Shopping Carts in Ravines

I’m amazed that I’m writing a blog entry about Starbucks here, given their ties (through Kraft foods) to tobacco giant Philip Morris. I’ve always regarded them to be an unethical corporation for this reason, and I have the feeling that their not-quite-fair-trade-so-let’s-not-quite-call-it-that claims were PR promotion, but I can’t knock them for offering up a vegan brownie.

Second Cup, Tim Horton’s, Coffee Time and Country Style have all totally disregarded vegans thus far, despite the consistent mainstream acceptance of vegan/green/health foods in nearly every other area of consumer products. There is now a vegan snack that, while not exactly being the healthiest (though it does have some value as quick food energy), is available on every street corner.

Which is, of course, both a good and bad thing, because Starbucks is an independent-café destroying viral chain.

But the brownies are actually very good as far as vegan brownies go. Most pre-made plastic-wrapped baked goods available by the cashier in health food stores are absolutely ludicrous. Some brownies/cakes will crumble apart as though the ingredients were only pressed together, not actually bound by anything, and cookies are dry and lacking in flavour or sweetness whatsoever. On top of that, they typically cost as much as these do.

But wait! According to a couple veggies at York, Tim Horton’s does in fact have a low-fat vegan muffin. I have yet to confirm this, and whether or not that includes considerations of refined sugar, I’m not sure.

The cover of the Toronto Star was very striking today… a larger version of this image, which has been cropped down to the focus.

…not quite as powerful as the one that went to print, but still gives you the point.

Whatever, it’s a good article on the corporate backers of climate change skepticism. Good, thorough investigation of the people who are trying to convince us to cover our eyes and ears with money and hope we don’t have to explain things to our grandchildren… something which I think is necessary in the mainstream public debate (or is it more like hierarchical opinion dissemination?) especially at this time, with the environment a precarious chart-topper on the public mind and tongue.

That’s 1000 people on the beach in San Francisco spelling out their exact message to congress.

There’s a major protest going on today in Washington, DC, and a group of people is getting together to do a similar “IMPEACH!” in front of the National Mall.

The Pirate Bay, the world’s largest bit torrent tracker search engine, is apparently trying to raise funds to buy an island to host their servers on, free from the jurisdiction of any nation. This follows on their recent issues with their home servers in Sweden being raided and confiscated by the cops under pressure from the American media groups (RIAA/MPAA).

They implemented design changes to improve redundancy across their worldwide mirror sites, as well as successfully won legal challenges in Sweden, but this is a significantly larger step towards maintaining the freedom of filesharing and thus all types of information on a mass level online. And I do mean mass - when their servers went down, Swedish Internet traffic declined 20%, and I’ve seen estimates that a third of Internet traffic is now torrents.

Update: Not happening, and they seem to have run off with the money. Assholes. But the Free Nation Foundation project is taking up this cause instead.

Grime, being generally self-composed and self-produced music, is one of the most exciting and inspiring examples I’ve seen of people turning nothing into something… though I suppose everything from jungle to jazz and from blues to (especially) hip hop is really the same thing - I never really got a chance to watch those things happen, though, being too young to know them until they reached the mainstream. Though of course I am now also watching hip hop street art culture come into an amazing period too as an incredible global free art movement. Really, I guess grime is a derivative of this free/street art movement.

Wiley is probably my favourite grime artist. Despite this, I hadn’t looked at his website until the other day, following him instead through his much more recently-updated MySpace profile. (The website is his old one, as it is through his old label, XL.) I totally love the three videos up in the A/V section… the video for “Pies” is just hilarious, but the other two, the video for “Wot Do You Call It?” and the mini-documentary “Wiley” are both very good introductions to Wiley, his particular Eskibeat style, grime in general, and his particular contributions in distinguishing it from UK garage house.

Update:

I just heard that Wiley is retiring!!! He announced it on Jan 22nd. All volumes of his 5-cd “Tunnel Vision” mixtape series are now out, and his third album is coming out early this year.

That’s heavy… I’m definitely gonna be buying the album, it’s a bitch and a half trying to buy grime from Canada, but I do want to support, I’d like to see his chart level with this one do well, and I expect it to be very good. I liked his first album, a good number of people did, but I’d say he’s consistently improved from then. Both his “Tunnel Vision” and his Roll Deep Crew’s “Rules & Regulations” are among my favourite full-length releases in grime.

From Wikipedia:

Wiley announced his retirement from the microphone on 22 January. In a statement released to RWDMag.com ([1]), he said “I’m retiring. I’m serious. I’m tired, really tired. I just want to be normal. I’m 28 and I’m tired. I’ve felt like it for ages but today I woke up and realised I can’t carry on because I’ve got responsibilities that are way beyond the grime scene.” ‘Playtime Is Over’ will be his final solo release, and he will instead focus on production and setting up a label to bring through younger talent.

In January 2007, Wiley announced his retirement from the Grime scene. He felt that it was not about making music anymore, and that it was time to make some real money. He also felt that having regular ‘beef’, would put his newborn daughter in danger, and that he does not want to be involved in this sort of scene. He will still continue to make beats for other artists.

Well, he does have a kid now, and he’s only retiring from MCing to avoid getting into fights with others in the scene… he claims he’s had Ghetto try to stab him, and I think he actually was stabbed by someone, plus he was rushed by God’s Gift and Mucky Wolf on Rinse FM. So I can understand where he’s coming from. As well, it was his production that was most influential, and if he’s still doing that and still supporting new artists coming into the scene (people he’s brought up include Dizzee Rascal) then this hopefully won’t mean too much damage to the scene and sound.

Cheney: Talk of blunders in Iraq is ‘hogwash’ (CNN)

Vice President Dick Cheney on Wednesday dismissed as “hogwash” the suggestion that blunders may have hurt the administration’s credibility on Iraq.

In an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, conducted a day after Bush delivered his State of the Union address, Cheney was asked to respond to some Republicans in Congress who “are now seriously questioning your credibility, because of the blunders and the failures.”

To that, Cheney answered, “Wolf, Wolf, I simply don’t accept the premise of your question. I just think it’s hogwash.”

With this from Cheney and with Robert Pickton dismissing the accusations against him by simply calling them “hogwash”, these two mass murderers are going to totally redefine the word.

I was walking by the US embassy in Toronto (on University) and thinking about the recent rocket attack on the embassy in Athens when I glanced up and noticed this bit of vandalism here at home. I only had my camera phone with me, but the smashed glass with Bush and Cheney’s photos in the background was too good to pass up.

I was sitting on the subway (in the seat pictured closest here) and these two guys were sitting near me. Both were wearing matching touques and sweaters (I forget the brand) and similar if not exactly matching pants and shoes, both had white earbuds, both had the same body shape, haircut and facial hair, and both were reading the same newspaper - yet neither showed any indication whatsoever at any point that they knew or even noticed one another. I turned my head from one to the other and back, seeing the exact same person sitting by themself on the subway. I had to take these photos at the last second just to verify that I hadn’t gone insane.