No coffee for you!

After years of controversy and a protest mounted by one of China's most popular TV personalities Starbucks has finally closed its doors in Beijing's imperial palace. Read: Starbucks out of China's Forbidden City.

Quid Pro Quo

According to this story, Chinese food inspectors banned meat products from seven U.S. companies. The ban comes weeks after U.S. FDA bans Chinese seafood imports.

The suspension of meat imports from the American companies -- including Tyson Foods -- comes just weeks after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced it would hold all farm-raised catfish, basa, shrimp, dace and eel shipments arriving from China until they are tested for residues from drugs not approved by the U.S. for use in farm-raised fish. Xinhua quoted the head of China's General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine calling the FDA action "unacceptable," and warning that "China, too, detects many substandard food products from the U.S."

In that case, I wonder why the China never detected any substandard food products from the US before the ban. All I can say is this is good for the average consumer. The stricter the inspection, the less chances we have of wolfing mercury for dinner. On a separate note read: Chinese tonight?

Spare me the Junk

Save upto 15% - Act now! (LCDs to coffee makers)
Rapid weightloss without a prescription (variations: your pharmacy order, order # etc)
Refinance your house at a low rate! (Need cash?, 0% APR through 2050, earn $10K per month working from home etc)
Supersize it! (variations: add 4 inches, Viagra, be better in bed, satisfy your partner etc.)
Pictures of hot singles (find a “partner”, horny singles etc)

Looks familiar? My “bulk” folder in Yahoo is driving me nuts. Hotmail aptly calls it the “Junk” folder. Apart from the annoyance of seeing hundreds of spam emails in my “bulk” folder, I have the added inconvenience of losing some personal email which ends up in that folder. I have wondered long and hard about who sends these spam emails! I am supposed to believe that the only heir to the king of Nigeria has emailed me and asked me for my bank account number so he could transfer $5 million immediately? Seriously, I have yet to meet a person who has refinanced his mortgage or added 4 inches by clicking on a spam email. Apparently there are thousands of scammers and phishers, hoping you click on their spam emails and links and do to you what you were hoping to do to those hot singles.

According to a survey, here are the different types of spam categories (in terms of % of total spam)
Products 25%
Financial 20%
Adult 19%
Scams 9%
Health 7%
Internet 7%
Leisure 6%
Spiritual 4%
Other 3%

Some more interesting statistics: there are 2.5 billion porn emails sent daily. 28% of people reply to spam email and 8% users purchase from spam email.

Finally, some action for the virgins.

Here is an incentive to embrace abstinence and preserve your virginity. You could get free theater tickets in NYC -- if you're a virgin. Running out of tickets shouldn’t be a problem for the producer of the show.

"There are a limited number of 'virgin tickets' available," he said. "However, there are not that many virgins in New York City."

No kidding.

Chinese tonight?

According to this story on CNN, chopped cardboard, softened with an industrial chemical and flavored with fatty pork and powdered seasoning, is a main ingredient in batches of steamed buns sold in one Beijing neighborhood.

The next time you say “this food tastes like cardboard” you might just be right. Which reminds me, you also have to stop saying “this coffee tastes like piss.” Careful what you wish for. And on a separate note – no green tea for me, thank you.

The Magnificent Seven

Here is the list of the new 7 wonders of the world.

Great Wall of China

The 4,160-mile barricade in northern China is the longest man-made structure in the world. The fortification, which largely dates from the 7th through the 4th century BC, was built to protect the dynasties from the Huns, Mongols, Turks and other nomadic tribes.

Colosseum, Italy

The 50,000-seat amphitheater in Rome was inaugurated in AD 80 by the Emperor Titus in a ceremony of games lasting 100 days. The Colosseum, which has influenced the design of modern sports stadiums, was an arena where thousands of gladiators dueled to the death.

Taj Mahal, India

The white marble-domed mausoleum in Agra was built by Mogul Emperor Shah Jahan from 1632 to 1654 to honor his favorite wife, Mumtaz Mahal, who died in childbirth.

Petra, Jordan

The ancient city of Petra in southwestern Jordan, built on a terrace around the Valley of Moses, is famous for its water tunnels and stone structures carved in rock.

Christ the Redeemer Statue, Brazil

The 125-foot-tall statue of Christ the Redeemer with outstretched arms overlooks Rio de Janeiro from atop Mt. Corcovado. The statue, which weighs more than 1,000 tons, was built by Polish-French sculptor Paul Landowski in pieces in France starting in 1926, then shipped to Brazil.

Machu Picchu, Peru

Built by the Inca Empire in the 15th century, the giant walls, palaces, temples and dwellings of the Machu Picchu sanctuary are perched in the clouds at nearly 8,000 feet above sea level in the Andes Mountains.

Pyramid at Chichen Itza, Mexico

The majestic step-pyramid surmounted by a temple is one of several structures in the city, one of the greatest Maya centers on Mexico's Yucatan peninsula. The pyramid is built according to the solar calendar so shadows cast at the fall and spring equinoxes appear like a snake crawling down its steps.

For more info, check http://www.new7wonders.com/index.php

Message in a Bottle

I have never quite grasped the concept of bottled water. Why not drink tap water or use those simple filters that can be attached to your tap? Is it ‘cool’ to drink bottled water? Safer? Purer? Convenient? Tastier? I remember when I used to go out on hikes, we used to drink flowing spring water in the mountains. The purest water you could drink – our group leaders used to say – and we drank it, enjoying the cool, pure water, not worrying about the ‘nutritional facts label’ or the fact that someone could be peeing in it upstream. Point is, I think it’s all a matter of perspective. What’s the need for bottled water? Especially in areas where you get perfectly safe drinking water right through your tap.What started out as a mildly irritating topic for me (because of the false lavishness and wastefulness involved) is a much bigger issue than I had imagined. Bottled water is a $15 billion industry in the US and about $50 billion world wide. Read an interesting piece ‘Message in a Bottle.‘ Some mind numbing excerpts:

Thirty years ago, bottled water barely existed as a business in the United States. Last year, US spent more on Poland Spring, Fiji Water, Evian, Aquafina, and Dasani than it spent on iPods or movie tickets - $15 billion. It will be $16 billion this year.

This is huge! So why do we drink bottled water so much? Is it safer? Purer?

Pepsi (NYSE:PEP) has the nation's number-one-selling bottled water, Aquafina, with 13% of the market. Coke's (NYSE:KO) Dasani is number two, with 11% of the market. Both are simply purified municipal water--so 24% of the bottled water we buy is tap water repackaged by Coke and Pepsi for our convenience. You can buy a half- liter Evian for $1.35--17 ounces of water imported from France for pocket change. In San Francisco, the municipal water comes from inside Yosemite National Park. It's so good the EPA doesn't require San Francisco to filter it. If you bought and drank a bottle of Evian, you could refill that bottle once a day for 10 years, 5 months, and 21 days with San Francisco tap water before that water would cost $1.35.

My tennis buddy always drinks Propel ‘Fitness’ Water (by Gatorade) when we play – you guessed it – tennis. Other times, he will usually grab an Aquafina. He obviously thinks drinking ‘Propel’ will somehow help him play better or at the very least hydrate him better than ‘regular’ water. If you need better stamina, how about running a few miles daily? Or better yet, how about you STOP SMOKING? But it’s amazing how the advertisements, branding, marketing can get in your head. There is startling level of thought and analysis involved.

Aquafina marketing vice president Ahad Afridi says his team has done the research to understand what kind of water drinkers we are. They've found six types, including the "water pure-fectionist"; the "water explorer"; the "image seeker"; and the "struggler" ("they don't really like water that much...these are the people who have a cheeseburger with a diet soda").

Impressed? I am. And let’s check out its impact on the environment. Surprise, surprise! Bottled water is bad for the environment

Bottled water wastes fossil fuels and water in production and transport, and when the water is drunk the bottles become a major source of waste. It takes more than 47 million gallons of oil to produce plastic water bottles for Americans every year. Eliminating those bottles would be like taking 100,000 cars off the road and 1 billion pounds of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Each one of those bottles required nearly five times its volume in water to manufacture the plastic and may have caused the release of nickel, ethylene oxide, and benzene. Then, rather than being recycled, 86 percent of them are thrown away. Breaking down these plastics can take thousands of years, while their components seep into our water supplies. The Fiji Water plant is a state-of-the-art facility that runs 24 hours a day spins out more than a million bottles daily. That means it requires an uninterrupted supply of electricity--something the local utility structure cannot support. So the factory supplies its own electricity, with three big generators running on diesel fuel. The water may come from "one of the last pristine ecosystems on earth," as some of the labels say, but out back of the bottling plant is a less pristine ecosystem veiled with a diesel haze.

So what’s the Message in a Bottle?

Bottled water is not a sin. But it is a choice. Packing bottled water in lunch boxes, grabbing a half-liter from the fridge as we dash out the door, piling up half-finished bottles in the car cup holders--that happens because of a fundamental thoughtlessness. It's only marginally more trouble to have reusable water bottles, cleaned and filled and tucked in the lunch box or the fridge. We just can't be bothered. And in a world in which 1 billion people have no reliable source of drinking water, and 3,000 children a day die from diseases caught from tainted water, that conspicuous consumption of bottled water that we don't need seems wasteful, and perhaps cavalier.

Once you understand the resources mustered to deliver the bottle of water, it's reasonable to ask as you reach for the next bottle, not just "Does the value to me equal the 99 cents I'm about to spend?" but "Does the value equal the impact I'm about to leave behind?"

My personal opinion – in areas where the drinking water is safe, bottled water is simply an unnecessary waste that could be easily avoided.

On a lighter note, read ‘My carbon footprint’.