The Ad Runs!

The “objectionable” photo in the ad I tried to run on Facebook was modified to fall within their standards.

Here’s the version of the ad which was approved. 

Same image but with the color taken out.  It would be interesting to know if this was approved by the same person who rejected the earlier ad, or if another person with a bit more open frame of mind OK’d this one.

No sense of humor

Today I was shocked to discover that Facebook, or at least some of the people who work there are far too serious … perhaps even to the extent of being prudish.

This all began several months ago, when I created a group on Facebook called I used to have a bellybutton and described it as a just for fun – totally pointless group to encourage others to post true facts which don’t make any sense. (I might add that I “lost” my own BB a couple of years ago during major surgery and occasionally joke about my “loss”.)

Recently, I decided to promote this group out of curiosity to see how many other people also might share my condition.

I applied to Facebook to run an ad promoting the group and displaying the above photo only to have it rejected with the following explanation:

The image of this ad is either irrelevant or inappropriate. Per sections 3 and 8 of Facebook's Advertising Guidelines, the image on your ad should be relevant and appropriate to the item being advertised. Images that are overly explicit, provocative, or that reveal too much skin are not allowed. Images that may either degrade or idealize any health condition or body type are also not allowed.

I didn’t particularly feel that the image was too risqué, however, I changed the picture and tried again with the following ad:

Again, the ad was rejected on the same grounds.

To me, the whole idea of seeing if there are others who share my condition was a bit of a lark, but the reactions of the people who run Facebook’s ads seems to me exceedingly conservative.

What do you think?

Fighting Ecology

Michael Phillips has written a blog encouraging us to fight Ecology, in which he urges us to do things which are inconvenient for ecologists.

While I am a sort of rebel at heart, and have committed some utterly stupid things in my life because I resented being told what to do, I don't feel I can wholeheartedly endorse Phillip's position.

When he points out that some of the things which have been done in the name of ecology which have produced negative effects, such as the increase in the world's affilictions for malaria in underdeveloped countries because DDT has been banned worldwide, I agree.

But when it comes to increasing the use of Styrofoam simply because ecologists are trying to ban them, I feel that is senseless.

Banning airports, which restrict result in travel restrictions, and congestion in airports, may not be convenient to Phillips, but at the same time, I believe that if there are costs which affect others in expanded airports (such as noise, air pollution, greater car traffic congestion) these costs need to be met and paid for by the people who directly benefit from the expansion.

It is not always easy to get the benefit users to pay for all the costs of a particular service, and it is quite likely that some of the costs may not even be known until many years after something has been put into place, but that doesn't mean that we need to place roadblocks into the path of development simply because we cannot foresee the dangers which lie in the future.

In the end I object to and resist laws imposed by politicians based on vested interests, either for or against specific interests and I fear we have far too many laws which do exactly this.

Somewhere I remember reading about a proposition that ALL LAWS should automatically expire after a certain period of time unless they are specifically renewed by the legislators. This could go a long way in at least providing a way to escape from many of the senseless laws that do more harm than good, or benefit only specific vested interests which are not apparent when the laws were passed.

Pro Commerce: This puts it together

Pro Commerce: This puts it together

Michael Phillips points out that most young people tend to favor socialism over capitalism (or commerce), tending to think of the latter as inherently evil.

The problem, in my opinion, is not that capitalism is inherently evil, but rather that what is popularly known as capitalism is not what true free-market capitalism is -- or could -- be.

The US is popularly thought of as the foremost modle of a free ecomomy, but the truth is that is is not -- and has NEVER been -- a free market economy (FME), and it is my guess that virtually all of the defects which are attributed to the FME are actually due to attempts to control the economy rather than letting natural forces run their course.

Sample Blog with Windows Live Writer

This is an effort to see what can be accomplished in this blog using Windows Live Writer.

We can add photos and manipulate them in several ways.

The text can be manipulated also and tables can be added

left	right
1	11

Devaluation in the works?

In watching the TV reports of the US budget along with all the commentary and analysis I was suddenly stuck by an odd realization: This year is two thousand nine, next year is twenty-ten. What happened to the other one thousand nine hundred and eighty (2000 less 20)?

I realize that this is an acceptable alternative way of speaking about the year, but still it strikes me a bit odd that for the first 9 years of this centry we used one form and then in the 10th year we switch to another. Is there any rational explanation for this?

There's another thing that occurred to me in mulling this over. Maybe, this is the way the politicians plan to deal with the massive debt and deficits which the US government is running and planning. Divide a trillion by 100 and it becomes 10 billion. Doesn't sound quite as bad, does it?

Is the US dollar going to be devalued during the Obama administration?

7 million miles of toothpaste wasted!

There's a web site that deals exclusively with toothpaste, if you're interested in picking up a lot of trivia about a very common household commodity: Toothpasteworld - World's Largest Toothpaste Collection. Also see Toothpaste in Wikipedia

Colgate, Proctor and Gamble, GlaxoSmithKline, and Unilever, which manufacture the major brands sold around the world, are among the largest companies on the globe today.

If you stop to think about it, there is an incredible about of toothpaste consumed every day.

I don't know if anyone has ever tried to calculate the actual consumption but let's make a rough attempt. In almost every ad and photo you see of toothpaste in use, a strip of about 1inch is spread on the brush. At this moment, the world population is somewhere over 6.8 billion people. If we suppose that only 25% of the people in the world use toothpaste, and that they only brush one time per day, the world consumption of toothpaste is a strip which measures some 26, 830 miles EVERY DAY!

That's more than one complete circumference of the globe.

What's the point of this?

From my own experience, I've discovered that you don't need 1" of toothpaste to effectively brush your teeth. In fact, I even have my doubts if you really need it at all, so long as you do brush your teeth regularly. But, in my own case I have found that just 1/4" of toothpaste does a very nice and refreshing job of cleaning in my mouth.

So, if the world's population were to reduce their use of this product to the level I have found effective, we could conserve all the resources and energy which is needed to make 20,123 miles of toothpaste each day. The annual savings would me more than 7 million miles of toothpaste.

Just one simple, small change which is within the capacity of everyone without any cost or inconvenience could add up to significant impact.

About Cantaloupe and dietary fiber

For years I've been hearing about dietary fiber which is also called roughage or bulk.

My American Heritage Dictionary define this as:

Coarse, indigestible plant matter, consisting primarily of polysaccharides such
as cellulose, that when eaten stimulates intestinal peristalsis.

I can remember family members who had problems with their digestion buying something in the pharmacy which looked to me to be nothing more than some kind of seed (I believe the product was called Metamucil, or something similar).

What stuck me as odd then, and even now was that many people I know who have had a problem with their digestion, always removed the seeds when they ate watermelon (Citrullus lanatus), whereas I simply swallowed them whole whenever I encountered them.

If our body actually needs a certain amount of indigestible plant matter, it didn't make much sense to remove them from what we ate, especially if they weren't unpleasant or difficult to ingest.

Over the past few years, I've started eating the seeds of cantaloupe (Cucumis melo var. reticulatus)too, also without chewing. When I first tried it, they seemed a bit repulsive as I scooped up a spoonful from the center of the fruit, mostly due to their "strange" appearance and the fact that -- by custom -- I had previously consider them to be garbage.

Now that I've become accustomed to eating them, I consider them to be the most delectable part of the fruit. The membrane which surrounds them is generally quite juicy and has a much more intense flavor than the remainder of the flesh.

On top of everything, I believe I'm helping my intestinal processes and have never had a single one one sprout while still inside me.