Sunday, June 27, 2010

dear jamba juice

I AM A HUGE FAN of your culture, mission, and products. i maniacally promote your brand and forward coupons and events widely. but brand loyalty can be like yesterday's meal - great at the time, but sh*t tomorrow. i am writing to implore that you never again use the paper cups for smoothies. here's my story:

i crave your smoothies on most normal days, and a hedonist, i indulge myself more often than not. on sleepless nights, i have counted the hours till opening, and on long days, i have broken many a statute and limit to place the last order of the day. for the most part, i hem and haw between two or three drinks, but you could give me anything and i'd love it. regardless, its always an original 24 ounce, whose breadth and depth i know so well, the rounded plastic lid usually with an iota of smoothie oozing out around the straw hole. i firmly grasp the styrofoam cup, sturdy and insulating. i know its dirty secret - that it leaves behind tiny flecks of your logo inside from the last cup in the stack, but no matter. i yank off the remainder of the straw's cover and take in that cool, fruity goodness. i close my eyes as the calming satiety rolls over me.

BUT WAIT!

this time, it was all wrong. i heard my name and reached for my drink. COLD. WET. something was terribly awry, like an m&m that melts in your hand. my jamba juice, not yet a minute or two into this world, was sweating all over itself. the damage was done, it had pissed all over my hands. i instantly realized that my drink was in a PAPER CUP! sacre bleu! and things only got worse. there were hard fragments of something i'm still not sure what, but i spat them out. and if this unfamiliar object condensating all over my hands with a rock boost wasn't bad enough, the sonofab*tch slipped right out of my hands and took a whopping dump all over the front mat of the third street promenade's gap. i actually meant to exit uneventfully, jaywalk right back to your store, and ask for my drink to be replaced sans rocks. but i fumbled making michael vick look better than jerry rice, and here's the kicker. you made me feel like an a**hole and i apologized profusely to gap's staff for your blunder.

your smoothies are dense and, i'm quite certain, would outweight 24 ounces of most drinks. throw a dense smoothie mix into a paper cup and it only creates a puddle of water. but start drinking that sucker and guess what, there's nothing to support the empty part of the cup, and you're stuck with a bottom heavy baby. so my hand was sufficiently wrapped two-thirds up on the cup when the opening folded in on itself as the slippery bastard simultaneously dropped out from my grasp. were i jim carrey in the truman show, we could cue back the incident and i could tell you which came first. but because i haven't subscribed to instant replay, you're just going to have to take my word for it that both events were mutually inclusive. subsequently, i find your change to paper cups inanely reckless and blatantly reprehensible. so to summarize, smoothie + paper cup --> slippery + heavy --> diarrhea on the floor.

albeit a socially responsible person, i don't care if you're moving away from styrofoam for environmental concern. no more paper cups.

all in all, the damage has been done. however, i am willing to retract half of my outburst for a modest sum of $11,800,275 for my troubles, but will gladly settle for a free drink.

Monday, June 21, 2010

i'll take two please

PEOPLE WANT TO BE white. As comedian Louis CK facetiously strews about, "Here's how great it is to be white. I can get in a time machine and go to any time and it would be f*cking awesome when i get there. That is exclusively a white privilege."

It's true, white folks have been the oppressor in a lot of different places in a lot of different times, including the present. They have been the superior power and we have this idea that it's f*cking great to be white.

Forget it, I don't have any more energy to be metaphysical today.

Tuesday, June 8, 2010

google still rules my life

i was catching up on my google reader (5am is perfect), and i noticed apple seemed to dominate the business management feed. then i saw this:

Apple is the world's largest technology company

then i saw this:

Shares in Apple rose as much as 2.8 per cent on the Nasdaq index yesterday, making them worth ten times more than they were ten years ago.


so i immediately opened my ticker feeds. $250.94 a share, down 1.96% from yesterday. market cap indeed at $228.34 billion with microsoft in fact trailing behind at $221.64B. all true, but the investment aspect was buzzing in my head more. ten fold return over ten years. but with late 08/early 09's market volatility, there was more. with a mid january low of $82.33 a share, the market had a fire sale. so compared to a decade ago, it was barely worth three times more.

forget about outperform now. with enough puts, calls, shorts, you could have made enough to retire. daytrade.

Monday, June 7, 2010

give me healthcare or give me death

patrick henry got his liberty alright, but he died of stomach cancer 23 years later. there is no such thing as right to healthcare. of course, by developing a complex government, bells, whistles, legislature complete, we can create these so called rights and define them, morality in tow. but of course, there's the concept of basic human rights. sure, we're all born free and equal, for a millisecond or two. and then life comes into focus and everything becomes relative. but all that aside, how can we say that healthcare is a right? it's a privilege. it's a privilege to be born or even living in a developed country. it's a privilege to be in an area with healthcare or some semblance of it. it's a privilege that darwinism doesn't predispose some of us to cancer, diabetes, hypertension, hypercholesterolemia, and the works. it's a privilege to have potable water, devoid of typhoid, hep a, cholera, and schisto. it's a privilege to have all of our basic human needs met in excess that we begin to think that access to healthcare is a right. it's a bloody privilege to be able to eat healthy, to have a job that pays enough and gives you enough hours in a day to make healthy eating a priority, to even know what health is. yes, these are all privileges.

as a wealthy nation where (fabricate large number) percent of the population suffers from issues where people around the world would consider it a privilege to have to worry about such things, sure, we are obligated to provide support abroad. but locally, the government is also responsible. but until every government pays for every medical student to attend school and pays for every hospital in every nook and butt crack of the world for every patient, healthcare can not be a right. if your country does not have a government, please disregard, crawl into a hole, and cross your fingers.