Trekkychick

Dear Readers,

“Excuse me Mister, in which aisle can I find the drinks that will simultaneously induce kidney, liver, and heart failure?”

For every five hundred reasonable coffee drinkers out there, there exists a hater who professes not to partake of this sweet caffeinated nectar. Of these outliers, some claim to appreciate the taste of tea, a pallid beverage made from soaking twigs or pine needles or whatever in hot water. While they appreciate the goodness of caffeine, tea drinkers are not to be entirely trusted. They have been known to exhibit suspicious behaviors such as drinking out of a miniature cup, raising their pinky daintily as they sip their anemic elixir, and consuming microscopic scones and miniature triangular-shaped egg salad sandwich wedges. One can only wonder what these tea drinkers are hiding behind that raised little finger.

While these tea drinkers are unusual, they are generally considered safe. Typically, tea drinkers make good friends. They demonstrate a remarkable ability to sit or stand in one spot without twitching for extended periods of time, they use a standard speech rate that doesn’t sound like a recording played in fast-forward mode, and best of all, they fall asleep at night, thus contributing to their pleasant demeanors.

While you need not fear the tea drinkers, Readers, you need to be aware of the dangers of those persons who drink neither our decadent staple known as coffee nor its diluted alternative known as tea. These persons belong to a third caffeinated category. They are known only by the name of energy drinkers.

Energy drinkers are a superhuman species that have evolved as their bodies have adapted to previously toxic levels of blood caffeine content (a 16 oz can of Red Bull contains 160 mg of caffeine) as well as the energizing and athletic-enhancing addition of the nonessential amino acid taurine. Energy drinkers are the rock stars of any party, outlasting even the most hard-core coffee drinkers. Due to their amped up nature, however, energy drinkers can be real monsters when crossed, and they’ll fully throttle you if you give them any red bull sh**.

While an energy drink is generally considered safe in limited quantities, some research indicates its blend of caffeine and taurine puts energy drinkers at risk for potentially harmful side effects related to changes in heart rate and blood pressure. For this reason, energy drinkers are encouraged to limit their intake to one drink a day. Combining their energy drink with alcohol (such as the ever popular red bull & vodka or the “jager bomb” –rock star energy drink mixed with jagermeister–) is also a poor idea, as it can lead to cardiovascular risk and shortness of breath, among other risks.

Remember, Readers, whether you’re a coffee, tea, or energy drinker, your pursuit of good caffeine is admirable. And don’t forget that regardless of which beverage you choose, you’re wrong, unless you choose coffee.

–Troi out

Dear Readers,

As you know, a morning without coffee is really no morning at all. There is no way to get to lunch, and the subsequent afternoon, and finally that favorite time of day I like to call time to get off work, without having begun the day with a small* mug of delicious local brew with my good buddies Batdorf & Bronson (also known as Dancing Goats), the coffee roasters.

*Small like a 7-11 Big Gulp is small.

Sometimes Batdorf and Bronson’s prices are through the roof —- which means that I have to climb onto my roof and sell each individual shingle in order to afford a 12 ounce bag—-but spending the extra roof shingle for a company like this is well worth the price. Batdorf & Bronson’s coffee is fair-trade certified, which means that in exchange for a super-size morning cup of coffee, my colleagues and clients are presented with a tolerable Troi who is both awake and amiable in general demeaner, which is a pretty fair trade if you ask me. Fair-trade coffee also supports a better life for farmers by adhering to strict criteria regarding price, environmental sustainability, fair labor conditions, and trade, among others. A fair price, particularly, ensures small coffee farmers are earning wages that exceed the cost of production, eliminating the cycle of poverty and debt.

Batdorf & Bronson’s coffee beans are also shade grown, meaning that their beans have been protected from sunlight, reducing their risk of melanoma. Maverick beans that sneak out of their shade grown home in their quest for a good suntan are required to wear a good-quality UVA/UVB sunscreen of at least SPF 30. In addition to having good skin, shade grown beans are grown, as their name suggests, in the shade of trees. These nitrogen-fixing trees enhance the soil and the growth of plant life as well as provide a natural habitat for birds that is not readily available in more recent hybrid coffee bean varieties that grow in direct sunlight. Birds in shade-grown coffee environments offer natural insect control by way of frequent foraging, reducing or entirely eliminating the need for chemical fertilizers, pesticides, or herbicides.

In contrast to shade-grown beans, the newer, sun-friendly hybrids require chemical fertilizers and pesticides, resulting in soil erosion, water runoff, and soil depletion and necessitating the need to clear rainforest for new planting soil. Not only is this an unsustainable practice, but many bird populations have been declining as a consequence of the shedding of shade-growing practices.

My good friends Batdorf & Bronson have also been purchasing 100% of their electricity from renewable resources since 2000. I much prefer my energy unrenewable (I hoard coal, oil, gas, and nuclear power whenever I can get my hands on them, for no reason in particular), however, Batdorf & Bronson seem to think they’re doing the environment a favor, and any company that produces such tasty coffee can’t be completely wrong about its energy practices.

If you’re likeminded in your search for coffee that you can feel good about drinking, click here to see some fair-trade certified coffee options. If you’re a fan of Peet’s Coffee, try their fair trade blend.

Happy Coffee Drinking!

–Troi out

Dear Readers, it is most fortunate [for you] that today you are provided the windfall of reading a post that is not written by me. That’s right, today’s guest blogger is a leading sportswriter* for an esteemed sports magazine* and has written dozens of articles about sports* that have been read all over the nation* and also maybe in other nations.*

*Not really, but I wanted to give him a nice introduction.

As published in the New England Journal of Kickball

Kickball is a common enough game. You might see it on any school yard on any given day or even at the occasional municipal playground being played by the neighborhood kids or inebriated adults. But few, if any, of these participants take into account the serious risks posed to them by their participation in this sport. Please consider the following:

THE BALL
Kickball is a game loosely based on the rules of “Kick” – where one person kicks the ball to another and then the recipient returns the kick in a timely fashion, and “Baseball” – where 9 players get together and stand around for a few hours looking intently at each other and occasionally scratching themselves (hopefully the two are unrelated). But in this Kickball adaptation, you must kick a ball as hard as you can that has been hurled at you. I ask, why the violence? Couldn’t the ball simply be placed in front of the kicker? Or to even further prevent any injury, might I suggest that there be no ball at all and that the kicker just yells out loud what his “kick” would have done. “Single to the left center gap,” the kicker would say, and then the fielders would react accordingly. Surely you can see where both kicker and fielders would be at low risk for injury in this situation.

THE LINE CHALK
I bet you have played on many a lined field, but you have to ask yourself just what goes into those lines. On some fields the chalk has been upgraded to a biodegradable paint, but in many kickball stadiums where budgets are tight and generally conserved for beverages, the more traditional chalk is used. This poses both a physical and internal health risk. Physically, the chalk makes a ridge on the base path with which to catch a cleat or stub a toe, thus rendering the base runner useless for his team with torn muscles and broken bones. Internally, everyone is at risk from the “dust.” Yes folks, you never knew it, but much like the DDT of the 50s and the 60s, line chalk is hazardous to your health if inhaled. It is mass produced mostly outside nuclear energy plants, where the condensed dust from the cooling towers is harvested for this precious commodity. So not only is it highly poisonous; it is also mildly nuclear reactive which is why it glows so well in the dark.

Please refer to the chart below that has nothing to do with Kickball, but which makes my report look substantiated and important when in fact I stole borrowed the format from the New England Journal of Medicine.

Total Numbers of Drug Shortages and Shortages Involving Sterile Injectable Drugs in the United States, 2005–2009. Lots of drug shortages in Kickball too. Obviously the drugs are all going to Football and Baseball. That is why there are no big “Home Run” kickers these days.

In conclusion, you are better off doing hours of dubious internet research before partaking in any activity no matter how harmless you think it might be. You can never tell when imminent death will await you around the corner doing exactly what you thought would have been the safe thing to do. Next week… “Tetherball and What the Duty Teacher Didn’t Tell You About it.”

Source Information
Sources? What you think I need to verify this stuff? Are you kidding me… I had a graph!

Dear Readers,

tacky, but free

So as my nearby beloved Hollywood Video recently became another casualty to the new generation of netflixers, it held a final closing sale to part with its cinematic stock. “Everything Must Go!” reported the banner strewn across the front of the store. “Prices marked down 30-50%!”

Now, I’ve never taken a business class, and I presume the definition of a liquid asset to be a really tasty microbrew, but I know the urgency connotated by “must” (Troi on a road trip of more than 10 minutes in duration: “We must stop now and find a rest area!”) and if everything really must go, wouldn’t marking it down by 100% speed up the exit of products from a store?

And it’s not just Hollywood Video’s oversight. In this economy businesses are closing their doors with lightning speed, each closure allegedly necessitating the elimination of all unsold stock, and yet not a single business uses my suggested catch phrase: “Everything must go. So come in and take it. For free.”

You may have heard that everyone’s favorite word is their own name. This is a misnomer. Everyone’s favorite word is actually “free.” Everyone’s favorite short phrase incorporates both their first name and the word “free,” as in, “Hey [insert your name here], did you hear about the free [insert object here]?”

A price reduction of 100%, rendering an item entirely without cost, is irresistible to the average American. Consider this: Free Cone Day at Ben & Jerry’s ice cream shoppe. People stand in line for hours salivating at the anticipation of a miniature confection that will take 1/100th the time to consume. And in Portland, our Ben & Jerry’s is downtown. The only way to get there is to take public transportation, which costs $4.75 for an all-day pass (which, face it, you’ll need if you’re waiting in line for that free cone), or to drive, which requires the price of public parking at $1.60/hour. It would be cheaper to walk to the nearest Fred Meyer and buy a half-gallon of Tillamook ice cream, which, if you were wondering, is bigger than a free cone at Ben & Jerry’s. But you don’t hear anybody saying, “Hey, it’s free cone day at Ben & Jerry’s! Let’s go to Fred Meyer and buy a half-gallon of Tillamook ice cream!” Instead, you hear them saying, “Hey, it’s free cone day at Ben & Jerry’s! Let’s drive down there, pay our life savings in parking fees to the city of Portland, spend three hours waiting in line in the Portland rain, and receive a single spoonful of ice cream in return for our troubles, because it’s free.”

And it’s not just Free Cone Day that sucks us in. Upon moving out, my roommate recently attempted to unload his surplus of worthless belongings onto my already sizable collection of worthless belongings.

“Look what a great pencil-holder this tacky ceramic teacup makes!” he suggested hopefully after carefully arranging my stray pencils in an awkward arrangement in the teacup.

“No way,” I answered firmly. “I don’t want your stuff. Get rid of it.”

“But…..it’s free,” he continued. “You don’t have to pay a thing for it!”

“FREE??” I exclaimed excitedly. “I’ll take two tacky ceramic teacups, then!”

Dangle the word “free” in front of us, and suddenly our whole outlook on consumerism changes. The words “Buy one get one free” add a whole new lure to the purchase of previously undesirable products. I recently bought mascara on a “buy one get one free” sale at Fred Meyer. I don’t even wear mascara. Certainly, it would have made more financial sense to buy no mascara for free than to buy two tubes of mascara at some cost to me. But the only word I saw was “free,” and now I’m trying to sell mascara on eBay.

“Free” is indeed a magical word. So Hollywood Video would do well to take my financial advice and mark down their movies by 100%. Because if “everything must go,” that should do it.

–Troi out

Comment now on Troi’s newest post for a chance to win a FREE* year’s subscription to her bestselling blog!

*All sales final. No exchanges or returns, no matter how unpleasant the reading experience.

So as I drove home from work today, I listened to OPB to catch up on the latest news from around the world; the BP oil spill, Sarah Palin’s newest book (I’m Roguer Than You Are, or something), and the most recent threat to mankind: Grasshoppers.

Wait…..what?

Yes, Readers, grasshoppers are the latest terrorists in a slew of enemies threatening to bring down the northwestern region of this great nation. According to OPB, a severe grasshopper invasion has been headed straight for the Northwest, predicted to be the most formidable grasshopper infestation since the Great Grasshopper Hostilities of 1933 when grasshoppers became privy to the fact that humans were covering them in chocolate and eating them. Legend has it that during the GGH, Grasshoppers became so tyrannical that they stopped hopping and began jumping from place to place, and some even went so far as to begin hopping in non-grassy terrain, like on soil and sidewalks. (They also apparently munched on a few crops, obliterating farmers’ harvests, or something, whatever.)

As frightening as our green adversaries sound, there is hope on the horizon. OPB reports that the northwest’s rainy late-May weather, which differs from previous years’ rainy late-May weather in no way whatsoever but apparently bears mention anyway, is well-timed as it provides a cold and damp climate that is ideal for breeding diseases and fungi that could knock baby grasshoppers right out of the grassy field. If these late-May weather patterns remain consistent, grasshoppers’ numbers should be dropping over the next few years, which is OPB’s nice way of saying frogs won’t be the only things croaking in the near future.

Now that’s just mean. Grasshoppers aren’t my favorite insect, either, and certainly, I wouldn’t keep one as a pet, anymore, but to report on their demise as a celebratory story (“But enough about the unstoppable oil gushing through the Gulf for the next five years, here’s Bob with a heartwearming tale of death to grasshoppers”) simply doesn’t seem fair to the little green guys. I mean, it’s not like the grasshoppers are hurting anybody (except organic and sustainable farmers’ crops, farmers’ livelihoods, and the food supply).

I think there’s an easy alternative to all of this grasshopposition that simply hasn’t been considered due to the strained relations that have endured since the Great Grasshopper Hostilities of 1933. Why not offer grasshoppers an incentive not to chew on crops meant for human consumption? (Hear me out on this one. My ideas are highly underrated—-to date, nobody has actually used one of them. I’m flummoxed.) We all know that grasshoppers are vegetarian. And we all know that nobody actually eats brussels sprouts. Yet brussels sprouts continue to be grown, to sit on grocery store shelves under the pretenses that somebody, somewhere, will actually buy them, and they continue to rot, unbought. Why not just place brussels sprouts in areas of high grasshopper traffic, with a sign that says, “Grasshopper Food.” Grasshoppers will surely see the sign and forgo their usual diet of farmers’ crops in favor of a nutritious brussels sprout. Crops will flourish, humans and grasshoppers will co-exist peacefully, and my family will stop trying to serve brussels sprouts during Christmas dinner.

–Troi out