The previous bar was set at $3, under a virtually zero-tolerance policy instituted by Evil Sam himself. But the company recently figured that it was losing money by pursuing these mini-thefts, and decided to stop doing so. (In some towns, police were so overwhelmed by calls from Wal-Mart that they had to add extra officers – yet another tax on the public associated with the company, which just today managed to wangle itself out of paying health benefits to employees in Maryland.)

Does this mean that you should shoplift in Wal-Mart without fear? Probably not. And you shouldn’t, you naughty devil. But if we ALL did, every one of us, we could put the bastards out of business for good. Imagine, 200 million shoplifters each pocketing $20 worth of Chinese-made crap – that’s $4 billion! Enough to make a pretty big dent in the Evil Empire’s balance sheet.

Anyone for a nationwide Steal-A-Thon?

(Just kidding.)

OR AM I??? MWAH HA HA! WAHA HA HA HA HA!

“Why would you bother to listen to music if you don’t know the words?” she demanded. After some tortuous metaphor or other, I almost got away with it – before inadvertently revealing that I didn’t actually know the words to even my favorite songs, such as Run by Snow Patrol, or even all the words to my number one song of all time, A Private Future by Love & Rockets.

Great was her indignation, and so I ruminated for several days on why this might be. I now have an answer.

Most song lyrics are actually merely bad poetry. I cannot stand bad poetry, and even when set to music and released by Journey, it’s still just bad poetry. Example:

My Pickle:

…may my pickle stroll about hungry
and fearless and thirsty and supple
and even if it’s sunday may it be wrong
for whenever gherkins are green they are not young

and may my sweet and sour do nothing usefully
and love yourself so more than pickle-juicey
there’s never been quite such a fool who could fail
pulling all the sky over him with one bite.

Ok, I think we can agree that this is, in fact, some dreadful poetry. (Thanks to a certain Jon Glass for this, by the way – I have no way of contacting you to request your permission to reproduce this truly awful drivel, but I will happily send you $10 via PayPal if you wish to contact me, or would reluctantly remove it at your pleasure.)

But… now sing it to yourself to the tune of You’re So Vain by Carly Simon. Go ahead, try it. Or Hotel California – nobody could ever figure out what the hell that was about, either.

Suddenly it’s STILL just bad poetry! Nothing changed! It just has a tune! The banality of song lyrics – with obvious exceptions such as Paul Simon, Suzanne Vega and Katy Perr… errrr… means they are simply not worth listening to. It is the music that creates the emotion, most of the time.

This is why I like Kraftwerk.

90% of American food is processed, and almost all of it is flavored. These New Jersey plants manufacture the flavors for the potato chips that inspired this post, as well as for sport drinks, microwave dinners, cereals, even pet foods. They also manufacture the aromas that permeate our laundry room (citrus fresh!) and even manipulate the chemical formulations behind the country’s biggest perfume brands.

The industry is worth over a billion dollars, which then begs the question – why don’t my Jalapeno Cheddar chips taste remotely like either jalapenos or cheddar? Are they incapable of making these flavors?

The answer is that the American palate is – or rather, has been until recently – one of the least discerning in the world. A good example of what I’m talking about can be found in Budweiser. The beer company has spent decades gradually eliminating bitterness from hops in its brews in order to make its product as palatable as possible to as many people as possible. In effect, Budweiser was trying to make its beer as inoffensive (and hence, tasteless) as it could. However, over the last few years the emergence and popularity of strongly-flavored micro-brews has caused Budweiser to re-examine its philosophy. Many in the brewing industry expect the company to begin launching products to compete with these stronger flavors.

Americans had been fed a bland diet since the First World War, when food processing began to come into its own. The inoffensive flavors (such as Kool Aid) developed after the Second World War further detuned the taste buds on this side of the Atlantic. It is only recently, with the re-introduction of natural foods to the average American’s diet, that stronger flavors have become popular once more. It is ironic that technology helped to destroy the market for natural flavoring, and yet it is technology in the form of globalization and logistics that has helped natural foods to stage a comeback.

That being said, companies are still wary of REALLY strong flavors. American cheese, by which I mean the cheese that goes by that moniker, is about as bland as it’s possible to get. Colby, Jack… terribly boring. But they’re still responsible for half the cheese sold in the States. Of course, now you can get a finely ripened Brie or a smoked Gouda in the cheese aisle at the local supermarket, but they don’t sell like the dull stuff.

So the reason my Jalapeno & Cheddar chips actually just taste of flavored salt is primarily historical, and not technological. Scientists have virtually perfected the art of flavoring, such that they could reproduce these flavors if there really was a market for them – but as yet, there isn’t. Give it a few more years though, with Wild Oats and Whole Foods and Trader Joes making inroads into the retail food market, and maybe eventually, like Budweiser, food companies will have to be more bold.

Incidentally, in ‘Fast Food Nation’ Eric Schlosser kindly reprints the recipe for artificial strawberry flavor. Here it is: amyl acetate, amyl butyrate, amyl valerate, anethol, anisyl formate, benzyl acetate, benzyl isobutyrate, butyric acid, cinnamyl isobutyrate, cinnamyl valerate, cognac essential oil, diacetyl, dipropyl ketone, ethyl acetate, ethyl amyl ketone, ethyl butyrate, ethyl cinnamate, ethyl heptanoate, ethyl heptylate, ethyl lactate, ethyl methylphenylglycidate, ethyl nitrate, ethyl propionate, ethyl valerate, heliotropin, hydroxyphenyl-2-butanone (10 percent solution in alcohol), a-ionone, isobutyl anthranilate, isobutyl butyrate, lemon essential oil, maltol, 4-methylacetophenone, methyl anthranilate, methyl benzoate, methyl cinnamate, methyl heptine carbonate, methyl naphthyl ketone, methyl salicylate, mint essential oil, neroli essential oil, nerolin, neryl isobutyrate, orris butter, phenethyl alcohol, rose, rum ether, g-undecalactone, vanillin, and solvent.

Mmmmmm…. methylphenylglycidate.

These things annoy me. But some other lapses just confuse me.

For instance, today I am wearing a shirt featuring a repeating pattern of motorcycles. Next to each motorcycle is the legend ‘McQueen’. The shirt, you see, is a homage to Steve McQueen, who was quite the coolest man ever to live. My brother knows this, which is why he bought me the shirt.

And today, two separate people have glanced at my shirt, and said “Oh, the Queen – cool.” Then, after a few seconds they have suddenly looked a little puzzled and asked me, in all seriousness, “Does the Queen really ride a motorcycle?”

Forget that the motorcycle on the shirt is tilted at a gravity-defying 25 degree angle, or that the person atop it is quite obviously male. Forget that the Queen is, oh, what, 106 years old. Forget, for Chrissake, that she’s the friggin’ QUEEN.

Does she ride a motorcycle?

Well, as I patiently explained, she used to. She actually took one round Donington Park at an average speed of 109mph once, back when she was a lass. In fact, Ayrton Senna only lapped a couple of miles an hour faster when he set the track record back in 1993 in a McLaren Formula One car. Of course, she had to quit when she acceded to the throne in 1953, insurance and all that. But yep, back in the day she was quite the speed demon.

“Oh…” comes the bewildered response. “Well, ok…”

And then they walk away, with that gratifying bafflement etched on their faces in a series of furrows in their brow that deepen as they leave.

Later, just in case, I google ‘Queen Motorcycle Donington Park’.

Nope, she doesn’t.

I’m mad about this,
As well as dog piss.
I wish you would cork your dog’s bum.

Why? Popcorn. That’s why.

You see – and call me old-fashioned, call me a dinosaur – when I go to the movies, I have but one thing in mind. Watching the movie. Listening to the steady mastication of four hundred teenagers whose creaking jaws drown out the dramatic silences on screen isn’t my idea of fun. The stench of ‘butter-substitute’ that pervades the air turns my stomach. The mechanical movement of the hand from bucket to mouth, often synchronized across entire rows (yes, watch for it) drives me to distraction.

Worst of all is the fact that the size of the popcorn container seems to grow in direct proportion to its owner. Giant, waddling fatties who take up two seats each can be seen stuffing great pudgy handfuls of the stuff into their gaping maws. It makes you want to shake them, to try and awake them from this consumerist nightmare – “If it’s there, I gotta have it.”

And now the phenomenon has moved into the workplace. Seems I can’t go out to deposit a check without someone using the interval before my return to whip out a couple of packets of Orville Redenbacher’s. And if ‘relaxing’ in front of a movie while drinking in the sickly aroma of yellow goo isn’t bad enough, try working with the stuff.

Anyway, the point of this post is simple. If I see you in a movie theater eating popcorn, be ready to wear the damn bucket as a hat.

That’s all I have to say on the matter.

It could be several years older than that, but I have personally owned it since 1987. It was a left-behind at the boarding school that my mother used to work at, a soft terry-doweled bath towel in royal blue that she couldn’t resist procuring once the owner had left for college.

It had – indeed, has – the name of that owner, Sarah Waterman, on one of those tags that gets sewn onto items of great value at school.

Ever since Ford Prefect first divulged to Arthur Dent that his towel would be the most valuable posession he would ever have (and of course, he turned out to be exactly right) I have kept this towel on my rack at all times. It has been with me through Hendley Drive, Tapton Hall, Crookes Road, School Road, Ashgate Road, Hyde Park Mansions, Endsleigh Road, Ealing Green, Sandwell Mansions on Abbey Road, West End Lane, Woody Creek, Harvard Street, Holland Hills, Table Mesa Drive, Stanford Avenue, Hartford Drive, Rand Way and Goshawk Drive. Seventeen moves over twenty years, covering approximately 10,000 miles. Not including vacations – Russia, Majorca, Menorca, the US on several occasions, Tenerife, Dominican Republic, Canada, St John, Mexico, France, Belgium, Holland… probably more.

It has been with me thick and thin – and while I’ve got thicker, it’s got thinner. My waistline has gained four inches over the last twenty years even while the towel has become threadbare and holey.

In fact, it is as close to a holy item as I own. Jen chastises me on occasion for leaving the manky thing around the house, but I will hold onto it religiously until it is less a towel than a mere rag.

I’m not sure how many more moves my towel will survive. Or I, for that matter. I seem to be settled now in Colorado, destined to spend the next who-knows-how-many years raising my kids here so as to avoid the huge disruption in life that comes with moving.

I hold onto the past more than most, I suspect. My attachment to a faded blue towel seems somewhat ridiculous in truth – but it represents a small sense of continuity throughout a life that has been at times magnificent, and at times desolate.

Perhaps it will survive another, what, ten trips?. It would seem somewhat appropriate for it to make forty-two journeys around the world before it retires.

I just hope I outlast it.

Trouble is, my venti-2%-no-whip-4-pump-mocha costs either $3.78 or $3.90 a day, depending on which county I buy it in.

Assuming I work 49 weeks a year, five days a week, that’s a yearly expenditure of between $926.10 and $955.50.

Holy crap. That’s my entire car insurance bill. It’s two flights to Vegas and two nights in the Venetian. If I added it to my 401k (and this is where it gets really scary) then my nest egg by the time I’m 62 would go from $898,822 (in real terms) to $961,962. In other words, my Starbucks habit could cost me around $62,000 in real terms over the next 26 years.

So – a 7-series BMW when I retire, or coffee every day for the next 26 years?

Voting enabled.

But the truth only manifested itself in its full, unadulterated horror when I tried to pack a few months back for a five day trip to Sweden. Oh no, I found myself wailing, I only have room for five shirts, five pairs of socks, five pairs of boxers and so on. I can’t take any spares! And only two pairs of shoes! I DON’T HAVE ROOM for all my stuff!

This is seriously weak. I mean, times past I’d just throw a bunch of stuff in a bag and hope for the best. I’d travel for weeks at a time with everything I needed in a backpack. Now I’m coming over all faint because I’m going to have to leave my nose-hair trimmer at home.

I try to be manly, really I do. I bought a Mustang Cobra convertible. I don’t cycle because I flat-out refuse to shave my legs, dammit. And I speak in a deep, booming voice when I order the kids to bed, so that they understand my masculine authority.

But if this whole packing episode is anything to go on, I’m in trouble. I’m already ordering raspberry mochas instead of Real Man coffee. I talk coochy-coo to my cats. Next thing you know I’ll be watching daytime TV and blow-drying my hair.

Somebody hit me. Not in the face! Not in the face!