Taomeow

Vladimir Borovikovsky, Portrait of Maria Lopukhina, 1797 Maiden name Tolstoy. She was an aunt of Leo Tolstoy's, but she died before he was born, at the age of 23. One of her many siblings was known to the aristocratic society as Tolstoy the American, due to the fact that he participated in a famous circumnavigation expedition of Admiral Krusenstern in the early 19th century and behaved in such an unruly fashion that the admiral left him on the Pacific shore of Kamchatka, whence the young hooligan made it to America. He returned to St. Petersburg a few years later sporting Native American tattoos and dances-with-wolves-like stories. I like finding out stuff about old portraits and realistic paintings -- all of a sudden Time itself unfolds its endless scrolls, its endless stories. Earlier in the thread I posted a picture of Cardinal Richelieu and his cats. There was no mention in The Three Musketeers of the fact that Richelieu, the villain of that story, was famous for his love of cats... If there was, I'm sure some of the sympathies of the readers would have been with the cardinal, not with the musketeers who, now that I think about it, behaved like entitled brats throughout the novel.

No, bird crap is not mixed in. And it's not just any bird, it's specific species of swiftlets whose nests are used. The nest is washed a hundred times, by hand, with close inspection. (I've seen the inside of some bird's nests in their natural state when I was a kid and liked to climb trees and explore, and the inside was covered in a layer of tiny little feathers all pressed together, much like a down mattress. It's a bedroom, not a crapper, so I don't know about every nest and every bird species, but the ones I've seen, the inhabitants were shitting outside of, not inside.) I've had the drink made with bird's nest sold in some Chinese herbal stores (not the nest itself though, which I haven't seen or haven't bought because it was too expensive, don't remember which). It's not a delicacy as much as a medicinal food. In classical Chinese medicine (as in every other ever in existence until the Rockefeller intervention 100 years ago) there's no sharp demarcation line between foods and medicines. Swiftlet's nest is one of the most potent yin tonics in this tradition, with great benefits for the kidneys, the lungs, and also used by women to enhance their beauty.

Been listening to a sci-fi audiobook that among other things has this scenario of a contact with an alien civilization. The aliens seem to behave like they're the devil, and are deemed impossible to coexist with because their logic is incomprehensible to us. They kill and torture, then apologize profusely, offer reparations, shower the people of planet Earth with gifts of extremely high value. They solemnly sign agreements, substantiate them by revealing to us all the vulnerabilities of their home planet, then immediately attack and destroy everything the agreement said they would honor. To everyone's puzzlement, studying the aliens' history reveals they had never been a warlike people, and now all of a sudden all hell breaks loose when they deal with people of Earth. Eventually the main protagonist manages to figure out what their incomprehensible logic is all about. Culturally, the aliens are just so wired that "beauty," "kindness" and "keeping it real/truthful" are synonyms to them. Beauty is their main pursuit, and doing things that accurately mirror reality is their way of being kind. So they start doing things people on Earth do because they want to please us, create beauty for us, much like a creative artist is trying to relate to the audience and to please, impress and befriend it. What they're doing to us is aimed at being the most accurate mirror of what we do to ourselves. War, torture, betrayal, subjugation, destruction -- alongside love, creativity, courage, all the great things we are intertwined with all the horrible things we are. To them, killing us all in the final war looks like what we've always been after, and they are willing to go all out to create this ultimate beautiful, kind and accurate reality for us.

I thought you were gonna say that the octopus is more closely related to the cat... as reflected in that ancient tale, Octopuss in Boots:

Who knows. I haven't read that story in a very long time so I may be missing out on some details, but don't think it was about physical strength. Especially considering shepherds, with their constant low-intensity high-diversity physical activity, such as walking long distances on steep uneven paths, are notorious for their stamina, have great cardiovascular health and longer lifespans than do people who work in the fields, whose toil is often backbreaking and involves repetitive monotonous movements. To say nothing of their respective diets. If it was a fair fight rather than a cold-blooded murder of the unsuspecting brother, who knows what the outcome would have been. Cowboys usually prevailed over everybody else in a fight, at least according to Hollywood. ))

That one was indeed the origin of all conflicts, but not so much because they were brothers as because Cain was a sedentary farmer cultivating grain crops -- the new lifestyle -- while Abel was a nomadic shepherd raising livestock, a traditionalist. Their father, obviously also a traditionalist, preferred shish kabob to flatbread... which is why he favored Abel, which is why Cain murdered him. And so it went from that time on. I have always maintained that sedentary grain agriculture is the root of all our troubles.

That was then this is now. Just the other day I read an account of a patient's family in Hawaii getting awarded something like $5 million (the patient himself died long before the courts, which took years to decide the case, finally did decide). The patient was undergoing spinal surgery for back pain. The surgeon was supposed to install two titanium rods, one on each side, to hold the spine. In the middle of the surgery it turned out the rods were missing from the kit. Rather than call it a day and try again at some later date, or alternatively wait an hour or so before they could be delivered, the surgeon took a screwdriver from the kit, sawed off the shaft and installed it in the patient's spine -- on one side only though, since he didn't have a second screwdriver handy. A few days later the screwdriver snapped and shattered into pieces -- the approved titanium thingies for this procedure have flexibility, since they are supposed to have a range of motion, while the screwdriver doesn't -- in fact it's supposed to be stiff to work properly at its primary task of driving in screws. The patient became paraplegic, underwent three more unsuccessful surgeries and died. This thread could get very very strange very fast if it veered into things medicine...

A plausible scenario... When I was in Peru, all they had in stores was Nestle. Had zero luck finding coffee beans too, and even ground coffee -- instant was the only thing available in many places. The locals explained to me that they export everything, nothing is left for domestic consumption. (And then they buy Nestle and Nescafe...)

Or better yet, a French chef.

Ethnically, culturally and religiously Russians and Ukrainians are way closer than Arabs and Israelis... doesn't mean a thing in political conflicts. Much less in political conflicts created by third party players. Reinterpreting the term "antisemitism" the way you do doesn't seem justified to me at all, but, yes, better not to go there in the light of a ban on current events discussions.

Right, I did mean the Caliphate -- I know what both are, just a momentary lapse of attention. The persistent bringing up the point I've seen many times (most often amidst veiled -- or not -- antisemitic rants) that, what do you know, Arabs are also semites ergo there's no such thing as antisemitism-means-Jew-hatred may of course stem from some academic purism...

Interestingly, racism does. Historically, the term "Antisemitic" came to refer to the hatred and persecutions of Jews, Jewish culture, and Jewish religion -- not Arabs, Muslim culture, or Islam. That's because there was no Arab diaspora until the late 19th century and the only semites Europeans ever had a chance to persecute were Jews, not Arabs. Most Europeans hadn't ever seen an Arab since Spain gained back its independence from the Ottoman empire (edit: that was a blooper, I meant the Caliphate), and many hadn't seen one till the late 20th century. Consequently antisemites are Jew haters, not Jews+Arabs haters. (And "anti-Zionists" are rebranded antisemites.)

Apparently it can be even more dangerous for cats, causing seizures. Luckily cats, unlike dogs, are very picky eaters, and none of the cats I had in my life ever got interested in chocolate.

What really intrigues me is all those medieval manuscripts dedicated to knights fighting snails. Sometimes the knight gives up without a fight though and begs the snail for mercy And occasionally the snail shells are inhabited by entirely unlikely animals

When I was doing keto, after about 6 months of no sweets and very low carbs I decided to have a piece of chocolate. Had to spit it out -- it burned my mouth as though it was acid. But that's not because chocolate is bad. Only because bad chocolate is bad. And I can't find good chocolate anymore, anywhere. You can't make good chocolate if you start out by stealing all the cocoa butter from it, processing it with harsh chemicals, and adding either too much sugar or not enough (that last scenario is what you get in "health food stores," overpriced, sandpapery on the tongue and hard to swallow. "Dark chocolate" they call it, 95% cacao they call it, charge you twice the price of the sugary commercial kind. A sucker is born every minute. Real chocolate is 55% fat -- that's the natural content in cocoa beans. So delicious... but it only lives in my memory. Fuckers.)