Pepsi's Got It (The Right Stuff)

My palate has been wooed by many a soda/pop in its day, and never more effortlessly than by A-Treat Birch Beer and Barq's Red Crème Soda. But alas, given my remoteness from both Allentown (PA) and a Kroger in Ohio, respectively, I haven't tasted either of those luscious libations in quite some time.

In their stead, I sometimes sip the sweet carbonated nectar of locally-operated Millstream Brewing Company, but by and large I've sold my taste buds to the industry's two biggest behemoths: Coke and Pepsi.

For years have I vacillated—like John Kerry in the wind—between the two. On one hand, nothing compliments a fresh Italian hoagie quite like an ice-cold can of Pepsi. But if popcorn is the course, and I need something to wash down the handful of Pop Secret Homestyle I just devoured (after noisily smearing it on the side of the bag), nothing but a Cherry coke (served in a pretentious little cup on the rocks) will do. Yet, I've always been more attracted to women who drink Pepsi. And so the debate raged on...

But after my recent dual discoveries of My Coke Rewards (MCR) and Pepsi Stuff (PS), the jury is no longer out. Not only is the actual website for PS (integrated with Amazon.com) clearly superior to MCR's slow and clunky design, a comparison of the actual "rewards/stuff" reveals, in my opinion, a slam dunk case in favor of Pepsi.

For simplicity's sake, I'll restrict my argument to digital music-related prizes. While a single-song download from Rhapsody.com (not iPod-compatible) "costs" 33 Coke points (aka 11 caps), a single-song DRM-free (i.e., iPod-compatible) download on Amazon.com costs a mere 5 Pepsi points (5 caps). About the only thing Coke offers for 5 caps is a "virtual jacket" for your avatar to wear around CC Metro, which is a computer-based, alternate reality island (à la Second Life) shaped like a Coke bottle (seriously).

Brumpelstiltskin's very own music critic, MC Gallagher, who's been known to rummage through the recycle bin in his workplace's break room in search of bottle caps, put it this way: "If given the choice between an actual mp3 or some make believe clothing shite—even if it's a powder fooking blue tuxedo—you better believe I'll take the first option every time".

The Price is Wrong, Bitch

As the human sibling of 11 (count 'em!) illegitimate feline brothers and sisters (of whom 36% are pictured left), I have firsthand experience with the profound ramifications of cat overpopulation.

For starters, there are the inevitable ribbings from friends that result as a corollary of Tigue's Law, which states that "as the number of cats that one adopts approaches ten, the probability that each new cat's name will be utterly ridiculous approaches one". (Just ask my younger brother, "Window Scratcher".)

Then there's the price. According to the ASPCA website, the average CPC (cost-per-cat) is $1035 for the first year and $670 for each year thereafter. Even if you remove all "luxury" expenses (i.e., toys/treats, health insurance, collars, scratching posts, carrier bags, and "misc."), you're still looking at $440/yr on food, litter and recurring medical expenses (plus an extra $280 during Year 1 on vaccinations, etc.). Given that the average lifespan of an indoor-only cat is 15 years, even under the second "luxury-free" scenario, a typical cat will cost $6880.

But there's more to this topic than monikers and money. Just a few weeks ago, amid an impulsive web search, I was unexpectedly struck—like a cat scratch—by the discovery that the scientific community has in recent years gone absolutely b.a.n.a.n.a.s. for felines. For the fever of curiosity that ensued, I knew the only prescription was to sink my teeth into the the first article I could get my hands on: "A review of feral cat control," written by Dr Sheilah Robertson of the University of Florida, and soon to be published by JFMS (that's The Journal of Feline Medicine and Surgery for you lay people).

Dr Robertson begins her review by defining the "feral" cat. Unlike my 11 siblings—who are among the estimated 90m "owned/pet" cats in the US—feral cats are not fortunate enough to be cared for by empathetic humans like my parents. Though sometimes defined in the literature simply as "escaped domestic cats gone wild" (aka the lost and abandoned), in truth the feral population also includes a massive subset who were never domesticated to begin with (e.g., barn and alley cats). While some rely on humans for varying degrees of food and shelter, they are all by definition free-roaming, and there are an astounding 25-100m of them in the US alone.

In her review Dr Robertson also details six main issues in the feral cat debate: (1) public health and zoonotic disease; (2) spread of disease to other species; (3) spread of disease to "pet" cats; (4) effects on local wildlife and ecosystems; (5) public nuisance (e.g., "the noise they make, fecal contamination and their presence around restaurants, cafes and other public places"); and last but certainly not least, (6) the welfare of the cats themselves.

The article also discusses potential solutions to this issue, but that will have to wait until a future post. In the meantime, for a clue, click here.

(This is the first installment in a planned two-part series)

A Punchup at a Wedding (No No No No No No!)

Barack Obama (Apr 6 in San Francisco; original story here; Obama's clarification here):

You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them," Obama said. "And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations

Hilary Clinton (Apr 12 in Indianapolis):



Thom Yorke (of Radiohead, circa 2003-2004; full lyrics here):



"The pointless snide remarks
Of hammer-headed sharks
The pot will call the kettle black
It's a drunken punch-up at a wedding, yeah"

FICO Matters

Thinking about money management can be a sh*tty business, but it can also have profound effects on our lives. As the Dickens character Mr McCawber (from David Copperfield) put it:

Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen shillings and six pence, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds and six pence, result misery

In the quest for personal financial freedom, there are numerous weapons at our disposal, and notable among this arsenal is the double-edged sword known as the credit card. Why double-edged? On one hand, its usage can yield reward points and cash back; allow us to pay for “big ticket” items in monthly installments (rather than one lump sum); and make us more attractive to future moneylenders. On the other hand, though, it can unleash monstrous interest payments; lure us to purchase items we don’t really need and can’t really afford; and make us less attractive to future lenders. For these latter reasons, my financial mentor (code name: “TG”) once told me:

You should use debit cards instead of credit cards unless you pay the bill in full religiously every month. If not get out the scissors.

That said, I initially charge about 30% of my expenditures to credit cards (largely on gas and groceries using this mamma jamma), so it’s definitely not my intention to scare anyone away from them. Rather, my goal is to shed a little light on how they can affect our “FICO” (aka credit) score.

F.I.C.O., which is named for Fair, Issac & Co. (the company who created it), is a number (in the 300-850 range) that indicates one’s “credit worthiness”. In other words, moneylenders (of car loans and home mortgages, etc.) perceive people with high credit scores as likelier to repay what they borrow—and thus more trustworthy. As a consequence, people with higher scores are more likely not only to qualify for a loan in the first place, but also to pay a lower interest rate on the loan they receive (which can save a lot of $ over time).

Since it can clearly pay off to maintain a high FICO score, it's helpful to know how one is actually calculated. To help answer this question, I turned to the folks at The Motley Fool and Bankrate. As it turns out, there are but five major criteria:

1. Past payment history (35%):
• Consistently paying your bill on time will help you immensely; late payments (esp. by 30 days or more) will not.
2. Amount owed (30%):
• As one's outstanding balance creeps nearer to one's credit limit (aka closer to "maxing out"), one's FICO score creeps downward.
• Note: this is where the wisdom of paying your bill in full each month really shines through (not to mention the costly finance charges that doing so prevents).
3. Length of credit history (15%):
• The longer your history, the higher your score.
4. Mix of credit (10%):
   
• FICO rewards borrowers with both unsecured/revolving loans (e.g., credit cards) and secured/installment loans (e.g., car loans and home mortgages).
5. New credit applications (10%):
   
• A lot of inquiries (specifically, those resulting from applications for new credit) in a short amount of time can lower your score.

Admittedly, this is pretty dry stuff, and can thus be difficult to remember. Lucky for us, though, Brumpelstiltskin's very own Mickens has composed the following limerick to help keep it all straight:

Card Payments Too Often Belated,
Limits Maxed But Never Abated,
A History Quite Short,
Plus Inquiries For Sport,
And No Mix Makes F.I.C.O. Low Rated

In conclusion, if you're wondering how to go about about checking your FICO score, I've got great news for you: doing so is easy and free. Namely, the 2003 Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions (FACT) Act "requires each of the nationwide consumer reporting companies — Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion — to provide you with a free copy of your credit report, at your request, once every 12 months". You can do so online any time via this website.

Greenspanke (left) is finance minister for Mic's Tape and manages a separate Quicken file for each member of Brumpelstiltskin

Into the Mystic

I'm quite certain that the most beautiful song I've ever heard is on Van Morrison's Astral Weeks. I just don't know which one it is ("Cyprus Avenue" or "Madame George").

Originally released in 1968, the above first came into my hands eight or nine years ago, and has since aged better than any other record in my collection. That said, with the exception of Moondance (1970), it wasn't until fairly recently that I dove headlong into the rest of Morrison's discography.

Part of my delay, no doubt, stemmed from the fact that much of Morrison's "best" work ('68-74) proved curiously difficult to find in shops. Fortunately, two recent developments have opened the floodgates: in Fall '07 iTunes struck a deal to distribute his collection digitally while in January Polydor/Universal commenced its re-release of 29 post-1970 albums in remastered format.

To take a step back, it bears mentioning that Morrison (above), born in Northern Ireland in 1945, first made waves as frontman for Them, a "British"-invasion band whose 1964 (self-written) song "Gloria"—later covered to great effect by Patti Smith among others—continues to stand up as a truly formative component of the rock single's lineage. Coupled with 1967's "Brown-Eyed Girl", released as a solo act at age 21, Morrison's early (albeit isolated) triumphs were alone sufficient to cement a legacy.

But it is his albums that truly separate Morrison, and none more so than Astral Weeks, a set of eight songs virtually unmatched in its cohesiveness (and available for a mere $5.95 on iTunes). Recorded in just three sessions, it is a lush, vibrant mixture of acoustic guitar, improvisational jazz rhythms, and delicate Celtic flutes and reeds—arched all of it by deeply personal lyrical evocations of Morrison’s Belfast youth. And yet despite this personal nature, the record inexplicably manages to somehow seem universally nostalgic. Indeed, there is no set of songs that more effectively recollects my own adolescent experiences in Lake George, NY: cherished memories of summery simplicity in a world filled with wind and waves against trees and rocks, contemplation and conversation, guitar and radio (but never television).

As I continue through his works, I have basked in the ethereal flute-driven "Country Fair" (closer of 1974's majestically pastoral Veedon Fleece) and reveled in the infectious jubilation of (the 1978 title track) “Wavelength”. In the process, a thought began to take shape: a thought given form by no less an authority than Bob Dylan. According allmusic.com, Dylan once said (in reference to Morrison’s 1971 country-tinged ballad “Tupelo Honey”) "that [the song] has always existed and that Morrison was merely the vessel and the earthly vehicle for it".

A quote from the man himself further fleshed out this thought of mine. As cited in Into The Music by Richie Yorke, Morrison has humbly claimed that:

['Madame George'] just came right out...The song is just a stream of consciousness thing, as is 'Cyprus Avenue'...I didn't even think about what I was writing.

Indeed, it just seems that this is the type of music that can strengthen one's faith in a higher power who guides us if only we open our ears to listen.