A BRIEF HISTORY OF JUICE

This website was born with grand ideals out of the mind of a shiftless hippy no-good communist bum in northeast philadelphia in the year commonly known as 2002 during the season whose name is fall. It was to be a compendium of knowledge on the subject of orange juice in the specific location of "Northeast Philly," an area falling somewhat north of "South Philly" and somewhat east of the "Pacific Ocean." It was to start off under the guise of a 'consumer guide,' with agents of the website performing field research -- interviewing grocery store workers, sampling different "brands" of juice from different stores, chatting up people on the street -- all of which would then be reported on the website. The site would deal with much more, of course, than the consumer issues of "cost" and "taste," providing info on where the oranges...

...came from, how much profit the executives of companies selling juice were reaping in, history lessons, you know, any information about orange juice that might color how people might view a specific type of juice. At some point we would branch out into other areas, maybe other types of juice, vegetables perhaps, along the way spawning like-minded folk with time on their hands to start a giant movement. The goal, of course, was to turn into an encyclopedia for the entire progressive movement (not that too many of us are actually progressing in the same direction). But you know, if you need information, come to us. Turn the house into a giant archive. Have people over. Have meetings and teach-ins and stuff. I mean, this was a damn good idea, ripe with potential. The key was starting with a do-able topic and sticking to the local community. And then show how this everyday item was manufactured in our reality and how it related to everything else around us. Imbue these commodities with a material existence, a social and political existence. It was a model that could be applied to any product, anywhere.

It was exportable is what I'm saying. Now whether we would have caught on in the local community and functioned effectively as a guide to local orange juice, or whether we would have caught on in the on-line community, or some combination of the two, feeding off one another, I don't know, but worst case scenario -- we'd get sick of drinking orange juice. But alas, reality drifted off on another path, and the previous iteration of this website only last a couple of weeks or so. Designing and maintaining a website with a dial-up modem that captures the telephone line when you have no experience designing or maintaining websites is not really a workable prospect. But, in the end, it was a sliver of negative feedback from a well-placed individual that was enough to dampen my enthusiasm and kill the movement. Anyhow, this latest apparition of the website will have a slightly different form, as, for one thing, we're no longer situated in NE Philly, and another thing, well, we'll get into that later. I think this brings us to our next section:

WELCOME TO MY WORLD

A Brief History Of Juice