Carbohydrates, 1984, Bookstores
Let’s see—Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 is coming out this Friday, the Iraq thing continues, and the Lakers’ Dream Team is officially broken up.
According to the latest news report, the Atkins diet isn’t good for the brain, because carbohydrates are supposedly brain food. The Atkins diet has around 20 grams of carbohydrates, whereas the human brain needs 130 grams of carbohydrates a day to function properly.
Here’s one article:
http://my.webmd.com/content/Article/81/96983.htm
That means if more people go on the Atkins diet, more people get stupid and less finicky about what they buy, which makes it easier for corporations to convince everyone to buy more stupid stuff. Good gig. But since Asians, me included, would rather sell our karaoke machines than give up our rice, does this mean we get to keep our smarts? I told my friend this, and he said that I’d get in trouble if I wrote about it, but it makes for a good joke and people will pause and go “huh? hmmm…” and realize that it’s a damn stupid generalization of cultures and it has absolutely no validity, but at least it made people think.
What else—oh yeah, twenty years after I was supposed to, I’ve finally begun reading George Orwell’s 1984. I’m at the part where they talk about something called the “Two Minutes Hate”. It’s where the follower society folks spend a couple minutes a day in a sort of mob mentality, focusing their anger on images projected onto a large movie screen. The main guy in the story, Winston Smith, notices that, if he really thought about it, there’s no real reason why he hates what he’s supposed to hate. He also realizes that he could make himself hate something, anything, as long as this Two Minutes Hate period lasted. No drugs were involved, just a lot of loudness, people jumping up and down, and a whole bunch of weird, hateful stuff showing on the big screen. Sorta like reality TV.
Something I noticed in the bookstores lately—the gift area keeps getting BIGGER. If they keep this up, soon Barnes & Noble will turn into a Hallmark Store, and the only place where you’ll be able to get real books will be at garage sales or, God forbid, at your local library. When was the last time anyone’s been to one of those?
Here’s my theory: the bookstore marketing people have figured out that commonfolk aren’t really reading, don’t intend to read, and sooner or later the commonfolk are gonna realize that the books that are in their homes will stay unread and there’s no reason to buy any more books. Now, how do you lure these commonfolk into coming back into your bookstore without making them buy something that requires reading?
– Coffee
– Music
– DVDs
– Yoga stuff
– Kids toys
– Greeting cards
– Thirty-dollar leather journals that will forever stay untouched
Thank you, and God bless you for reading my blah-blah. Now go read something more substantial. Try the bookstore, I heard they actually have books there.