Planner

I don't think I get it.

Actually, I'm pretty sure I don't get it. It, of course, being the reason that I'm just not really coming up with much to write about in this blog lately. I try. Really I do. I'll get in little fits of ambition and cruise Fox News and CNN, only to learn that I really don't care about the Ports deal and think that, while natural disasters appear to occur more or less round-the-clock, there's not much to say about them. Yes. They're bad times. But more than that, they don't make for very interesting blogging.

I will say that I am excited that I'm finally done with Winter Quarter (though my grades aren't up yet, Northwestern. As you're reading this, you big anthropomorphic degree-granting institution, I'd appreciate it if you could let me know how I ended up doing in Bioorganic. Thanks. Now, if you'll remember, "I'm done".) So I've only got one class left, got out of this one alive, and can finally get some actual progress on the synthesis of these probes.

It just seems that I'd have something, not always witty, but at least something last summer, when this blog really took off in earnest. Maybe McDonalds is thousands of times more exciting than Northwestern (It's not. If you're at McDonalds, I'd advise you to instead move to Chicago) or maybe the diminished social interaction that goes along with working these damned hours is to blame (again, not likely as I'm a hermit at home too). Perhaps I just have less time recently to poke around on the internet until I find something worth commenting on.

But enough of that for right now.

On to the interesting things.

In fads, culturebox examines the appeal of Whole Foods, which, if you're not familiar, is an "organic food store" that is prohibitively expensive for, well, me, and is capitalizing on the craze over organic foods. Some reasonable points are made (Any ecological benefit derived from using a more earth-friendly fertilizer is effectively negated if the chemically fertilized stuff is from Jersey and the earth-friendly stuff is from Chile due to transportation, that if these foods really are better for us, increasing their price so drastically is akin to elitism, and that really, the claim that a vast majority of organic farmers are family farmers is playing with semantics), though for the most interesting point to my mind you'll have to go somewhere else. Namely, that you can call something "organic" if everything you put on it, in it, around it, or through it is found somewhere in nature.

So that quite a few of these additives are synthetic (not that there's anything actually inherently wrong with synthesized products).

Smoking cigarettes is really a disgusting habit that kills you, and I understand the importance of second-hand smoke legislature. Hell, I'll even go as far as to say I'm down with Chicago's recent ban on smoking in public buildings. Chicago's specific ban includes a restriction on smoking outside in one place, resulting in the bizarre march of the smoker, up and down the alley so as not to be in violation of standing outside a building and smoking, but Calabasas, I'm afraid I just can't agree. Sure, relegate cigarette smoke to a strictly private affair in one's own domicile or one one's property (so long as that property isn't right up against some public property), but this bit's a bit rich:

Smoking in one's car is allowed, unless the windows are open and someone nearby might be affected.

Nicotine addiction is a disease. Smokers are not within their rights to threaten the health of nonsmokers by smoking at them. But the fact that they're now forcing smokers to confine said deadly toxin (for slow release into the atmosphere through the ventilation of the car) in such a small space is just further damaging the health of the person who's smoking. Moreover, they're doing it in a big polluting metal machine. One wonders if they're not banning the smoking in cars thing such that the nearby person can enjoy the fresh, wonderful smell of car exhaust.