Hormones (rBGH). Now, the corporate food industry is spending plenty of bucks to convince you that this stuff is harmless—see, for example, the Milk is Milk website put up by the agribusiness-funded Center for Global Food Issues (there’s even a blog!), but don’t you believe it. The European Union bans the import of US meat containing rBGH, given the ample evidence that it is not only highly carcinogenic, but that due to the environmental contamination produced by industrial farming, low levels of rBGH show up in our drinking water and may be a factor in both the increasing early onset of puberty in girls and in the slowly falling sperm level counts in men.
Whole Foods does offer organic milk, but it costs about twice as much as the non-organic stuff, which so far has kept me from buying it. As much as I’d love to buy only the best and the purest, the sad fact is in DebtorsPrison America, shitty food often costs less, and when you have low income and large debts, you have to choose your battles carefully. But perhaps organic milk is one more modest step I can take.
And even there you have to make choices. Is there really a difference between organic milk from cows grazed in open pasture versus penned cows fed organic grain? Here’s the scoop according to Organic Valley Farms: grass-fed, open-pastured cows are healthier, the farming practices are more environmentally sustainable, and the milk is healthier too, richer in such heart-healthy and cancer-fighting compounds as Vitamin E, Beta-Carotene, Omega-3 fats and Conjugated Linoleic Acid (sounds awful, but it’s all good for you).
So maybe the extra buck or two per week for pasture-fed organic milk is a worthwhile addition to my rage-against-the-machine shopping basket. As I said at the outset: every penny we spend has real-world repercussions.
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