Reflections From a Murky Pond

Taking time to have a hot breakfast is a great way of starting your day. Face it, your mother was right: Breakfast really is the most important meal of the day. Not only does it give you energy to start a new day, but breakfast is solidly linked to many health benefits, including weight control and improved performance.

Start The Day With A Hot Breakfast

Not only is a hot breakfast a nice, peaceful start to your day – before all the stresses of family, work, and obligations fully ramp up and take over – it’s a fine way to get your blood pumping in the right direction. 😉

And, for those of you like me who telecommute regularly, we can often come back later for “second breakfast.” This eliminates the quandary over sunny side up or over easy.

The Cola Wars have been raging since the 1980s, with Coca-Cola and Pepsi targeting each other in advertisement after advertisement. Given that there were billions of dollars on the line it wasn’t too surprising how vicious the Cola War became for a while. Even so, some of us were surprised and a little concerned about the war over cold drinks “going hot” when, in 1989, PepsiCo purchased: 17 submarines, a cruiser, a frigate, and a destroyer from the Soviets.

NOTE: The fleet’s purchase, along with PepsiCo being the US distributor for Stolichnaya was part of a countertrade arrangement that allowed Pepsi to be sold in the Soviet Union.

The fleet was nearly immediately sold for scrap. Interestingly, however, for a short period of time PepsiCo had the 7th largest submarine fleet in the world. 😯

Shortly after that the Cola Wars calmed down a bit. Now, however, Coca-Cola has changed the war by politicizing it and bringing America as whole into the conflict. They did this with their 2014 Super Bowl commercial, “It’s Beautiful.”

Some love it, others loath it. Few have no opinion about it. Coca-Cola’s “It’s Beautiful” almost seems more battle anthem than marketing. Perhaps never before has a simple television commercial so divided a population.

Americans v. Liberals

Whether they intended to do or not, Coca-Cola’s Super Bowl commercial directly pit Americans and Liberals against each other. Americans have, at least, some discomfort with- and qualms about the message “It’s Beautiful” promulgates and/or reinforces and normalizes, while Liberals absolute love that message.

It boils down to whether the viewer loves America and her culture or loathes it in favor of foreign cultures. If the viewer believes that immigrants should strive to become Americans, bringing with them those parts of their birth culture that will add to America, they will likely find fault with the commercial’s underlying message. If, however, the viewer desires for immigrants to keep all or most of their birth culture after relocating to America. they will likely love it.

This is simply because Americans love their country, their culture and language, and convergence. Liberals, contrariwise, loath American culture but love diversity and plurality.

Godless Passive-Aggression

Naturally, the Atheists had to chime in because the song, “America The Beautiful” contains the refrain, “America! America! | God shed His grace on thee,” and any mention of the God(s) anywhere outside of the home or a church that isn’t a denial of the Divinity’s existence sets their teeth on edge. What was interesting about their interjections into the conversations were their acrobatic apologetics.

Reading the various displays of the Godless’ passive-aggression was actually amusing since they had to contort their comments to show support for the various oikophobes that fetishize diversity while still maintaining their Atheist “cred” by bemoaning the Godly reference.

~*~

Read the rest of this entry »

No morning that starts with a hot mug of coffee can be called entirely bad.

Start The Day With Coffee

Of course, some mugs of coffee are hotter and tastier than others as are some mornings…

OK. You got friends and, having them, you like to go drinking with them. After all drinking buddies are a good thing. They make the evening’s bacchanalia a lot more convivial. And you can normally count of them to have some idead of what to do aside from just drinking…
 

 
You should, however, probably remember that just because your drinking buddies have given you advice doesn’t mean you have to take it.

Then again, in this age of smartphones and YouTube, talking the advice of your drinking buddies might be your ticket to fame. 😛

And bringing a whole new meaning and visceral understanding of the old axiom, “Chickens come home to roost,” I present you all with the picture below which I took back in September:

These chickens were stacked up, along with many dozens of other crates of them, right near where Bedford-Stuyveasant, Clinton Hill, and Williamsburg meet, i.e., all along the intersection of Myrtle Ave. and Bedford Ave..

It was a bit of an odd site. In most places the realities of where our food comes from is carefully and thoroughly hidden from view. Not so, apparently, in this area of Brooklyn and I, for one, am happy about this.