Strong Opinionation (Page 3)

I often wonder just what it would take to get Americans to rise up and storm the gates of their corporate masters. Maybe…the threat to chocolate could do it! The federal Food and Drug Administration is proposing to redefine the very essence of chocolate and to allow big manufacturers such as Hershey to sell a bar devoid of a key ingredient — cocoa butter. The butter’s natural texture could be replaced with inferior alternatives, such as vegetable fats. And consumers would never know. Chocolatier Gary Guittard said it best: “No one can afford to sit back and eat bonbons whileDown the rabbit hole….

I hope Teresa Nielsen Hayden doesn’t mind, but this comment that was put into a thread at Making Light, and was then posted in full to her own front page, is sufficiently sobering and well-considered that I’m quoting it in full here. (Let me know, TNH, if you want me to remove it.) UPDATE: TNH requests that I credit the comment’s author, who goes by the handle “Old Jarhead”. While he doesn’t seem to have a blog or site of his own, his entire commenting history at Making Light (a short history thus far, but insightful) can be perused here.Down the rabbit hole….

If I were banished to a deserted island, and if I were given an iPod with an unlimited amount of power but which would only come with a single item on it and that item was the video of a single dance number from a movie, and I had to pick before my marooning the one and only one dance number which I would ever again be able to watch, and my choices came down to this number or this one…I’d just wait for the tide to go out and then swim out to let myself be taken with it.Down the rabbit hole….

Yesterday The Wife and I spent a bit of time at the mall (the Galleria, for you Buffalo readers). Not much excitement there — my days of happy mall-shopping are now long over, and I’m content to visit the mall two or three times a year just to see what’s up — but I did note at one point, while we were standing in line at Sears (The Wife was buying a new spring jacket), a family behind us was conversing away in a language other than English. I notice this more and more these days around the area, andDown the rabbit hole….