Junk Food is an International Problem

Saw Cornae corn snacks at Mekong Rainier and had to try them. Mekong is a Seattle market that is also an importer working with local restaurants and they like to try out new products.

These were repulsive to me. Corn meal products are delicious and all you need is salt. Certainly not aspartame. And definitely not phenylalanine, which is in aspartame. Harmless, perhaps, but not if you suffer from a genetic condition called phenylketonuria.

Best to avoid junk snack with long lists of ingredients. Palm oil is the one thing that seems to be in almost every ready to eat chip and snack marketed in Southeast Asia. Not a healthy choice or good for Earth’s troubled ecosystem.

Hey Useful Food CO., LTD of Bangkok Thailand? There’s no need to put MSG and other uneccesary stuff in your corn treats.

—Alex

Back in the Saddle

It’s been a long, cold, damp winter and I don’t like to work from my chilly basement office during that time, especially because once a dog urinates on a space heater you have to throw it out. The space heater, not the dog. This Winter when that happened I sort of gave up and vowed to not spend yet another $30 on yet another cheap space heater from Amazon. And now Spring is here and I’m back in the sort of warm basement, typing away! Fueled by espresso that I grind cinnamon and cardamom into. And cold moussaka from last night - I didn’t have milk for my béchamel sauce so I used yogurt and water which sort of worked.

New Project Brewing

What if someone were to publish a quarterly print magazine (online too, of course) inspired by the radical magazines of the 1960s, especially Ramparts?

This publication would feature investigative work and be padded out with excerpts from political news and opinion podcasts. Now that Apple automatically transcribes all podcasts, pulling information from them has become easy to do. This would provide free fair use content so that 100 percent of the budget could go to our freelancers producing original work. Podcasters would benefit from the publicity, and would be at the top of the list of potential paid contributors.

There would be lots of art too - no AI generated slop allowed.

Supported by fundraising events. Writers and artists paid well.

People who read opinion pieces in The New York Times (which at this point is basically Der Sturmer for Zionists) without laughing out loud, or who watch FOX or MSNBC or subscribe to the Atlantic or other right wing/corporate/neoliberal/capitalist legacy media outlets that have failed us so completely in this moment will not like this project. The rest of us are dying for this sort of thing. Literally. Stay tuned.