Author: Kenneth Sutton

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Overpackaging

There’s a good article on overpackaging in Britain in the magazine of the Guardian: The Observer | Magazine | One family, one month, 50kg of packaging. Why?.

‘Morrisons coconuts are shrink-wrapped to ensure that they reach the customer in the very best condition. The packaging helps to keep the product fresh, limit damage from breakages, stop coconut hairs getting into other foodstuffs during transport and allows an information label to be attached.’ While coconut hair has never been one of my top 10 worries, this is probably enough for the supermarket to justify its shrink-wrap decision on the grounds that the consumer demands it. Crediting dodgy packaging to the consumer’s wants and needs is difficult to refute and explains why, despite an EU law which forbids overpackaging, experts can only cite three examples of prosecutions in the UK in the past decade.

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Ten times four things

OK, so it’s a day late to be a Friday Ten (more observed in the skipping than the posting), but it is a ten. And it’s the Four Things meme that’s been going around. No one’s tagged me (that I’ve noticed), but I’ve really liked reading other’s lists, so I just decided to do it.

Four jobs I’ve had:
  1. boll-weevil trap checker
  2. account executive compensation specialist
  3. deli counter clerk
  4. editor
Four movies I can watch over and over:
  1. Top Hat (really, anything with Astaire and Rogers)
  2. Philadelphia Story
  3. Bringing Up Baby
  4. The Thin Man
Four books I could read over and over
  1. The Lord of the Rings  by J.R.R. Tolkien
  2. Little, Big by John Crowley
  3. A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin
  4. Heritage of Hastur by Marion Zimmer Bradley
Four TV shows I love:
  1. Lost
  2. Stargate SG‑1
  3. Battlestar Galactica
  4. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Four places I’ve lived:
  1. Brawley, California
  2. Blokzijl, Overijssel, Netherlands
  3. Camden, New Jersey
  4. Dorchester, Massachusetts
Four places I’ve vacationed:
  1. London
  2. Key West
  3. Grand Tetons
  4. Montreal
Four of my favorite dishes:
  1. chicken tikka masala
  2. potato (potato salad, potato pancakes, aloo chat, . . .)
  3. cheese
  4. dark chocolate
Four sites I visit daily:
  1. Pepys’ diary
  2. Astronomy picture of the day
  3. Guardian Unlimited
  4. Wim van der Meij Etsen’s photoblog
Four places I would rather be right now:
  1. London
  2. Lerwick, Shetland
  3. Amsterdam
  4. Forbidden City
Four bloggers I am tagging:
  1. docsmartypants
  2. black thorn
  3. not-so-fresh
  4. insert your name here
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A Life Stripped Bare: My Year Trying to Live Ethically

Leo Hickman is a journalist at the Guardian, where he undertook an extended experiment in ethical living. This book is the result. I picked it up in a bookstore in Birmingham and finished it just after I returned home to Boston.

I had seen it in passing in a bookstore in London, and when I decided I’d look for it in B’ham, I went up to a clerk and said I was looking for a book with “naked” in the title and “a year of living ethically” in the subtitle. He eventually found it for me!

It’s a good book, and it raises some real questions, but it also shows its roots as a series of newspaper features.

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The Artful Teapot

Yesterday I went with Bob to see The Artful Teapot at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem. It was very entertaining. Some of my favorites were not the art teapots or the examples of high design. There were two English teapots shaped like a cauliflower and a pineapple from I think the 18th century (maybe 19th). There were also two examples of a very clever kind of teapot: Simple Yet Perfect, which allow you to brew more than one cup and leave the tea in the pot without it continuing to steep.

There were also some lovely art teapots and lovely or clever sculptures made in the form of a teapot. Here’s one of my favorites, from the PEM webpage for the exhibit:

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Ten things in London

Since I’ve been totally negligent about the Friday Tenâ„¢, I thought I’d post these ten things I’m looking forward to doing while I visit London for the next eleven days:

  1. Love Revealed: Simeon Solomon and the Pre-Raphaelites (which is the reason for the trip)
  2. Visiting my friend John and meeting his partner Nick
  3. V&A: Style and Splendor and Arts and Crafts collections
  4. Neal’s Yard Dairy
  5. New Year’s Eve in Brighton
  6. Rubens exhibit at the National Gallery with a fellow member of Copyediting‑L
  7. Favorite museums: National Portrait Gallery, Tate Britain
  8. British Library
  9. Eating and drinking: Indian food and bitter
  10. Theater: Billy Elliot — The Musical, Edward Scissorhands, or maybe a preview of Gutenburg! The Musical   

 

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Christmas vs. “Holidays”

There’s a great post with relevance to the whole “war on Christmas” buzz at Liz Opp’s The Good Raised Up: The Jew in me at Christmas time. She tells a story of being at meeting for worship on Christmas day and listening to the kids in First Day School:

I was learning that the story of Jesus’s birth was told in play and with great love to the children, rather than being told with hatred or malice against Jews.

When I talked to my family on Christmas day, my father and my sister each made reference to the Merry Christmas/Happy Holidays debate, both scoffing at the “political correctness” of “Happy Holidays.” It made me sad, their knee-jerk reaction.

My sister, who’s a small business owner, said she made sure to say Merry Christmas to every customer and had the window-painter put Merry Christmas on the shop windows. And I just thought to myself: good thing you’re in business in Brawley and not, say, Williamsburg.

I saw an actress in an interview saying she doesn’t mind when her Jewish friends wish her a Happy Hannukah, so why should anyone mind when someone says Merry Christmas. This sentiment seems to be at the center of objections by many cultural Christians. They so don’t get it. Such a lack of empathy. Have they never experienced being surrounded by people who ignore their reality? Can’t they even imagine it? Are they unable to make the cognitive leap to realizing that’s what it’s like for non-Christians in America?

I guess it’s just par for WASPs in America (and apparently the original WASPs, as well: fjm has an English perspective on the same problem).

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Don’t Know Much About Mythology

Kenneth Davis’s Don’t Know Much About Mythology is an engaging, funny read. I learned a lot about world myths, as well as learning a fair bit about the European myths with which I was already familiar. I enjoyed his cheeky, sometimes breezy pop references. I loved some of his wordplay. (Inanna’s withering gaze she learned from her sister was a favorite.)

The chapter on African myths turned out to be interesting, although as the chapter began I was struck by how much it was written for Euro-Americans (like the whole book). The structure of the book reflects the largely Western European point of view of mainstream America, as well as the European bias of academia.

This is the first “Don’t Know Much” book I’ve read, and as an introductory overview, I thought it did well. If I become curious about what I don’t know about US history or world geography, I’ll certainly think about turning to Davis’s other books.