yoohoo

Yesterday afternoon I drove two weeks' worth of recycling to the recycling center downtown. For some reason, the city of Reno picks up only glass, plastic, aluminum, and newspapers -- so if you've got cardboard or mixed paper, you've got to take it downtown. Forget about recycling motor oil or batteries. Oddly, the recycling center in Eustis, Maine (population 800), is far better than the one in Reno (population 200,000). Go figure.

As I was dumping empties of various microbrews into the glass dumpster, I noticed that the only bottles already in there were empty bottles of Yoohoo. Hundreds of them. I can only assume that they all came from a single source. Was this a single individual drinking all that Yoohoo? A family? How must it feel to subsist entirely on Yoohoo? Ingredients: water, dairy whey, high fructose corn syrup, corn syrup solids, cocoa (processed wtih potassium carbonate), partially hydrogenated soybean oil, sodium caseinate, salt, tricalcium phosphate, dipotassium phosphate, xanthum gum, guar gum, monoglycerides and diglycerides, vanillin, soy lechitin, calcium ascorbate, "natural flavor" (whatever that means), vitamin A palmiate, niacinamide, and riboflavin. I can only imagine the bloated, slightly euphoric, mostly nauseous feeling of an all-Yoohoo diet. Blech.

I was going to post today about World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz, who arranged for his girlfriend, Shaha Riza, a staffer at the World Bank, to receive an annual salary of over $193,590 a year, tax-free, making her the highest-paid employee at the State Department (more than Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice). But then I thought that pointing out the brazen corruption of yet another Bush administration senior official seemed kind of gratuitous. And really, it's the Yoohoo questions that are most present in my mind.