[L]ast week, I found myself sitting around a table at Roberta’s Pizza with Entourage star Adrian Grenier, getting an in-depth lesson on the blight of plastic straws.Here's my anti-straw post from a couple weeks ago. My problem was not environmental, it was that you look foolish if you are a man. My problem is avoided by being a woman. Grenier's problem is avoided by using paper straws. I agree that paper straws are much better — aesthetically and environmentally. So if you are a woman, click on that link and you can get some nice old-time paper straws.
“We consume 500 million straws each day. The equivalent of 127 school buses filled with straws. It’s disgusting, ” Adrian Grenier declares the minute I sit down, brandishing a plastic straw that the waiter had forgotten to remove. “There should be children in those school buses, going to school, to learn, not straws,” he adds, wryly.
Grenier orders me a mezcal soda, his drink of choice. “No straw, no fruit,” he tells the waiter... Grenier is very passionate — about straws, pollution, whales, the ocean, conservation, his vinyl collection... and he talks with the unfiltered confidence of a man who is used to people listening to what he has to say. He is a fan of hugs, and back-touching, and scooping food onto your plate even if you indicate that you’re full....
September 14, 2016
I was going to make fun of the man who "Lives Every Day Like He’s at Burning Man."
But then I saw that the first thing he took issue with was an official Althouse bugaboo, straws!
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72 comments:
Those school buses should be filled with children? Does Mr. Grenier know that those are figurative school buses, not actual school buses filled with straws?
If anything could make me pro-straw it's reading that...
Yeah....I'm not a straw fan. I'm really adverse to putting anything in my mouth that needs to be sucked.
The school bus form of measure is the gobsmacking aspect of this article. It's so wonderfully sophistic that it can't help but metastasize.
Shouldn't he apologize for the pollution that was Entourage?
Those school buses should be filled with children? Does Mr. Grenier know that those are figurative school buses, not actual school buses filled with straws?
I'm betting not.
The best and the brightest Hollywood has to offer. Yikes!
I think your dismissing the straw and all its uses to easily, in those busloads of straws are potential science projects, spitball shooters, potato hole poking, whistles, snorting coke off a hookers , just to name a few, Your straw man argument is invalid.
Ann Althouse said...So if you are a woman, click on that like[sic] and you can get some nice old-time paper straws.
I genuinely do not understand the rules around when it is and is not ok to hold and express gender-based stereotypes. Isn't this terribly sexist, Prof.? It must be, but it also must be the case that this example of sexist thinking is ok. What is the rule?! "Sexism I object to is objectionable (and bad, should be punished, etc), but sexism I don't object to is fine?" That's not much of a rule!
he talks with the unfiltered confidence of a man who is used to people listening to what he has to say.
Of course people are used to listening to what he has to say! He's Adam Green, star of "Roberta's Pizza"!
Google "Adrian Grenier smelly" and enjoy the (unsurprising) gossip.
"Shouldn't he apologize for the pollution that was Entourage?"
That was a truly horrid show.
The school bus form of measure is the gobsmacking aspect of this article. It's so wonderfully sophistic that it can't help but metastasize.
We use enough straws to fill enough school buses to fill one-fifth of the Grand Canyon. That may not sound like much, but let me remind you the Grand Canyon is quite large.
Has Grenier done anything noteworthy besides Entourage - which I liked, mostly for the writing and for Ari and Johnny Drama. OK, and Lloyd.
Finding straws not made in China is a task.
Someone should invent green American made straws.
Men using straws is slightly homoeerotic.
Burning Man is possible because it is supported by all the non-Burning Man activities that many millions of people do. People can camp and temporarily live (eat, drink, etc) in the middle of a desert wasteland because other people work and produce things.
Burning Man is about as far from self-sufficiency, conceptually, as you can get. "Living every day like you're at Burning Man," then, is ironically apt as a description of a parasitical existence characterized by moral preening and self-regard.
So...it's like Hollywood.
@madAsHell said...
Yeah....I'm not a straw fan. I'm really adverse to putting anything in my mouth that needs to be sucked.
You must understand that your statement cannot be true since infant nourishment requires sucking. And then throughout life we generally have pleasant experiences generated by the not-entirely-latent infant sucking syndrome - especially during sex.
He is a fan of hugs, and back-touching, and scooping food onto your plate even if you indicate that you’re full....
Controlling asshole then. Got it.
Men using straws is slightly homoeerotic.
So is women eating clams, if you are Beavis or Butthead.
"“We consume 500 million straws each day. The equivalent of 127 school buses filled with straws. It’s disgusting, ” Adrian Grenier declares the minute I sit down, brandishing a plastic straw that the waiter had forgotten to remove. “There should be children in those school buses, going to school, to learn, not straws,” he adds, wryly."
Wryly? Unless the author meant "jokingly" he's an dolt. And I can't believe anyone litens to what this B List bum has to say. Entourage rocked, but not because of him.
“We consume 500 million straws each day. The equivalent of 127 school buses filled with straws.
Somebody do the math.
The ultimate straw man, Barack Obama.
whats wrong with men using straws? Note, I almost never use a straw. But why is it bad for men specifically to do so. THat sounds very provincial.
whats wrong with men using straws?
How else are you expected to drink a milkshake, a thick smoothie or a slurpee if not with a straw.
So, Althouse, no men in shorts and no men using straws.
Does that mean that no men have to get the short straw?
What's wrong with men using straws? It doesn't look manly.
500M straws each day is more than 1 straw for each person in the US every day. I'm suspicious of that total.
A school bus has a volume of 960 cubic feet, and a plain old straw is -- what -- a cylinder that is 6" long with a diameter of 1/3". The volume of a cylinder is pi r^2 h -- in this case 3.14*.25/36 = .0218 cu feet. So you can put 960/.0218 = 44,000 straws in a school bus. 500,000,000/44,000 = (drum roll please) 11,363.
I might have made a mistake or two.
If you care that much - him - use a metal straw.
(And like Brando said first, there's no relation between "straw volume expressed in buses" and "actual buses taking kids to school".
That he talks like there is suggests a category error at a very deep level.)
D'oh! I mixed up r and h! 3.14*(1/36)^2*.5 = .001212 cu feet per straw.
960/.001212 = 792,059 straws per bus.
500,000,000/792,059 = (another drum roll please) = 631 buses.
Hmm....
Seinfeld riffs on a man using a straw here:
http://comediansincarsgettingcoffee.com/jon-stewart-the-sound-of-virginity
Go to the two minute mark.
Man at a important meeting with a drink and a straw: "I say we do it and if the shit hits the fan fuck it...." then he struggles to get the straw in his mouth to take a sip.
How many school buses would you have to fill with fireflies in order to illuminate the Oscar awards show?
Men should not be sipping cocktails through a straw. But a soda from a fast food place or an iced coffee? How else is one supposed to consume that?
You must understand that your statement cannot be true since infant nourishment requires sucking.
You must understand that it was a penis joke.
"whats wrong with men using straws?"
I understand that drinking beer with a straw can give you gas.
It takes a university educated woman to be oblivious to the multiple uses of the straw. Only a hands-on man knows these things. She actually thinks they are for drinking stuff. I can fix your car, end pestilence, and herd cats with a single straw. Girls, sheesh!
Wait a second. I thought my big handlebar mustache from my days as a Vietnam-era draftee gave me a pass on using straws.
We should be incinerating all forms of plastic that aren't #1 or #2 in co-generators in order to recover some of the energy used to make it.
"If you took all the school buses it would take to hold all the straws we use in a day and lined them up bumper to bumper, they would stretch all the way to the Universe, and fill up the black hole in space." --Tony Orlando
What is the rule?! "Sexism I object to is objectionable (and bad, should be punished, etc), but sexism I don't object to is fine?"
Bad sexism limits women's choices. Good sexism limits men's choices.
That enough straws to fit in 256 nuclear bombs! Plutonium should be in those bombs!
OK, OK, my humor is very dry... but explosive...
When men drink cocktails with a straw, it's not to make themselves look better.
Grenier is very passionate — about ... conservation...
He is a fan of... scooping food onto your plate even if you indicate that you’re full....
And he's too stupid to understand that creating the food to scoop onto your plate consumes resources...
Oh, yeah, burning Man, that hotbed of Green Thought:
https://thechive.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/sht-happens-sometimes-267.jpg
And he's too stupid to understand that creating the food to scoop onto your plate consumes resources...
Or how much a resource suck Hollywood is...
Working backwards, 500,000,000 straws in 127 school buses means just under 4 million straws per bus. Let's assume a bus is 35 feet long. (That was longer than the value I used above, btw).
The volume of the school bus is 35 feet by 7 feet (tall) by 8 feet wide, so a volume of 35x56 = 1960 cubic feet. Let's make it 1500 cu feet to cut out the space taken by the seats. If you're fitting 4 million straws inside 1500 cu feet, then each straw is .000375 cubic feet (let's ignore any dead space)
Going back to pi r^2 h for the volume of the straw, if a straw is 9" (0.75 feet) long -- I don't know if that's true, and a straw is 0.000375 cubic feet, then the radius has to be .012 feet or 1/6".
Seems kinda narrow.
Anyone who thinks that a man using a straw looks foolish, or is homoerotic, is a blithering idiot.
We suck titties too, fools!
We suck other parts of the female anatomy - at least, if you want your girl to have a good time and she practices good hygiene.
Seriously, how else are you supposed to drink soda filled with crushed ice without a straw? I want to drink my soda, not chew through ice and get brain freeze trying to get a few lousy mL of actual liquid. And I'm not gonna sip through my teeth as a filter, because that actually does make you look foolish, and horse-like.
Kyzernick said......and she practices good hygiene.
Therein lies the rub.
With every straw comes a paper wrapper. Just like a tampon. Men who play with tampons in their drink are perverts.
"Here's my anti-straw post from a couple weeks ago. My problem was not environmental, it was that you look foolish if you are a man. My problem is avoided by being a woman."
Really?
On Amazon, a box of 2000 straws is available measuring 13 x 13 x 9 inches, comprising 0.88 cubic feet. Let's pose a school bus interior that measures 30 x 8 x 7 feet, for 1680 cu. ft. Each bus would hold 38,181,818 straws. 500,000,000 straws would require about 131 buses. So, OK, he's a lot closer than I thought he would be.
On the other hand, the 500,000,000 figure is patently ridiculous. It would require every man, woman and child in the US to use 1-1/2 straws every day. This is just not in line with reality.
If you think about it it's mainly in flyover places like Wisconsin that anybody worries about men wearing shorts or using straws. If you go to destination places it's all perfectly okay.
@coupe
In the Tom Clancy novel The Sum of All Fears, the German nuclear scientist actually uses bundles of coated soda straws while rebuilding the nuclear bomb for the Muslim Terrorists.
I too am curious about the 500,000,000 straws per day.
I wonder how many of those are the tiny little straws that come with juice boxes -- are those still a thing in school lunches? How many are in fast food -- a soda from McDonalds or the like. How many are actually used, as opposed to being provided for customers who never bother to unwrap them? Are we counting the tough little straws that are often found by the office coffee maker and used as impromptu stirrers rather than as straws? How many straws are used in children's art projects or in physics classes?
Is there any support for the 500M statistic? I can find it stated over and over via my Google-fu, but nowhere that cites a source.
"How else are you expected to drink a milkshake, a thick smoothie or a slurpee if not with a straw.
EXACTLY. I cant drink a milkshake from the cup. The few times I didnt have a straw I ended using a spork to eat it like ice cream. Not that I drink milk shakes that often.
But straws do come in handy on occasion.
"What's wrong with men using straws? It doesn't look manly." That assumes that men are supposed to look manly. In this topsy turvy world, what does manly even mean?
"Grenier orders me a mezcal soda, his drink of choice. “No straw, no fruit,” he tells the waiter... Grenier is very passionate — about straws, pollution, whales, the ocean, conservation, his vinyl collection
His VINYL collection? Does he think thats environmentally neutral?
"Lives Every Day Like He’s at Burning Man."
He works out, puts on his underwear and goggles, and rolls around in the sand to start each day?
Terrible example, Curious George; nooooothing wrong with Rashida Jones. She can straw it up all day.
"HoodlumDoodlum said...
Terrible example, Curious George; nooooothing wrong with Rashida Jones. She can straw it up all day."
She's smoking hot...past that if you read Ann's position and watched the clip, I can't help you.
The Spanish bota concept is very underused.
Also, real men only drink from shot glasses, jagged, rusty tin cans, or military mess tins and canteens (but only metal ones), thats if they haven't got their enemies skulls handy.
"Seriously, how else are you supposed to drink soda filled with crushed ice without a straw"
Real men don't drink soda. Soda is for children. Soda does not really go with whiskey either.
"How else are you expected to drink a milkshake, a thick smoothie or a slurpee if not with a straw."
Real men don't drink milkshakes, smoothies or slurpees. These are for children.
@#$%ing hipsters.
I like drinking with straws, makes me feel like a kid again. If some don't approve, meh, I'm willing to take the hit. Life is short, and small pleasures are worth it.
Horse troughs, muddy puddles, irrigation ditches and natural bodies of water are all also acceptable.
Glass and ceramic bottles are also OK as long as they are used for liquor. If they have been broken open, as opposed to using the stopper as designed, thats even better.
It is never acceptable to drink a non-alcoholic beverage from a bottle of any kind.
Barrels, metal, wood or synthetic, are also fine, if one drinks direct from the bunghole while lifting the entire barrel. Drinking from a tapped barrel is only acceptable if it is an alcoholic beverage and one is lying directly under it in a non-ambulatory state of intoxication, or if one is recently deceased. It is always acceptable to be immersed in barrels of alcoholic beverages, alive or dead.
I realize that these rules are complex, but a mans life is not necessarily easy.
So, assuming this straw/man stereotype is out there, does such a stereotype matter in the least if 1. the stereotypee is blissfully unaware of being stereotyped, and 2. doesn't care one bit about it, and 3. if really aware, might be inclined to act out the stereotype, just to annoy the stereotypers? Sounds like a grand opportunity for mild juvenile sucking and slurping mayhem at dinners out.
A straw in a glass of soda on ice is a muthastinkin tool. It is also a model of a larger hydraulic system, like a water well or an air stripper. Who knows where inspiration comes from. More fish for bicycle logic brought to you by why when a lawyer falls in the forest and everyone sees it, no one cares. When a hasbeen TV actor falls, at least a bird cage gets a new liner.
Buwaya: the bota is a negative-space straw that doesn't suck.
Straw men.
Manly use of a straw ends with hitting teacher with a spit wad in junior high. After that, they're all downhill for guys.
Any drink that requires a straw is probably unhealthy.
A giant (standard size) Straw is 0.22" in diameter. Circular stacking = 90.69% Lets assume 6'x8' cross-section (48-sqft). That's 164,903 straws per section. Straw length is 8", therefore, each straw-section consumes 36-cuft. 36-feet is prolly a good interior box length of child storage area (of a 45-foot bus) and yields 48 straw-sections, which yields 7,915,344 straws per bus. 127 buses hold 1.005 Billion straws. Perhaps Mr. Greiner is on the short bus.
tim in vermont any restricted use of a tool is gurl-logic. What about using a straw to apply WD40 to lubricate a crack? Doesn't a siphon start out as a straw? Not much hard-core industry in vermont, eh?
Perfesser: "My problem was not environmental, it was that you look foolish if you are a man."
You're funny! I sometimes imagine you as a man saying these sorts of things about women.
Hello, Annarishi.
That should be "Annarushi." Sorry.
I only drink with straws while wearing shorts, just like I only wear Hawaiian shirts when I'm wearing shorts. Part of taking a vacation from my manly man dark suits and blue/white button down shirts. K?
You should take a poll on how many people like straws.
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