Why Lactose Tolerance?

Why? Why, indeed?

That should be all I need to say, but this is the Internet and so there's never a good time to stop talking. You need to seem to be a real person. Be folksy. Talk with a voice. Voice is a literary term. Hemingway had a voice. Raymond Chandler had a voice. Vonnegut has a voice. You know immediately how they sound, even if you run across something of theirs you haven't see before. Voice has been defined as the spaces between the words. That's not a very good definition, but then again most bloggers don't have a very good voice. There are 50,000,000 blogs out there. Can you tell any of them apart?

What about this one? Here's a sample:

Our work will be done once society is free of every last ounce of negativity. The following are projects we are currently working on:

-Removing the entries for "mean," "bad," and "no" from Wikipedia
-Adding the word "please" to every stop sign
-Legally changing the term "antacid" to "pro-base"
-Eliminating the letter grades B, C, D, and F from schools
-And, of course, promoting lactose tolerance worldwide

If that doesn't scream "viral marketing" to you then you're just their audience.

And what's that about lactose tolerance? I write about lactose intolerance all the time. So that must be the opposite, right? Not getting symptoms from milk? As in, drink more milk?

No, it's not our friends over at the California Milk Marketing Board, the Got Milk? people. Close, though.

The Lactose Tolerance blog is being brought to you by the same people behind lactosetolerance.org. That .org is cute. You might even think that it's a real organization, for about half a nanosecond. Hey look, it even has a campaign headquarters with the kind of cheap plastic banner one gets printed up at Kinko's.

It ain't cheap, none of it. The truth? It's all a promotion for Nesquik flavored milks. And there are five flavors, yet you only get to vote for two. Is that a satiric commentary on the difficulty smaller parties have when trying to wedge their way in between the hegemony of Republicans and Democrats in our two-party system? Nah. They just don't think their viewers can handle five options all at once. We've gone from Puff Daddy's Vote or Die to chocolate v. strawberry on a website too lame for lamers.

And over at craigslist, we find this gem. [Name of recipient deleted]

Reply to: X
Date: 2006-09-13, 12:06PM EDT

Do you want to support a cause? Do you root for the underdog? Do you have a quarter I can borrow? Then join the cause at lactosetolerance.org.

· no -- it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests

The irony! It burns!