#table sugar

Table Sugar

Oiter gonna kill Table Sugar

The food chemical company Monsanto, now owned by Bayer, developed a genetically modified variant of corn that was completely resistant to glyphosate, a weed-killing herbicide marketed under the name Roundup, which they also developed. Monsanto scientists genetically removed their corn’s susceptibility to the chemical. This potent combo—Monsanto’s GMO corn coupled with Monsanto’s weed killer—enabled farmers to spray their entire crops and have the herbicide kill everything but the corn. The Vermont ice cream company Ben & Jerry’s uses corn syrup as a sweetener for some of their products. (Yes, I too was surprised to learn this.) News that some of their ice creams had trace amounts of glyphosate from the corn used in their syrup created a media dust-up. In response, Ben & Jerry’s decided to stop using GMO corn syrup altogether, even though the one-part-per-billion detection levels of glyphosate were far below US and European standards. Since many people who buy Ben & Jerry’s ice cream lean left—aligned with the company’s generally progressive views on all things—Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Holdings Inc. judged this ban to be a wise business decision.

Let’s look closer at what happened there. Every substance you could possibly ingest, food and otherwise, has a calculated lethal dose associated with it, measured by what’s called LD50. That’s the dose per kilogram of body weight where 50 percent of the people who consume that amount will die quickly. These data often come from tests on laboratory mammals such as mice. There’s another metric, called no-observed-adverse-effect level (NOAEL), which addresses the long-term influence of a substance on your health and is more sensible when thinking about food safety. LD50 helps to make a different point. The smaller its value for a substance, the more lethal it is. As such, tables of LD50s can be quite illuminating. Here’s a sampling:

Sucrose (table sugar) | 30 grams per kilogram

Ethanol (common alcohol) | 7 grams per kilogram

Glyphosate (Roundup) | 5 grams per kilogram

Table Salt | 3 grams per kilogram

Caffeine | 0.2 grams per kilogram

Nicotine | 0.0065 grams per kilogram

The most lethal substance on this hand-picked list is nicotine. Caffeine looks quite potent too. Just drink about eighty demitasse cups of espresso if you want to die from it. Next comes salt.

The least deadly on the list is sugar, as you might expect. Notice further that glyphosate is less lethal than table salt, but not by much. Actually none of this concerns us here. What matters is what happens to a 150 lb. (70 kg) person who eats Ben & Jerry’s ice cream—a fact I calculated but relegated to my Forbidden Twitter file, where it remains, simply for how disturbing it would be. In social media, I never intend to be disturbing:

You would need to consume four hundred million pints of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream for its trace amounts of glyphosate to kill you. But after only 20 pints you will die from its sugar content.

Ben & Jerry’s made the right corporate decision if it protected their profits. Although they could have also used the occasion as a teaching moment—a mind-blowing lesson on comparative risk. But that works only if people are open to learning. In modern times, many of us don’t satisfy that criterion, perhaps because, according to the nineteenth-century British essayist Walter Bagehot,

One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea.

It is, as common people say, so “upsetting;” it makes you think that, after all, your favourite notions may be wrong, your firmest beliefs ill-founded.… Naturally, therefore, common men hate a new idea, and are disposed more or less to ill-treat the original man who brings it.

MyFullNameIsTableSugarButYouCanCallMeSugar!

C12H22O11 :3

I'mActuallyTransparent!

MyPronounsAreShe*/Her*!!!

//OOC: hi there, main's @states-system, shoutout to @elementcattos for letting people make RP blogs! //How to draw table sugar under cut.

Olympia shows for The World and Beatniks

My column from Maximum Rocknroll #414 (November 2017), one of the rare months this year when I mostly wrote about demos from new bands, as opposed to reissues of records from thirty-plus years ago. 

The time that I’ve spent writing this month’s column has been marked by all sorts of strange happenings and general flux. The skies in Portland have been smoke-streaked and raining ash for days because a couple of jackass kids tossed firecrackers into the evergreen forests of the Columbia River Gorge to the east of the city, setting tens of thousands of acres of trees ablaze in the process. My hometown of Houston is still largely underwater after catastrophic hurricane-triggered flooding, and even though it’s been twelve years since I left the city, this might be the first time that I’ve felt so genuinely separated from it, helplessly watching from the opposite side of the country as the places and things that defined my formative years (for better or worse) are completely upended. I quit the radio show that I’d been doing for the last year and a half because the pressure of coming up with a two-hour program week after week without repeating myself was making me lose my mind just a little bit, so I’m back to doing a podcast from my apartment whenever inspiration strikes and I can already tell that it’ll be a better change for me. And I started a new band called COLLATE with two friends a few months back that finally recorded this week, just in time to make some tapes for a short tour down to California in mid-October—come hang out if you’re in Chico, Los Angeles, San Francisco or Oakland and you want talk about oddball ‘70s and ‘80s post-punk records with us.

Five years after Dark Entries’ remastered vinyl reissue of UK minimal wave duo LIVES OF ANGELS’ 1983 cassette Elevator to Eden, they’re back with a brand new LP collection called Hole in the Sky drawn from the group’s unreleased odds and ends and archival tracks sourced from hyper-obscure tape compilations. In contrast to some of their aesthetically similar contemporaries like SOLID SPACE or SECOND LAYER, LIVES OF ANGELS didn’t splinter off from the fertile early ‘80s UK post-punk scene, and in fact vocally rejected it—multi-instrumentalist Gerald O’Connell apparently dismissed everything from the era with the exception of COCTEAU TWINS, DEPECHE MODE, and NEW ORDER. The influence of the latter is especially apparent, and when O’Connell’s wife Catherine takes her turn at the mic (see “I Know About You” or “After Dark”), the result is a sort of striking bedroom synth-pop driven by the mechanical heartbeat of a vintage drum machine, suggesting slightly ragged takes on “Ceremony” or “Age of Consent” as sung with the detached warmth of Alison Statton of YOUNG MARBLE GIANTS. The Gerald-sung songs “Call Moscow” and “Somebody Else” also point to some shared wavelengths with jangly home-taping pop freaks CLEANERS FROM VENUS, who appeared on more than one mid-’80s small-run cassette comp alongside LIVES OF ANGELS, but best of all might be the dark electro-punk minimalism of “Look Out Kid,” spun almost entirely from reverbed drum machine clatter and retro-futuristic synthesizer that connects the dots between KRAFTWERK and the NORMAL. (Dark Entries, livesofangels.bandcamp.com)

From an obscurity dug out of the archives of the 1980s cassette underground to something more contemporary that could convincingly pass for the same: Imagery is the debut four-song tape from MIDNIGHT GARDEN, which appears to be one person armed with a four-track machine in modern-day Toronto crafting fever dream post-punk that sounds like the half-decayed remnants of a demo originally sent to Rough Trade in 1981. The driving, melodic bassline running through the opening and standout track “Structures” immediately had me thinking of early FOR AGAINST (clearly going after my own heart here, as I’ve been trying to rip off the same for years), cutting through the cavernous echo of some tom-heavy drumming and deadpan vocals buried under a thick fog of tape hiss. Then there’s “What Moves You?,” with an insistent back-and-forth of scalpel-edged single-note guitar and pulsing bass that occupies the liminal space between the stark, rhythm-minded approach of Factory Records’ early ‘80s post-punk faction (think pre-electronic SECTION 25) and the desperate and moody atmosphere of goth-adjacent bands like the CHAMELEONS. When you’re this reverent of your source material, it’s all too easy to come off as overly forced and derivative, but the roughed-up and off-kilter aesthetic of these recordings gives MIDNIGHT GARDEN the homespun spark that made the first wave of fiercely DIY post-punks so provocative in the first place. (whatmovesyou.bandcamp.com)

TABLE SUGAR have been making the minimalist art-punk of my dreams in Olympia since at least late 2016 when their demo Introductory Material first surfaced, but it took a tip this summer (from my friend Jay over at Dynamite Hemorrhage) for the band to actually be brought to my attention, and despite all of this brilliant racket happening less than two hours north up I-5 from me in Portland. For any of y’all who rightfully flipped your lid for LITHICS, take note: TABLE SUGAR are truly the next great post-punk weirdos of the Pacific Northwest. Sparse, taut guitar lines stretch out between throbbing bass and choppy drumbeats like the string connecting a pair of tin can telephones, while twin vocalists intone their parts over one another in cool monotones and ecstatic shrieks, sometimes within the span of the same song. “M.e.” even throws some violin into the equation which will undoubtedly evoke some references to the feral femme spirit of the RAINCOATS, but much like their freewheeling Australian counterparts in BENT, TABLE SUGAR are guided less by any rigid adherence to the scratchy groundwork laid down by the RAINCOATS (or DELTA 5, or the AU PAIRS, or…) and more by their foremothers’ general gleeful refusal to color inside the lines. (tablesugarband.bandcamp.com)

Blown-out basement punk newcomers STRANGE FATE hail from the woods of Western Massachusetts, where I spent most of my twenties enduring way too many shows dominated by mysterious guy hardcore bands who were in various phases of moving on from fawning ORCHID worship. I was so desperate for something like this during my time there—frantic, no frills femme-led DIY racket, with dual yelped vocals from guitarists Callie and Lindsey that bring to mind those first two NOTS singles when they were still inviting endless “KLEENEX meets the URINALS” comparisons. STRANGE FATE have the same penchant for whiplash choruses consisting primarily of shouted chants, with most of the songs careening to their end in just barely over a minute. For sheer econo-punk brilliance in 2017, look no further than “I Don’t Wanna Know,” whose lyrics are little more than the title delivered over and over in a snotty sneer over slashing guitars and urgently bashed drums for exactly 60 seconds, although the breathless repetition of “don’t tell me! / don’t tell me nothing!” on “Round Up” is pretty great, too. (strangefate.bandcamp.com)

Upcoming gigs

- @table-sugar-catto