Anti-Drug Commercials

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I’ve only seen like three of these broadcast- my favorites are Cleaner Girl and the one where the girl ignores her friend drowning…

But what happened to “I learned it from watching you!!” or “No one says I want to be a drug addict when I grow up.” ? What happened to “You’re a smart kid Timmy.” ? These are the classics, man. Anti-drug commercials from the late 1980s.

Ah well. Maybe they were part of another campaign and therefore not archived? Maybe I need to start my own archive.

Meth. oooh meth!

Web link of note: Anti-Drug Commercials
(At http://www.mediacampaign.org/mg/television_archives.html)

Mr Machine

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I was surfing randomly while watching The Jayne Mansfield Story– which I hadn’t realized had Loni Anderson and The Governator in it. Bizarre.

At any rate, I saw this toy I used to have, “Mr Machine,” made by Ideal. It was a wind-up plastic clockwork man. You could wind him up, and he’d whistle and wheel around. When I owned Mr Machine, I used to wonder how he worked… you could see his gears inside.

But today I found out just now that he was the lamer, “safer” version of a even cooler version of Mr Machine- the earlier version you could take apart! He came with directions and was over 160 pieces.

I am so jealous. Some of these memories online are pretty funny though- recollections of taking him apart and not being able to put him back together again. I don’t think that would have been me- I had almost every “Zoid” ever made up through the early 1990s, and we kept them in pieces in a giant bin, ready to be reassembled.

Oh crap, looks like once again, I can buy things to overcompensate, this time a reproduction from Robot Island. A mere $89. Yikes. Also, here’s the commercial!

Someday we will figure out how to efficiently generate energy from plastic. And then people who live on landfills will be RICH!

Jake in Progress

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This show is such a great example of TV being the opiate of the masses.

Alice was watching this last night, and getting her attention was like trying to talk to someone on smack. Hello, Alice? Yo! Over here!

The show is John Stamos basically being the Jerry MacGuire character, except this time, he’s in PR. He starts to flip out over how shallow his life has become. He starts looking for a real, down-home way of living. He is amazed when he can buy ten pounds of cashews at the store for cheap. He is charmed by the suburban lifestyle.

This show is a girl show. A self-delusional girl show.

News flash housewives- people with lucrative, professional careers, who date supermodels, don’t envy your suburban life. Most likely, they started off there, and clawed their way out. They won’t be amazed by being able to buy cashews for cheap- their cashews come in convenient tins at Whole Foods, are imported from exotic locations, are organic, and flavored with spices you’ve never heard of before. They don’t care about cheap nuts because they make twice as much as you. They could just buy you on a whim.

This show is a fantasy that you watch to try to pretend your life isn’t boring. And you’ve wasted valuable time watching it- that was another hour you could have been doing something interesting.

You are all doomed.

SpudTech

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For the thinking redneck geek who’s not satisfied with a simple potato cannon – this guy has rifled barrels, “bolt action spudguns,” and a bunch of stuff I didn’t really understand, not really being a “gun person.” Intense!

Who’d have thought there was even such a thing as a “coaxial, breach loading combustion spudgun”?
Web link of note: SpudTech
(At http://www.spudtech.com/)

Yerba Mate

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I was at some friends’ place a while ago and I saw this thing on their coffee table which looked like a tiny hookah, or a really fancy bong. It was made from an ornately-decorated gourd, with a thin metal shaft sticking out of it … upon closer inspection it looked like a metal spoon with a bunch of holes in it. I asked what it was, and they told me it was for yerba maté.

It’s this tea beverage that looks like bunch of green tobacco- dried, flat light-green leaves all ground up. You add hot water and directly to a cup almost entirely full of the leaves- then you sip the water with a special filtered straw called a bombilla (bom-bee-ya).

So back to the thing on the coffee table- did you guys just finish drinking some or something? No, it’s just there for decoration. “Yerba maté tastes like grass, I can’t stand it.”

At work I found this enormous sack of this stuff. To my surprise, we also had the paraphernalia (a small wood cup with the bombilla) in the cupboard. Whoda thought. One of my coworkers walked Anthony and me through the preparation and consumption of the stuff.

Anyway, they were right. It does taste like grass. Or straw maybe.

Incidentally, you don’t need this fancy stuff to drink yerba maté- it just looks cool and adds to the ritual.

Something else that is really funny- some people online insist that yerba maté does not contain caffeine, instead containing the active ingredient “mateine.” I’m not sure what their motivation is; perhaps they think it’s less bad for you if you have this mateine in lieu of caffeine. Predictably, there is no distinct substance “mateine”- it’s the same stuff as caffeine. If it’s any consolation, in the early days of organic chemistry, people thought there was something called “teaine.” That is, the active ingredient in tea. Don’t get too excited; it was still caffeine.

There is a lot of opportunity to get yerba maté, in bay area grocery stores, or online if you live away from civilization- the most interesting one to me is Guayakí‘s Mate Chai Latté- it might have a milder flavor I can deal with. Although when it comes to that, what is the point?