Archive | March, 2011

Have 250 Milliliters of Coke And a Smile.

17 Mar

March 17, 2011

Once again they’ve changed the way they present calorie information on packages. Until recently it was good enough if it was on the package in a standardized nutritional display. Now the push is to put it on the front of the packages. Soda bottles are leading the charge.

What’s the point? No one drinks Coke for their health, and if they’re worried about calories they drink diet soda. I have no problem with displaying the nutritional information but it comes to a point where it simply gets insulting. Is it too hard to turn the bottle? Do we really need it shoved in our faces? Has anyone complained that one inch and 90 degrees is too far away?

Of course, all of this assumes that the bottle will be facing you in the cooler. If isn’t, then what happens? Will they design a bottle that rotates itself?

HL Mencken once said the no one has gone broke underestimating the intelligence of the public, and I’ve done my share of it too. And I’m about to do some more. The label, in nice big figures, says 110 calories/250 ml. So for every 250 milliliters there are 110 calories. Fair enough, but it is in a 591 ml bottle. Therefore, the bottle is not 110 calories, as they hope the public will think, it is really 260. A more honest label would tell you the total calories in the bottle. Like it or not, no one will do the math. and if they do, who measures out 110 milliliters?

Remember when you could go out and buy a soda in a small cup that was actually small? Today a small, if you find one, is about the size of a Volkswagen.

Again, I think it is great to give people all the nutritional information they need to make informed decisions. I dislike the fact that this label assumes we are too stupid to figure it out without having everything brought down to the lowest common denominator and shoved down out throats. I find it insulting.

 

The bottle of the future.

 

 

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Picture Postcard Wednesday- Decaying Atlantic City Pier

16 Mar

March 16, 2011- midday

If you walk to the end of the Atlantic City Pier, past the casinos and the Steel Pier, you find the rotting remains of this pier, overgrown with weeds and lurching out into the surf like an accusing, boney finger. I took this in 2009, on a day when an Atlantic hurricane was churning the waves.

Despite the waves I walked below the pier on the dry sand below. It was still not high tide (I can only imagine the surf then)  and there was enough dry sand to keep my feet from getting wet. As I walked underneath the experience of the surf crashing in and causing great echoes all around was very surreal.

I walked out on the pier as far as I could. There was a visitor center at the head of the pier. It was closed and the gates were shut but not locked so I slipped in and walked out until I found a fountain, pictured below. Beyond the fountain were some ancient rusted gates that were securely locked. That was as far as I could go. When I walked back I found that the gates I entered through were now chained, but the chain was loose enough to let me slip out.

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