USEDCARSALESMAN

Vegetarianism is Good (And May Get Even Better When You Use Blood and Saliva Tests To Monitor Your Health)

Usedcarsalesman is going on three of the last four years as a Vegetarian (he had a year-long lapse in 2005, but returned in 2006). Used didn't really start with Vegetarianism because he hated the idea of killing and eating chickens, bulls, pigs and other livestock. Actually, Used thought those chickens, bulls and pigs were rather tasty. And, Used didn't start with a vegetarian diet because it was better for the environment or something like that. Rather, Usedcarsalesan began a vegetarian diet for the following selfish and somewhat speculative reason: he believed that it would help to optimally maintain his long-term health.

Anyway, in his own case, Usedcarsalesman came up with some interesting findings related to his vegetarian diet. He'll now do a "pro-versus-con," CNET-style review like Vegetarianism was a new High Definition big screen TV.

Pros:

• Cholesterol plummets. Usedcarsalesman didn't have high-cholesterol to begin with (still, he did test at 142, down from a more typical 180s pre-veg cholesterol level test). But, if you an older person, have high cholesterol and the drugs aren't working and you are on your last legs and want to live, seriously consider Vegetarianism.
• Also, kidney function apparently improves -- kidney-function tests such as Blood Urea Nitrogen and Creatinine and Glomerular Filtration Rate (GFR) all improved remarkably in Usedcarsaleman. Used was concerned he might have been showing early stages of kidney disease prior to beginning Vegetarianism due to test results of the aforementioned that were borderline out-of-range. As a vegetarian, Used found these aforementioned tests numbers all stabilize to optimum "adult" levels.
• Also, Usedcarsalesman found that his hormonal levels were all maintained after becoming vegetarian; ie., there was no pronounced drop in Testosterone, DHEA, etc as demonstrated by blood chemistry tests "pre-veg" and "during-veg." (Note: Usedcarsalesan admits that his conclusions here regarding his cholesterol levels, kidney function, hormonal levels as they relate to a vegetarian diet are not "scientific;" so, reader beware!)

Cons:

• However, you're going to want to keep an eye on your Red Blood Cell Count and Your White Blood Cell Count if you are a Vegetarian. 'Used' found that his Red Blood Cell Count had fallen out of the control range since he had become a Vegetarian. Why? Likely, because there was no or minimal iron in his Vegetarian diet (no egg yolks, dark green vegetables, etc) or in his supplementation and, as such, his bone marrow didn't have the mineral it needed to produce new Red Blood Cells. Used adjusted his diet to include more iron-rich foods and supplemented with moderate amounts of iron; he, then, noticed a pronounced boost in energy, less fatigue, and greatly enhanced athleticism (keep in mind, red blood cells carry oxygen; if you're short on red blood cells, then you may experience shortness of breath during exercise, chronic fatigue at work, etc.)
• Also, Used's white blood cell count (WBC) was in range, but on the low end of the scale. Low WBC count may indicate slight malnutrition and inadequate amino acid intake due to inconsistent protein quality; ie., Used might not have been getting the full range of amino acids from his Vegetarian diet because the protein he consumed may have been somewhat incomplete (he was eating protein containing foods, say nuts, beans etc. but they were not adequately balanced enough with grains etc). And, though eggs and milk tended to provide more complete protein (especially eggs) who wanted to eat such foods all the time? Since, Used had been getting sick a lot, with head colds, influenza etc., he could reasonably speculate that his low WBC count might be a contributing factor and had allowed these infections to occur.

So Usedcarsalesman saw that he needed to stick with Vegetarianism, due its apparent benefits, but add a little iron and supplement with decent quality, full-amino acid spectrum, vegetarian protein. He decided to go with MetRx-styled complete protein shakes using a mix by Puritan's Pride. Needless to say, his incidence of sickness has declined remarkably since, just by having one of these shakes every few days. Used, of course, must test and confirm his presumed Red and White Blood Cell count increases in the future. But, regardless of existing data, Usedcarsalesman currently notices a very positive difference in his overall health after supplementing his Vegetarian Diet with iron and adding a complete protein shake (2 Times per Week) to his vegetarian menu.

Usedcarsalesman obtained the aforementioned blood chemistry information on himself through his HMO and the aid of willing Medical Doctors there. 'Used' also supplemented these tests with saliva-based tests (comparable to blood tests) from companies such as BodyBalance. HMO based blood chemistry tests are one thing (covered as part of you insurance premiums); but, paying out of pocket for saliva-based tests can get a bit expensive if you are taking them regularly. Nevertheless, if you are a strict Vegetarian like Usedcarsalesman (or the even more hardcore, "Vegan") good for you; But, 'Used' suggests to Vegans, and other Vegetarians like himself, that they seriously consider having regular blood chemistry and saliva-based tests done to shore up any dietary deficiencies and insure their optimal health.

Had to go underground for 6 months. Sorry.

Like a Fox evading red-coated hunters, Usedcarsalesman dove in a hole for 6 months to leave the critical view of certain unspecified, non-regular readers (...Its a long story). But, now, he's back and better than ever: Brighter, Bolder, Wider-Collar, More Gold!

Will be posting again regularly, every week or so, and will give advanced notice if needing to go South-of-the-Border, Down-Under, or otherwise "out of visual range" for an extended period.

Satellite Telephone Service A Better Idea in the Wake of Katrina

At one time in the late 1990s, Usedcarsalesman worked for a certain Wall Street investment firm that leased 6 floors worth of office space in the World Trade Center; the company generally used said space, with its accompanying auditorium for employee training purposes.

In July 1999, Usedcarsalesman was working for the company out of a Washington D.C.-area branch office and was told that he would have to go to NYC and attend a training session at The Twin Towers. Transportation and expenses would be covered and he'd basically get to meet and train with fellow employees from all over the U.S.; he and the others would get put up for a little more than a week in July at a mid-town hotel and get shuttled down to the Trade Center each day. Usedcarsalesman was generally looking forward to it and it turned out to be an enjoyable experience.

The recent events involving Hurricane Katrina have made Usedcarsalesman recall some of the specifics from his time in company training in July, 1999 at the World Trade Center. You might ask, "is this recollection caused by the terrorist attacks? The fact that, 15 months after you were there in NYC, the World Trade Center and surrounding buildings were destroyed in the events of September 11, 2001? Actually, Usedcarsalesman would say, "no, my recall actually relates to a company-sponsored "Contest" we had during this July, 1999 NYC training session."

The contest of which Usedcarsalesman is speaking was called the "Stock Presentation Contest." We had approximately 250 people in this training class and each of us was asked to present a stock of our choosing to the other members of the class. Usedcarsalesman chose Iridium, the satellite-telephone company -- a company which he had a bit of an unjustified fascination with (and, which is currently enjoying a demand explosion in the wake of Hurricane Katrina).

The large, aforementioned training class was broken in to 12 groups, based on the region of the country in which you were from. The 12 winners from those groups would then go to the auditorium, mid-level in the South Tower of the World Trade Center and pitch their stocks to a large room full of classmates. The managers running the class would rate each presentation and an overall winner would be chosen.

So Usedcarsalesman was in one of the 12 groups; he pitched his stock, did a good job and became one of the 12 that was to make a presentation to the entire class of 250 in the large Auditorium. In the initial presentation, Usedcarsalesman had done the job of explaining the merits of the satellite telephone and how a stock like Iridium was going to grow because its product could do things that existing cellular technology could not. Yours truly did well selling the stock to my classmates representing the heavily urbanized, deep-pocketed mid-Atlantic group. Now, it was on to the big presentation in front of a more diverse group of people from all over the United States.

Usedcarsalesman figured that to win overall, he'd obviously want to win the audience better than the others presenting -- this might kind of clue the judges in to which presentation registered with listeners the most. Therefore, Usedcarsalesman figured he needed to modify his presentation slightly to take account of a larger, more geographically diverse audience now before him.  Knowing that he was going to be facing an audience that now included people from the west coast and the southern U.S., Usedcarsalesman thought, "these people in the west and south already have cellular phones...what would make a company providing satellite phone service appealing to them?" The only thing new he could come up with was "Staying on top of business during a Disaster."

So Usedcarsalesman did the following: he got up in front of this class full of people from all over the United States during the big, safe, go-go bull market of the 1990s and pitched not "Greed," but "Fear!?" As part of his Iridium presentation, he said, "if you live in the south or you live on the west coast and you are ever faced with Hurricanes, Tornadoes, Earthquakes which destroy your regions' communications infrastructure, you can still do business using your Iridium Satellite Telephone... so, Iridium stock will do great!"

Well, in 1999, Usedcarsalesman's pitch for Iridium ended up landing him in 3rd place in a class of 250, which wasn't bad. The 1st place speaker pitched Budweiser stock; 2nd place pitched IBM. So maybe satellite-telephone provider, Iridium, was a little too exotic for business in the peaceful, go-go 1990s. And, he'll admit, the Iridium Company definitely seemed like an expensive solution for a problem that hadn't really reared its head. Of course, Iridium went bankrupt and its billions in assets were purchased a few years later for approximately 25 million.

However, since "Katrina," the stocks and sales levels of Satellite Telephone providers have taken off. So Usedcarsalesman hopes somebody is up in NYC pitching Iridium, Globalstar and other satellite-phone providers like it today; that somebody would likely win a "Stock Presentation" contest this go around!

Katrina: Unfortunate Rumors

Usedcarsalesman speculates that the situation in New Orleans is a bit worse than most people are currently led to believe (understandably, the Newspapers and TV Networks are probably a bit cautious about painting too grim a picture). Although this is just hearsay, it comes by way of a source that I believe to be reliable:

"(from New Orleans)...First off, they expect the death count to be in the tens of thousands...People went to their attics, and unless they had an axe to cut their way out, they drowned, or are stuck...At morgues and cemeteries bodies are being pulled up, and there are just floods of bodies floating everywhere.... Its so bad, that the rescue crews have a system where they go house to house, and in the houses where everyone is dead, they paint black over the door. Houses with survivors get a red mark...The looting is out of control. Gun and hunting stores are being broken into. People are shooting at police, and now are so desperate, even HOSPITALS are being looted for food and water...And, there are real alligator or poison snake problems as well (Water Moccasins, I guess)...The water that is flooding the city has become diseased from all the death and sewage, causing other sickness and possible death, as well as death from the 100 degree weather and humidity...All gas and electricity is off. people are sleeping on the highways...50% of New Orleans is uninsured...People are running out of food and water, and have no cars or gas to get to places WITH such things...A lot of the outlying areas are stuck and those people cant get out because too many trees have fallen on the roads."

Help these folks in any way that you can!

Note, June 23, 2007:  The immediate death toll of all who died in Katrina has been calculated as being approximately 1300-1800 persons depending on the source.  Testimony before the U.S. Congress suggests that Katrina's delayed after-effects on public health likely caused a total of over 4,000 deaths in the New Orleans area

The Theater Unlimited Work-Shop in Hollywood, Ca.

Usedcarsalesman is participating in a work-shop for actors, writers and directors that was organized by his friends, screen-writer, Ray Lopez and director, Keith Hammons. Their work-shop currently takes place at "Theater Unlimited" at Lankershim and Camarillo in North Hollywood, Ca. and performs 3 new scenes every Sunday evening at 9pm (Usedcarsalesman wants to add that he is impressed by how the site, Craig's List, may have helped Ray and Keith a great deal in forming and managing this large, industry-specific working group;  If Craig'sList can get people together on something arts related, it can probably get people together on just about anything.  It pays to use Craig'sList).
            
Before The Theater Unlimited Work-Shop, Usedcarsalesman was off to an expensive start training in Hollywood.  He had been in L.A. for a couple of years and, like many newcomers to the entertainment industry who were drawn to doing on-camera work, took advantage of the numerous dramatic scene-study acting classes offered by the area's renowned instructors. Typically, these classes met once a week and the monthly cost to him averaged about $250 per month for each class.

               

A typical dramatic class for an actor -- Usedcarsalesman, in this case -- would involve performing a short 3-5 minute scene (with or without partners) which he had selected during the previous week; often times the scene was something that thousands of actors had performed thousands of times or was a scene from a too familiar film or television program.  Prior to performing, the actor would essentially have to "direct himself" (there was no "second-person" director with a visual idea of how he or she wanted this scene to look). Then, he'd perform the scene after self-direction and the class instructor would generally make comments about what he or she liked or not and what you needed to work on. Basically, the instructors "directed" you "after-the-fact," usually with the vigor of a certain, dark-haired, male, Reality-TV celebrity of British descent; and, the instructors would generally not assist in the area of scene selection.

                  

As far as Usedcarsalesman could tell, this "process" was par-for-the-course for acting classes in Hollywood (nonetheless, he did find that the classes he took here in L.A. were still immensely valuable, with instructors often providing him with performance insights that were worth many times the price of the courses and which an actor really couldn't get anywhere else). 

                        

However, The Theatre Unlimited Work-Shop-- versus the aforementioned format of traditional, expensive and autocratically-led scene-study classes in L.A. -- seems an evolved "animal."  Still a peer "creature," just cheaper and more economically shrewd.  For example, monthly costs for each Theatre Unlimited member run 1/6 the price of a traditional scene-study class. And there is no option of, "because-I-was-so-busy-working-this-week-I'll-just-sit-back-and-watch-while-somebody-else-performs." Everybody has to act in, write or direct a Work-Shop scene every week for the group to fully function.

                      

Usedcarsalesman will run through a typical week with the Work-Shop in the following:  At the beginning of each week, the group's screenwriter members each submit a 7 page scene that they have written; actor members are cast for the scene and each receives the "sides" (an emailed copy of the scene) early in the week; a director in the work-shop pairs with each screenwriter and organizes the physicality of the scene: it's look, interplay between characters, positioning of characters, use of props and its timing and pacing; when the Sunday work-shop meeting rolls around, the actors have memorized the scenes and, with help from the screenwriter, the director organizes the scene's operation for its performance that evening; The scenes are then performed. 

             

What's great about this Work-Shop process for actors is that they are dealing with fresh written material and are receiving great direction before the scene is ever done in front of an audience. And, the finished look of the scenes really shows.  Usedcarsalesman cannot say this was the case with traditional dramatic scene-study classes in Hollywood.
                      
The Theatre Unlimited Work-Shop also provides major value to its screenwriters. It enables a screenwriter to actually see his or her work performed each week, to actually see if what they imagined will trigger the emotional reaction or impact they are looking for.  Usedcarsalesman believes this is a great advance for screenwriters who often get together with other screenwriters and maybe do a read-through of each others work, but never get the "edge" of actually seeing their work performed in it's early stages.

               

The Work-Shop also benefits the member directors who find themselves confronting the weekly and uniquely "directorial" adrenaline rush of organizing actors around a fresh scene. Again, Usedcarsalesman is hard-pressed to think of a venue that enables directors to really hone their skills under such dynamic conditions. Normally, a director who wants to practice "directing" has to literally create work around himself or herself by way of producing, directing, writing, and recruiting actors for their own short film or seeing if they could get a gig directing a local stage play.  Both of these options, though useful, involve considerable effort beyond simply "directing" and certainly lack the dynamic characteristics of directing fresh, weekly scenes and regularly-changing working-partnerships.
                      
Finally, actors, writers and directors in the Work-Shop also have the advantage of having their Sunday performances videotaped. This allows all three types of participant to accumulate video material in to a "reel," a video copy of the work that they act, write or direct. Other than the minor costs involved with video reproductions, the Work-Shop itself, at present, costs each member only $40 dollars a month, and that's just to cover the fee for use of the theater.

                        

Personally, Usedcarsalesman would say that the value of the Ray and Keith's Theatre Unlimited Work-Shop is on par with some of the best acting classes that he's taken in L.A. And, for $40 a month, Usedcarsalesman feels like he is getting a ridiculous bargain.

More Efficient Emergency Medical Treatment

Usedcarsalesman hasn't written any comments since July 2 and here it is July 9, so his goal of keeping to the above "new post every 4 days, so read regularly!" subject-blurb kind of went out the window or at least took a temporary hiatus. He should actually have a partner "Usedcarsalesman" (/woman) or two who can continue to bring "truth" to the world if "yours-truly" is in any way incapacitated or if people otherwise seek a little variety.                  

Anyway what's his excuse for this delay?  Well, Usedcarsalesman had to go to the Kaiser-Permanente ER (in Los Angeles on Sunset Blvd.) about 9:30pm on the evening of July 7 to have a little "emergency oversight" done. He finally got out of the Kaiser ER on the morning of July 8th in one piece and with a substantially lighter wallet (he has health insurance through Kaiser Permanente and he was a bit surprised by the "deductible" a Kaiser member has to pay after a Kaiser Hospital ER visit vs. if he had gone to a non-Kaiser hospital ER). Needless to say, July 8 and most of today were spent picking up loose ends from July 7 in an effort to prevent the occurrences that led to my hospital visit that day.

Obviously, when you have a brush with the medical community outside of your normal doctors visits, you may tend to evaluate your surroundings and see where things could be more efficient, easier, and better for both Doctors and Patients. After his ER stay on July 7, Usedcarsalesman certainly thought of a few areas where technology could make the provision of medical treatment more efficient for myself and a generation of aging Baby-Boomers:

1. A small, inexpensive, portable solid-state electronic record of a person's medical history. The US military has been working on something like this for a while, you know, medical history incorporated in to modern dog-tags. Great idea, I know that I would definitely want one. Such complete medical information would give doctors a frame of reference regarding a patients display of symptoms, thus potentially cutting out some of the stress involved in making a diagnosis. Doctors would still have to test the patient to insure that nothing was overlooked as they were making their diagnosis, but they would clearly be in a less stressful position. Sure, to some extent this already exists with Medic Alert (call the number on the bracelet and somebody will tell you for what the wearer is currently receiving treatment). I'm talking, instead, about a total life story of medical treatment, including all the details, medications, tests etc.
2. Team-based Medical Treatment involving doctors living in Different World Time Zones. Frankly, when the worst happens and you need medical help, often times its going to be late at night or in the AM. If medical doctors partnered up using modern telecommunications equipment and teleconferencing gear, they could effectively always work daytime hours while providing their patients with near 24 hr emergency consultative service (think a partnership of physicians across Australia/New Zealand, The U.S./Canada, and The United Kingdom). This would also eliminate the early morning emergency pages they may occasionally receive. Physicians at an ER might more quickly directly contact physicians working within such a 24 hour framework, thus again taking some of the stress out of treating the patients before them. Obviously, such a partnership would require taking different rules and jurisdictions in to account, which would be no picnic. But, it might help patients and medical doctors in many cases.
3. An "On-Star" System for People. General Motors offers it's satellite-served, On-Star system as an accessory on their cars; it causes a satellite to locate your equipped car's position, communicate with the driver and dispatch help to him/her if an accident was detected. What about having such a system for people? Basically, such a system would constantly remotely monitor your condition using a sensor and signal transmission gear of some kind. If the "On Star for People" system detects a problem with one of its users, it notifies the HQ, attempts to call you by cell-phone and/or help is dispatched to your location. Something like that.
4. Bring the Doctor to the Paramedics/Patient, rather than vice versa- Ok, typically, a paramedic is going to have a doctor on the phone when he is treating a person in trouble. So the Doctor is, by phone, effectively able to oversee and advise treatment from his location at the hospital. But, using teleconference and tele-presence gear, you could effectively bring a doctor to the paramedics and the location of the patient and allow the Doctor to directly, physically treat the patient at the scene. To some extent this is already being attempted by the US military in an effort to speed surgical treatment on or near a battlefield. Civilian society could use it too.
5. A small alarm Device w/bio-sensor which alerts people in a wide area if a person is having a medical difficulty. Look, bracelets and jewelry are nice, but they are inanimate and require a passerby to come up and read the bejeweled item to find out what is wrong with the wearer; if the rescuing party is especially ambitious in his or her care of you, he or she may call the Medic Alert phone number listed on the bracelet and get more details about the wearer's condition. Usedcarsalesman says, if a person is on a city street and dying, he or she is not going to mind so much if a loud, electronic alarm sounds and a loud voice message plays from a device on his person saying "This man/woman/child has "Fill-in-Blank" Disease, please do not be alarmed and provide him with this or that assistance and he/she will gratefully pay you (PayPal) you $100 cash for a few minutes of inconvenience!!!. That kind of thing. Usedcarsalesman remembers the old U.Va. Sociology class, 'Kitty Genovese-" story, where a woman was getting murdered and yelling for help as people watched, but nobody came to her aid. Conclusion was that she should have yelled "Fire!" instead of help. Apparently, when peoples' property is at risk, they tend to take action (at least in NYC). So, Usedcarsalesman says put some money on the line and people will definitely come to your aid (in this case, no property at risk, but financial "property" to be gained).

Usedcarsalesman realizes that all of the aforementioned thoughts will be cheap and easy to implement. So, we'll give business and government 24 hours to work cooperatively to implement these changes, starting now. :)

Sports For Fans; Sports and Art For Athletes?

If Usedcarsalesman was a professional athlete he'd take every drug in the book to insure his competitive advantage. He'd use Human Growth Hormone and Steroids and even Insulin to gain muscle mass, he'd pop Amphetamines to improve reaction time, he'd dose Ritalin and Modafinil to improve intelligence and decision-making and he'd take an assortment of foreign drugs that would complement the aforementioned "hyper-pharmaceutical" cocktail. 

Although, he would have a vague idea that these drugs could be harmful to his long-term health, he would also know that pro-sports careers are inevitably short in duration, so use of these drugs wouldn't be in his system forever. He'd know that he was "drugging" to preserve his livelihood, advance his career and help his team. He'd sleep ok at night and so would, he suspects, most professional athletes.

Though Usedcarsalesman doesn't know too many professional athletes personally, he speculates that as athletes advance through the high school and college ranks of their respective sports, they see that certain things are "done" to improve athletic performance. 

Coaches may also make certain indirect demands: "Jim, the guy I need as a defensive-end in four weeks weighs 240lbs." Jim, the defensive-end, currently weighing in at 210lbs, gets the picture about what he needs to do. So, certain impressions may be made on athletes that stimulate their need to utilize performance drugs.

Of course the various Professional Sports Leagues, the Olympic Committee, The Tour De France all host what many speculate may amount to a pre-contest charade -- the side-stepping of various "legitimate drug tests" by one means or another in order for professional athletes to be around for the game.

Usedcarsalesman recalls that Andy Warhol once said that "Art is whatever you can get away with." It would seem that if the speculators are correct, Pro athletes may have to "get away with" quite a bit to stay at the top of their respective games. 

Thus, Usedcarsalesman might reasonably draw a conclusion -- if the aforementioned speculations have any merit -- that pro "Sports" as the fan sees them are just athletic contests with a winner, a loser.  

But from the Athlete's perspective, pro sports may be more a hybrid of Sport and Art.   You have the athletic contest, winners and losers of course.  But then you may also have an environment in which Warhol's definition of "Art" may come in to play:   pro athletes may -- some suspect -- have to "get away with" quite a bit pharmaceutical-wise to stay competitive within their respective field of endeavor.

So is this theoretical Sports and Art dynamic wrong? Shouldn't the public demand an end to the use of performance enhancing drugs? 

Usedcarsalesman doesn't know, really. He thinks that the public seems to grudgingly accept that when they are "paying" for seats at a sports arena, the people they will be watching are often pharmaceutical augmented in some fashion. 

He thinks where the public starts to raise questions is when an individual player's performance transcends the competition so completely (certain baseball players come to mind). Or, if say all NFL players from the 1970's era die of heart failure when they hit 55 years of age due to Cardiovascular trauma brought on by performance drug use. Those issues might cause the public to look at professional athletics and potential performance drug use more critically. 

Regardless, Pro sports does seem a reflection of the demands of society and of the athletic competition itself.  Those demands may require that the best athletes be artists of sorts also.

Maybe the Mojave Space Port is California's Next Silicon Valley

In the 1990s, people my folks age threw a lot of 401K money at .com stocks and development of the Internet in general. Usedcarsalesman guesses that the massive "roll-out" of the computer network in to people's every day lives was a big deal for Baby Boomers. They had gone to college pushing punch cards in to room-sized computers and the whole "connected-to-the-world- from-your-house" thing of the Internet was a dream come true.

Well, as a kid who grew up watching films like Wargames, Ferris Bueller, Weird Science or The Running Man (Arnold buys plane tickets using a keyboard connected to a TV in Maria Conchita Alonsos's character's apartment; the first depiction of e-commerce?) or reading books like Enders Game or Neuromancer, the concept of an individual imposing himself on the world by way of his connected computer already seemed kind of familiar. Frankly, oceans of 401k money or not, "cyberspace" and .coms didn't really do it for Usedcarsalesman in the 1990s. However, there was always another type of "space" that, in the back of his mind, he was curious about getting involved with or investing in. That's right..."outer space."

Last year, in June 2004, Usedcarsalesman drove up from L.A. early on a Sunday morning to see the first launch of SpaceShipOne at the Mojave Airport (later that day named the "Mojave Air and Spaceport," the first commercial space-port licensed by the FAA). 'Used' saw the crowd of almost 20,000 people and the apparent professional diversity of these people seemed almost representative of the chocolates in a Whitman's Sampler box.  He saw Cal Tech aerospace-nerds, Ribbon-covered-Edwards AFB staff, hardcore Star Trek marshmallow shaped fans, the odd shiny celebrity and assorted nutball locals wearing colorful SpaceShipOne T-shirts. Usedcarsalesman thinks about 4-5 regular-type people from L.A. were there, but he'll be liberal and say "10."

         

Anyway, the event was a very big deal that was really under most of the world's radar screen: SpaceShipOne didn't blow up; it took off, actually made it in to the vacuum of space and then landed on a runway in front of us an hour later. Usedcarsalesman was like holy cow!  And, then he was like "hmmm" (thinking) and all of these analogies started pouring through his head in Mojave like, "Northrop-Grumman is to IBM as Scaled Composites or Space Dev is to Microsoft," that kind of thing. And he continued to wonder, thinking, "could outer space-related companies be one of my age-group's big long-term investment plays, just as tech and bio-tech stocks enjoyed strong support from Boomer-aged investors?" 

                     

Usedcarsalesman will now hazard a guess and say "yes," at least to some extent. He thinks that these companies may evolve similarly to the way the Wright Brothers various companies evolved in the first 50 years of powered-aviation in the U.S.  These companies will grow, the practical application of their service will evolve and may become evident to many.  They will ultimately they get taken public, bought-out or merged over the space of 50+ years. 

               

So, Generation X'ers, get ready to park you 401k money in your investment adviser's latest choice of "AstroFund" around 2020 :)

         

Note: Usedcarsalesman doubts there will be a justifiable reason -- barring military conflict or some kind of semi-nationalistic "space race" the U.S. may engage in with China or other states -- for an investment boom/bust in these commercial aerospace ventures.  He thinks investments in these ventures will simply appreciate gradually over time.   

DARPA Exoskeletons: a Bell-Weather of Greater Insect Consumption By People?

When he was a kid, Usedcarsalesman often heard other kids say: "You-are-what-you-eat."  He doesn't know where they got this saying from. But since Usedcarsalesman has never heard people express opinions or show evidence to the contrary, the saying must be true (ha ha ;)

         

For the sake of this post, let's suspend disbelief a second time and count this next saying as "true": "you-eat-what-you-are." Meaning if you are a performance athlete, you eat performance foods; if you are rich person, you eat expensive food; if you are a health nut you eat healthy foods; if you are floating around in the International Space Station, you probably eat astronaut food.

            

What happens if Usedcarsalesman gets a little more literal with the concept of "you-eat-what you-are?" When the definition of who you "are" in the year 2040 is basically a 200lb insect -- a soldier or other person wearing a powered-exoskeleton? 

                  

This human-made, powered-exoskeleton technology is actually under development at DARPA (the U.S. lab for technology that sociable people are not going to use for 30 years).  The lab is going to have a working, powered exoskeleton in testing by 2005. And it will supposedly give its wearer an ant's power-to-weight ratio and enhanced speed, traits useful to a soldier on the battlefield and perhaps in the civilian world of the future (basically a wearer would look like a smaller, lighter and faster version of the Ripley character's Loader suit in -Aliens- film).

All very Interesting. But will -- dare Usedcarsalesman say it -- "you-eat-what-you-are" in this 2040, when potentially millions of people don powered exoskeletons and effectively become "giant insects" in civilian life and on the battle-field? Will we then adopt the behaviors of insects with natural exoskeletons? Will we commonly consume other, smaller insects for sustenance like they do?

       

Who knows?  It might seem quite trendy and reasonable then.  Maybe sooner, given all the increasingly exo-skeletal garb people wear:  multiple, wearable communication and electronic devices, artificial limbs,

body-armor, night vision goggles and temperature adaptable clothing.  Hey and why not eat insects now? Grasshoppers, ants, grubs and beetles are surprisingly high-protein sources of food and probably quite tasty with the right preparation and seasoning.

                

Post:  Usedcarsalesman will admit that he was highly skeptical that the public would ever consider eating insects in the modern age.  That is until he was awakened to this potential after reading a recent article about a "plague of locusts" that had descended on the Middle East. Apparently locusts are still considered a "delicacy" there;  you probably remember that passages in the Old Testament describe their consumption with honey.

         

After stifling his gag-reflex, Usedcarsalesman thought: "if these guys are eating these bugs, these Middle-Eastern "delicacies" in 2004, then you know some guy in the west could do some clever marketing, capitalize on future trends and make grasshopper, ants, grubs and beetles in to an All-American dietary staple over the next few decades. So, you might end up dining at a McDonalds in 2040 and kindly ask your spouse to "pass you the blackened grasshoppers and barbecue sauce!" (or maybe not :)