NoJoMo 21

Brilliantly stupid!

1. Apple computers had the most profitable period in the history of the world this year. Record profits. All-time record profits. Their products are expensive and for the most part worth it. I have my very first Apple product in my pocket right now, an iPod. But, the thing is so stupid it makes sounds no matter which way you set it up. I can put the sound right down to zero so that music playing will not be heard through the internal nor plugged-in speakers, but when I get a facebook comment it makes a burbling noise. So, I’ve been shutting off the internet at church and hoping nothing else wakes it up and sounds an embarrassing alarm. Earlier this week I finally did surgery on some old useless earphones to make plugs. Now, I just plug this little bit of metal and plastic into the iPod and it thinks it has a set of earphones attached. Then it tries to play sound out through them and the audio signal goes out into dead air! Is that brilliantly stupid of me or of Apple?

see the silly white "dongle" hanging off the corner?

2. I have a house full of delicious healthy food. I love kidney beans, fresh veggies, frozen veggies, etc. So why did I get up hungry for a huge hunk of fried hamburger? I went shopping this afternoon for nice lean turkey, so why did I grab the chocolate "muffin" (anyone else notice that the nice healthy muffin craze of 2005 is now the awful high-fat-cake-in-a-cup craze of 2010?) and eat it on the way home? When I was already full! Why?

3. Why do Bill Gates and Warren Buffet get kudos for giving away money when neither of them earned a penny of their money with honest hard work? Bill Gates has never, not once, successfully sold anything he created. Every product he has made his $billions from, was stolen from someone else. Every single one. Warren Buffet does not load a single rail car, but now gets a small profit from much of the rail traffic going all over the U.S. He is nothing but a Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon version of Michael Milken. Now these two "saints" are working with the "high moral kings" of the entertainment industry to manufacture an image of U.S. industry and financial elites as the good guys? Give me a break!

3. The world of medical care has brought a huge wealth of great health building knowledge to modern humankind. They’ve eradicated smallpox, polio, and practically dropped the deaths from childhood leukemia to nothing. We know so much about the nutritional value of foods, that no one can keep up. No one. Practically every food I look up at Nutrition Data has at least one nutrient in it that I can’t identify. Yet, we just found out last year that warming up before exercise is either harmful or useless most of the time. The special circumstances in which it can be objectively shown to be beneficial are so rare that no one can even figure out why it sometimes helps in those situations. This after at least a century of careful study of the matter! There are dozens of the most basic health questions that the mainstream health care industry is completely in the dark about. Helpless. Worthless. Likely as much harm as good. But, what is the single most harmful yet baffling problem? Compulsive bad behavior. We know that drunkenness, smoking, over-eating, gambling, stress, and dozens of other personal choice behavior syndromes are undesirable, but no one has any even moderately successful cures for any of them. None. Where is the key?

4. Other than that, life is good!