Photo by KIIS FM
Our culture and music industry has taken yet another step backwards (or at least in the wrong direction) with the new release of Chinese Food. This remarkably racist song is sung by Alison Gold, who everyone is calling the “new Rebecca Black,” and produced by Patrice Wilson who also produced the viral hit single Friday. The video features Wilson as a dancing panda, pho (not Chinese) floating in the sky, and Gold swooning in poor pitch over broccoli and egg rolls. The song also features subtitles for the lyrics in varying languages, which is actually just confusing. The cultural stereotyping is outrageous. It’s so bad it’s almost funny. Almost.
Photo by Obama Foodorama
The government shutdown continues to wreak havoc, this time in the President’s own backyard in Michelle Obama’s beloved Kitchen Garden which has been at the forefront of her Lets Move! campaign. Two weeks into the absence of the many furloughed employees who would ordinarily take extremely careful care of the garden the plants are overgrown and tangled with weeds, squirrels are gorging themselves on the cherry tomatoes, and the President’s favorite sweet potatoes are being reclaimed by the ground. The only care the few remaining employees are allowed to take of the garden is watering and removing trash, barely enough to maintain the meticulously cared for garden that existed just two weeks ago.
Photo by Better Out Than In
Banksy has been on a public escapade, selling artwork for $60 from a street side stand which apparently did not get many takers and driving a farm truck filled with stuffed animals animated by four puppeteers emitting sad animal siren sounds – a piece of performance art appropriately titled Sirens of the Lambs. The truck has been spotted in the Meatpacking District (appropriately) and in Brooklyn, and it has been making its mark on the psyche’s of young children, making a couple run in fear and a baby cry. The truck is clearly a commentary on the sources that allow our frequent meat consumption. We wonder if Banksy is a vegetarian.
Photo by Associated Press
Mexico is doing what New York couldn’t do, seriously addressing the rising risk of obesity that consistent soda drinking is causing. Bloomberg Philanthropies is funding a three-year $10 milion grant to “support anti-obesity advertising campaigns, finance research at Mexico’s National Institute of Public Health and promote policies like the soda tax, nutrition labeling and controls on junk-food television advertising aimed at children.” About 70% of Mexicans are now overweight and a third are obese, similar to the proportions in the United States and so the soda tax does not seem entirely uncalled for however much people still take personal offense to a wealthy New Yorker trying to impose his ideas of health on a country that is not his own. The soda tax, which was proposed by President Enrique Peña Nieto is being directly supported by Bloomberg, in the hope that if the soda tax passes in Mexico it can serve as a precedent for the same to happen in the U.S., or at least in New York.