Taomeow

Appreciate your appreciation. No back story except I have a small collection of beautiful (and comfortable to use) chopsticks, a dozen or so -- some gifted, some thrifted, some I was planning to gift. I can send a couple of twisted pairs your way if you like, PM where.

By the way. The guy I heard this from was a brain surgeon, so maybe he didn't know much about the rear end of the body, but he asserted that hemorrhoids do not occur in people who wash their ass with water instead of wiping it with toilet paper. Don't know if it's true, but he's 94 and stopped working only at 80 something, and working involved standing at the operating table, which I'm guessing hemorrhoids would have made difficult.

What about mine? What do you think they represent?

I think something happened to oranges. I used to enjoy them very much, but I hardly ever come across ones that taste "right" anymore. Yes, even "organic." Even my favorite blood oranges. Sometimes I can still score at a farmers' market (but I don't have the patience to look for a parking spot for half an hour every time, so I don't often go there either anymore). When that happens, once in a blue moon, I remember, with delight, what a real orange tastes like. It's hard for an absolute sucker for "real" to live in today's world. When all those discussions about "the nature of reality" happen here or elsewhere, I'm always tempted to offer, "you can tell by the taste and fragrance of it." Appearances are deceptive, and 'thoughts about,' more so. But smell it and taste it and all kinds of inside information -- genetic to experiential -- get activated. Unless those have long been stripped of exposure to the real (in every possible sense) and atrophied. But for better or for worse, mine haven't.

In Chinese mythology the term was used to describe the transformation, due to staunch perseverance, of a certain carp. That stubborn fish was swimming against the current aiming to get to the top of the waterfall, and while its mates gave up and turned back, it kept at it for one hundred years. It must have grown some badass muscles in the process, in body or spirit or both, for it finally succeeded. Once it reached the top of the waterfall, the gods rewarded it by turning it into a golden dragon. Metaphors of this sort, promising magnificence, against insurmountable odds, as the outcome of stubborn disregard for a long stretch of failures, are rather popular in Chinese culture. The story strikes me as the antithesis of the Western myth of Sisyphus.

Only the "everybody knows" kind coming Urbi et Orbi (as the Pope of Rome would put it) from the mass dispensers. If you have any of those you can fully trust them to be rooted in anything but reality. Speaking of the Pope of Rome... no, I think you've had enough for one day. And Mother Theresa, the monster that she was... no, I'll stop right there. Apologies.

Authenticating Tibet: Answers to China’s 100 Questions, edited by Anne-Marie Blondeau and Katia Buffetrille. Foreword by Donald Lopez. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008, pp. 81–84. What were the conditions regarding human rights in Tibet before democratic reform? [Questions 12, 13, and 92, 2001] Before 1959, all except 5 percent of the Tibetan population were slaves or serfs in a feudal system in which they were regarded as saleable private property, had no land or freedom, and were subject to punishment by mutilation or amputation [from both the 1989 and 2001 editions]. The serfs were liable to be tortured or killed [from the 1989 edition]. Economy and culture were stagnant for centuries, life expectancy was 35.5 years, illiteracy was over 90 percent, 12 percent of Lhasa’s population were beggars, and the Dalai Lama was responsible for all of this [from the 2001 edition].

Another favorite of mine: lychee

I saw them for the first time when they served them on a plane en route from Guangzhou to Xi'an. As an airplane meal they wowed me, but I had them a number of times since then and they didn't become a favorite. They are pleasant but I found the taste rather one-dimensional (so to speak) unlike the striking appearance.

That's what Eastern dragons eat. Western dragons eat virgin maidens and, with luck, knights attempting to save them.

What do dragons eat? ))

Humans and chimps share 98.8% of DNA. And yet you wouldn't mistake one for the other. The butterfly effect of the 1.2% difference between our species translates into massively different organisms. So any conclusions about us humans having been designed to eat what chimps eat might be valid for any human who has the same amount of fur as a chimp, is not bipedal, has much larger and stronger jaws but a lighter and shorter body, and has a brain three times smaller. (Incidentally, there's a rather well-argued theory that we owe the size of our brain that set us so far apart from our furry primate relatives to the consumption of animal fat by our ancestors.) Not that I doubt that chimps are smart and, on some differently defined terms, might be smarter than we are. Yet we are who we are and can't score any points with mother nature by adopting the dietary style of a different species, however closely related. So I don't think trying to copy this one aspect of the overall chimphood would serve any aspect of our humanhood.

Mexican fruit salad from a street vendor! Prepared, as you watch, with a humongous machete at high speed! I always bought it when I used to travel to Tijuana, and learned to make it at home (minus the jicama, could never get into that.) Papaya+every fruit that's in season, the more the merrier+cucumbers+jicama ("no jicama por favor")+lime juice, cayenne pepper flakes, and salt. The only way I eat papaya ever since.

We most definitely didn't evolve on fruit. Far as I know, except for the tropics, nowhere on earth were fruits edible until painstakingly and expertly cultivated. I have encountered wild apples and pears, e.g., still growing in some forests in Europe. The former are very small and bitter. The latter are so hard that you can break a tooth before you find out what they taste like. (Like cardboard.) Most temperate climate fruits are fruits of civilization. Don't know the story behind the tropical ones, except for dates -- those were also cultivated, thousands of years ago, and took a while to become edible. In the 90s I used to know a whole community of "fruitarians" in LA. The kookiest people ever. Possibly because the human brain is comprised of 60% fat -- not obtainable from fruit -- and, importantly, the outer fat layer on the neuronal dendrites serves the same purpose as insulation on electric wire: when it starts thinning out and disappearing (which it does on all fatless diets), the brain turns into a jumble of interferences. To quote Homer Simpson, "butter your bacon, boy!" Another problem with immoderate consumption of fruits -- modern commercial ones have been selectively bred for sweetness (to name just one problem, there's tons more), and have waaaay too much sugar. In moderation, and the least sweet varieties you can find (e.g. the only apples I eat here in the US are Granny Smith) are fine. Though "moderation" is a very individual parameter. As for my favorite fruits -- well, those are berries, real ones. All of them. Mostly the ones I haven't had in a very long time. Sour cherries from Ukraine... oh boy. They only sound sour, in reality they are just intense, intense everything -- sourness, sweetness, juiciness, color, fragrance, esthetic appeal... everything. Second only to wild strawberries sometimes referred to as fragola (and sometimes mistaken for a cultivated variety, which is not even remotely the same.) Berries are perhaps the exception to the cultivation rule -- many are fine quite naturally. We probably supplemented our prehistoric diet with those, and some ancient Native American recipes seem to reflect that, e.g. pemmican, originally made with bone marrow mixed with dried and powdered wild berries.

Have you tried filling it with champagne and cognac? That's how I was served drunken watermelon in Armenia, on more than one long gone but not forgotten occasion. Sometimes they'd throw in ripe apricots and peaches, pitted and halved. Heaven on earth.

Classy! Talking about a present party to the conversation to a third party as though she's an irrelevance to the disagreement you started (and possibly planned to escalate into a shouting match... the party to the conversation you casually brushed aside wasn't planning on any shouting, I can vouch for that.) That'll surely put her in her place.

Yeah, historically... all that history of billions of abandoned single dads struggling to raise their children on their own... of sons left penniless and powerless because the daughter had to inherit it all... of husbands cooking three times a day every day and cleaning nonstop so their wives and children could flow through their own far more important and lucrative work without the bother... of fathers always busy tending to their family's emotional needs, wiping tears and asses, spending countless sleepless nights giving medicine and comfort to the sick... of bosses eagerly and preferentially advancing the careers of women who they knew would never inconvenience them with distractions like pregnancies and childbirths and troubleshooting at home because their husbands will surely take care of all that job-irrelevant nonsense... Tell me where I can read up on that historical injustice. Because what I observe in real life doesn't quite compute into that (in)equation.

One reason taoism resonated with me from the get-go while the rest of the world's institutionalized "paths" seemed belonging to the genre of patriarchy-approved fantasy self. Despite all the fossilized patriarchal crap many of its schools picked up along the way and incorporated on misogynistic autopilot, taoism remains the only "path" with a physiologically sound premise -- the Great Mother. In alchemical taoist cultivation (barring all the aforementioned crap) a man is often expected to start out by creating a virtual womb and conceiving, and giving birth to, an "immortal fetus" -- a rather challenging sine qua non for someone with zero real-life experience. A woman who has a non-virtual womb and has, historically in the vast majority of cases, conceived, nourished and given birth to the actual fetus is halfway there already, by virtue of embodying the prerequisites ziran. Though social conditions are a great equalizer -- a woman has a much harder time moving on from the prerequisites to the actualization. She's busy with the daily process of creating the world... often terminally busy, spending all her qi till nothing is left for her own advancement. It's no surprise that of the Eight Immortals, only one was a woman -- who had to be a virgin to focus on her cultivation properly or else she would have been too busy with family chores.

One strike and you're dead. That red button at the end punctuates full stop.

Soft reeds do not break. Make a flute from hollow stems. They know a secret.

A fable. A man came to the usurer and said, - Sir, lend me one dollar, I absolutely have no money, can't buy any food. - Why not? - the moneylender said. - But I charge a sizable percentage. In a month you will have to give me two dollars. It's the law. - I'll give it to you, I will! - the man said. - OK,-- the usurer said. - But we can't do it without a collateral. It's the law. What do you have to pledge? - Only my axe... - An axe? Fine. Give it to me. Here's your dollar. And remember - in a month you will bring me two dollars, and you will get the axe back. - I'll bring it to you, I will! - the man said, took the dollar and was about to leave. - Wait! - the usurer shouted after him. - Giving me two dollars, it will be hard for you, right? - It's hard, sir, very hard... - Here's how we can make it easier for you. We'll do you a favor, as the law stipulates. You can give it back in parts. Will it be easier for you? - Easier, sir, it would be easier, oh my benefactor! - Then give me one dollar right now, and the second dollar at the end of the month. Deal? - Deal! The man then goes home and thinks, “So. I don’t have any money. I don’t have my axe. And I still owe a dollar... But the important thing is, everything is perfectly legal!"