I spent the holiday caring for "poultry" at Forever Wild Animal Rehab Center. I learned how to quickly dispatch a mouse for Boondock, a blind burrowing owl kept as a potential foster parent. (He literally has no eyes; the owl on the left is a burrowing owl I found online.) The first time around, I'd tried to just grab the mouse by the tail and whack his head against the wall like I'd seen other volunteers do, but this mouse was tough. He didn't want to die. The outer sheath of his tail came off in my hand, and he started running around the avian center bleeding. God, I felt like an asshole. Darleen showed me how to crush his neck quickly with a pair of forceps.
The moment I'm choosing a mouse out of the cage, though, is the worst. They're all happy in there with their wheel and their mouse chow. I pick whichever one sticks its tail in the air in such a way that I can grab it easily. . . I just feel like an undeserving arbiter of the fate of this little soul.
I also distributed a lot of chopped collard greens and tomatoes to a lot of ducks and geese. God, how they love tomatoes. Tomatoes, cantelope rinds, and sunflower seeds. That's what these guys like.
I'm just thankful I've got someone to feed this year.
Well, if SETI is the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, then I figure SEO's gotta be the Search for Extraneous Orangutans or something. (LMNO. . .)
Anyway, SEO is merely a sadistic-sounding acronym for "search-engine optimization." (I've posted an uninformed primer on this subject down below.) Journalism-ista Mark Briggs writes about the importance of SEO in his 2010 book Journalism Next as such: "Remember, you have two audiences online: readers and robots." He goes on to discuss an apparently apocryphal liquid he calls "Google juice," making me think he was either moderately thirsty or exceptionally horny while working on this chapter.
And but so, Briggs's point is just that if you want to get Googled, you have to craft searchable headlines. Think about it. If you didn't know what SEO was (perhaps that's how you got to this page), you'd type in something like "what's SEO?" or maybe just "SEO". If you were looking for "cheap gourmet recipes," you'd type in just that. Your headlines/post titles should reflect this. But crafting searchable headlines is only half the battle: the other half is inticing someone to click on you when you come up in their search results. So add some flavour: "cheap gourmet recipes that totally kick/won't-go-straight-to-your ass." Or some such.
Anyhow, Briggs also talks a good deal about analytics [insert sophomoric pun here]. If you have a Blogger blogg, you can get an idea of what he's talking about by going to STATS on your Dashboard and playing around. You'll get a sense of your traffic sources (i.e., which webpages people are on immediately before they end up on your blog), and you can take a peek at a graph of visits to your site. If you don't want to track your own visits (presumably you're not interested in how interested you are in yourself, although you should be) you can check a box and Google will insert a blocking cookie on your browser.
Slightly more advanced is Google Analytics. Create a free account with them (could you have imagined ten years ago how many "free accounts" you would one day have?), and they'll give you a chunk of inscrutable text which you can insert on your blog's template. (Go to Design, click on the Edit HTML tab (you may want to click on Download Full Template, which will save you a copy of your blog in case you screw up the HTML), open the Find on this Page box on your browser (probably under Edit), type </head> into the Find field, go to the space immediately before it, and paste in the chunk of text.)
Go back to Google Analytics after a couple of days to get more data than you can "shake a stick at."
"and i know the biggest crime/ is just to throw up your hands/ and say This has nothing to do with me/ i just want to live as comfortably as i can"
-Ani Difranco, 1993
Uh huh. Coca-Cola, that paragon of American exceptionalism, has for years hired paramilitary groups to intimidate, harass, kidnap, torture, and murder union organizers at its bottling plants in Colombia. It's all at killercoke.org. And it's not just in Colombia. There's currently a civil lawsuit pending against Coca-Cola in a U.S. District Court which alleges a systematic campaign of violence against unionistas in Guatemala. Prominent among its victims is union leader Jose Alberto Vicente Chavez: paramilitary forces attacked his family on March 1, 2008, killing his son and gang-raping his daughter.
In India, Coca-Cola contains such high levels of pesticides (DDT, malathion, etc.) that farmers have been spraying it on their crops with great success. And what do they do with their waste products? The solid stuff they distributed as fertilizer until recently: it contained such high levels of lead and cadmium that the local government finally ordered them to stop. And they've solved their liquid waste problem by pumping it into the holy River Ganges.
So that's how a sausage gets made.
Last year's film "The Coca-Cola Case" is an excellent primer to Killer Coke. Here's the trailer:
That's capitalism, served fresh daily.
Tell me, is it worth the dizzying highs when the hard times hit like hammers on your skull? Is it worth it, thumb-wrestling the invisible hand, when you know the house will always win?
Growth in gross domestic product is the cocaine that our current economic system needs (and totally freaks out about when it temporarily runs out). Growth requires one of two things: ever-increasing population ("new markets") or ever-increasing consumption, i.e., everyone spends more every year. We're pushing the limits of what our planet can hold population-wise, and credit-wise, we're tapped out, as we've seen in the last couple years.
Just wanted to share a great post I found on another blog about one of David Foster Wallace's greatest short fictions, "Good Old Neon," from his 2004 collection Oblivion. I haven't gone back and read "Good Old Neon" since Wallace's suicide in 2008, as I loaned it to a friend in Albuquerque in 2005 and never got it back. I'll have to find that book again, though, it's a masterpiece, although his 1999 collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
resonates more deeply in my memory.
"Good Old Neon," by the way, is a 1st-person account of the suicide of a fictional character named David Wallace.
