Pi-Consulting

The Washington Post’s annual American “What’s Out – What’s In” report for 2007 has plenty to interest us social and attitudinal trend-watchers, starting with sexual mores and self-indulgence. Away with abstinence. Welcome back, pre-marital sex! Goodbye to driving drunk. Try driving nude instead! If you must wear clothes, pull your jeans up to waist-level; that off-the-butt look is now hopelessly old-fashioned. Out goes the ex-urbs McMansion. Now it’s a Designer Prefab in the “rur-urbs”. And so it goes on….

Perhaps the most striking switch is in TV audience allegiances. “America’s Next Top Model” becomes America’s “so-last-year” yawn. Who needs beauty? Make way for “Ugly Betty”! The eponymous heroine of this blazing new super-soap wears googy red spectacle frames, awful bangs and metal braces on her teeth that rival a barbed-wire fence for sheer rampant sex-appeal. It takes several hours in make-up to “uglify” the actress who plays poor Betty. (She’s actually very beautiful, natch, as wincing audiences will find out in later episodes).

How does Pi know this? Because we’ve seen the whole series already – in Spanish! The show originated as a brilliantly-written soap-opera (or telenovela) in Colombia, under the title “Betty la Fea”, or Betty the Ugly. Now it’s America’s turn to gasp in horror at how cruel nature can be to the female form, and to await the transforming happy ending, many episodes in the future. Oh, and she gets the guy. (Source: Washington Post, Pi Market Research)

Ours is indeed an “Animal Planet”. Domestic beasts already outnumber the planet’s six billion human inhabitants. Our 1.5 billion cattle, 1.7 billion sheep and goats and at least the same number again of pigs and poultry already run the human head-count pretty close, even at the rate we are killing and eating them. (The animals, not the humans. Though now you mention it…). Add in dogs and cats, and homo sapiens is easily outnumbered by domestic animals.

These facts come to light (in a report from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization) just as concern for climate change and global warming is going mainstream. So where’s the problem? There must be an innate link between planet-saving attitudes and being an animal lover, right?

But wait. The proliferation of domestic animals and the health of our environment are actually on a collision course. Worldwide, animal feed and grazing uses up 30% of the total land surface says the UN report, ominously titled “Livestock’s Long Shadow”. Our domesticated animal friends eat more than they represent in food value (a bad sign for humanity’s growing meat-addiction), and they compete increasingly with humans for precious drinking water resources.

Even more disquietingly, all those animals directly account for 18% of the global warming effect, through the combined effects of flatulence and poop, which respectively produce harmful methane and unhelpful nitrogen. The increased need for grazing land also destroys biologically sensitive land resources, especially rain-forests.

So, if you’re tempted to blame your neighbor’s gas-guzzling car for the impending ecological disaster, sniff the air first for the ripe smell of animal-dung. It’s a bigger ecological problem than all the world’s automotive industries put together. (Source: The New York Times).

50 things we learned this year

1. U.S. life expectancy in 2005 inched up to a record high of 77.9 years.

2. The part of the brain that regulates reasoning, impulse control and judgment is still under construction during puberty and doesn’t shift into autopilot until about age 25.

3. Blue light fends off drowsiness in the middle of the night, which could be useful to people who work at night.

4. The 8-foot-long tooth emerging from the head of the narwhal whale is actually a type of sensor that detects changes in water temperature, pressure and particle gradients.

5. U.S. Protestant “megachurches” - defined as having a weekly attendance of at least 2,000 - doubled in five years to more than 1,200 and are among the nation’s fastest-growing faith groups.

6. Cheese consumption in the United States is expected to grow by 50 percent between now and 2013.

7. At 68.1 percent, the United States ranks eighth among countries that have access to and use the Internet. The largest percentage of online use was in Malta, where 78.1 percent access the Web.

8. The U.S. government has paid about $1.5 billion in benefits to thousands of sick nuclear-weapons workers since 2001.

9. Scientists have discovered that certain brain chemicals in our tears are natural pain relievers.

10. FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover wrote a drooling fan letter to Lucille Ball in 1955 to tell her how much he enjoyed an episode of “I Love Lucy.” “In all the years I have traveled on trains,” he noted, “I have often wondered why someone did not pull the emergency brake, but I have never been aboard a train where it was done. The humor in your program last Monday, I think, exceeded any of your previous programs and they have been really good in themselves.” (more…)