BLINK 182 covering The Cure's "A Letter to Elise". It's a pretty horrifying cover, but I do have to give them props for being a bit more original and not covering "Lovesong" like virtually every other band covering The Cure seems to do.
I have this theory, I'm sure you'll think I'm on drugs but that's okay because I'm used to people thinking that about me. Part of my job is keeping up with product recalls, and I'm sure you've probably noticed that there have been quite a few of them from China lately. In aggregate though - especially considering that there have actually been quite a few more than the average person knows about unless they're going out of their way to follow it - it all looks pretty horrifying. If you were prone to believing in conspiracy theories you might even think that China was trying to take over the world, and were trying to ensure that America was never a threat again. They have the perfect weapon after all: our love for cheap stuff and endless consumerism. But in reality I don't really think that is what's going on; I think that Chinese companies are taking advantage of their ascent in the global economy and accidents happen when you get careless. I suspect the same thing happened with the U.S. as well in the early days of our rise to economic power, but there just wasn't the immediate access to information back then.
The latest weirdness out of China: toys linked to date-rape drug recalled. Again, probably totally accidental, but apparently the chemical coating on these toys metabolizes to GHB (aka "roofies") when swallowed, and kids have died from it. What the hell is going on? It makes me scared to buy anything for my kids that I didn't hand-make by myself. Of course I will still line up for game boy games with all the other
Reading about the number of dangerous things that get recalled and realizing that only a very small fraction of items ever even get inspected, it's kind of scary. I am not a vegetarian because I love animals or because I'm mostly Buddhist (though both of those things are true about me), but because I've read too much to trust the food inspection system. I realize that compared to the past, when people didn't have refrigerators and didn't understand sanitation, illness from contaminated food was far more common than it is now. That knowledge is the only thing that makes me able to eat anything at all. But considering how much wealth is at hand in the world economy, there is absolutely no excuse for this sort of approach to risk management. We have the resources that we could make sure nearly everything was safe, instead of taking a "ehh, good enough" approach.
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