Dear Continental Airlines

Dear Continental Airlines,

Vegetarians do not eat turkey. There, I said it.

When I bought my tickets from New Orleans to Columbus, I requested a vegetarian dining option. You gave me a turkey sandwich.

There is terminology for part-time vegetarians of all different persuasions. Pescetarians eat fish. Flexitarians often eat vegetarian meals, but sometimes consume dishes containing meat or meaty ingredients. I am a full-time lacto-/ovo-vegetarian (I will explain the tenets of veganism at a later time when I see that you are able to comprehend the differences between a vegetarian and a flexitarian).

See, you gave me a turkey sandwich. And I'm a vegetarian.

Vegetarians don't eat turkeys, or pigs, or cattle. They don't eat sea creatures. Some (like me) won't eat gelatin because it is made from cow bones.

Apparently I need to come up with a better way of explaining vegetarianism to you. You could have relied on answers.yahoo.com to find out if vegetarians eat turkey, and the interwebs would have told you that turkey is no good for vegetarians. But I want to create a better definition of vegetarianism for you on the off chance that you get another vegetarian flying with you now that you are the largest airliner in America.

One of the more clever ways I've seen to understand the requirements of the vegetarian diet is that a vegetarian doesn't eat anything with a face. This seems simple enough for Continental to understand.

However, vegetarian dining to me seems simple to understand, and you brought me a turkey sandwich. I'm afraid that you will interpret the no-faces mantra to mean that a vegetarian will eat worms and sea cucumbers. And they won't. See the earlier entries on pescetarians and flexitarians for details. Or watch any show with Andrew Zimmern or Anthony Bourdain if you want to see video of people eating worms or sea cucumbers.

So now I have to go to the scientific concept of taxonomy in order to get your head around vegetarian dietary requirements. Your average diner decides that they will eat members of the animal kingdom, thus cutting their dietary choices off at the genus level. This decision, combined with social norms and legal restrictions, keeps people from eating other people with the exception of the book and movie Alive and a few other moments in history, while still allowing them to eat baby cows and baby sheep without conscious guilt.

Vegetarians, however, move up the ladder of taxonomy and choose not to eat things by kingdom, in the upper echelon of biological taxonomy. This concept would exclude turkey, worms and sea cucumbers from my tray table the next time I fly Continental. Just don't bring me any members of the animal kingdom. No salmon, no bison, and definitely no turkey.

I hope that my angry diatribe will help you help vegetarians who fly Continental Airlines in the future. Luckily enough, the flight was only two hours, and I travel with enough food to nourish a small band of travelling minstrels. However, I don't want the next vegetarian flying Continental to starve because they don't travel with my moveable feast and you bring them turkey sandwiches.

-- Yours truly

Travis Barker is a quitter

If his reality show and sophomoric music weren't enough to convince you that Travis Barker is a tool, the latest gossip about Travis going back to eating meat after 25 years as a vegetarian in order to treat his severe burns will definitely allow your prejudicial labeling mechanism to place Mr. Barker squarely in the "doofus" box. I'm not a nutritionist, Travis, but 1 gram of soy protein is the same amount as 1 gram of dead animal protein. It's like the quandary of weight: which is heavier, a ton of bricks or a ton of feathers? I'm sure your dietician knew the answer to that riddle. He also knew you wouldn't be able to figure it out for yourself.

Watch where you eat

It's official--the sodium-laden, greasy crap people eat (a cuisine known to those in the nutrition field as the Western diet) is bad for your heart. According to recently published research, all that mass-produced, garbage food that America perfected makes people fat and keeps their heart unhealthy. Part of the problem is attributable to meat consumption according to the Canadian Institutes of Health Research study. The crazy part is that the negative effects of McDonald's dining are taking their toll worldwide. It sounds like it's time to put the donuts down and climb on the treadmill, tubby. Put the Big Mac down, copy this text, paste it into Babelfish and try eating something that hasn't been submersed in hydrogenated oil.

World's Oldest Vegetarian

Anthony Kedis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers was named the sexiest vegetarian piece of man meat for the year of 2008. There has to be somebody sexier than Kedis, who is one month shy of 46 (and to be honest, he doesn't look a day over 60). Leona Lewis fits the bill--she was the winner on the ladies' side of the bill. She is also half the age of Captain Blood Sugar Sex Magic.

If you really insist on voting for men for the Sexiest Vegetarian Award, I'm sure Tobey Maguire, Orlando Jones, Milo Ventimiglia and Andre 3000 are all sexier than Anthony Kedis (not that I'd f%$# any of them with your d*&% or anything like that...I'm just saying). This election is rigged somehow. Kedis' entire record label must have been voting for him or something. I demand a recount.

As an active voter in the vegetarian reality sex appeal popularity contest circuit, I can say I voted early and often in this poll, but never for the winners. I threw my endorsement behind Sophie Monk (because really, who wouldn't want to be behind Sophie Monk?), Carrie Underwood and Natalie Portman. But, as the cruel mistress Democracy has shown me before, my vote doesn't really matter. Whatever.

I'd just like to state for the record that I did not vote for Anthony Kedis. The general public may be voting for him as a sexiest lifetime achievement award or something like that. But the award doesn't say anything about lifetime achievement--it's a sexiest-right-now honor.

Can't resist your charms

It isn't every day that you witness the police laying the smack down on a perp. It's even less often that the perp weighs about 90 pounds and the cops weigh an estimated 1000 pounds combined. Rarer still are the times when the person being beaten by the police is female. I'm just guessing the rarity of these instances. I am by no means a statistician.

I also have no idea what the woman did. It must have been terrible based upon the force the officers used to subdue the woman. The officers picked up what no doubt must have been a small amount of plutonium or smallpox from the pavement before the police (undoubtedly justified in their use of force) showed the alleged criminal mastermind who was boss (Answer: Not the person being smacked around by the police).

I propose three other plausible explanations for this thing that I saw today. I can confirm none of this. I am only proposing it for discussion.

A). The woman was, in fact, Maurice Clarett. The police were smacking some fear into s/him before they returned s/him to prison.

B). The woman was an unpledged Superdelegate, and members of the Democratic National Committee enlisted the officers to reason with the woman in order to get her to see things their way. She will be pledging her support to Obama (or Clinton, depending on how your version of the conspiracy is framed) by tomorrow morning.

C). This is all part of Mayor Coleman's long term plan to revitalize Downtown. If you don't buy anything, we will beat you until you do. And this woman definitely didn't have any shopping bags. They could rebuild City Center overnight if they try forcing people to shop there.

Sexy Veggies, Part 17

Hot on the heels of this blog's tenacious reporting on PETA's sexiest vegetarian next door, Maxim magazine has provided some healthy competition.

Maxim's newest Web pictorial is titled, "Our Sexiest Vegetarians." They got more than a few direct hits on this one. Kylie Bax is smoking. Rachel Leigh Cook is easy on the eyes. Meat might be the only thing Pam Anderson hasn't put in her mouth (but the vegetarian diet has treated her well anyway). Petra Nemcova is a little better than average. And vegetarianism has also helped Shanon Elizabeth recover well from the Charlie Sheen aftershock.

But they also missed a few winners. I wouldn't kick Carrie Underwood out of bed for eating meat (even though she hasn't since she was 13). Ashley Judd can eat whatever she wants as far as I'm concerned, and she's still a vegetarian. And I'm not gay, but if I were, the first vegetarian I would make love to would definitely be Prince. Granted, he'll be a hard sell in Maxim, but who cares anyway?

Despite all my criticism of the oversights, Maxim nailed one choice right on target. Natalie Portman is the sexiest vegetarian on this or any other planet. She always looks good enough to eat...and that's definitely a no-no no matter what degree of vegetarian or vegan you are.

ESPN censorship

So I realized while I was sending out an email to the members of my fantasy baseball league on ESPN that they edit all words out that contain a swear word. They censored the word bypass in my email because like 75 other words in the English language, it ends with the letters A-S-S.

What gives? What if I have to ask somebody on the league message board what kind of influence Dick Pole will have over a young player's career? Maybe I think that some guy is a 21st century version of Johnny Dickshot, and I need to communicate it to a league member to get a trade brewing. He isn't going to know who Johnny *%#$shot is. That's a problem. I should be free to say Dick Pole and Johnny Dickshot whenever I damn well please.

And what if Paul Assenmacher comes out of retirement? I won't even be able to trade Chen Ming Wang for him, because ESPN will censor my trade request.

Whatever. My last draft pick this year will be none other than Rusty Kuntz. Let's see them try to put a clamp on old Rusty.

The Prince Fielder diet

The beefcake 1st baseman of the Milwaukee Brewers Prince Fielder dropped a pile of meat on the plates of unsuspecting media members at the end of last month: the 260-pound slugger is now a vegetarian.

Fielder's physique suggested that there was almost nothing that he wouldn't eat, but he started batting from the veggie side of the plate after reading a book his wife gave him that described the cruel methodologies employed to slaughter animals.

As a Cubs fan, I can't hope that the diet improves the Prince's already bloated statistics. I will, however, hope that the carnivorous Carlos Zambrano plunks you with a hard four-seamer before he takes you out to dinner at Green Zebra, Alice & Friends or the Blind Faith Cafe so there's no hard feelings. Enjoy the lifestyle while you simmer over your new contract.

90 Day Lame

I don't want to come off as an asshole or anything, but I'm glad it isn't going to take 90 days for Jane to kill herself, because if it did, I might expedite the process and kill the bitch myself.

In case you missed it, some young lady, in a morbid effort to draw attention to her otherwise inconsequential existence, began a blog that's purpose was to document her last 90 days on Earth. "Why were they her last 90 days?" you ask. According to her blog, it's because on day 90, she is going to kill herself.

"Why would somebody undertake such an endeavor?" you might also ask. The first explanation for me would be that she wanted to bring suicide to the Web 2.0 platform. I mean, why kill yourself by blowing your head off in the middle of a shopping mall, or by jumping headlong into oncoming traffic on the highway hoping for the news media to pick up on your death when you can ponder the decision in the blogosphere, and film your demise while sailing off into that good night. If Lindsay Lohan dies on the same day Jane offs herself, 90 Day Jane might not even make the evening news broadcast.

Plus Jane will get to react with her readers, and she can solicit suggestions for how to kill herself. My personal recommendation would be for her to fly over to fly to Pakistan, dress in a Jyllands-Posten Muhammed cartoon bathing suit, and run down the street waving an American flag screaming at the top of her lungs, "My god could kick your god's ass, infidels!" If it were 89 days and 23 hours through her little ploy, she'd be dead with 57 minutes to spare, and nobody would argue that her efforts weren't suicide.

She also might want to try the McDonald's diet. If you saw "Super Size Me," it was obvious that McDonald's was killing Morgan Spurlock. The other positive element of this approach is that Jane would be a cadavorous stiff by day 45, effectively eliminating the need to drag this ruse out any longer. I guess it might be difficult for her to die of McDonald's poisoning exactly on day 90, so maybe this isn't the best plan.

My third suggestion would be to spend her remaining hours trying to find a research lab that stores Ebola. It might take some research, but I'm sure if she Googled enough labs, one of them would be bound to store the deadly disease. She could mix it into an Orange Julius and drink it down. I would definitely tune in if she set the Web cam up and started dying a la "The Stand" right on her Web site.

In all seriousness, however, none of these things are going to happen, because 90 Day Jane is in fact a complete hoax. She speaks about it as a piece of art in the following post from yesterday:

I feel a massive sense of responsibility to my art, but more importantly the readers of this blog. My closeness to this project must have made art seem like reality to many people. That is not a reaction that I expected nor can I morally justify. This is why my project, 90DayJane, will be taken down in the next few days.

This is really too bad, because after the pain Jane put me through reading her middling prose, not only did I want to kill Jane, but I wanted to kill myself. People in the United States speak out strongly about the horrors of waterboarding torture, but those who think waterboarding is a horrible way to treat prisoners should catch an eyeful of 90 Day Jane's writing. If they fed this prose to the prisoners in Guantanamo, they'd beg for the torture rack.

With lines like, "My generation has had no great depression, no great war and our biggest obstacle is beating Halo 3. So, if I feel like saying "game over", why can't I?" and "I got an email this morning from a guy at work asking me out for Valentines Day. I'm not sure what disturbs me more, the fact that he emailed me when we work in the same office or that he's asking me out for Valentines Day specifically," it makes me want to kill myself, 90 days be damned!

The other issues with this poorly planned hoax start with the scheduled suicide. I mean really, who schedules their own death? With the exception of euthanasia, it's relatively difficult to plan to die. She probably should have just called herself "Shirley Gonnakillmyself" or "Dead End Dolly" and not set a final date, because then everybody would have had to check out her blog on a regular basis waiting to find out if this was finally the day. Oh well...maybe next time.

Also, did anybody really believe that Blogspot was going to let some poor misguided youth kill herself on their blogosphere? If Blogspot would shut down sites for posting copyrighted material about television shows like "Lost" or for posting dirty pictures of boobies, nobody would buy that they were going to let some doofus off herself and post the video (and YouTube probably wouldn't allow suicide videos either).

Oh well. 90 Day Jane might have been an entertaining idea considering the media attention it drew, no matter Jane's protests to the contrary . Unfortunately, it was poorly written, executed and planned. At least Jane didn't kill herself, and at least I didn't have to torture myself by reading another sentence she wrote.

Look Before You Eat

If you eat out often, you will either want to ignore or pay close attention to the Men's Health article about the 16 secrets the restaurant industry doesn't want you to know.

If ignorance is bliss, don't read this. If you fear eating an appetizer with 2,900 calories, read on.

Some offenders in the article are better than others. Places like Applebee's advertise low fat items that are laden with calories and carbohydrates. Hooters sneaks all sorts of unpronounceable chemicals into its chicken wings. Arby's puts artificial flavoring into its "All Natural" chicken because the FDA can't regulate the term "All Natural" (Luckily, little of this affects my vegetarian eating habits).

But there are a few more insidious culprits. IHOP offers a 1,335 calorie omelet with more saturated fat than a crock of Crisco. Outback Steakhouse was the guilty party with the 2,900 calorie appetizer. I'm sure they meant you to share it.

There are a number of other establishments that offer food with artificial coloring (Panera Bread), fry French toast with four grams of fat per stick in oil laden with trans fat from their poorly prepared pork, chicken and fish menu items (Burger King) and sell smoothies with more than 60 grams of sugar (Dunkin Donuts).

The worst offenders, like Fuddruckers, Maggiano's Little Italy and Red Robin, refused to release the information to the authors of the article. Apparently restaurants are now allowed to plead the fifth.

The article in Men's Health describes how professional restaurant organizations and the Governator in California ignored legislation that simply would have required restaurants to post nutritional information on their menus. Apparently ignoring this practical suggestion might help to explain why Arnold is looking so soft around the midsection (the article is in Swedish, but don't worry--you don't need a translator to understand the pictures).

The consumer is responsible for what they put into their body. But being unable to figure out what crap is in the food you're eating makes keeping tabs a difficult proposition. I don't eat at these places, but on behalf of those who do, it's about time that the powers that be allowed the public to know exactly what they are eating.

If I buy a 9-millimeter hand gun, it would be fairly easy for me to judge what would happen to me if I point the gun at myself after firing it at a practice target a few times. Without being able to find out how many calories are in your lunch, you might be killing yourself thinking that by eating you are gaining simple sustainence.

Nutritional values should be public information. By keeping this information secret, and further, by serving food with no available nutritional value, the restaurant industry is playing a huge role in the nation's obesity epidemic.

The Super Bowl Stumble

If one thing emerged for me last night during the game last night, it became evident that the Patriots aren't the best of all time. They were the second best team in the Super Bowl. I guess Mercury Morris was right.

But hey--there can only be one greatest team ever. I'm glad I can still say that it was the 1985 Chicago Bears. The only reason the Dolphins in 1972 were 17-0 was because they didn't have to play the 1985 Bears.

The Dolphins played teams with a combined winning percentage of .396. Big time wins, guys.

And the 1985 Bears beat Joe Montana, Jerry Rice and the 49ers pretty handily, so this argument keeps getting easier and easier to make. The Cowboys were the best at smoking cocaine, and that’s about it.

Even though it only lasted one year, the Bears would beat the pants off of your sorry best-team-of-All-Time if time travel would allow it. So sing along with me now as we celebrate the G.O.A.T. :

Bear down, Chicago Bears,
Make every play clear the way to victory.
Bear down, Chicago Bears,Put up a fight with a might so fearlessly.
We'll never forget the way you thrilled the nation,
With your T-formation.
Bear down, Chicago Bears,
And let them know why you're wearing the crown.
You're the pride and joy
of Illinois,
Chicago Bears, bear down.

Home Depot

Home Depot has announced that they will lay off 10 percent of their employees at their Atlanta headquarters. Analysts are citing the downturn in the housing market and the problematic economy as being responsible for the terminations. I have an alternate theory. With Michael Vick getting off so easily after his dogfighting ordeal, it seems like upper level management of the Depot (and the Falcons) had to make somebody pay the piper.

Die Hippie, Die!

It's official--U2 is managed by Eric Cartman.

Actually, that isn't true. The cultural dinosaurs, following on the heels of their induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, are actually managed by a relic named Paul McGuiness. U2's manager delivered a scathing diatribe at the Midem Music Conference in Cannes about the state of the music industry.

In his rant, McGuiness demonstrated how he has his finger directly on the cultural pulse of the world by blaming hippies for the downfall of the music industry. With management like that, U2 should keep putting out shit music and receiving unbelievable adulation for their sorry efforts for years to come.

McGuiness is (more so than the hippies) a symptom of a music industry that is so out of touch with its audience that it no longer can conceptualize how to reach them. Reality talent farms like "American Idol" and the newest junket into the genre "Gone Country", where CMT tries to recycle has-beens like Bobby Brown and Dee Snider into country music superstars, are another symptom of how those in charge of the business blame their problems on everybody BUT themselves.

And Mr. McGuiness, do you blame the old Grateful Dead-era hippies, or the newfangled Yonder Mountain String Band hippies for the shortages in your music revenue? Whoever the culprit is, I'm sure this helps explain how Sting and his merry band of hippies The Police were the highest grossing touring band of the year, even topping the second place Rolling Stones (the band that is credited with ending the 1960s, by the way).

Maybe U2 should hire Thom York from Radiohead to manage all their future projects. Radiohead still seems to sell pretty well, even with all of their hippie album releases. Plus, unlike Paul McGuiness, Radiohead started their music career in the 20th century, which puts Radiohead 90 or 100 years ahead of the McGuiness and his reactionary philosophy.

Whatever the case may be, hopefully McGuiness is seen for exactly what he really is...an out of touch relic from a bygone era of music. Peace and love to you Paulie McG...best of luck in your antique endeavors, and leave the music business to those who can use counterculture terminology that comes after the year 1987.