Nutella - kicking arse without bubblegum

Adelaide stand-up comedian Michael G D’Agostino is a man brave enough to not only do stand-up, but do it almost naked. But I am sad to report that Mr D’Agostino has in fact lost the plot. The man is pea-nuts.

Michael said on his blog recently that peanut butter is the “best thing since sliced bread". Personally I would have at least chosen penicillin since the patent for making peanut butter is dated 1884 and bread did not become sliced until well after the shift from home bakers to factory made bread in the 1930s. There is even archaeological evidence that the ancient Aztecs feasted on a similar peanut paste. Sorry Mr D’Agostino, but you are wrong.

In Australia the most Aussie thing to have on a sandwich is vegemite, but being an acquired taste and not very versatile, the best spread in my opinion is the hazelnut chocolate spread known as Nutella.

It is far from being healthy, and if you are sad enough to think that it ever was then we can no longer be friends. This however does not make peanut butter healthier as anything can be unhealthy in excess, even water. Since Australia is the fattest nation per capita, closely followed by other western countries, who are we trying to kid about wanting something healthy? They are both on par for energy density, and qualification by being the “lesser of two evils” is just being delusional. Dog poo is a healthier choice then cat poo, but you are not going to tuck into that.

If you were a crepe, you would choose Nutella. If you were a creep, you would chose peanuts. Not just because it sounds like urine and testicles, but because there is nothing more evil in this world than peanut butter.

Kraft peanut butter, the most beloved peanut butter in Australia and Canada (due to hit American shelves soon), is never oily, never dry, but leaves a taste of evil on the roof of your mouth. In 1988 Philip Morris Companies purchased Kraft for $12.9 billion. What type of companies could afford $12.9 billion in 1988? Tobacco companies, that’s who. Phillip Morris changed their name to Altria in 2003, and then in 2007 the 88.1% of Kraft that Altria owned was given to their own shareholders. Altria is a company that founded its own “science” institute so that smoking, pesticides and global warming could have a fair voice on their side by bullying the scientific community and dismissing all their research as bullocks. This institute was run by a man on who was a columnist for Fox News, and we know how politically balanced those guys are. 

Mega consumer goods company Unilever, whose use of palm oil had been clearing forests in Indonesia until someone mentioned it in public, owns “Skippy”, one of the three most popular American brands of peanut butter. Unilever plans to have their palm oil from sustainable forests within the next couple of years, good on them, but they were clearing land in the forests of Côte d'Ivoire to do so until protesters started pointing out the irony. In their defence, it was a supplier and not Unilever themselves doing the damage, and to their credit is now pushing for a proper environmental study. However a company of that size and dedication to the environmental wellbeing of the Earth to still to have a “if we don’t ask you don’t tell” is very disappointing.

Then there is Peter Pan, the brand of peanut butter that has killed people. In 2006 they had a highly publicised salmonella outbreak that made hundreds of people sick in 46 of the 50 United States and led to 9 human deaths. I say human deaths because there are no figures of deaths in the pet food products that were contaminated. To be clear, I’m still talking about the peanut butter Peter Pan and not some pubescent teen breaking into your house and stealing your children by drugging them with “fairy dust”.

Jif is the highest selling peanut butter brand in the USA owned by the J.M. Smucker Co. who specifically target stay home mothers in their advertising, proving once and for all the power in day time television. If you are willing to pay for your advertising to sit around episodes of the “Bold and the Beautiful” (which is anything but) then you deserve to be tasered to death in the nipple with a spoon full of salmonella to help your own medicine to go down.

Okay, so I found no dirt on J.M. Smucker Co., but they sound like drain cleaner, so… yeah… take that!

Despite the atrocities that peanut butter makers have done over the years there is really only one thing that separates the spreads and that is taste. For lunch, breakfast, or even dessert Nutella tastes like methamphetamines from the gods. After a loving spoonful you want to dance like a knob and make love to household items. Surveys have shown that the majority of women would prefer to eat chocolate than have sex. There are no figures on where women stand on sex vs. peanuts; it’s probably because they’re all too busy having chocolate or sex.

The most popular flavour of anything in the world is chocolate. Even potato chips rock with a chocolate flavour (try a salted variety with Nutella; you will need to change your pants). So why not have the most popular flavour on the most popular lunch food in the western world? You are not crossing the desert or running from a famine ravaged country, torn by decades of war, fighting the crowd at the Red Cross truck. You are not Bear Grylls forced to squeeze the moisture from faeces. Statistically you live in a city or a town. You live in civilisation surrounded by access to food and you are on the internet where you are surrounded by food in 4-6 weeks. What’s the point of living in the West if you can’t love the luxuries?

Go on, have Nutella on your sandwich.

Space, between the rigs

Thank flying duck for rich people. James Cameron and Google co-founder Larry Page have unveiled a brand new resources company that plan to mine asteroids floating near the Earth. I hear Michael Bay and the guys over at Yahoo were thinking of starting up a gardening business based on solitaire.

If you don’t know what Planetary Resources Inc. are up to by now you must have been hiding under a rock outside the asteroid belt, but have a look at video below.

How awesome/bat shit crazy is that? I’ve imagined them sitting around a futuristic board room telling each other “it’s so crazy it just might work…”

There are more than 8000 asteroids that boffins classify as “near Earth” that could be rich in rare and important metals that can be brought back to Earth, but more importantly the asteroids could contain water.

“Big deal, I can understand about the metals and shit, but we have water here,” I hear you say (that’s right; I’ve bugged your place. You shouldn't swear - it degrades you). But believe me, water in space is a big deal.

When you go hiking you can either take all your water with you or you can organise for water to be waiting for you along the way. If you are boldly going where no one has gone before, you need to take all your water with you. That can be heavy. Every day you need about 2 litres of water per person for drinking, cooking, washing, etc. But if you could have water waiting for you, you need only take the amount of water you need to get you there. This means carrying less water, lighter payloads in space shuttles, and therefore less energy to get that shit into space. Astro-dudes will be able to grow their own food, have longer showers, swim a few laps before breakfast, wet t-shirt competition... You know live a little.

This will allow us probe (he he) the special vast regions (he he) of space (he… oh wait, there’s no euphemism there), and who doesn't want more probing? H.G Wells is probably an exception; he knows what happened last time. 

Some of these “near Earth” asteroids are a better choice than the moon for a drive through for two reasons; it takes less energy to get there and leave in some cases, and the moon is so 1960’s. Despite the Soviets getting there in 1959 with an unmanned craft that had less processing power than a modern air-conditioner.

I wish Planetary Resources all the best. If you find Unobtainium James, leave it the fuck there. Michael and I don’t want to have sit through another Avatar mate. But if we get Richard Branson away from being the face of space travel, it will be worth the risk.

If you could send an appliance to space, which one would you blow into the sky?

One Bark for right, two barks for left

Because I am last with your breaking technological news, you may be aware that Google released footage of their computer driven car. It essentially does what is in the name, it is a car driven by a computer. “So what” you say, “it’s just a dude in a bad suit driving a piece of shit Prius with a bad paint job. There is no way what-so-ever that this could be interesting. I would even rather watch Mythbusters than waste YouTube time on that.”

And I thought my car had a blind spot

The reason why this car is cool is that it was driven by a man not on Mythbusters, and who is leagally blind. 95% blind we find out in the video. I bet you’re regretting that bad suit comment now. Probably not the Prius one though. Its okay, he wasn't actually wearing a suit.

The man with the questionable licence is known as Steve Mahan to his parents.  From his home he picked up his dry cleaning, went through the drive through of Taco Bell, and then headed home not touching the steering wheel, accelerator, or even the brake pedal once, and completely unaided. How awesome is that? I like to think that he got cut-off and used an app to give the knob the finger.

This is a triumph for engineers down at Google, and more independence on the horizon for people who need it. Things like this might have been done before at universities around the world, but they generally required the use of signal reference points along the road, or were alone on a test track. Google’s engineering team have had this baby on highways travelling at speed, navigating regular traffic, and I wouldn't be surprised if it has helped move house once or twice.

From here we can develop algorithms to dictate the best way for traffic to flow and we can remove human error from accidents. Depending on how "naughty" you have set your filter search options, you may end up at a different toy store than you were planning.

While this will ultimately make things easier for drivers, I do think we have created a few more problems. Namely do you call road side assistance, a tow truck, or IT tech support?

“Hello, yeah I can’t get my car to start. No, it was working before. Did the car crash or did the computer crash? I think it might be the computer, I was driving along and then it stopped. Have I tried turning it off and on again? Not yet...”

I find this exciting because I hate driving to work. I would rather kick back and eat some breakfast or catch up on the morning blogs. No all the things you do and love on the bus/train/tram/tandem bicycle you can do in your car. You want to air guitar to La Grange with ZZ Top on the way to work like my mate and fellow Adelaide comedian Michael? Why not push that driver’s seat back and play a real guitar? If you don’t play guitar you have 30mins a day to and from work to learn.

What would be the first thing you do when trying auto pilot for the first time?

Bee-n there, pollinated that

Science interests me. It is a human trait to want to know how shit works, and an engineering trait to find ways to exploit it so capitalists can make money from you. I came across an interesting article on the Discovery website about scientists at the University of Illinois looking into the risk taking behaviour of bees – I imagine because they have no beach to study the effects of bikinis and fun – and how it relates to risk taking behaviour in humans. (I’m sure there would be grants for the bikini study somewhere. Do Playboy offer a scholarship?)

At any point in every hive, 5-25% of bees are food scouts. These food scouts do not do the normal honey run like other bees. They are the hipsters of the hive; they will find a new source of food, tell all their friends, but never go back because all of their friends are now there and popular is uncool. I imagine using something similar to Facebook, maybe BeeBook, or checking in on OcelliBook if the bees knew the Latin name beach-lacking-scientists give for their face. (That is a case of trademark infringement Mark Zuckerberg’s lawyers would not want to touch… The Defence would like to release its opening statement your Honour. Attack my pretties!)

“You look at animals and they look really different and they act really different, but when you drill down deeper and look at the genomics, you find these deep commonalities” said Gene Robinson who is an entomologist, geneticist, and neuroscientist in charge of the study. The first thing I noticed when reading that quote is not the implications this find makes on what we believe makes humans human or that this man is obviously knee deep in bitches, is that he is a geneticist called Gene. That is like a Backhoe driver changing his name to Doug, or Footballer legally changing his name to “Sexual Assault”, or Chris Brown’s few remaining friends calling him “Punchy”.

Gene continues by saying “when you see this kind of result, you can say that personality is not a human invention”, I thought that would be obvious if you studied genes and was called Gene.

What the boffins did is find similarities between scouting bees, and other risk taking behaviour in mammals, including humans. People who are prone to alcoholism, gambling addictions, promiscuity, skydiving, Wall Street trading, or strip lawn bowls have a link to thrill seeking genes similar to those of the scouting bee. To translate, if scouting bees had a credit card, they would put it all on black while sculling vodka upside down after a bungee jump. Then they would post photos of their genitals on OcelliBook.

The interesting thing is that the scientists were able to tweak the genes patterns implicated in risk taking through experimentation, and increase the likelihood that the bees would become food scouts, and therefore increase the likeliness of them becoming risk takers. This is an amazing break through and good news for Gold diggers who are thinking about buying base jumping equipment for reluctant husbands.

 Now I don’t know what they mean by “tweaking genes”, but I believe it to be similar to “tweaking nipples”, and that’s the kind of science I can get behind, and probably more likely to get Playboy funding.

Check out what Hipster bees would look like at Pish Posh

Being colour blind and Australian in a good way - Kreativ Blogger

I was quite surprised when Wily Guy over at It’s MY Mind dropped a comment on my last post [like it was hot] informing me that I had won an award.

My spell checker is having a breakdown

Now that his cooling down period has passed… You beauty! (Which is Australian for winning, Charlie Sheen style)

Where do I begin in expressing the gratitude of winning such a prestigious award? By not getting ahead of myself and restrain from turning into a knob. You're welcome. Out of all the blogs WIly Guy could have given this award to, and even comparing myself to the other blogs he did give it to, I’m happy to be the smear on his otherwise impressive list.

As per the rules of the award, I have to disclose 10 random things about myself.

1. I have a degree in Mechatronic Engineering. Most people do not know what it is as it is a made up engineering stream. I know this because Microsoft Word only started to recognise it from the 2010 release. No, I haven’t misspelt Mechanical.
2. It hurt when I chose chemistry over drama in my final year at high school.
3. I have never urinated on an electric fence from memory. But the pain is something, I imagine, that I would wipe from memory.
4. I normally do not dream, but when I do they are always nightmares.
5. I have seen sumo wrestling live in Japan, and it was awesome. You never would have thought that two fat men in nappies running at each was entertainment. Well, when I say running...
6. I have skinny dipped in hotel pools where I was not a tenant. Too many people have photos of me naked than I am comfortable with. Maybe I should get into politics.
7. I cannot have one biscuit. It has to be one biscuit pack. I have done a few projects in an Arnott’s biscuit factory for work, and in the cafeterias they have free biscuits. It was not good.
8. I would give my pancreases to my sister in a heart beat.
9. I played Clarinet for eight years at school and was the only male woodwind player. Genius.
10. I did not own a mobile (Australian for cell phone) until 2003 when I moved out of my parent’s house at the age of 18.

 Now, who will succeed me, and enjoy the glory of my shadow over their reign? There are no requirements or limits for the recipients that I can give this to. So here is a snapshot of six blogs who I know are creative in every way and inspire me to create more (pronounced in Australian as “stop doing that to my leg”)

1. Dogs On Drugs. My favourite blog in the blogosphere. He is a larrikin (Australian for a fun loving mischievous shit) as far as the definition will take it. He writes with a strong voice and not enough people read that blog. If you are easily offended, probably best not to stick around too long there. It's not a Bloggie, not even close, so just force a smile and accept it Dogs.
2. A Beer for the Shower. Probably way to popular for this to be their first Kreativ Blogger award given to them by one of their 1000+ followers, but I can’t think of any other team who are as creative as they are. Tough luck Beer, this is the price of fame.
3. A Tale of Two Continents. I am new to this powerhouse team that crosses oceans. Look at their photos; tell me they are not awesome. It’s not even a photography blog.
4. Buttons Are Not Currency. This award is not because she took a photo of her boobs, but because she reveals a little of herself every time she puts fingers to keyboard.
5. Penning the Poetic Narrative. If you don’t know if you’re into poems and shit, read some of this. You will know then. She's good.
6. The Transformed Non-Conformist. An interesting take on the world and the unfolding story with him and Red of Doesn't Speak Klingon is entertaining none the less. It has all the ingredients for a romantic comedy, minus Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant. Easy to read style that is humble as pie.

Special mention does go to Wily Guy at It’s MY Mind. If he did not give me this award I would have given it to him. 

Cheers,

Rusty