I get the news I need.... on the traffic report?

As a DJ at my college station and a big fan of NPR, I cannot tolerate the uniformity of conglomerate commercial radio stations. Nevermind that tuning into a commercial radio station at any given moment will probably be a slough of commercials. To me, it is more remarkable that no matter where you are in the United States--be it Podunksville, Nebraska or New York City--commercial radio stations and DJs sound identical. I could certainly write something about the radio personalities that usurp the airwaves, but a particularly amusing Strongbad E-mail about the topic of radio probably sums this up better than I could. In fact, before you read any further, I insist that you watch it. Here's the link again: Click me!

What I love about this cartoon is that Strongbad pokes some good, hilarious fun at every type of radio station and personality, including my own precious terrain of public and college radio. As Strongbad points out, there is a certain (though perhaps more benign?) uniformity, even amongst the non-commercial/alternative wavelengths on the radio dial. Public radio is "smooth and smarmy," reliant upon use contributions with gifts like tote bags. And, hey, I will admit it, college radio is a totally amateur operation. Sure, Strongbad may not know that we all have to take a test on FCC rules in order to legally broadcast. But he certainly hits home with some of the more, let's say, esoteric music selections and the bumpy transitions inherent to a one-(wo)man show.

Of course, humorous elements aside, there is something quite unsettling about how local variety has been swallowed up over the years by a cultural conglomeration. Because most radio stations are owned by giant media corporations (like ClearChannel), there is very little local flavor left on the air. In less obnoxious ways, the same can be said of NPR affiliate stations, which usually do have some local programming, but also broadcast shows that you can hear almost anywhere. While I do love the feeling of knowing that someone, somewhere far away is listening to same program as I am, I wonder if I sacrifice that kind of connection to people who are geographically closer to me, as well.

This is precisely why, as a DJ and lover of public radio, I have grown quite fond of the traffic report. I know that probably sounds absurd, and it certainly is ironic given how much I abhor the traffic in Miami, but hear me out for a second. For all of the uniformity and convergence of a national radio culture, the traffic report is a decidedly local language. Go to any other city, tune into the radio, and it is likely that what you hear is something that sounds familiar. When the traffic report comes on, however, it is as though the reporter is speaking in another language.

If you are from Miami, for example, you know what it means when I say that there is a slowdown on Kendall Drive, or that the Palmetto Expressway is jammed from Ludlam Road to 27th Avenue. Today I was listening to the traffic report and there was an accident on the Julia Tuttle Causeway blocking traffic on i-95 Northbound during rush hour. I was personally quite thankful to be far away from that mess, but I could not help smiling at the irony of the radio traffic report being such a strange uniting force among locals. You know that you are truly a resident of a particular place if the traffic report is a language you speak fluently. When I lived in New Orleans, even when I finally did have a car there, I was never well-versed enough in road names to comprehend the full traffic report.

So the next time you are sitting in traffic, listening to the report on the radio, take a moment to smile. You and thousands of others are grimacing in the same language.

Birthday Time!

Although I have some things I would like to blog about, I am interrupting my already-intermittent posting schedule to give myself a little birthday space. Today is my 22nd birthday which is, all things told, rather insignificant. It seems like only yesterday that I was celebrating my 21st birthday, sipping my three drinks like a champ, and moving on with my life. Still, though, a birthday is a birthday, and I would like to commemorate that glorious day I came screaming and kicking onto this planet. To that purpose, I present my readers with...

Awesome, Random, and/or Odd Birthday Facts

• Other January 11th birthdays of note: R & B Singer Mary J. Blige; Actress Amanda Peet; Federalist, Founding Father, Portrait on the 10-dollar bill, and inventor of the U.S. monetary system Alexander Hamilton.
• If you care for astrology, I was born under the sign of Capricorn -- the goat.
  
• According to Wikipedia:
• Birthday cakes date back as far as the Middle Ages when the English would conceal symbolic items such as gold coins, rings and thimbles inside their cakes. Each item was associated with a prediction. For example, a person finding a gold coin in a birthday cake would supposedly become wealthy; a person discovering a thimble would never marry.
• Happy birthday in Yiddish is "A Frielekhn Geborstag!" Check out this page to learn "Happy Birthday" in a bunch of other languages.
• According to BirthdayCelebrations.net:
• In Argentina and Brazil, the birthday boy or girl gets his or her earlobe pulled for each year.
• In China, everyone celebrates their birthday on New Year's day. They also believe that a baby is born one year old.
• In Ireland, the birthday child is lifted upside down and is then "bumped" on the floor for good luck. (Sounds a little painful...)
• In Nepal, the birthday child has a mixture of rice yogurt and color rubbed on his or her head for good luck.
• In Saudi Arabia, birthdays are not generally observed.
• And, of course, in some American households, it is customary to give a birthday spanking--one slap on the ass for each year. (You are not welcome to observe this custom today)
• January 11th, 2002 is the day that the United States Government opened its doors at Guantanamo Bay Prison. Awesome!
  

Happy birthday to me!

The Anatomy of Chewing Gum

It has been busy the past few days, and I have fallen magnificently short on my goal to write everyday. Even though there are many serious things going on (Supreme Court hearing a case about lethal injections, the New Hampshire primaries, etc.) I'm going to try to get back into the loop of things by writing something a little more light-hearted today.

Anyone who knows me well will testify that I have a serious gum-chewing habit. I know, I know: it is probably terrible for my jaws, but chewing gum actually quells my often-fried nerves, keeps me awake in class, and helps me concentrate when I am reading or writing a paper. Oh yeah, chewing gum also helps prevent that good ol' American habit of Eating Just to Eat, Even When You're Not Hungry (we all do it).

Over time, I have become very particular about the gum I choose. I have stringent criteria by which I evaluate any brand or flavor I try. The next time you are perusing the chewing gum section of the store, take into consideration my expert guidelines to make an informed purchase. You're welcome.



Flavor Enjoyability

The first category by which to evaluate any piece of gum is its taste. This may sound so unequivocally obvious that you're ready to skip down to the next criterion. However, impatient reader, you should pause a moment and heed my word! Gum manufacturers sometimes get a little too experimental with flavor. They will often also create flavor names that do not really say anything at all about how the gum is supposed to taste.

To illustrate the former point, I will single out Bubble Yum's Hershey's Chocolate Flavored Gum. I have to say, it is valiant effort on Bubble Yum's part. It sounded just disgusting enough to have left me skeptical, but novel enough to compel me to purchase it. It wasn't outright intolerable, but, I am sorry to say, I think that chocolate-flavored gum is missing something essential to the experience of eating a real chocolate bar. Perhaps you are ahead of your time, Bubble Yum.

As for ambiguous flavor names, there are two sides to this coin. You might pick up a pack of gum with a really cool name, thinking the taste will be commensurate with the moniker only to be sadly disappointed. Conversely, you might skip over something delightful because the name just does not call to you. Take, for instance, Bubblelicious's Twisted Tornado flavor of bubble gum. One might pass over this gum, intimidated by the hyperbolic meteorological appellation and miss out on delicious flavor and an overall pleasant gum-chewing experience.

Flavor Endurance

Being careful about choosing a tasty gum is important, but equally important--and perhaps less apparent--is just how long that flavor lasts. Trust me, when you have two hours of class and only two sticks of gum to last you, flavor endurance is everything. Otherwise, your choice is running out of gum (not a choice, duh) or enjoying the flavor of your own recycled saliva. Delish.

Most gums are pretty average in the arena of flavor endurance. In more stressful situations, I often find myself needing two sticks of gum to extract the full flavor that I demand from a gum. Some gums maintain moderate flavor for the duration of the chewing experience. With the exception of a few varieties like Cinnamint and Bubblemint (because I have, of course, tried almost all of them), Orbit-brand gums sustain a nice, even flavor for as long as you chew.

As far as flavor endurance goes, a prospective gum purchaser will want to steer clear of the kinds of gum that quickly go bland. Two specific varieties come to my mind when I think about quickly-fading flavor: Wrigley's Juicy Fruit and Fruit Stripe Gum. You don't see the latter flavor around very much anymore, but any kid who grew up in the 90s knows that flashy packaging only conceals a really crappy quality gum. Besides, both types are sugary, which is not very good for your teeth.

Texture

Although some of this depends on how long a pack of gum sits on the shelf before getting into your hands, different brands and varieties have distinct textures. I suppose this category is more subjective than others, but I think there are some things on which we all can agree. There is quite a magnificent spectrum of gum textures, and it would be impossible to cover every nuance in this small guide. Personally, I like a nice balance of softness and resistance--a gum's chewiness, as it were. You need this kind of balance to blow good bubbles: soft enough to get over the tongue, but resistant enough to sustain a bubble shape once you've blown air into the gum.

Probably the biggest textural faux pas is when a gum is brittle, and tends to break into tiny little pieces as you chew it. Aside from making it more difficult to chew or blow bubbles, this type of texture can cause you to swallow the gum. The types of gum that usually commit this mortal sin are the ones with the hard shell--i.e. Dentyne Ice, Orbit White, and Chiclets. This is not to say that a hard-shelled gum will always be more brittle; often these gums are quite soft and refreshing. But if you get a pack that has been sitting on the shelf for awhile, you might be in for disappointment.

Furthermore, brittleness seems also to be more prominent among certain flavors. Unfortunately, I just don't have the knowledge of chemistry to explicate much further. Just know that any brand can have its downfall in texture with a single flavor. It's never a wise move to write off a particular brand of gum for one rogue flavor.

Here's to a more well-versed gum chewing experience. Cheers!

Economic Revelations

For a very brief period of time in my floundering undergraduate career, I was considering economics as a major. Naturally, I discovered that this topic was not something I wanted to pursue further than intermediate microeconomics. The mathematical/technical element of economics ended up boring me to tears. Still, though, I am interested in the ethical implications of economies because money and commerce are inextricable from our relationships with other people and other nations.

I think that many people do not realize that capitalism and free market theories of economics are relatively new inventions in the history of human civilization. Hell, my dad reminds me that even credit cards--those dangerous pieces of plastic we rely upon so heavily nowadays--were not all that common in the 60s and 70s. Credit makes things convenient for people. It makes large purchases (i.e. cars, homes, etc.) possible for those who do not have the liquid assets to make them immediately. But the more we ensnare our finances in credit, the further we remove ourselves from the real implications of exchange and value. Well, until bill collections come knocking and calling, I suppose.

Part of the reason that so many people find themselves mired in debt is because they aspire to an untenable standard of consumption set by the American economic elite. Bigger cars, bigger homes, more expensive gourmet items, fancy dinners, designer clothing and accessories--it's the American dream, is it not? Most of us are here today because family members somewhere down the road of ancestry fled their places of origin for a better, more prosperous life, right?

In the later 19th and early 20th centuries, the United States saw an influx of immigrants unparalleled by any other period of time. Jews from Eastern Europe, Poles, Italians, and anyone else who could fled harsh economic or political environments for the blank slate of the New World. I remember watching Charlie Chaplin's short film, The Immigrant, in my AP American History class during high school. Despite its comedic intent, this film was one of the most instructive elements of the entire course. It really captures the wonder, the fear, and, in some ways, the disillusionment of being a cultural outsider in this country. Some of those who endured the treacherous boat ride across the Atlantic Ocean made a much better life in America. But more often, immigrants found themselves condemned to abject poverty, squalid working and living conditions, and... well, let's just say not a great deal of tolerance from the established American citizenry.

What we did not really touch upon in history class that much is what turmoil and unrest resulted from the early 20th century immigrant experience. We did learn about the Red Scare and about the hysteria that surrounded the Cold War, but never about the enormous immigrant-led revolutionary leftist movement in the United States. At the turn of the century, Russian-Jewish immigrants, like Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, led a powerful anarchist movement. Sympathizers were jailed and blacklisted constantly. Often obscured from mainstream portrayals, even Helen Keller was a leftist sympathizer!

It is obvious that the Marxist analysis of class struggle deeply resonated with immigrants in America. To abandon their places of origin--their languages, their cultures, and their religions--only to see the greediest few exploit them for labor was the exact scenario Mr. Marx describes in his writings. Whether they were reading Marx or not, early 20th century immigrants helped spurn the great communism versus capitalism debate in this country that still manifests itself today. With few exceptions, though, it seems like capitalism may have won--for now.

I was thinking about all of this last night and grappling with the different economic systems in my mind. My personal views are pretty far to the left at this point, but I am, above all, a pragmatist. I know that, attractive rhetoric aside, communism in practice has been an abhorrent failure, empowering some of the most oppressive regimes in history. So how is it that the disparate systems of capitalism AND communism both result in an exploitative hierarchical structure?

The problem, I think, is that the closer both systems get to being the idealized versions laid out by economists and philosophers, the less impetus there is to uphold the system. In other words, both capitalism and communism--even in less pure forms--provide incentives for people to tip the scales to their own advantage. Think for a moment: if the standard of ideal capitalism is self-interest, wouldn't it be in one's best interest to create an imperfect market?

Not to beat this example into the ground, but Wal-Mart is a case-in-point. In terms of free markets, I argue (and think others with more credentials would agree) that Wal-Mart is actually a market failure in multiple ways. It is not even necessary to get into the technical details to see that Wal-Mart succeeds in our economy not by being the best competitor but by stamping out all competition. Because it has such a disproportionately large share of the market, it can artificially lower its prices. This goes for many other modern-day corporations, as well. Capitalism works so well for these corporations because they create market failures that benefit them.

Communism is no different when you dissect it a bit. Unlike capitalism, which touts self-interest, however, communism is about the collective and equitable distribution. But as history has demonstrated, communism has incentives for greedy individuals to create imbalances, too. Some people might refer to this as the collective action problem: if there is an opportunity to freeload from the work of others without consequence, what is the impetus to contribute? More simply put, the "aggregate good" is not an attractive enough cause for most people. The ability (and desire?) to have more than others at little or no cost to one's self proves to subject communist systems to the same pitfalls. Again, individuals have every reason to want to subvert the system for their own good.

I don't really have a verdict about what does work or what should work. What I do know is this: ideals are not pragmatic. It is a bad idea to hold steadfastly to principles that history proves unsustainable. The upcoming election scares me because Americans are addicted to attractive rhetoric, but are piss poor students of history. I fear that these past 8 years under the Bush regime have made the public so government-phobic that we forget what we elect officials to do. Free markets and competition do benefit us. But taxes and restraints on commerce are important safety nets for those who are new to this country and those who barely get by day-to-day. When one fantasy scenario fails, it is inevitable that its idealized antithesis will, as well.

When I was in elementary school, companies like Scholastic used to set up shop biannually in our school library and host a book fair. At these fairs, I procured many 1990s kids classics, like the Magic Eye series and The Kids' Book of Insults. Being an avid young player of Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? for the computer, I also purchased The Harper Collins World Atlas at one of these fairs. Like any good product of the American public schooling system, I had no clue where, say, Jakarta was on a map.

Since then, I have always been captivated by maps; I can literally sit and study them for hours. Opening up Google Earth on my computer is a dangerous impediment to my productivity, allowing me to indulge in stationary jet-setting on a whim. Novelty aside, looking at maps also reminds me of the world's vastness, so easy to ignore in the insular United States.

My favorite continent to study in my National Geographic College Atlas is Asia. It is not really a particular interest in Asian cultures (though that is extremely important right now) driving my fascination, but that Asia is the most misrepresented/ underrepresented/poorly represented continent in the world. It may sound idiotic, but seeing where different nations are in relation to one another always blows my mind.

Take Mongolia, for instance. You probably have not thought about Mongolia very much, yet it is the bridge between two of the most volatile forces in the entire world--China and Russia. Its territory is fairly vast considering its tiny population (not even 3 million people in 2005), larger than any country in Western Europe. I suppose the land is far too treacherous and cold to become a bustling population center, even if it can be exploited for minerals.


And while I am talking about Russia, look how HUGE it is. Of course, large swathes of land are totally unpopulated (frostbite is quite a deterrent, I guess). Still, though, when I look at Russia, or Kazakhstan, or Iran, which are all enormous countries, I think about how reductive the rhetoric of the news is. When I am listening to reports about UN meetings or other negotiations between diplomats, I am always slightly disconcerted by the use of nations as pronouns. When a reporter says, "Russia did this" or "Iraq did this," what does that even mean?

I know that for my part, I would like to create as much distance as possible between my own views and the actions of American elected and appointed officials. When, under orders of the administration., American delegates refuse to heed the rest of the world's calls to action on global warming, I would like to think that I am entirely separate from the "America" present on the world stage. Nationhood is such a problematic way of characterizing people and politics because it shoves so many different people and cultures and world views under one misleading moniker.

To return to a moment to the maps, Russia and China are so very close. When we hear Russia in the United States, we think of communism, we think of the Kremlin, we think of Vladimir Putin and Sputnik. But there are so many ethic groups and languages and histories that are all but ignored by the eternally incomplete label of "Russia." Nation-states create war in that they allow us to extract the human element from power struggles.

I hope one day that we can transcend this and appreciate the world without restrictive compartments.

Inaugural post: 2008 will be a year to write

A New Year has arrived and it is time to be a grown up--time to abandon the middle school drama of LiveJournal and contribute my two cents to the blogosphere. Whether or not I acquire any kind of readership, I hope that this will encourage me to write daily. Back when I was in exile from Hurricane Katrina, I was writing feverishly and, though I was numb and depressed, my writing improved tremendously. Hopefully this free format will afford me an opportunity for constructive self-analysis. Happy 2008!