I am proud to announce that Taken For Ranted will soon be branching out from t-shirts into a line of all-natural products. I am working hard on a line of soups made with all-natural ingredients. Details are still in the making, but all of our products will boast only the finest ingredients:

• Organic, pesticide-free castor bean.We have sourced our wild castor bean from a Texas location that uses no pesticides or chemical fertilizers.
• Organically-grown, genuine Greek hemlock. The same stuff recommended by Socrates! Never grown with anything but all-natural pesticides.
• Pure Missouri lead. Our products will contain only the finest all-nautral lead from the Missouri Lead Belt. This product is ultra-purified to get rid of any contaminants.
• Genuine, pure arsenic from the High Sierra. The Sierra contain some of the highest concentrations of arsenic. Our products are filtered to remove organic materials to leave us with only the purest, highest-grade, all-natural arsenic, straight from the idyllic hills of California’s High Sierra.
• Hormone-free, free-range rattlesnake venom. We harvest our venom from nothing but rattlers grown in the fresh air of the Sonoran Desert.

So remember, these products are pesticide-free and are completely natural! They must be good for you, right? Yum yum. Be healthy! Live natural!

Popularity: 11% [?]

Eighteen dollars per gallon and rising? Could it be that something that bad for the environment is also that expensive? Yep, that’s right baby! That’s what you’ll be paying for water if you drink out of plastic bottles. (more…)

Popularity: 5% [?]

Factoids from the New York Times on alchohol consumption:

1. 17% of all alchohol expenditure is on alchohol consumed by underage drinkers
2. rougly 20% of all alchohol expenditure is on alchohol consumed by problem drinkers (my calculation based on numbers given in the NYT).
3. “people who begin drinking before age 15 are four times as likely to become dependent on alcohol as those who start after they turn 21.”

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Popularity: 6% [?]

A friend complained to me on the phone the other day that at current prices (then $1.69 per pound in his store), he could not afford to buy apples. In fact, many American families cannot afford to buy fruits and vegetables. Somehow, though, they can afford Coke, Pepsi and Doritos. No doubt, they are partly to blame for their priorities, but the person in question is not someone who has a cell phone, broadband internet or cable television. He does not have a lot of electronics, never eats in restaurants and works hard. What about people like him? At least in part, one most point to American government farm subsidies that encourage people to eat unhealthy foods and do little or nothing to encourage healthy eating.
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Popularity: 9% [?]