I have been thinking about yesterday’s post with the surprising statistic that in the US, three rolls of toilet paper per person per week are used. That seemed improbably high and so I conducted a quick survey asking people to estimate how much they think they used per week. The sample was small (just my wife, actually) and she estimated half a roll. She was shocked when I told her that it was six times as much.
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I sometimes hear white-collar workers speak disparagingly about manual workers whom they see relaxing. They seem to think that such people should be working non-stop even though they are doing extremely difficult and tiring jobs, often in terrible conditions, while their critics push paper around in air-conditioned workplaces where a lot of time is spent in idleness. I, for example, have never really done a hard day’s work in my life and am aware that I am very fortunate and am grateful for being so lucky.
I was glad to see that the creators of the Blondie comic strip were taking a stand for manual labor against this unfair criticism.
It’s been awhile since I had a post about cricket. There have been some unusual happenings recently and the good news is that it does not involve cheating or other bad behavior by players but instead is about the game itself. It used to be that national Test cricket teams had periods of dominance of a few years when a good crop of players matured together and then went into a slump as those players retired and new ones entered who had yet to find their feet. But now teams lurch from looking dominant in one series to looking awful in the very next one and then bouncing back again, all within a period of months.
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I only got around to watching last Sunday’s show Patriot Act yesterday and it was another excellent one. This time he took on the high drug prices that people in the US pay, much higher than in other countries, that often results in people not being able to afford drugs to live. Rather than give a generalized critique, he used as a case study the price of insulin (a drug that so many people need to just stay alive) to show how three big drug companies Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk, and Sanofi, that market drugs under a multiplicity of names, have formed essentially a drug cartel that keep raising prices together and also exploit patent laws (they own the majority of them) to prevent cheaper drugs entering the market.
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A group of young children in California went with a petition to ask their senator Diane Feinstein to sign on to the Green New Deal. Her condescension and arrogance towards the children and their parents was infuriating to watch. See for yourself.
Everyone needs to watch this video of @SenFeinstein disparaging literal children from @SunriseMvmt calling on her to support @AOC and @SenMarkey’s Green New Deal.pic.twitter.com/SjF8thnucQ
— Waleed Shahid (@_waleedshahid) February 22, 2019
We are used to envisaging Abraham Lincoln as an older, bearded man, formally attired, the way he is presented in the memorial to him in Washington, DC. Pretty much all official representations of Lincoln adopt that basic look. Hence I was startled to come across this image of an 8-foot tall statue of a young Abraham Lincoln situated in a Los Angeles federal courthouse where he looks like he was posing for a Ralph Lauren ad, though the statue was commissioned eighty years ago.
This Sunday will be the Academy Awards show that I never watch because not only do I hate awards shows in general but apart from everything else, the awards are often given to those films that have the biggest backing by their producers who spend a vast amount of energy and money promoting their films and undermining the competition. Marlow Stern and Kevin Fallon look back on the history of such vicious campaigns that were often successful in achieving their goals. They say that disgraced mogul Harvey Weinstein was one of the worst culprits.
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I was listening to the radio program The World yesterday and one item struck me as barely credible. It said that Americans are the heaviest users of toilet paper. That itself was not surprising because Americans in general consume a lot more per person than most other parts of the world. But what was shocking was that Americans use three rolls of toilet paper per person per week!
Can that really be true? I know that our household comes nowhere close to using at that rate because I am the person who purchases it.
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As I have occasionally mentioned before, in my social circle is a vocal Trump supporter who gets quite heated when his hero is criticized, so much so that we avoid discussing politics when he is there. But occasionally our guard slips and this happened last week at a dinner party when we were discussing how in an interview, billionaire presidential vanity candidate Howard Schultz could not name the price of everyday items that one might buy in a grocery store. This is a popular line of questioning by reporters who suggest that failure to give the correct answer shows that one is out of touch with everyday people
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The bass player for The Monkees (whose full name was Peter Halsten Thorkelson) died today at the age of 77. I always liked The Monkees with their cheerful, upbeat songs. Because they were a band brought together by TV producers for a show, people tended to underestimate their musical abilities, even referring to them derisively as the ‘pre-fab four’. In addition to the bass, Tork could also play the keyboards, banjo, and harpsichord.
Here they are singing one of their big hits Last Train to Clarksville.