Hot off the Press: Wine snobs taking over my favorite book store edition

Mexico City's traffic woes are compounded by too many cars, too few roads, and protesters: http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-fg-mexico-protest12-2009nov12,0,3029785.story. Imagine what LA would look like if this country had a collective conscience.

Hopefully, this will be the only time I report any movie news. There is apparently an attempt to make a domestic version of the 2003 Korean film Oldboy: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/the_big_picture/2009/11/hollywoods-oldboy-remake-gets-a-new-lease-on-life.html. Pardon my moment of cinema snobbery, but I've seen Oldboy and its demented twists. It's a good movie, but the thought of it made me ill for days afterward (maybe because of all the Pabst Ice I drank while watching it). The world is fucked up enough with one version of Oldboy, so please don't spoil a good thing by remaking it.

Two Germans, who were imprisoned for murder, are suing Wikipedia in an effort to have their names removed from site. German law apparently allows for the names of criminals to be suppressed in news accounts after they has done their time. But that doesn't gel well with the First Amendment in the US: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/13/us/13wiki.html?_r=1&ref=us. I'm very surprised Germans would grant this kind of immunity.

A recent outbreak of E. Coli has been traced to a slaughterhouse that stopped testing its products for the pathogen years ago: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/13/us/13ecoli.html?ref=us. The FDA does not require meat companies to test for E. Coli, so meat producers don't do it. Here's a tasty quote from the article:

The New York Times reported last month in an article about a surge in E. coli outbreaks in ground beef, which have now reached 18 since 2007, that the beef trimmings commonly used to make ground beef are more susceptible to contamination because the pathogen thrives in cattle feces that can get smeared on the surfaces of whole cuts of meat.

But while slaughterhouses seek to limit such contamination, and conduct their own testing for the pathogen, they have resisted independent testing by grinders for fear that it would cause expanded recalls.

Let's see: should we dig into our profit margin and have our meat tested, or keep the money and maybe kill people? Another reason why I'm a vegetarian.

School children in one Spanish region are being taught the art of "self-love": http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8358629.stm.

Text from lobbyists has found its way into the capital hill debates on health care on more than one occasion: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/us/politics/15health.html?_r=1&hp=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1258276396-eC/QwrURB6wPhpN95OPfQQ.

Here's a book review/essay on Jonathan Safran Foer's latest book, Eating Animals, which appears to be a memoir-esque study on the ethics of eating meat, the meat industry, and vegetarianism (Foer is a vegetarian): http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/books/review/Schuessler-t.html?_r=1. I might check it out. I didn't care for Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, a book everyone else couldn't stop raving about, so I want to see what his nonfiction is like.

As if there's not enough alcohol available in downtown Iowa City, Prairie Lights now has a wine bar: http://www.press-citizen.com/article/20091116/NEWS01/911160306/1079. A book store that sells wine, eh? This chafes me for some reason, and not just because I'm a beer drinker.

A team of researchers at the University of Rochester say that baby boys exposed to high doses of phthalate, a chemical used in plastic, "went on to be less likely to play with boys' toys like cars or to join in rough and tumble games," in affect making them more feminine: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8361863.stm.