TKM

This made me so happy I may have peed myself a little.

Released today, just in time for orgiastic holiday shopping, the Human Rights Campaign has distilled their Corporate Equality Index into a handy-dandy Buying for Equality guide, delineating the good-for-the-gays from the bad in shopping categories from apparel to technology, with additional sections covering air travel, dining, banking, and more. Click the link or image to download the PDF and engage your deviate self in a little homo-friendly consumer activism this gifting season, because nothing speaks louder to sucky, noninclusive corporate policies and attitudes than a dollar spent with those rotten pro-equality do-gooders down the street.

“Stop Googling yourself!” le domestique commanded when I told her the two-faced kitten had died.

How could she know that having become Googlable represented for me the realization of a hastily conceived eleventh-hour backup dream? Indeed, how could she even understand the singular thrill of finding herself online when she can’t even effectively Google herself, her full name being far more common than mine and therefore returning more hits—72,800 in a quoted search—than are worth sifting through for the little nuggets of self-referential celebration contained therein.

“Teresa Morrison” isn’t such a rare name, of course, returning 1,590 hits of its own, and in searches past I’ve had to sift through my own share of more notable women who share my name—Teresa Morrison the bog turtle expert; Teresa Morrison the Nova Scotian soccer midfielder who, along with her identical twin, plays in a Canadian national women’s league; Teresa Morrison the racing yacht skipper; Teresa Morrison the second-grade teacher whose class collected 1 million buttons for a history project—to find even a single genuine reference to Teresa Morrison the copy editor—that would be me—as listed on the online masthead of The Advocate. Listen, I’m pleased as punch to work on the magazine, but finding myself on its masthead online isn’t as thrilling as all that; I know that I work there, and even what I do, and I can see my name on the masthead in real paper issues any old time.

Then again, I’m not sure the Teresa Morrison in Lake City, Fla., who grabbed headlines in March 2005 as the owner of a cat who gave birth to a kitten with two faces—two sets of eyes, two noses, and two mouths that mewed in unison, side by each like a little domesticated Janus—was herself all that thrilled with her peculiar status on the World Wide Web.

The two-faced kitten TM has long been the most prolific source of hits for all us Teresa Morrisons. So many were the mentions of her mother cat’s queer little anomaly—the first such birth on record—that like a tree lost amid a forest, the follow-up story reporting that the kitten had died just two days later had completely eluded me in my past searches. So it was with some sadness that I recently passed that news along to le domestique, prompting the suggestion from her that I was perhaps spending too much time searching for myself online.

All this self-Googling started a couple of weeks ago, when I noticed a precipitous spike in hits to my blog, including a wealth of click-throughs from a piece I had written for Advocate.com, “The People vs. Loving,” on California’s Assembly Bill 43, which but for its veto by Governor Terminator would have removed references to gender in the state’s marriage laws, clearing the way for same-sex couples to wed—and clearing the way also, by dint of an exceedingly slippery slope prophesied by the collective lurid imagination of the religious right, for polygamy, incest, bestiality, rampant public sex, the death of the American family, and the crucifixion of all that is holy and good.

Even Belgian dogs reject our advances.

The curious thing about this spike was that it came weeks after the commentary had been posted, and therefore weeks since it had been at all prominent on Advocate.com’s splash page. So I Googled the title of the commentary and solved my little mystery quicker than you can say “Encyclopedia Brown: Boy Detective.”

An article on the subject at The Washington Post’s Web site had linked to my AB 43 commentary, along with other recommended related reading. Let me say that again. A newspaper that is regarded among the top half dozen or so papers in the nation—that little rag that broke Watergate—pointed to my silly old commentary on an LGBT news site that likely sees 1/100th the traffic commanded by its own online maw. And some of the readers who followed the link and read the Advocate piece came, in turn, to my silly old blog!

Good golly, if The Post is tapping my genius, can The New York Times be far behind?

Yes, it turns out, it can be, as I have yet to find evidence of any notice of ME by the newspaper of record. I have found one other news site link, this one from a blog at the Spokane, Wash., Spokesman-Review pointing toward my latest piece, “Boy, Interrupted,” a commentary on our societal gender baggage as seen through the lens of LGBT infighting over the scope of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act.

That piece also prompted a number of links from sites that aggregate transgender and gender politics news, which is kind of cool considering that I feared just the opposite might happen: that transgender rights folks who read the piece might say, “Who the hell are you to speak out about gender issues?”

For the record, I’m just another voice in the wilderness. And thank you for not yelling at me.

My online proliferation—proliferation being defined here as anything less than complete anonymity—comes not a moment too soon, as I can practically feel the heat of 40 candles lighting up a trans-fat-free birthday cake even as I write this. Depending on whom you trust—me, or the federal government—I entered the world four decades ago tomorrow, or maybe yesterday.

Am I the only person with a Social Security birthday that differs from her actual birthday? I didn’t realize this until several years ago, the first time I tried to file my income tax return electronically. My return was rejected because the birthday I entered differed from my birthday of record, which was apparently entered as November 13, not November 15, at the time my Social Security number was issued. This was news to me, so I naturally called my mother, who had filled out the application for my SSN when I was still in grade school. After I explained the confusion, she expressed a moment of doubt (!) and suggested I check my birth certificate. I did, and it confirmed the date I’ve always celebrated: November 15.

For simplicity’s sake, I changed the date on that year’s tax return to November 13, thinking I would iron it out later, but in years since I’ve been both (a) too lazy and (b) too disinterested to go wait in line at the Social Security office to disabuse the feds of the notion that my birthday is any day but what I say it is. Besides which, when it comes to the Federal Bureau of Misinformation and Wrong-Headed Opinions About Me, date of birth is very low on my list of correction priorities.

So if you think our government is never wrong, my birthday was yesterday and you totally missed it. Otherwise it’s tomorrow.

Whenever you personally celebrate my birthday, I will this week enter my 40s, which is high season for a midlife crisis reflection as to who we are, what we stand for, and how life thus far stacks up against our lifelong goals and dreams. I could overcomplicate this, but for once I won’t:

Failure: I haven’t published a book.
Accomplishment: I haven’t killed myself.

The latter is an ongoing goal that can’t technically be called an “accomplishment” until my death is achieved via any non-self-inflicted means, but I feel confident in declaring victory on that front because I now know of a place I can go where condescending but well-meaning people will keep me away from the knife drawer and ration my pills in little paper cups.

On the other hand, the former goal can’t truly be labeled a “failure” just yet. In life’s marathon, I’m only at mile marker 13, maybe 14 (if you have reason to believe this is an erroneous assumption, please notify me immediately). I still have time to write my masterpiece minor-key memoir, and even if I never publish a book, that goal seems more mutable to me now than it did when I was 12 and first conceived it. In 1979, the World Wide Web was more than a decade from fruition. There was no way for me to conceive then of a future network through which I could pass school notes on a grand scale, reaching 10s, even scores of readers, many of whom aren’t even in my homeroom! Had I known that, would I still have dreamed of one day publishing something as tiredly old-school as a book—an object of heft in the hand, one with pages, whether rough or smooth, that propel the reader through setup, conflict, and, with any luck, a satisfying resolution, after which we may close its covers with some small ceremony, taking a moment to reflect on the just-completed journey, perhaps reading or rereading the author’s bio and gazing at his or her jacket photo with simultaneous deep admiration and slight jealousy?

OK, I might yet be suckling at the teat of that dream. But had I known at 12 what wonders lay just over the Commodore 64 horizon, surely I would have conceived a backup dream of one day being Googlable. And had I been so prescient, that backup dream would seem nigh on the eve of my 40th birthday!

I’ve been inching up the Google chain these past few weeks, and have made significant progress even in the last few days. During a search this weekend, my earliest Google hit was at number 25, with subsequent citations at odd intervals. But a search just conducted in the moment before I wrote this sentence yielded my first hit at number nine! I have entered the Teresa Morrison top 10! High-five me, bog turtle expert, even if my second mention slips all the way to number 61 (!), after which many of me can be found hanging with my homegirls in the 80s and 90s.

It’s fascinating, isn’t it, watching the notoriety of non-famous people—and even famous bog turtle experts—rise and fall like stock market shares?

The Teresa Morrison with the two-faced kitten, once so dominant on the Googlescape, has now fallen behind me. She’s also lost ground to folk musician Teresa Morrison of the duo Up River, available for weddings and your more Celtic-themed bar mitzvahs; New York chanteuse Teresa Morrison, who can be seen and heard on YouTube singing “Easy As Life” from Aida to a noisy-to-the-point-of-rude lounge audience; and, of course, Nova Scotian identical twin soccer stud Teresa Morrison.

And don’t count out that second tier of Teresa Morrisons—the group with whom I identify most strongly, even if I’ve temporarily slipped toward the head of the pack. Many of us are making our case for first-page status even as you read this. There’s the Teresa Morrison of Kitchener, Canada, who in a formal complaint to her district laments that excessive truck noise and traffic on her residential street limits the time she spends in her garden and her outdoor enjoyment of her property. There’s the Teresa who owns the Morrison Inn and Holiday Bar in Morrison, Colo., whose 450 residents fancy theirs “the most haunted town in America, per capita.” There’s the Teresa Morrison of Nassau County, N.Y., who, as a losing candidate for the Farmingdale Village Board of Trustees, campaigned on a platform that pleaded “for people to be happy to live here and for the bickering to stop,” a sentiment I think we can all get behind. There’s the Teresa Morrison who as a lab tech at the University of Georgia School of Veterinary Medicine founded a now-20-year-old pet visitation program for homebound seniors.

In the end, though, I think there may be one way in which I’ve affected the Google fame of every Teresa Morrison out there, and I’m not sure how they’re going to feel about it. Due to the nature of my appearances and citations on LGBT-oriented sites, our name has become a keyword that will generate hits on bottom-feeder porn sites, whose little spiders go out Web crawling and collect captive phrases resulting in nonsensical hits like this one, which, if clicked, will make your monitor erupt as a pornographic house of mirrors with new windows opening faster than you can shut them:

Gay Squirts: Most actual news about hunk fucking and gay surfing; civil unions; gay-friendly; Teresa Morrison!

Or, even better:

Gay Canadians: Best Gay of Mexican hunk information source! By Teresa Morrison

At last, I’ve achieved gay porn search term status! And to all those other Teresa Morrisons who never did nothin’ gay to nobody, “You’re welcome!”

With my backup dream accomplished, and my not-killing-myself goal making steady progress, I can put foolish dreams and cares aside and turn 40 without a worry in the world as to what this second act may yield. With one eye focused bravely on the future, and one lazy walleye retrospectively surveying the detritus strewn about my beaten path, I will move through life with the courage and the pride of a woman who has no need of worldly huzzahs.

Life, I am told, begins at 40. Well, all I’ve got to say is that that’s one fucking lame time for life to start, given all the preamble and muck we have to go through to get there. But seeing as how I’ve arrived and all, bring on the dancing ponies. I’m ready for the good bits.

We’re having butter issues, le domestique and I.

Actually, we’re having buttery spread issues—butter originating in the udder is untouched by the controversy.

It’s sad, really. We thought we had found a buttery spread with which we could form a lifelong bond, but our BBF betrayed us—or, rather, never had our back at all. Land O’Lakes® Light Butter with Canola Oil, a product chosen for its low fat content, rich flavor, and lack of hydrogenated oils, served us in any number of ways for a year or more. We had switched to LO’L from Brummel & Brown®, a yogurt-based spread previously chosen for its low fat content, rich flavor, and agreeable spreadability factor. (For the record, LO’L was a little too spreadable. Straight out of the fridge it was ready to melt invitingly on to—or even molecularly merge with—your toast, your pancakes, what have you. But if you happened to take it out of the fridge too early, like, more than 30 seconds before you absolutely needed to, it assumed its preferred liquid form. That’s what one gets, I suppose, for asking too much of her buttery spread.)

We had turned our backs on B&B—the discovery of which, its product Web site promises, is “like when you discovered that laughing was also a full-body workout”—only because its “vegetable oil blend” (B&B is advertised as 10% yogurt and 35% vegetable oil, leaving the product potentially, by my calculation, 55% puppy blood) contains partially hydrogenated soybean oil—hydrogenation being what puts the trans in trans fat.

I’m not typically a dietary alarmist, but when I heard an NPR story some time ago calling hydrogenated oil “plastic fat,” as in, that’s how it reacts with your biology, those long-dormant alarm bells sounded. My larder is quite full enough, thank you, without ingesting something predisposed to settling into a cozy pocket of my stomach for a years-long nap. Even our corporate-friendly government, by way of the Food and Drug Administration, has declared that when it comes to trans fat, the only healthy dietary intake is no dietary intake.

I labored over my choices. Have you had to choose a new buttery spread lately? The variety is astounding, but while all promise “rich, buttery” flavor, very few lack hydrogenated oils (almost all claim 0% trans fat, but because of business-friendly consumer-hostile FDA labeling standards, those products can still contain significant amounts of the stuff; the only way to figure out whether your butter products contain hydrogenated oils is to stand interminably before your grocer’s dairy case inspecting labels).

After reading the nutritional information on a number of promising products, I settled on the aforementioned LO’L spread, one of only a handful of contenders that appeared to meet all my criteria. And all was sunshine and buttercups until the Human Rights Campaign released its confounding 2008 Corporate Equality Index, a.k.a. the “good to the gays” rap sheet.

As an operative for the Gay Agenda, I’m well acquainted with the Corporate Equality Index, which reports the results of surveys returned by hundreds of large corporations, detailing their LGBT inclusion in employment and public outreach policies. Even if it weren’t my job to pay attention to the list, I’d find it worth studying. With LGBT rights increasingly politicized by BushCheney Inc., how we spend our money has become at least as powerful as how we vote, an idea underscored by the fact that while we’re still having trouble getting a law passed at the federal level that would make it illegal to fire an employee simply for being gay—currently A-OK in 31 states—nearly half of the Fortune 500 companies who responded to the HRC survey met every single LGBT-friendly criterion set forth, which is no cakewalk: In order to receive a perfect score on the CEI, employers must prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation as well as gender identity and expression; provide diversity training covering each of the above; offer a transgender wellness benefit; offer employees’ domestic partners the same benefits package as married spouses; and support an LGBT employees’ resource group. Compared to LGBT rights at the federal level, such corporate policies are nothing short of extraordinary.

Anyhow, this year I have rededicated myself to putting my money where my rights are, and it is with a heavy heart that I report Land O’Lakes received a measly score of 53 on the CEI. According to the chart accompanying that score, LO’L fails to explicitly prohibit discrimination based on gender identity and expression; fails to provide diversity training in areas of sexual orientation or gender expression; has no LGBT employee resource group; and makes no effort to include LGBT populations in advertising, marketing, or philanthropy.

For the record, I’ve identified a number of companies with lackluster scores with whom I’ve done business in the past but have no problem abandoning until they get it together to show my people some love. In most such cases, there is at least one counterpart company that seems to have my back. To wit:

• Barnes & Noble got a 63? Fine. Borders got 100 (and I like its stores better anyway).

• Bayer got a 15? Fifteen? Are you fucking kidding me? Wouldn’t you think a company that’s been sued by multiple Holocaust survivors claiming the company was involved in concentration camp medical experiments and other war atrocities would try just a little harder to redeem itself in the 21st century? It isn’t as if Bayer has no competition in the rarefied field of pain relief, or even more narrowly, aspirin, which, having been invented in the late 19th century, isn’t exactly a patented formula these days. (Interestingly—to me, at least—Bayer fought tooth and nail in the early 20th century to trademark the name “Aspirin” and was repeatedly refused, even by its own German government. When the company finally won a trademark suit, in the United States naturally, it began to charge up to 10 times as much for its product here as in the rest of the world. Then in World War I the Allies seized Bayer’s assets, along with those of just about every other German company, and by 1921 “aspirin” had been reduced to a lowly lowercase genericism.)

Should you care for a tablet or two, might I suggest Walgreens’ generic version? The company not only scored a perfect 100 on the CEI but stood its ground when Christian right organizations appealed to their crazy fundamentalist minions to boycott the brand, asserting that the company, in giving money to the 2006 Gay Games, was promoting casual gay sex in an effort to increase the HIV-positive population and thus the client base for prescription medications sold in its pharmacies. I don’t make this shit up. The company disregarded the lunacy and stood by its support of the Games, held in the company’s hometown of Chicago that year. Go, Walgreens!

• ExxonMobil Corp., number 1 on the Fortune 500, got a big old doughnut, just as it does every year. Meaning not only that it fails to meet any criteria for gay and lesbian inclusion but that its PR folks gleefully return a survey to HRC saying so (whereas they could simply ignore the query), implying that such failures may even be a point of pride in the company ranks. Not content merely to ignore gay rights, Exxon managed to regress them when it acquired Mobil, rescinding the latter company’s existing gay and lesbian nondiscrimination policy and domestic-partner benefits. To put that 0 in perspective, and please don’t take this as an endorsement of Wal-fucking-Mart, but yes, even the big W-M, number 2 on the Fortune 500 list, offers the small concession of a written nondiscrimination policy covering sexual orientation and provides diversity training to its employees, earning the world’s most ironic smiley face a 40 on the CEI.

Like Bayer, Exxon has a bit of a gaffe in its past—the whole Exxon Valdez thingy—that one might think would cause the PR department to work that much harder to overcome its poor public image. (BTW, Exxon has yet to pay court-awarded damages to 33,000 fisherman and landowners negatively impacted by the Exxon Valdez’s pollution of 1,200 miles of Alaskan coastline. After being ordered in 1994, five years after the disaster, to pay $5 billion in punitive damages, Exxon filed appeal after appeal seeking to duck the penalty, which at the time of judgment represented one year’s clear profit for the corporation. Even after the award was reduced to $2.5 billion by a federal appeals court, an amount that now represents just three weeks of profit for the corporation, Exxon appealed to our big business–friendly Supreme Court, which, yeppers, agreed on October 29 of this year to hear the case sometime in the spring of 2008—meaning that we the taxpayers continue to pay for America’s most powerful corporation’s refusal to cooperate with a 13-year-old jury award that has since been reduced by half even as inflation has made the amount increasingly insignificant to the company. Something to think about when choosing a filling station.)

Chevron (which also owns Texaco) and BP (which also owns Arco and Amoco) both received perfect scores on the CEI. With a gas station at just about every major intersection, we have options, so if you can’t ride your bike or walk or take mass transit to work, while there might not be a true “best” choice for your fossil fuel needs, there sure as hell is a worst.

• FedEx got a 55? Fine. UPS not only earned 100 on the CEI but came in at number 39 on this year’s Best Corporate Citizens list, which scores large companies according to criteria such as community relations, diversity, employee relations, and environmental efforts. Besides which, deliverywomen look hot in their UPS browns.

For the record, the other companies who earned perfect CEI scores and are among the 100 Best Corporate Citizens are, in order of BCC ranking: Nike, Motorola, Intel, IBM, Agilent, Starbucks, General Mills, Herman Miller, Dell, Cisco, Johnson & Johnson, Adobe, the Gap, Google, Eastman Kodak, American Express, Microsoft, PepsiCo, Wells Fargo, Xerox, Bright Horizons, Sun Microsystems, Best Buy, Lexmark, Nordstrom, KeyCorp, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and Principal Financial.

Hey, not all corporations are bad.

As much as I want to adhere to the lists for all my consumer decisions, there are instances where that’s impossible. Of the three pharmaceutical giants whose products I require enjoy, two received perfect scores, while the third received an 85. AstraZeneca fails to prohibit discrimination based on gender identity and expression; while this issue is pretty close to my heart—because I think it’s utterly absurd that anyone should get antsy about anyone else’s personal presentation and, let’s face it, I have a somewhat alternative PP myself—I feel that it is, mentally speaking, both easier and wiser to reconcile such an omission in AZ’s employee relations than to go off a med that keeps me relatively sane.

I also recognize that I often have no idea how smaller companies, who are not rated by HRC, conduct themselves. Just as not all corporations are bad, not all mom-and-pops are good. In my nine years of service to an independent music store—during which I served as the senior buyer and witnessed its expansion from a 1,000-square-foot strip mall space to a 5,500-square-foot store, moving twice to accommodate its growth—I never received a single paid vacation or sick day, and I was completely uninsured. Nevertheless, anyone who shopped there felt superior for not shopping at nearby chain music stores like Virgin and Tower, who undoubtedly compensated their key employees more fairly.

While the competing low-fat, non-hydrogenated buttery spreads I’ve located are hardly mom-and-pop enterprises, they are marketed by companies that fly a little further under the radar than LO’L (number 301 on the Fortune 500). For instance: Smart Balance and Earth Balance, my leading contenders to replace LO’L. The Balance sisters are two of only three buttery spreads available at Whole Foods, which outright bans any products made with hydrogenated oils. (While Whole Foods’ score of 90 isn’t perfect, it beats 75, awarded to both Safeway [which owns Vons] and Kroger [which owns Ralphs]. My overall grocer preference is for Trader Joe’s, which is too small to be rated.) The third was a rice-based spread, at the idea of which le domestique made a face.

As it turns out, the Smart Balance® and Earth Balance® products I tried are both contender-worthy. At least I think so. Le domestique criticizes SB’s spreadability factor, which is very low. While it melts obligingly enough on hot skillets and just-toasted bread, it is otherwise as dedicated to its solid form as LO’L is to its liquid. Which confuses me, because the very reason hydrogenated oils show up in so many processed foods is that hydrogenation solidifies oil—fully hydrogenated oil is shortening—making it very versatile in achieving desired consistencies. I had assumed LO’L melted all over the damn world because of its lack of such hydrogenation; it certainly isn’t due to its inclusion of actual butter, which in its refrigerated form is about as spreadable as my dog’s jaw when I need to give him a pill.

Despite my desire to pronounce the Balance sisters both delicious and pro-gay, and therefore my new BBFs, I think it’s only fair that I do my best to hold the smaller companies to the same standard as the larger ones, so I sent the following e-mail to Smart Balance Inc. (as well as Trader Joe’s, while I was at it):

Hi there—

Can you please tell me whether your company promotes LGBT inclusion by including sexual orientation and gender identity/expression in its employee nondiscrimination policy? And, where applicable, are the domestic partners of your employees entitled to the same benefits as married spouses? I enjoy your products very much, and as a consumer it’s important that I spend money with companies that support my rights. Thanks very much for your time!

Best regards—

Teresa Morrison

I acknowledge that whoever fields consumer feedback may dismiss mine as the work of a crank, and I imagine that if I receive a reply at all, it will be along the lines of:

Dear Ms. Morrison—

Thanks for your feedback about our products! Please use the attached coupons to continue enjoying them.

Kind regards—

Your New BBFs

Then I figured that as long as I’m corresponding with the corps, maybe I owe it to LO’L’s rich buttery flavor to give it another chance. After all, according to the company’s corporate home page, “Land O’Lakes Inc. values and recognizes the unique talents and potential of all employees and is committed to continue to build a diverse workforce.” I figured I should drop LO’L a line to let the feedback folks know of my quandary and offer them a chance to tell me about any upcoming diversity planning.

Hi there—

I’ve long enjoyed many of your products, particularly your light butter with canola oil. It’s difficult to find a butter spread that’s both low in fat and free of hydrogenated oils, and yours happens to be my favorite.

As such, I was dismayed to see that Land O’Lakes Inc. earned a relatively low score on the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index. I recognize and appreciate that you prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation and that you offer your employees’ domestic partners benefits equivalent to those of married spouses. But many Fortune 500 companies like yours now explicitly prohibit discrimination on the basis of gender identity and expression as well, which I think is necessary for the full inclusion you strive for in your workforce.

I hope that you’ll consider adding such protections to your written nondiscrimination policy; LGBT issues are becoming increasingly politicized, not so much by LGBT people themselves as by our own state and federal governments, and sometimes it seems that our only political capital lies in spending power. In such a scenario, it’s essential that I put my money where my rights are, and I would love to be able to include your products in the “buy” column of my consumer activism campaign.

Thanks very much for your time!

Best regards—

Teresa Morrison

I’ve thrown down the exceedingly polite gauntlet, and now all I can do is wait to see whether either, neither, or both of these companies care to answer my plea for just one delicious buttery spread that has my gender-vague lesbian back. If not, we may have to try that rice stuff. Le domestique hopes it won’t come to that.

————————————————————————————————-

November 6 update!

I have just received the following reply from Trader Joe’s:

Teresa,
We appreciate your inquiry and bringing your concerns to our attention. Trader Joe’s specifically prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression. We also offer the same benefits to a Crew Member’s qualified same-sex partner as we would to a Crew Member’s opposite-sex married partner.

Sincerely,
Amy
Trader Joe’s
Customer Relations

Yay, Trader Joe’s!

—————————————————————————————–

November 11 update!

Smart Balance Inc. responds:

Dear Ms. Morrison—

Yes, to all questions asked.

Sincerely,

Smart Balance Customer Relations

Brief? Perhaps. But affirmative all the same.