The Green Porch Archives - Page 25 of 30

Reeferpunk: Viva This!

March 24, 2011 by David Mark Brown

It’s always difficult to describe a life-altering moment before it happens. This is one of those, for you. I know the phrase “life-altering” gets tossed around these days by so many Benny Hinn impersonators and beer commercials that it’s hard to believe I still have toenail fungus and less than perfect, sun-kissed abs (I mean, you would think a cube of Miller Light a day would do it). But I use the phrase justly.

[dropcap2]Y[/dropcap2]ou may not yet know what Reeferpunk is. For most of you, I’m certain that on the surface you don’t want to. Reefer and Punk? Didn’t we grow out of the former in the seventies and the latter in the eighties? (I was only 5 the day the seventies died, December 31st, 1979. So I missed the first round.) This may be so, but you put the two things together and they transcend their former realities. Like peanut butter and jelly or wine and popcorn.

Twang Flavored Salts: a Gateway Salt

March 14, 2011 by David Mark Brown

Twang pickle salt packets — Twang's gateway salt: pickle flavor

I know it would be a first, but I’m afraid that the United States Food and Drug Administration has gone amiss in its regulatory duties. And with all the attention being given to gateway drugs over the past few decades, I’m completely shocked that the FDA has left it up to the RedneckGranola to blow the whistle on Twang.

Twang Partners, LTD. (not to be confused with the great blog, Twang Nation) has been targeting its flavored salts to children for the past thirty years. Hey, you might be thinking, lay off. It’s just flavored salt. You would be correct. And hypertension is just hypertension. Cardiovascular disease is just cardiovascular disease, and left ventricular hypertrophy is just left ventricular hypertrophy. Face facts America, salt kills.

And the fine people at Twang have been dangling their sodium death packets in front of children’s faces since the 80’s. I remember when

A Steer in a World of Vegetarians (or Damn you YA!)

March 10, 2011 by David Mark Brown

[dropcap2]W[/dropcap2]hich would be better, being a freshly born bull calf who gets his nuts chopped off and a year later slaughtered to feed man’s hunger for beef? Or, as a bull calf you get your nuts chopped off just in time to find out that the world has suddenly gone vegetarian? Surely you can see the dilemma. On the one hand, you get to go on living a considerably less purposeful life. On the other you are used for what you were forced to become.

This is how I’m beginning to see the creative industry. Novelists are streaming to young adult literature (YA) because readers appear to be youngening even as they get older. (It’s not because 16 year-olds are suddenly reading more. It’s because their parents are raiding their bookshelves.) Why read at the eighth grade level when one can find books for adults written at the fifth grade level? It just wastes brain energy one could use for sudoku or for understanding the witty quips on Castle.