LaShawn Barber excerpted the following review of the latest Lenny Kravitz album from Blogcritics today:

At 43, Lenny Kravitz is more self-reflective than usual.

He recently spoke to Maxim magazine about his newly declared sexual abstinence, “a promise I made until I get married.” Sex-free for the past three years, Kravitz wants more than just a physical connection. “I’m looking at the big picture.”

Relishing the satisfaction that can result from practicing self-discipline in a gratify-me-now culture, the four-time Grammy winner told Australia’s Herald Sun that abstinence “frees you from a lot of things and it also takes a lot of power away from people who are trying to seduce you… Ultimately I’m trying to do the right thing, to honour myself and the other person and honour God.”

I’m heading over to iTunes now to check it out.

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Buffy Holt points out a sad state of affairs:

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) — It was lunchtime in one of Haiti’s worst slums, and Charlene Dumas was eating mud. With food prices rising, Haiti’s poorest can’t afford even a daily plate of rice, and some take desperate measures to fill their bellies. Charlene, 16 with a 1-month-old son, has come to rely on a traditional Haitian remedy for hunger pangs: cookies made of dried yellow dirt from the country’s central plateau.
…
“When my mother does not cook anything, I have to eat them three times a day,” Charlene said. Her baby, named Woodson, lay still across her lap, looking even thinner than the slim 6 pounds 3 ounces he weighed at birth.
…
Food prices around the world have spiked because of higher oil prices, needed for fertilizer, irrigation and transportation. Prices for basic ingredients such as corn and wheat are also up sharply, and the increasing global demand for biofuels is pressuring food markets as well.

The problem is particularly dire in the Caribbean, where island nations depend on imports and food prices are up 40 percent in places.

The global price hikes, together with floods and crop damage from the 2007 hurricane season, prompted the U.N. Food and Agriculture Agency to declare states of emergency in Haiti and several other Caribbean countries. Caribbean leaders held an emergency summit in December to discuss cutting food taxes and creating large regional farms to reduce dependence on imports.

At the market in the La Saline slum, two cups of rice now sell for 60 cents, up 10 cents from December and 50 percent from a year ago. Beans, condensed milk and fruit have gone up at a similar rate, and even the price of the edible clay has risen over the past year by almost $1.50. Dirt to make 100 cookies now costs $5, the cookie makers say.

Still, at about 5 cents apiece, the cookies are a bargain compared to food staples. About 80 percent of people in Haiti live on less than $2 a day and a tiny elite controls the economy.

Buffy says this makes her feel ashamed. Personally, it makes me angry. Historically, famines are caused by politics more than they are by nature and are generally localized. Politics is a driving force in this famine as well, and its effects could cross many borders.

It’s one thing for us to be inconvenienced by the higher costs and irritated by the short-sighted (at best) or well-meaning evil of the environmentalists and ag-lobbyists — cheered on by a righteous and fawning media — as they lead legislators around by the gold ring they’ve inserted in their noses while everyone in the parade has their hand out and palms up like silk-clad beggars, all while chiding the non-believers for being the blind ones. So what, we pay a bit more for our gas, our groceries, all while our freedom is picked from our pockets. At least we’re not reduced to eating dirt — yet.

It’s all clean and neat here, while thousands of miles away, almost out of sight, real beggars are feeling the true effects of the game. Like cracking a whip, the ripple of these policies curls out almost unnoticed until you get to the end where the lash snaps and falls. Not everyone is blind to what’s going on, however. As I wrote before, Oxfam International has already noted the consequences

“Decisions on biofuels made in Europe are directly affecting millions of people in Indonesia. In the relentless pursuit of biofuel gold, big powerful palm oil companies are callously clearing communities from land they have farmed for generations, workers and small holders are shamefully exploited and we are losing valuable agricultural land to grow the food we need to feed ourselves and make a living. The proposed EU policy will only make this worse – pushing more people into poverty and concentrating land in the hands of a few.”

Additionally, as Wired notes:

Studies Say Biofuels Worse Than Gasoline
When all relevant factors are accounted for, biofuels produce more greenhouse gas emissions than fossil fuels.

So conclude two studies published yesterday in Science*, adding to a growing body of research suggesting that crop-based fuels, once hailed as a clean answer to oil, are not a magic green bullet.

Biofuels seemed so promising at first — what could be cleaner than running our cars and factories on plants? But early prognostications were a bit thin on details. They didn’t always account for the energy that would be needed to grow, harvest and refine the fuels. Most importantly, they didn’t consider that greenhouse gas-gobbling vegetation would need to be cleared for fuel crops — or, if these were planted on existing pastures, that new fields would be cleared to make space for displaced food crops.

[*Note: here (funded by the National Science Foundation an the University of Minnesota) and here. NW]

Closer to home, Tom Meersman of the Star Tribune has written a couple of articles recently that pick up on the same information. An excerpt Ethanol: More harm than good (Feb. 7) reports:

But a growing number of scientists are questioning the ecological benefits of biofuels. A policy report last month by the British Royal Society indicated that biofuels have been described as “carbon neutral,” meaning that the carbon they emit to the atmosphere when burned is offset by the carbon that plants absorb from the atmosphere while growing.

The problem is that those benefits assume the world can turn large amounts of crops into biofuels, the report said, without needing to use more land to make up for lost food production. Clearing tropical forests and growing crops on natural peat lands in Malaysia, Indonesia and elsewhere “risk releasing enough greenhouse gases to negate any of the intended future climate benefits,” the report said.

The reason for scientists’ concern, said Tilman, is that soil and plants hold three times more carbon than air. Clearing trees to grow more corn or bulldozing tropical forests to grow more sugarcane emits large amounts of carbon dioxide, either quickly through the burning of the wood, or more gradually through the decomposition of carbon stored in plants and soil.

Tilman calculated that converting natural ecosystems to raise corn or sugarcane for ethanol, or soybeans or palms for biodiesel, will release 17 to 420 times more carbon than the annual savings from replacing fossil fuels. The Minnesota study estimated that in the United States, it will take 93 years for the carbon losses from plowing one acre of healthy grassland to equal the carbon savings from corn-based ethanol produced on that land.

Ethanol industry officials downplay the effects, saying that the process will become more efficient over time and that other organic resources will also be used to take pressure off of fuel crops. I wonder, however, what will replace all the groundwater sucked out of the earth to produce ethanol, as Meersman reported in Is ethanol tapping too much water? (Jan. 28):

With a flood of ethanol plants headed toward Minnesota, there’s growing concern about whether there will be enough groundwater to satisfy the booming industry’s thirst.

The issue was brought into focus last year in Granite Falls, where an ethanol plant in its first year of operations depleted the groundwater so much that it had to begin pumping water from the Minnesota River.

It takes between four and five gallons of water to produce a gallon of ethanol at a biofuel plant, and with 17 ethanol plants now operating in the state, six under construction and 10 more proposed or in the planning stages, the threat of more drains on underground water are rising…

The industry is consuming about 2 billion gallons of groundwater per year, according to state estimates.

That amount could quadruple by 2011 if the state’s ethanol production more than doubles, as expected.

I wonder how many mud pies that much water could make? Finally, another article in Wired, Can’t See the Forest for the Biofuels, makes many of the same points and also notes:

Brazil has designated nearly half a billion acres of forests, grassland and marshes as “degraded” areas suitable for conversion to farming. While the entire Alaska-sized area won’t be cleared, much of it could be planted with soybeans, the staple of that country’s biofuel efforts.

Half a billion acres? That’s 500 million acres in just one country, being sacrificed to “save” the earth. It must be the same scientific reasoning that once said bleeding a patient was a good way to cure him. Meanwhile, 500 million acres is 250,000 times the size of the 2,000 acres (out of 19.5 million) in ANWR considered too precious to allow oil drilling (though those 2,000 acres will yield an assessed 10 billion barrels of oil. Just a little food for thought, especially if you don’t like dirt cookies.

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Tiger Lilly turns 14 today. She could have had her birthday a couple of weeks sooner, but she tarried past her due date and our doctor finally had to induce. I think he offered chocolate. Despite her initial hesitancy to meet the world she has not been shy about getting out into it, whether it’s meeting the neighbors or traveling to China and Romania on missions trips.

Fourteen is an interesting time for her as each day brings new opportunities — and wardrobe. Camo BDUs one day, lacy camisoles the next, and she thinks it wouldn’t hurt to have a formal or two on hand for whatever might come up. It’s a time for looking back, considering one’s options and greeting the future with a smile.

Happy Birthday, Patience.

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Here are a couple of Super Bowl commercials that I missed last week but came across on YouTube. I’m not a big fan of Bud Light, but we do have birds, and these really make me laugh.

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So every other day, Benny comes over and hangs out with us. Except for the other day when Faith went to, as the Reverend Mother put it, “Hang out with the monks” at the seminary/monastery.

Which made me veeerry suspicious. They could be doing anything!!! You know those wily monks. They’re right up there with ninja cows. You just can’t trust ’em. So, naturally, I donned all black clothes, packed a couple of knives (I just got a new one, a nice Marine Corps knife), and was off to the monastery. As I spied, I made sure that nothing… er … ‘interesting’ was going on*. *Sigh* Nothing ever does. Every time we take Benny home, they talk about boring theological stuff that makes me fall asleep. But I resist!!! I must, because it could be a devious plan to talk about the most boring things in the world and make me fall asleep so that they can start doing ‘interesting’ stuff. It won’t work! I won’t let it!!!! I REGRET NOTHING!!!!!

…

Where did that come from?

Whatever.

Usually I sit in the back seat of the car and read with my good eye while keeping my evil eye on them. BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!

Sometimes I enjoy this too much. Not often, but sometimes. A lot of times it’ll be late by the time we have to take Ben home. I wanted to charge Faith 25 cents for every minute past 9:30 pm that we were out taking Ben home. It would’ve worked, but when I asked Mom about it, she said no. If I have to do this anyway, why not make some money while I’m at it? I don’t have any other form of income except for my allowance until I get a job.

Man, this sucks.

*This never actually happened. This is purely in my head and for my own amusement.

Ciao for now!!

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Let’s see, you could have an acerbic, irascible, quick-with-quip wounded war veteran who is much older than his opponent as the Republican nominee for president, who could be going against a fresh, young face who has come out of nowhere in recent years to infuse and enthuse an electorate that seems eager for change.

How did that turn out for Bob Dole?

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Well that was an exciting Super Bowl yesterday though some might say it didn’t measure up to other years. Similarly, I thought the Super Bowl commercials were pretty good overall, though some might say this was a down year. As for me, my standards may have been irreversibly lowered after last year; from now on any year that doesn’t feature two guys kissing while eating a Snickers bar is at least in for an honorable mention. In fact, I thought this year had a number of solid entries that made it difficult to pick a single best commercial, so I broke them down by category: Those With Animals; Those With Celebrities; Those With Breasts; The Surreal; The Worst and an “Open” category for commercials that didn’t easily fall into one of the other categories but made me smile.

Those With Animals
Cute animals are always a good start and are deserving of their own category even though these could easily fall into the “Surreal” niche. For example, the Fedex commercial with the big pigeons for the “heavy stuff”. Ok, pigeons bigger than a bus get attention and the creators went just far enough with the gag with the scenes of chaos in the streets. Of course, Fedex isn’t in competition with gargantuan carrier pigeons so the strong product benefit message gets kind of lost. I also liked the Sobe “Thrillicious” commercial with the lizards mimicking Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video. Great animation, loaded with little extra bits of business like a mini-fart cloud, but the commercial seemed to suggest that drinking Sobe turns you into a zombie, albeit one with rhythm. Better was the Budweiser Rocky commercial where an aspiring Clydesdale misses the cut to be on the Bud team but is taken under the paw of a Dalmatian coach (personal trainer?) who puts him through grueling exercises and training, turning him into a ripped “Italian Stallion” (they did use the Rocky theme). Somehow, though, I couldn’t help wondering if the horse was really on steroids, and if the Dalmatian gave him “the cream” or “the clear” since the Clydesdale’s head was nearly as big as Barry Bonds’. That was enough to tip the balance in favor of my favorite animal commercial, the Bridgestone tires “scream” commercial where a squirrel chasing an acorn into the road appears about to meet his maker (or KingDavid), but for the superior handling of the tires. Instead of squealing rubber we heard and saw the animatronic screams of the squirrel, owls, deer, the woman passenger…I don’t know, it just moved me.

Those With Celebrities
The only two celebrities I could remember off hand were Justin Timberlake for Pepsi and Will Ferrell for Bud Light. I don’t remember too much about either commercial since my mind always tries to block these two guys out when I see them, but I do remember they both seemed to be about “sucking one.”

Those With Breasts
I know, I know — it seems as if just about every commercial featured breasts in some way. The ones I selected, however, simply, um, stuck out. The first I’ll mention in this category was the CareerBuilder one where the poor working woman drone is so demoralized by her evil boss that her heart leaps out of her chest and through her shirt like a scene from Alien. Ok, it’s not really about breasts, but it struck me as a kind of “anti-breast” commentary on all the other commercials that fixate on womens’ chests. Or maybe the copywriter just needs a new job. The Victoria’s Secret commercial featured legs, breasts and music that I could actually hear because it also induced nearly absolute quiet in my living room filled with 20 people. A very awkward quiet. The best, or most over-the-top, breast commercial was the one with the chubby mechanic on a road call to jump start a woman’s car. He puts one end of the cables on her battery, then opens his coverall and attaches the other ends of the cables to his nipples, cues the ginormous sound machine in his truck and with a swig of AMP accomplishes the mission. The best part, however, was the “Do Not Attempt” message that stayed at the bottom of the screen throughout. Ya think?

The Surreal
This is the largest category as it appears advertisers are going farther and farther out there to make their ads to stand out. Sometimes this can be rather dark and even vaguely disturbing, such as the CareerBuilder ad with the Jiminy Cricket-type character being eaten by a spider, the Cars.com ads for extreme “Plan B” car negotiating that suggest having a head-shrinking witch doctor or a hulking wrestler in a circle of fire are acceptable ways of doing business, or the Doritos ad that suggests you shouldn’t tease or tempt a six-foot mouse. Bridgestone also appeared in this category when the driver of the car, on a dark, winding road, must suddenly steer around hazards such as a deer, Alice Cooper and Richard Simmons. You could feel the drama as the driver’s hands tightened on the wheel as he fought with himself over the urge to run Simmons down. Similarly the E-trade ads with the talking baby/day-trader had a way of arresting your attention in a kind of creepy way. The first ad featured the baby spitting up at the end, which isn’t a good idea when your audience is probably stuffing their faces. I was just about ready to write off the second one, where the baby talked about renting a clown with all the extra money he’d made with E-trade, when the kid looked at the clown then back to the audience and nearly took the words out of my mouth when he said, “I really underestimated the creepiness factor.”

Then there’s the silly-absurd ads like the ones from Bud Light that suggest their beer can give you powers like being able to breathe fire or fly. The one that nearly won this category in my household, however, was the Planter’s cashews ad where the ugly woman with the unibrow nevertheless had all the men around her completely smitten — all because she used cashews as perfume. The winner, however, was the commercial for Tide with the poor guy at a job interview (perhaps he got it through CareerBuilder) who is undone and shouted down by a large talking stain on his shirt. This one seemed to get the most and loudest laughs from our group.

“The Worst”
Where to begin? When you think of the amount of money that someone has to spend for a Super Bowl time slot, and then see the misbegotten effort the company puts forth, it strikes me as a bigger abuse of stockholder’s/investors money than Enron. It’s kind of like sending Travaris Jackson out as your Super Bowl quarterback. Among the worst this year was the Coke commercial featuring James McCarville and Bill Frist. McCarville’s face outdoes any clown’s in terms of creepiness factor, especially in High Def. Supposedly Coke won a bidding war for his services, topping the folks at Sobe who wanted to use him as one of their dancing lizards. Another flopper that went over with our crowd about as poorly as the announcement that we were out of chicken legs was the Parental Advisory ad with the drug dealer outside the quickie-mart complaining that he couldn’t make a living any more because kids were getting all the high they needed from their parents’ prescription drugs. Whatever. I kept expecting to see Jay and Silent Bob show up (once Bob got through over on the AMP commercial) to run the guy off their turf. Actually, what it made me want to do was run upstairs and hide the Lipitor — until I realized we don’t have any Lipitor. Speaking of drugs, the ad using a magical hand to wave a Zantac over a bloated woman to make her look better was just plain weird and wrong. Besides, I thought making women look better was beer’s job.

Another stunningly bad groaner was the Sisyphus ad for the Yukon Hybrid. Please, as if trying to sell people on the utility of a battery-powered half-ton SUV isn’t akin to pushing a boulder up a mountain anyway. Another car commercial made it into this category was for Audi, which was too bad because I kind of had high hopes for it at the beginning as they set up the scene like the infamous horse-head in the bed scene from The Godfather. Ultimately, what a waste of a premise as the “execution” left the commercial completely flat, almost as if the creative team’s heads had been cut off before the commercial was finished. Then there was the numbingly bad, even paralyzing, Gatorade commercial where a large dog drank loudly and messily from a water dish. That had a very high flinch factor as you kept wondering what it was about, and if you really even wanted to know. I remember feeling the same way watching Eraserhead 30 years ago, waiting for some pay-off or explanation. Then, and now, there wasn’t any.

But to get to the worst, however, you’ve got to have Go Daddy and Sales Genie slugging it out for a nice, dark wet spot at the bottom of the barrel. It truly galls me that I’m stuck with Go Daddy for my domain name following last year’s RegisterFly melt-down. There’s no effort to promote the benefits of their product (whatever it is), no offer to meet a need (except perhaps the most puerile), no product comparison. The ads aren’t even really saying “Look at me!” as they seem to be much more about looking at something else. At least the commercials inspire some emotion, even if it’s negative. The Sales Genie ads, however, are truly a waste of time and brain cells as I believe the animation, colors and dialog actually kill brains cells. With genius like this behind the company you really have to wonder how it ever became successful enough to make enough money to buy a Super Bowl ad, let alone two. Any future year without a Go Daddy or Sales Genie ad will automatically qualify as a “good” year for Super Bowl advertising.

Finally, there were some ads I liked that didn’t fit in any category other than they made me smile. The first ad, for Diet Pepsi Max almost fell into the “worst” category, however. First off, I can’t stand Joe Buck, so seeing him almost ruined it right off the bat except that he happened to be nodding off, which is what I do when I see/hear him so that was kind of funny. There were some other great clips in the ad of people nodding off before being revived with the product and going into a take-off of the old Saturday Night Live Night At the Roxbury skit. The commercial flirted with danger again as this skit is one of the most annoying skits in SNL history. Just as it was really starting to get on my nerves, however, the commercial ended with a guy snapping “Stop it!” to a couple of bobbing bimbos.

I also really liked the Bud Light ad with the guys being roped into a wine and cheese party with their girlfriends. What I like about these types of ads, while they focus on the guys’ obsession with beer, is that they at least portray the lads as being clever in the way they go about smuggling the beer into the party disguised as a block of cheese or a long baguette, or the way a TV is hidden in a box of Chablis. The clincher, though, was the pay-off line at the end where one the guys leaves the party “On a cheese run,” ranking right up there in my mind with “And a chain saw!” from last year’s Bud Light Super Bowl ad.

The warmest ad of the evening, however, was from Coke as it featured large cartoon character parade balloons of Underdog and Stewie from Family Guy breaking loose and competing with each other in slow balloon motion over an inflated bottle of Coke. It was funny, but especially satisfying when at the last moment a Charlie Brown balloon rose up out of nowhere to snag the prize. Yay! Charlie Brown finally wins!

By the way, if you missed any of these commercials, or want to see them again (even the bad ones) you can find a collection of all the ads from yesterday’s game in one place here.

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