Day: March 6, 2012

Eat My Sports: Time of self-loathing

Its my favorite time of year folks, baseball time! Except this year, it’s a little bit of back to basics for me, and I’m really glad.

Ask McBournie for confirmation, but I officially wrote off the Red Sox 2012 season on February 17th at 5:20 PM! Why, you ask? Well unlike the past nine years where Theo Epstein has spent so much in free agency that it hs offensively loaded but financially crippled, the Sox made almost no moves this offseason, and instead chose not to address our need to replace our crappy pitching and crappy JD Drew.

And for this, I thank them. Growing up a Sox fan, I fully expected them to suck. Now, with no improvements on a team that couldn’t win a damn game in September, I’m back to the “WE SUCK AGAIN!” aspect of baseball, and personally, it couldn’t feel better.

Spider silk better at conducting heat, inducing heebie-jeebies

Research conducted by Iowa State University associate professor of mechanical engineering, Xinwei Wang, shows evidence that the structural (non-sticky) spider webs conduct heat better than any other organic material and even some non-organic materials like silicon and copper. This could lead to flexible, lighter weight electronics, burn wound bandages, lighter weight hot weather clothing and — once we perfect Monster, Inc.‘s fear-based energy plants — free electricity for all.

We look forward to a glorious future when high school athletes smell like spider ass instead of Axe Body Spray.

One step forward, two steps backward

The Tokyo Metropolitan Government is currently in the talks of enacting a bill which would revise an existing ordinance regulating fugu (blowfish) trade in the area. Taking effect in October of this year, the bill would allow unlicensed chefs to process and sell the poisonous (on the inside, spiny and nightmare-inducing on the outside) fish.

The change in policy is prompted by the inefficacy of current license restrictions. Hironobu Kondo of the metro government’s food control department reports that a significant portion of Tokyo residents now simply buy fugu from prefectures with fewer regulations. Tokyo is among only a handful of prefectures where restrictions apply. While in recent years, safety concerns associated with fugu consumption have become less of an issue, the Tokyo Fugu Association claims that the revision of the ordinance would also result in a big drop in the overall price of fugu products. Furthermore, as license requirements are dropped and the number of restaurants selling fugu increases, it is also predicted that so will the incidence of food poisoning cases. Sometimes you just can’t win!

So, where’s the problem? Everywhere. While yes, this does mean that anyone can now slice open those monstrous fish, this is exactly what the animals want. Not only do they wound us upon capturing them, an untrained and unskilled chef can now potentially kill a lot of people, and this is now a legitimate possibility. Irony, thy name is fugu, as the Japanese have now unleashed a veritable kamikaze upon themselves.

Art on trial

What is art? Are any of us truly qualified to say what is or isn’t art? It’s like, man, can any of us say whether Mountain Dew is green or yellow? It’s all in the eye of the beholder.

That’s exactly the point that Ira Isaacs’ lawyers are trying to make. Isaacs is facing obscenity charges in California. For what, you ask? For, to put it in SFW terms, graphic and shock-inducing adult movies. It’s free speech on trial, will the First Amendment stand?

Isaacs is the director, distributor and sometimes-actor in his movies. Now, in order to find out what is art for the sake of art, and what is illegal, jurors had to watch a couple of his movies. Including one titled “Japanese Doggie 3 Way,” which, aside from missing a hyphen, is probably exactly what you think it is. Justice may be blind, but the jurors, including an elderly woman, are not.