Current mood: irate This is a fascinating little device.  Most of us loose the ability to hear high pitched noises as we get older because of the cumulative effects of hearing damage, and the rate of frequency loss is predictable:  people over 20 typically can’t hear above 8 khz.  A company called Compound Security is exploiting this little known fact to drive teenagers off of public property.  They market a device called the Mosquito that emits hideous noises just above 8khz and sets malingering youths to flight while leaving adults unaffected.

This is the sound.  If you can’t hear it, I assure you it’s irritating.  I seem to be an exception to the 20 year limit and this feels like a dental drill being applied to my skull.  I tried putting it on loop to simulate effect of the devices and after a minute and a half I wanted to break my speakers.

The principle behind these things has a Nazi flair to it.  Labeling a whole category of people as undesirable and then indiscriminately repulsing them through sonic torture, regardless of their behaviour, does not sit well with me.

My company packages a product named Toki (”Porcelin Skin from Within!”) that is designed to lighten skin color, or, as per Lane Labs marketing, give the skin a “radient porcelin glow”. There are plenty of skin creams that will make your face pale. They are called “makeup foundations”, and they contain a white pigment, often titanium dioxide, that sticks to skin and makes it lighter. Toki isn’t like other cosmetics though; you don’t apply Toki, you eat it. It is an off-white powder in a little plastic baggie that you take either straight or mixed with water. I can vouch for it’s “delicious cherry flavor” as I’ve been inhalling it every day for the past month.

Eating titanium dioxide would give you radient porcelin intestines and not much else, so Toki must have a unique mode of action to be able to alter the skin via the stomache. I’ve  checked the ingredients list, looking for the secret, but it just says something incomprehensible about seaweed amino acids and collagen infusion. The active principle must be disguised, as is typical for WePackItAll supplements. Super Nitro Energy, for example, lists an exotic combination of African shrubbery, but an FDA warning reveals it’s pharmaceutical foundation: 300mg anhydrous caffeine. Unfortunately, everything on the Toki box looks inert, so I can only speculate about the source of it’s transformative powers.

Some ways eating a little packet of tan stuff could lighten your skin:

1) Toki is poisonous. The user becomes ill and must stay in bed for several weeks to recover. Since they are too weak to leave the house, they don’t get any sun and loose their tan.

2) Toki, like most of our products, contains caffeine. The user is unable to sleep for days at a time and their face takes on a ghastly pallor as sleep deprivation sets in.

3) Toki does contain white pigment, but compounded with something like dimethylsulfoxide, so that it penetrates the digestive tract and enters the blood-stream, coloring it white and truely giving the user “porcelin skin from within”.

4) Toki is a mixture of white pigment and sneezing powder. When the user tries to eat it, they sneeze and blow Toki all over their face. I sure as heck sneeze every time I get too close.

5) Toki’s “delicious cherry flavor” causes intense nausea. The user turns white as the blood drains from their face right before they throw up.

6) The whiteness of Toki is a metaphorical whiteness that refers to the purity of it’s all natural ingredients, our purity of purpose as we seek ever-shinier, ever-brighter skin, and ultimately, the purity and greatness of spirit that lead human-kind to it’s greatest achievement: edible cosmetics.

1 and 3 can probably be ruled out: DMSO is an unlicsenced medication and the FDA limits how much poison is allowed in nutritional supplements. Sneezing and nausea aren’t predictable enough to be effective, so 4 and 5 are gone too. Caffeine is a strong possibility, but the market is awfully saturated. My best guess is 6: Toki promotes a whiteness of the spirit, not of the flesh.

Current mood: cynical

The following is a list of products sold by a local drug store. While I did make preferential selections to prove a point, this is a fairly representative sample. I read through the store’s website and used about half their inventory of this product type. Carefully consider each name before I reveal what they describe

Caviar Rapid Repair Spray
Freeze Pudding Extreme
Raw Bondage Rock Hard Hold
4-PLAY Moulding Paste
Beauty Binge Hair Pudding
FX Special Effects 3D
Headrush Adrenaline Spray
Hemp Seed Styling Souffle
Forte Glam Rock
5th Ave. NYC
Cristalli Illuminating Serum
Texturizing Taffy
Head Games Power Hungry
Frisky Scrunching Gel with Attitude

You’ve probably guessed these are hair care products, but something is amiss. These names for the most part have nothing to do with hair. They are about sex, or food, or attitude, and even in one case some kind of abstract concept of illumination. Some other products I didn’t list have long, pseudo-scientific names that don’t mean anything. What’s going on here?

We expect certain things from a name because of how English works. Names symbolize objects, which implies a real correspondence between the qualities of the object and the name. A name should take us into the core of it’s referent; a name that lies takes us somewhere else. Names can lie in two ways:

1) If I say my name is Joe, I am lying because my given name is Matthew. This is an explicit lie: the name is taking us into the wrong referent. Explicit lies are illegal in advertising – they are false advertising.

2) Suppose my parents named me Wendy. This would also be a lie because I don’t have the characteristics of a ‘Wendy’ (I’m male) Here the lie is implicit (as well as legal): it involves an inherently impossible relationship between the name and it’s referent. Lies like this are insidious because they appear to point at the correct referent, but in fact present a sort of imaginary, self-contradictory version. If we aren’t paying attention we may simply be deceived. If we do notice but are carried along anyway there is a sense of violation. But if we are quick, the lie fails and the name is funny because of it’s incongruity.

When I read a shampoo bottle, I expect to discover the shampoo’s qualities. “Gentle Shampoo for Dry Hair” might be an appropriate name. Instead, I see “Raw Bondage Rock Hard”, then “4-PLAY Molding Paste”. I’m looking to treat my dry scalp but end up in the middle of an S&M sex act. Now I’m freaked out: I don’t know anyone (I’m picturing the people on the shampoo bottle), I don’t even like S&M, and I’m not sure what to do. Am I going to offend these people if I leave their orgy? What kind of excuse is appropriate? I settle on “Sorry, I forgot to picture myself with a pack of Trojans..” and head back to the hair salon.

Unfortunately, my eyes are still moving along the rack. Next is “Beauty Binge Hair Pudding”. Now I’m sitting at a table in a French cafe, eating bowls of jellied hair while a snooty waiter watches disapprovingly. Finally, after my fifth serving, I look up and see the jar of Cristalli Illuminating Serum. Forget the shampoo, this is what I really want! Sand blows up from behind me as I gaze at the little glass container. I’ve journeyed a fortnight through the wastes of Akbaar, crossed the Gorge of Dismemberment, and slain Urgoth the Terrible, high in his rocky fortress, all to gain the legendary Serum. At last, the prize is mine! I anoint myself with the Serum of Illumination and wait for the mysteries of the universe to be revealed. Nothing happens. My hair is a little shinier though. What the hell is going on?

All sense of reference is gone.

his kind of deception is rampant in marketing. People come to a point where on the surface they ignore the name but at a deeper level accept what is being said. Shampoo is to bondage as apples are to Pakistan, but it makes sense if you don’t think about it. Anything makes sense if you don’t think, and the subconscious forges a connection. It’s possible to sidestep the lie by paying attention; unfortunately we read everything we look at and can’t be aware all the time. I’m something of a cultural hermit so the absurdity is more shocking and I notice, but we all stop noticing awfully quick

Why should advertisers want to associate their products with Science, or Sex, or the Rich and Famous? On the surface it might seem these things are simply exciting, so by association the product becomes exciting and thus more attractive. This may be true to an extent, and no doubt a variety of forces are at work in modern advertising. I believe the biggest impact of ads is not from simple excitement, however, but from something much more basic and complex. Advertisement is the basis of a new, American religion; a religion in which celebrities are deities, hair products are sacraments, and the final goal is material or sexual success.

Advertisements and the media set up the conditions for this “religion” in two ways: first, the media makes the rich, the famous, and the powerful into deities by glorifying them in popular entertainment. Second, advertisers, through false naming (as above) and celebrity endorsements, create associations between their products and both celebrities and the consumer. Thus, the consumer can use those products as an intermediary to reach the divine (celebrity).

One might ask how there could be a new American religion since modern man has no dealings with spirits - he doesn’t even believe in spirits. Our culture has, it is true, abandoned spirituality. We talk about it a lot but the words are empty. There is no imminent sense of another, different reality interwoven with this one.

But belief in the supernatural is a natural thing (it’s a joke!). There is a deep desire to look for the Other and ascribe power to it. So much so that we inevitably have faith in something, in spite of our best atheistic efforts. In fact, the supernatural in America is only thinly veiled, but self-deception is easy and most people don’t know the Other is still here. Anything can be functionally supernatural if it is sufficiently distant from us and seen as a repository of power – it must simply be outside the ‘natural order’ of our daily lives. Examples are:

Science
Medicine
The Famous (typically Movie Stars and Rock Stars)
The Cultural Elite
Drugs
Government

The increasing specialization of our culture means an average man has no dealings with science, high culture, or the government, like he might have 100 years ago. He has been disenfranchised, and these areas have become incomprehensible (supernatural) to him. The media heightens the effect by focusing on and fawning over the rich and powerful. The result: all of the above are transcendent. They can be good or evil - it makes no difference. They are absolute in our minds, unaffected by causality and the material. The Scientist bends reality to his will. The Famous live above the law and can do anything. Drugs have an irresistible strength, whether to enlighten or corrupt. The Wealthy control the world. These are our gods, and the stories we tell about them, on TV, in magazines and newspapers, are our myths.

Thus the modern pagan. We have a fruit basket of celebrity gods: any flavor you like.. When we go to the store and get ready to make fruit salad, that’s when the magic happens.

Why are celebrity endorsements effective? They are a form of magic. The celebrity probably knows less about the product than you do. Why will having Johnny Depp’s name on my Rogaine make it work better when Johnny Depp uses some cutting edge $5,000 Japanese hair laser and has never touched a bottle of Rogaine? Johnny Depp is not a person; Johnny Depp is a god. The supernatural is controlled through it’s name (this is an ancient principle of magic, present in every magical system), and by using Rogain I am literally applying a name of power to myself. Through name and ritual I am controlling the transcendence that is Johnny, in order to grow more hair.

The same ideas apply to the rest of the product list. When I buy “Cationic Hydration Interlink Ceramic: Ionic Far Infrared Shine Infusion Thermal Polishing Spray”, it is not because I understand the science behind the name and know it will work. If I understood science I would realize the name is bullshit. I am invoking the Other by reciting it’s names, so I might better cleanse and condition.

I’m being somewhat facetious; we don’t invoke the supernatural just to improve our coiffure. The new American religion has a dual nature. On the one hand are magical associations between the transcendent and consumer products. On the other hand are magical associations between consumer products and the real objects of our desire, mostly Sex, Money, and Power.

Rogain is a talisman, or sacrament. An example from another culture may be helpful. A Wiccan wants to improve his sweet potato crop this year. His religion tells him there is a relationship between quartz and fertility, so he must use a quartz rock to make his field productive. The quartz alone is not enough, however. It has provided the right conditions, but there must be a source of energy for the crystal to transmute. Our wiccan invokes the gods of the mountain, writing their names on the quartz. He can thus, through the quartz, use the strength of the gods on his potatoes.

A more modern example is Holy Communion. Let’s suppose a catholic had an affair with his secretary, and he wants to be forgiven. The bread and wine of the host are Types of Christ’s body and blood, and are thus related to his own body and his venial sin. Again, the bread and wine alone are insufficient – they are merely a vehicle. They are imbued with Divine power through the ritual actions of the priest which can then be applied to the supplicant.

We do the same. Countless hours of advertising have created the necessary relationships. E.g. cosmetics and perfume = sex, beer = sex, cars = sex / money / power (something this expensive has to be versatile to justify the cost), and so on. Let’s say what I really want is sex. There is a magical relationship between hair care and sex (established by TV spots with women applying shampoo and moaning orgasmically), so I set out to buy some hair gel. I get to the store and see a bottle of goop endorsed by Tyra Banks. Tyra banks is especially potent in my particular theology, and her name is on the bottle, so her power is controlled and contained within. Since the hair gel is connected both to my goal and the power needed to achieve that goal, it can function as an intermediary, i.e. a sacrament. I buy the goop, and can now apply Tyra’s power to myself in order to get laid.

Current mood: angry I’m kind of angry.  I have been taking fluoxetine (Prozac) for a couple months, ostensibly for depression.  The psychiatrist was quick to prescribe this after talking with me for about 5 minutes.  I asked about the effects, side effects, etc, and the way it was described it sounded like little candy pills.  I might get a headache for a day or two, but then I would feel completely normal, like I wasn’t taking anything, except I would no longer be depressed.

My first inkling that something wasn’t quite right were the alegedly non-existent side effects.  I felt less depressed? (this is a hard thing to quantify), but I couldn’t think straight, my vision got funny (things looked like they were subtly waving or melting), my stomach was shot, and I was tired all the time.  This tapered off some after a month, but never went away entirely.  I mentioned this to the doctor, and he told me pretty flatly these things were not from the fluoxetine.  A few days ago, I yet again forgot something at work, and decided to look up the side effects myself.  The list is long and unpleasant.  More significantly, this stuff regularly and consistently causes significant brain damage.  Your seratonin neurons twist up into corkscrew shapes, then shrivel up and die.  This is an accepted fact in the psychiatric community, but is never discussed.

Apart from any other possible side effects (which I was essentially told didn’t exist), I feel like the doctor should have mentioned the brain damage before blithely prescribing this stuff.  I no doubt have enough holes in my brain as it is; I’d like to hang on to what I do have.  Coincidentally, I have stopped taking it for several days now, and not only do I feel much better physically, but also less depressed.

The physical effects do get better.  My current theory, however, is that the drug burns out and kills the sytem it is stimulating, so the stimulation is countered somewhat by a reduction in neurons.  If anyone is taking this, or another SSRI (they are apparently similar in the damage they cause), please be aware of everything it is doing when you weigh the potential benefits.

The diary of some guy who had his buddy drill a hole in his skull. It’s supposed to expand consciousness by increasing blood/brain volume or some other such bullocks. It’s pretty interesting though, in a dark, perverted kind of way.

Current mood: amused

      Caffeine              Guaranine
    

Quote from a guarana energy product, as per Johns observation yesterday:

“Guaranine and the other alkaloids have muscle-relaxant and diuretic properties (2,3,4,7). Guaranine is an alkaloid similar to the theine of tea and caffeine of coffee (2,4).

Case studies have indicated that guarana acts in a different way from caffeine and produces none of the undesirable side-effects (1).

Results of a trial comparing guarana and caffeine found that guarana had a strong and consistent positive effect on reported disposition and performance.”

Now, look very carefully at the caffeine and guaranine molecules above. Caffeine and guaranine seem to have the same chemical structure, but we know better thanks to the helpful marketing team at herbal energy co. Not only is guaranine a different substance, it even has a different mode of action (caffeine competively binds with adenosine, so maybe guaranine binds competitively instead).

This is quite mysterious.. what could explain the different mechanism of action if not the chemical structure? I fancy myself a bit of a scientist, so I would like to propose a theory. First, note that carbon is porous and very absorbtive. Caffeine is synthesized in nasty factories, where the carbon atoms soak up Bad Mojo*. Bad Mojo is medically proven to cause vasodilation**, hence the caffeine headache. Guarana, on the other hand, grows in the jungle, where it is surrounded by cool things like Tigers and the Spirits of Dead Shaman. It only absorbs Good Mojo and therefore has no side effects.

* See Feltz A. et al. Effects of Etheric Vibrations on the Intra-Neural Messaging Cascade for a technical definition of Bad Mojo.

**A famous series of experiments in the 60’s established a causal link between Mojo and arterial tonicity. See A. Hoffman et al. Aural Manipulation of Smooth Muscle