"Furthermore, most of these people became millionaires through a relentless drive for self improvement and success, making sacrifices, and not taking the easy road."

"If you want to be on 'Cribs' get off your ass, and start *working* toward a goal. You may not ever reach it, but you'll get more of what you want by working for it than by watching it on TV and wishing for it."

Wanna suggest another warning label? E-mail burgerguy@gmail.com

The point that Seth makes is that for most projects, you have to be able to be able to categorize it. People don't want to know what it is, but what it's like. That gives them a quick, experiential point of reference they can build on. "It's like King Kong, but with a giant bunny" lets the audience's memory/perception quickly fill in a whole bunch of blanks so you don't have to.

On a rare occasion, though, your project is so unique, it defies a simple categorization. You can't get that quick hit of familiarity. You either have to describe it in full, without the aid of familiar references, or you have to say "it's like nothing you've ever had. Just trust me and try it."

People would ask me to describe my novel in just a few words, and I couldn't. It wasn't a "vampire novel" per se. It just happened to have a vampire in it. Some of the story was driven by Alain's vampirism, but a lot of it wasn't. There was a lot of borrowing from Dante, some from Milton... Categorizing it was very difficult for me. I was too close to it to be able to boil it down to a few catchphrases and keywords.

I didn't know if it was that unique, or if I just didn't want to categorize it. To categorize it feels like you've not only limited it, but you've taken away a degree of its uniqueness. So, as the creator of an "artistic" work, it's quite possible I was merely resisting categorizing my story rather than the story itself resisting categorization. Every child is unique, right? Even if they aren't.

But when you're trying to sell a work, saying "just trust me and try it" is not a great approach if you haven't built trust with the person. Furthermore, when you say "this is unlike anything else," you have to be 100% sure it is unlike anything else. If someone gives you the benefit of the doubt, reads it, and says "this is just like...", you're screwed. You asked them to trust you about it's uniqueness and lost.

I'm still on the fence over whether my novel is resisting categorization or I'm resisting categorizing it, but Godin has given me some insight that is helping me look at it more honestly. If I want to sell it, I need the best answer for "what's it like" that I can find.

I decided to do some math on how much a french fry tax might raise. For a back-of-envelope calculation, I found an article from 2002 that put annual per-capita consumption of french fries in the United States at 28 pounds, with 90% of that being at fast food restaurants.

So that makes 25.2 pounds of french fries eaten at fast food restaurants per person per year. A large fries at McDonalds is approximately 1/3 of a pound. So that makes 75.6 orders of fries per person per year, or a little less than 1.5 per week. At a "quarter per order," that means $18.90 per person in taxes.

Now, that's a "per capita" figure which is an average among all people, from babies to senior citizens. So if the average person ate 75.6 orders of fries and paid $18.90 in "quarter per order" taxes on them, a population of 300 million would generate $5,670,000,000 in new taxes.

Now, $5.6 billion is just a drop in the bucket considering our national debt and all the other things we're facing, but it's a start. Consider California's budget crisis. They have 10% of the population. If they did "quarter an order" on french fries, they could conceivably generate over a half-billion in new tax revenues, and in a state that has been so welcoming of sin taxes on tobacco, when heart disease and obesity related illnesses are such huge health issues, why wouldn't the taxpayers welcome a sin tax on french fries?

I eat fries, though not nearly as much as I used to. But I'd welcome a quarter per order tax in Washington rather than a gasoline tax or a sales tax increase. If I don't want to pay the tax, I can have a salad or some fruit or sliced veggies.

'Course, if they try to tax bacon, there's gona be a revolt up in this motherf... but I digress. If we're going to tax cigarettes, we might as well tax french fries. It's only fair, and right now state governments need to find revenues where they can. "Quarter per order." It's an idea whose time has come.

I read this story about Ed Chrisman, an 88-year-old American who was recently given a humanitarian release from a Mexican jail. I'm not going to go into the details of why he was there or a rant about his treatment. Read the full story if you want all the details.

It was the second-to-last paragraph of the story that just made my blood run cold:

"He told one story - one of the guards there had a guard dog inside the prison and the dog had pups. The rats are so thick in there that rats came and started to drag off the pups and eat them," said Don.

I told this to a person who isn't a "dog person," and even she gave a sympathetic whine for those poor puppies. If you want a way to describe the squalid conditions in a Mexican prison, puppy-eating rats hits it right on the freakin' nail.

Holy crap!

Let's start with the pledge: "I pledge to join the Hunger Challenge starting April 20 and experience firsthand how it feels to survive on $7 a day." Plainly and simply, you can't experience firsthand how it feels to survive on $7 a day in the space of five days, mostly because it's only five days.

In my freshman year of college, I took a class on civil rights and the disabled to satisfy a humanities requirement, and the professor said something that stuck with me. All those experiments where you try to put yourself in someone else's shoes for a day or two are fine and dandy, but they miss one very important part of the experience... the knowledge that this isn't going to end anytime soon. You can spend a week in a wheelchair, but when it gets really hard, you have the knowledge you'll be able to get out of the wheelchair in X days as well as the choice of saying "I quit" and getting out now.

The hunger challenge is the same. If you're hungry or unhappy with the food on Wednesday, you know that you'll be able to go to your favorite sushi bar on Saturday night when it's all over. And if it gets too hard, you have the option of quitting and calling for a pizza. You can't know "firsthand how it feels" because you know exactly when this will end, you can quit it whenever you want, and you're never faced with the depressing situation of having it stretch before and behind you for months.

But the 5-day outlook makes things artificially harder too. This challenge has the fallacy of trying to buy all your spices and oils on a budget of $7 a day for five days. You cannot build a monthly budget that allows you to take a longer term outlook and stretch purchases like that (or a 10-lb bag of rice, or a large bag of beans, or a large sack of sugar) over a longer horizon.

I'm not saying that you can eat like a king on this budget, but that the 5-day period makes your situation both better and worse than people who have to live like this and it gives you a skewed concept of what it's like to be on food aid. It's basically dipping your toe in the coldest part of the pond and saying you know what it's like to swim in it.

A home economics class, where you had to prepare shopping lists for a family of four on this budget for a month, would give you a better concept of the rigor and planning that has to go into living like this. A five-day experiment like this just makes me think of upper middle class people who think they know what it's like to be poor because they drove through a slum and saw all the sad little people who just broke their hearts.

This is the foodie form of limousine liberalism and it just annoys me.

Giant burgers are nothing new, and the Travel Channel's "Man V. Food" has featured some bigger burgers in its hard-not-to-watch orgy of gluttony, but I guess this is the first time such a huge burger has been offered at a ballpark. Presumably added to the menu to get some press about its novelty, it did just that, making the wire services and getting stories in newspapers nationwide.

That attracted the attention of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. Although dated April 1st, the open letter from dietitian Susan Levin was released to press sources yesterday and another round of press for the Whitecaps began almost immediately.

Levin asked for the following warning label: "WARNING – Eating meat is associated with increased risk of heart disease, cancer, and death."

I like a different quote from her letter that many of the press outlets ignored: "I venture to guess that your monster burger harbors more synthetic hormones than most professional baseball players."

Woo-hoo, the humorless killjoy tries to make a steroid joke, and almost pulls it off. Most of the letter, though, is about how too much meat and cheese causes most of society's medical ills and riffs on "what kind of example are we setting for the children?"

Honestly, I think this is just bandwagon PR. Look at how much mileage the PCRM got out of one little press release. Just like the story on the burger, it got on the wire services, got picked up by lots of outlets, and it's provoking a reaction. Used to be that the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) was the best known food-issue grandstander. One of their more memorable campaigns was trying to expose all the dangers of movie theater popcorn. More recently, they've been suing beer makers over making caffeinated alcoholic beverages they're calling "alcospeed."

Still, good intentions aside, mercenary attempts to ride on the coattails of someone else's publicity aside, the claim that the burger needs a warning label is just insulting on so many levels, and that's probably what's made people take notice. It's not so much that the "food nazis" are at it again, but they're calling Joe the Plumber an idiot again. And people are getting pissed off at the arrogant, humorless twaddle coming out of activistville yet again.

Susan, this is why people hate you. You talk down to them. You think they're not capable of making their own decisions and need or want you to interfere. So here's my proposed warning label.

WARNING: There are some people in this country who believe you're potentially stupid enough to mistake a 4-pound burger with cheese, chili, and corn chips on it for health food. Humorless blowhards like this are known causes of irritation and stress. Please use extreme caution when listening to these pompous twits.

Every Black Friday is chaos. There's always a story about a crowd at one Wal-Mart or another getting unruly. Wal-Mart knew that their first-come, first-served early morning discounts create crowd-control problems, but they didn't have enough security in place. Now someone's dead because of it.

I like Wal-Mart. Their prices really are low and they offer a huge selection. But this is unacceptable. I really hope that this guy's family has a good lawyer.

I called the number they were ostensibly from and the guy said he knew nothing about it.

So I used Sprint's e-mail support and sent in this report:

Original Question: Gross Porn Picturemail From Stranger
Question: I was sent two picturemail messages to my phone
(425-XXX-XXXX) timestamped 2:48 from a number I did not recognize
(425-XXX-XXXX). They were gross pornographic photos (one of a woman
crapping on a guy, the other an animation of a woman ejecting grapes
from her vagina). I called the number and the person answering claimed
it was a cell phone he uses for business, never texts of sends photos,
and he knew nothing about it.

This wasn't just porn, it was disgusting. It was someone pooping on
another person.

I want to know who sent it and I want Sprint to not only take action
regarding it, but to tell me what action you took.

This was Sprint's reply. Note how they misspelled my last name (they couldn't just cut and paste?):

Dear Mr. Bulmush,

Thank you for contacting Sprint regarding the gross pornographic
photos. I apologize for the inconvenience this issue has caused to you.

Please contact the local law enforcement by dailing 911.

Thank you again for contacting Sprint. We appreciate your business.

Sincerely,
Reeve K
Customer Service Specialist
Sprint

Besides the fact that Sprint refused to do anything about this gross abuse of their network, they suggested I call 911. Now these may have grossed me out and may warrant contacting the police to file a complaint, but 911 is for EMERGENCIES. You call 911 when someone is having a heart heart attack, when you see a car accident, when something's on fire, when someone is actively trying to break into your home. You do not call 911 two hours after a stranger sent dirty pictures to your cell phone. Calling 911 when you're not in immediate danger potentially delays getting timely help to someone who is.

So why is Sprint telling me to call 911 in a non-emergency situation?

Well, if I do report this incident to the police, perhaps I'll also discuss Sprint's advice with them and ask them to remind Sprint about proper uses of the 911 system.

But what about the company Sarah Palin keeps? Her husband joined a secessionist party. He so hates America that he wanted to make Alaska its own country and stop being an American.

Obama served on a charity board with his America-hater. Sarah Palin sleeps with hers.

But more to the point, Sarah Palin tries to play up her Christian values. I'm not sure, but I thought that two of the biggest tenets of Christianity had to do with man's potential for change and redemption and man's duty to forgive. Considering that Ayers has put the 60s behind him and has done some good works, maybe she could let go of the past. Maybe she could forgive him and believe he has changed.

Ahh, but like most Republicans, Sarah Palin is a politician first and actually living up to the values of Christianity come a far, far second. If it is profitable for her to stop believing in redemption and forgiveness for a while, she's only too happy to chuck them out the window. She picks and chooses which "Christian values" will bring her profit and power and she pisses on the rest. One of the pictures the right likes to circulate is a recent one of Ayers standing on the flag. Wish we could circulate one of Sarah Palin shitting on the bible.

But it's not just this. She's been blaming the media for her own inability to form meaningful or coherent answers to their questions and she's been riling up her "base" against them at her speaking events. She's now got her fans booing and jeering at the reporters who cover her speeches.

This quote from a Washington Post article just made my jaw drop:

Worse, Palin's routine attacks on the media have begun to spill into ugliness. In Clearwater, arriving reporters were greeted with shouts and taunts by the crowd of about 3,000. Palin then went on to blame Katie Couric's questions for her "less-than-successful interview with kinda mainstream media." At that, Palin supporters turned on reporters in the press area, waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. Others hurled obscenities at a camera crew. One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, "Sit down, boy."

How can we take seriously her attacks on the company Obama keeps when this is the kind of company she keeps?

Here's how it works. The men and women are split into teams of eight, one man and seven women per team. In the first of the 13 episodes, a special 2-hour season opener, we get to meet all the contestants and no one gets eliminated.

The idea is that each guy on the show is looking for love and he's presented with 7 potential mates on his team. In even numbered weeks, the man and all the women in his team compete together as a team to avoid the whole team being eliminated. In odd numbered weeks, they work on the romantic part and the man has to eliminate one woman from his team.

As teams and players are eliminated, we whittle down from 56 players (7 men and 49 women) to 3 players (1 man and two women) in the final episode. And on that final episode, the man chooses between the two women to pick the one who has won his heart.

So this is the status of / number of players at the end of each episode:

Week 1: 56 players on 7 teams (1 man & 7 women per team) no elimination
Week 2: 48 players on 6 teams (1 man & 7 women per team)
Week 3: 42 players on 6 teams (1 man & 6 women per team)
Week 4: 35 players on 5 teams (1 man & 6 women per team)
Week 5: 30 players on 5 teams (1 man & 5 women per team)
Week 6: 24 players on 4 teams (1 man & 5 women per team)
Week 7: 20 players on 4 teams (1 man & 4 women per team)
Week 8: 15 players on 3 teams (1 man & 4 women per team)
Week 9: 12 players on 3 teams (1 man & 3 women per team)
Week 10: 8 players on 2 teams (1 man & 3 women per team)
Week 11: 6 players on 2 teams (1 man & 2 women per team)
Week 12: 3 players on 1 team (1 man & 2 women)
Week 13: 2 players on 1 team (1 man & 1 woman)

Of course, since I don't have my own production company, I'll never get this on the air myself. But maybe some production company will read my blog, "borrow" the idea, and then I'll at least get to watch it.

Despite that, there were cars filling up at Shell, 76, and Tesoro. If you have a truck with a 20 gallon tank, you're wasting over $5 per fill-up by going to Shell or 76. If you fill up once a week, you're wasting $260 a year. Is Shell's plain old 87 octane regular so much better than Arco's that it's worth $260 a year? If you're already hurting from high gas prices, is there a reason why you're needlessly paying an extra $20+ a month?

I'm not saying everyone should go to Arco. I'm just wondering how multiple gas stations can charge 7.6% more for gasoline than a station just down the street and have customers at the pumps.

Dear sir:
I am sorry to bother you for a moment, we would be honored to introduce our company and products, hope that we may build business cooperation in the future.
Our company is located in the ¡°garlic hometown of China ¡°,Jinxiang ,and we manufacture and export garlic, onion and dehydrated vegetables for many years. We have profuse goods with series quality grade , and expressly ,our price is very competitive because we are manufactory ,we are the source. You are welcome to visit our website: [URL removed] which includes our company profiles, history and something latest news.

Here are our mainly products and a attachment about some details of garlic list:
Garlic : fresh garlic, garlic granule, garlic powder, garlic flake
Onion: fresh onion, onion thread, onion powder
Carrot granule, dried shallot, ginger flake, chili ,etc.
See if there is anything you need ,please let me know about the size ,package, quantity, and payment term you request. We will be happy to give you details
Waiting for your reply soon. And you can chat with me on the MSN if you have any questions.
Best regards
Sales Mr. Big
JinXiang DaCheng Food Co., Ltd
JiNing ShanDong China
Mail: goodlying@yahoo.com

Have you figured what set off my red flags? Look at their e-mail... goodlying@yahoo.com. Good Lying at Yahoo dot Com. Puhleeez. I am not making this up!

Now it may be a scam and when you send off your money for their products, you never see a product, or it may just be some aggressive businessman in China who doesn't get it. With a name like Mr. Big and an e-mail address like Good Lying, he's not going to build a whole lot of trust with English speakers.

Plus I wouldn't buy any food product grown or processed in China after all that country's attempts to poison us and our pets last year.

I did reply, however. Two words...

Free Tibet

A woman was talking about how we rely more and more on our pharmacists and then cited a time "when my daughter's temperature came back." Well, I was up on my high horse and spurring it to a gallop with that one.

"I'm glad your daughter's temperature came back," I said, talking back to the radio. "What happened? Did she drop to absolute zero? No temperature at all?" Then I got sidetracked for a moment, contemplating whether absolute zero is the absence of temperature or merely the absence of heat, but I got myself back on track, fuming over this idiomatic, colloquial slangmongery, where QFC was talking down to its patrons using incorrect English. I pledged to blog about it when I got home.

As I prepared to start this blog entry, I went to get the definition of "temperature" from Dictionary.com so I could back up my righteous indignation.

Whaddaya know? "Temperature," when applied to body temperature, can mean a fever. Both the Dictionary.com unabridged and American Heritage dictionaries say so. I got myself worked into a lather... and I was wrong.

Don't tell my wife.

Anyhoo, I said I'd discuss the KUOW pledge breaks that were interrupting "All Things Considered" and thus driving me to KOMO 1000 AM. See, there are three reasons why I do not call in a pledge:

1: Even if I pledge, I still have to listen to pledge drives. So my listening experience is the same as a freeloader as it is as a member.

2: I joined KCET in Los Angeles when I was young and stupid. Every two weeks they called and/or or sent me junk mail, asking me for more money. I estimated that they spent at least 30% of my pledge amount on the costs of their junk mail. I donated that money to pay for programming, not to pay for harrassing me.

3: Six weeks after I donated to KCET, a dozen other charities suddenly started mailing me. They shared my contact information!

I like the content on public television and public radio. I'd be happy to make a $50-75 donation to KUOW since I listen to it so often. I even sent them an e-mail saying I'd gladly pledge if they could promise me that I would be put on ZERO mailing lists. I never got an answer.

Give me a "here's your money, now leave me alone" option for pledging, and I'll be all over it like white on rice. But if pledging gets me MORE inconvenience than freeloading, then I'll be over here listening to CDs or AM news radio while you get this latest pledge drive out of your system. In the meantime, the only support I can pledge is my emotional support.

I'd recently selected a photo of a guy holding a big trout he caught while on vacation in Utah, but we ended up not using it. Why? Because if we'd posted a fisherman holding a dead fish on the home page, a number of people would have lost their minds and sent us obscenity-laden e-mails, possibly even threats. To avoid all the controversy and screaming weenies, we decided not to run the photo.

Now this is a company that is not only tolerant of alternative lifestyles, but goes out of its way to be inclusive of them. For example, I've run content promoting events sponsored by gay employee groups.

Now, some fundamentalists of various religions find such groups and such people an affront to God. But if they were to lose their minds over it, the gay employees could complain to management and the religious people would be disciplined for their intolerance. Yet if someone were to lose their mind over a picture of a fisherman, they're considered an "activist."

I just wonder why the fisherman can't go to the office the gay employees would go to, say "they're being intolerant of my lifestyle choice," and get the animal activists disciplined.

But if you think about it, you're not going to see a major protest rally and a furor across the internet, shouting "boycott Megacorp because they discriminate against fishermen." But if they disciplined the animal rights activists, there would be a protest rally, and vandalism, and a boycott because "Megacorp supports the killing of innocent wild animals."

And Megacorp knows this. They know that the animal rights activists are much bigger weenies than fishermen and have a lot less emotional stability. So, because the animal activists are more willing to commit extreme acts and go to the limits of legal protest (and possibly beyond), they win. They don't have to tolerate being confronted with evidence of a co-worker living an alternative lifestyle choice that they find offensive, yet others at Megacorp do.

Me, I don't like bigotry or intolerance of any stripe, whether it's directed at drag queens, Catholics, or sports fishing enthusiasts. So it's interesting to see that bigotry and intolerance are nowhere near dead in our society. It's okay to make jokes about how Priests molest little boys, but if you said that about blacks or gays, you better be prepared for sensitivity training. Bigotry isn't dead or dying out. We're just changing our definitions of which bigotry is acceptable and which isn't. And that's just sad.