twinkie-defence

I’d venture to say that there could be nothing that so succinctly encapsulates the downfall of society into an overly-sheltered and gratified mockery of itself than the news that the fabled Playboy mansion has been sold to a cupcake magnate. There’s small consolation in the stipulation that the ninety-year old Hugh Hefner gets to reside there until his death, but the new owner has expressed interest in acquiring the whole empire. Who can say what the franchise, not that it’s necessarily worth preserving—but given this infantilising, sweet-toothed legacy, might be a vehicle for in the near future?

foilage

Perhaps we could take a leaf, in rather desperate times, from the pages of the industrious leafcutter ants (Acromyrmex) of the Americas to hopefully rehabilitate some of our notions about health and hygiene. These colonies have been in the business of agriculture, to include biocide and population health for æons, and have yet to find themselves in a pinch whereas humans just harnessed antibiotics and pesticides a few generations hence, and through abuse are seriously at risk of returning to pestilential times, plagued by crop-failures and untreatable infections to the exclusion of modern medical procedures.
Not that we weren’t warned from the onset, but adding an antibacterial sheen to everything and using it as a panacea of first resort has made the strongest thrive and is making the incurable more and more dominant. Returning to our friends, the leafcutter ants—whom drink the sap of the leaves for energy but actually take back the leaves to their nests to grow a specific fungus that’s the chief food staple, scientists are finding that having evolved symbiotically with the resources and threats if their environment, the ants are able to cultivate only what they’ve intended and keep weeds and other pests at bay (despite the inviting hot-house of a nursery they build for their favoured fungi). The blight of invaders is avoided, researchers believe, by a cocktail of novel antibiotics administered, which the ants gather (naturally occurring in the soil) and possibly produce through their own chemistry, confounding the ability to acquire resistance. Hopefully, we can learn something from these ancient farmers, and if we are granted a reprieve from returning to the medical dark age, hopefully we will not repeat the same mistakes.

unpalatable or hue and cry

What has been determined to be the world’s most loathsome and revolting colour, called Opaque Couché, is to be generic hue going forward for all plain-packaged cigarettes in Australia and the UK, which also won’t be allowing identifiable logos or signature typefaces.
Reverse-marketers are hoping the aversion to the colour, which looks like the filth of spent soil, will also deter people from smoking. Pantone, the tincture company who produced Opaque Couché and is known for nominating a colour of the year to reflect or determine the interior decorating zeitgeist of the moment, is not happy about having any of its carefully cultivated spectrum called ugly. For me it’s hard to image that any choice in palate won’t eventually become a branded look itself, even if it’s for the Victory cigarettes and gin of the addicted proles of Airship One—like the particular reds and browns that are associated fast-food and reportedly hunger. What do you think? There have been other proposed candidates for packaging that might prove a bigger deterrent.

silicon valley, tin-pan alley

It is indisputable that the wired economy encourages moonlighting and pushed a sizable proportion to a managed, feudal entrepreneurship wherein risks and rewards are mitigated for the organisers, but the Guild also cultivates a myth about its importance and predominance. Being a feckless challenge to question the drift of market-forces in whatsoever capacity, it’s hard to dispute progress without being labelled a Luddite.
That sense of entitlement, however, to being a serf, a mechanical Turk to a pyramid-enterprise that trickles down. As much as we might rail against nationless corporations for not paying their share of taxes into government coffers or being exempt from the same regulations that govern mere mortals, we attribute the same belief that enables the scoff-laws—government policies and policing are antiquated institutions that stand in the way of progress and our own jonesing for something on the side. What should I be the only chump paying into that system?  Zoning and safety laws or an evolving framework of regulation certainly would only suppress and prevent us from turning vacant apartments into boutique-squats for well-paying tourists, and price-out established residents or so gentrify courier-services as to drive into the ground the entire infrastructure with competition. What do you think? Despite our complaints, wouldn’t we all like to be as clever and exploitative, even if we wouldn’t admit to sharing those same values?