The Snake Oil Bulletin: Bet You Didn't Know Cashews Had To Be 'Activated'

A hearty hello to you! Welcome once again to the Snake Oil Bulletin! We hope you enjoyed your Holy Festival of Ballfoot this weekend, wherein our finest young virgins were cast into the boiling bowl of super to be a worthy sacrifice to our advertising gods. May their sacrifices bring us bounty in the coming commercial season.

In the meantime, we have a fresh piping hot cauldron of bullshit percolating on the fire. Come over and have a whiff while we jump into our first story.

Gwyneth Paltrow's juice lady early contender for Nobel Prize in Pretentious

All rise for the daily Two Minutes Hate. Big Brother reminds you to have your pitchforks and torches at the ready, and to always wear your gas mask in case of toxic levels of smug.

Today's subject is Amanda Chantal Bacon, founder and owner of Moon Juice , a Los Angeles based ... juice thing. We can't tell if it's a juice bar, a juice store, a juice cult, or our late Christmas present. Ms. Bacon has made a name for herself through our old friend Gwyneth Paltrow of the vagina-steamer Paltrows, who frequently features her "alkalizing" juices and smoothies in her GOOP newsletter . As part of the relentlessly annoying trend in which "healthy" celebrities share their daily diets to show how much healthier they are than you (we're looking at you, Gwyneth of the Seven Limes ), Ms. Bacon shared her own "personal" diet with Elle Magazine back in May. For reasons only the internet gods understand, the interview has pinged itself back onto everyone's radar, almost entirely because after all this time it still doesn't make a lick of goddamn sense. Would you like to read about a flower child resolutely stuck up her own ass? Of course you would. Let's take a gander at a day in the life of a green juice mogul.

[contextly_sidebar id="fnTNzNv56dVV4by5KfMbmGfJWs06lCiJ"]

To begin, It's a bad sign when even your puff-piece interviewer can't hide their skepticism right from the opening line: "Amanda Chantal Bacon, founder of Moon Juice, has a diet full of ingredients we've never even heard of." Oh this should be good.

Bacon's daily diet is a well-tossed word salad of trendy buzzwords and product placements. Words like "alkalize," "mineralization," "brain boost," and worst of all "easy" come flying at the reader's head faster than they can comprehend the bullshit of the previous sentence. Things like dried seaweed and pickled salt plums are considered "staples," pressed turmeric root in freshly squeezed grapefruit juice and bee pollen is considered a "lazy" breakfast, and handfuls of cashews must be "activated" before they can be eaten.

Just read this explanation of Bacon's "pre-breakfast" to get an idea of what we're facing:

At 8am, I had a warm, morning chi drink on my way to the school drop off, drunk in the car! It contains more than 25 grams of plant protein, thanks to vanilla mushroom protein and stone ground almond butter, and also has the super endocrine, brain, immunity, and libido- boosting powers of Brain Dust, cordyceps, reishi, maca, and Shilajit resin. I throw ho shou wu and pearl in as part of my beauty regime. I chase it with three quinton shots for mineralization and two lipospheric vitamin B-complex packets for energy.

What did we read? What on earth are half those things? She's putting pearls in her tea? Are we talking pearls from the sea or bags-of-sticks-shoved-up-our-vajayjays pearls? Why is she putting a highly parasitic fungus in her (second) cup of tea? Why does her almond butter need to be ground with a stone like she's a gluten-free cavewoman? What is happening? Where are we? Are you my mummy?

Bacon's lunch is even more incomprehensible:

For lunch, I had zucchini ribbons with basil, pine nuts, sun-cured olives, and lemon, with green tea on the side. This is such an easy, elegant, and light meal. I made this while on a phone meeting before heading out for the rest of the work day. I often alternate this with my other lunch staple: a nori roll with umeboshi paste, avocado, cultured sea vegetables, and pea sprouts. This is my version of a taco, and it's insanely delicious. These ingredients are all pantry staples, so I eat some version of this everyday.

These are staples for her? That means she has a pantry full of Japanese seaweed, pickled plums, and olives baked under a sun lump at all times. Without these items, Bacon looks in her pantry and forlornly exclaims she has no food.

Remember those activated cashews we mentioned earlier? Bacon says she likes to have a handful for a tasty snack because they provide "brain chemistry magic." Ignoring that load of gobbledy-shit, what in the name of stilt-walking Christ are "activated cashews"? Luckily for us, Ms. Bacon lays out the exact process for "activating" said seeds on her Instagram. 

Are you ready for this? First you soak the cashews in salty water. Then you ... oh wait, that's it. That is literally all there is to "activating" them. Don't believe us? Read the process straight from the horse'sassmouth:

GET ACTIVATED//

In the Moon Kitchen we activate all of our nuts and seeds using alkaline water to awaken their dormant powers, increase digestibility and absorption of minerals, and reduce phytic acid, which can cause bloating and breakouts. We say "activate" not sprout, because we don't take it all the way to the green sprouting stage.

Soak your nuts and seeds in slightly salted water for 8 hours, rinse, and then either use in a recipe immediately or dehydrate for 12 hours to the perfect activated crunch for snacking or as a pantry staple to have on hand for future recipes.

Those mushy salted seeds don't come cheap either. For the grueling work of tossing crap into water and leaving it, the fine folks at Moon Juice charge $21 for 16oz. worth of these "activated" cashews. The extra $13 must come from using only the finest "alkaline" water to soak the fucking things. Those plebeians at Walmart use vegetable oil, and they're not even guaranteed gluten-free. It is to laugh!

Twenty-one clams for a nut snack is practically a ha'penny compared to the rest of the Scrooge McDuckian list of items Bacon claims to shove in her mouth hole. In fact, Rebecca Vipond Brink at The Frisky totaled up everything Bacon claims to eat in a single day on this diet and found that it comes to, at minimum, $710 before taxes. That's for one day's worth of food. Her "pre-breakfast" meal (if you're eating "before breakfast," doesn't that become your breakfast?) will cost you a whopping $357 alone.

Maybe we're being too hard on Bacon. Maybe we're distracted by the GOOPian stink that pervades her tone deaf diet blog to see the gentle soul beneath. Oh look, Bacon posted a pretty snake picture on Instagram to celebrate the Chinese year of the snake! Oh, and here's a poem! Surely this will be a sweet little message with absolutely no horrifying sexual imagery whatsoev-

NAGA NEW YEAR//

Naga, Snake carries the elixir of life and immortality, giving love to this Nature Spirit for a year wet with fertility and protection for our Mother Earth and all of us beings feeding off of her!

#newyear #motherearth #thrivecosmically

"Wet with fertility."

If (what am I saying? WHEN) we get to a time in which robots write all our erotica, one of the phrases they most definitely will include will be "wet with fertility." It will come right after a loving description of how Jean Claude "gazed at Melinda's swaying hips, which were optimally shaped for squeezing a child's cranium out of her vaginal canal without rupturing her internal organs. Her breasts sagged from the weight of the milk necessary to nourish mewling infants feeding off of her. He had no doubt that she was wet with fertility."

You laugh now, but in the robo-rotica future that paragraph alone will leave your hover-panties dripping.

So long, Bacon, and thanks for all the smug.

Alien tourists dumb enough to leave laptop in ancient Greece

Don't you hate it when you're an alien from outer space, and you make the innocent mistake of time-traveling to Ancient Greece and leaving a laptop behind? Allegedly?

That's the claim of this breathless article from the Daily Mail. What are we saying? Every article from the Daily Mail reads like a breathless pensioner just walked up six flights of stairs to complain to the magistrate that the skateboarders down the street are giving him cancer. What on earth is its beef today? It's this sculpture from a Greek tombstone from 100 BC:

Is that a laptop the servant is holding? Of fucking course it isn't. And the Daily Mail isn't arguing it is either. It's Just Asking Questions. See the question mark in the headline? Is this ancient Greek statue proof someone took a laptop back in time (or is it just a TABLET?) 

Sure, you can get mad at The Daily Mail for providing fuel to this conspiracy, especially since its only source for the nonsense is StillSpeakingOut, a YouTube conspiracy theorist who believes Hitler was a Jewish double agent sent to create the state of Israel .

‘I am not saying that this is depicting an ancient laptop computer,’ StillSpeakingOut, conspiracy theorists [sic], said in a video he released on YouTube in 2014.

‘But when I look at the sculpture I can’t help but think about the Oracle of Delphi, which was supposed to allow the priests to connect with the gods to retrieve advanced information and various aspects.’

Or maybe the Oracle was just a teenage girl huffing ethylene gas fumes . In ancient times that made you a prophet. Today that makes you pock-marked Judy in third period.

Let's assume the Oracle had a WiFi connection to alien Wikipedia and was using it to make vague predictions and self-fulfilling prophecies. That makes more sense. What else ya got, StilSpeakingOut? As even the Daily Mail admits, the objects looks identical to wax tablets that Greeks used all the time in the old days.

StillSpeakingOut says the object shown etched in the sculpture is much thinner than the wax tablets and that the woman isn’t holding stylus, also seen in Greek art with individuals using the wax tablet.

 It looks pretty identical to us , but we've never been able to see the big picture, man. Hell we're so blind we still don't see how Bill Gates caused the Zika virus with vaccines . What a bunch of sheep we are.

StillSpeakingOut also disavows the claim that the box is a jewelry box because it isn't the right size and shape. That'd be a valid point, except as Kristina Killgrove of Forbes points out , the Ancient Greeks weren't exactly known for high realism in their art. These are the same people who would depict penises like this, after all:

Yeowch.

Killgrove also notes that it very likely is a wax tablet. She dismisses the claim that a woman wouldn't have a wax tablet in that it was frequently used in depictions of Athena, and if there's anything rich assholes have loved since the dawn of time, it's comparing themselves to gods .

[contextly_sidebar id="7pYMSJoHM4zUOyA4Czu20LXqonhZjsJq"]

And of the holes that supposedly resemble USB ports, Killgrove points out that this statue is probably pretty old, yo, and old things aren't great at avoiding wear-and-tear:

Ancient marble sculptures often have holes that used to hold wooden or other perishable objects. Perhaps a wooden facade graced the box/tablet.

This particular stele shows evidence of reworking. It was originally a three-sided grave marker, but it is now missing the top pediment, the wall on the left side, and an inscription on the bottom. The holes could relate to any of the pieces that are now missing.

But yeah, sure, laptop holes make more sense. You got us. We'll let our Zionist IllumiNAZI masters know you're too smart for strangers.

It's cute that the Daily Mail tried to Fox News its way into the ancient aliens debate. This style of headline really is the Queens Received equivalent of "Is Obama's fist bump a terrorist fist jab, pip pip?" We'd expect nothing less from the paper so predictable in its bullshit that even the parody headline generator is indistinguishable from the real thing. Is political correctness giving pensioners diabetes? We report, you decide.

Flotsam, Jetsam, and Hokum

Is Wonkette's new card game the secret to eternal youth? Can it realign your root chakra with your kundalini line and alkalize your blood into the next wave of quantum consciousness. Yeah sure, why not? Let's go with that.

If you love your Snake Oil Bulletin and love your Wonkette like we know you do, consider stuffing a few dollars in our g-strings so we can make the greatest card game in the history of card games!