Some of the shit you should be aware of while pondering the Oscar noms and getting beseiged by tweets about the US State of the Union address.
via economist.com
I suppose a couple of obvious (yet maybe sarcastic) questions come to mind.
- Since the cost of labor in Nairobi is so much lower, wouldn't the cost of the Bigg Mac be cheaper as well?
- If a Big Mac cost 2.5 hour's worth of wages, would I even want one?
- I wonder if a McDonald's wage was calculated in the findings... I would think that if they only used McDonald's wages, they'd find that employees of their own stores would have to work inordinately long to even afford to eat there.
If the stats developed by the UN are right, and the BBC hasn't misrepresented them at all, and I can wrap my head around this number, there are 1,000,000,000 (that's one billion folks) frogs culled to get to the world's plates every year:
"Frogs legs are on the menu at school cafeterias in Europe, market stalls and dinner tables across Asia to high end restaurants throughout the world," said Corey Bradshaw from Adelaide University in Australia. "Amphibians are already the most threatened animal group yet assessed because of disease, habitat loss and climate change - man's massive appetite for their legs is not helping."
Now while I don't want to even think about the numbers for chickens, cows, fish, or pigs, I've only got one thing to say. If you can watch Kermit sing "It's Not Easy Being Green" and ever want to eat a frog again, you have no heart... or you may be the Swedish Chef.
Well, when you thought you'd heard it all, something appears in the far periphery of your radar that just doesn't seem to make any sense. With this in mind, I offer up the lead from the article entitled "Two Girls Married Off to Frogs":
In a bizarre ritual, two minor girls, both seven, from the remote Pallipudupet village in Tamil Nadu's Villupuram district were married off to frogs on Friday night. The ceremony, an annual feature during the Pongal (harvest) festival, is conducted "to prevent the outbreak of mysterious diseases in the village."
I figure if we were, for years, ready to accept the marriage of Miss Piggy and Kermit, this isn't too far of a stretch... I fear, however, that California may have to set up another Prop referendum to make sure this doesn't happen in that state.
No word in on whether any of the frogs have turned into Prince or the frog formerly known as Prince.
So politics in Sweden has come down to the big question: just because someone treats politics a bit tongue-in-cheek, does that mean they can't do an effective job of representing a population in government?
The Pirate Party of Sweden has a membership that is outgrowing that of the Green Party, has 50% of all males under 30 ready to vote for them, and needs a 100,000 votes in total to get a seat in parliament. Swedens proportional system of government allows for the popular vote to dictate representation. That, as is common in North America, we are often restricted to a single choice, left-side/right-side conundrum may be traditional to us, but is hardly effective representation.
In Canada, for many years, we had the Rhino Party who proposed ludicrous ideas to maintaining the country, but, upon reflection, I sometimes wonder if the ludicrous is not what's often needed.
So here's to the Pirate Party. Avast ye scurvy dogs! Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum! If I lived in Sweden, they'd have my vote just on the name alone.
