Going Ape & Taxing Crap

• Rise of the Planet of the Apes is positioning itself to be the big summer success, both intelligent and entertaining. Animal Rights groups are heralding the film as clear evidence than no real apes are ever needed again to be cruelly forced to perform tricks for the camera, as Rise's entire simian cast is CGI. Filmcritic.com's Bill Gibron is a big fan:

"Rise of the Planet of the Apes is an excellent post-modern meditation on animal rights and human complicity in the continuing fulfillment/failure of same. It's a smooth and slick entertainment, loaded with emotional heartbreak and angering abuse. It sets ups its heroes and villains in strange, restricted strokes and then paints in the subtleties once our simian protagonist prepares for revenge. Make no mistake about it, this is a film founded on payback."

I am totally going to see it this weekend, who's with me?

• An article in the New York Times last week by the ever-controversial Mark Bittman is just asking for an attack from the meat, alcohol, junk-food and tobacco PR machine, Center for Consumer Freedom. In the article, Bittman argues for taxing soda, meat, and other unhealthy foods:

"By profiting as a society from the foods that are making us sick and using those funds to make us healthy, the United States would gain the same kind of prestige that we did by attacking smoking. We could institute a national, comprehensive program that would make us a world leader in preventing chronic or “lifestyle” diseases, which for the first time in history kill more people than communicable ones. By doing so, we’d not only repair some of the damage we have caused by first inventing and then exporting the Standard American Diet, we’d also set a new standard for the rest of the world to follow. "