Taomeow

Tragedy upon tragedy. Salmon is apparently dangerous! I already knew they named it after salmonella, but I had no idea there's other perils hiding in that fish! Speaking of dangerous foods: Once upon a time I had a summertime romance. He was working during the day while I was on vacation, and I spent my daytime hours foraging for wild mushrooms which were abundant in that location. On my last vacation day I cooked a large skillet of the choicest, chiefly boletus mushrooms, and brought it to the farewell party he and his friends were throwing for me. He was taking pictures of me the whole time while the romance was going on, dozens of them, and was supposed to mail them to me once processed (that was the era before smartphones, photos were physical.) I never got any mail and never heard from him again. Which left me with a lifelong unanswered question: did he just decide that what happens during the summer stays in the summer, or did I kill him and/or some of/all of his friends by inadvertently letting a death cap slip into my mushroom harvest?

It's almost Chekhov. There's a classic short story of his about a guy who was waiting impatiently to be served blini (pancakes similar to crêpes) by his cook, full of anticipation, three kinds of vodka on the table waiting to help the blini along -- and then, when they arrived dripping with fresh butter, he grabbed the first one burning his fingers in his impatience, garnished it with smoked salmon and sour cream and caviar (at three rubles forty copecks a pound -- i.e. the expensive variety in his time, the kind that is $600 a pound today), wrapped everything into his blin (the singular of blini), smacked his lips and was about to take a bite and had a stroke.

Made goulash with mashed potatoes for dinner. The boring part? It was yesterday and it's gone... so I'll have to cook something again tonight. But what? All I have left in the fridge is vegetables. Boring...

The first song I ever heard in English -- I think I was 8. I fell in love with it then and it's still a favorite. Who'd have guessed that getting "unburdened by what has been" can be expressed with such deep feeling and beauty and meaning... instead of whatever "it" "has been!"

I drink very little, but appreciate it when it's something good. Will have to check out the Washington state wines, it's terra incognita to me. As for relatives thwarting our modest drinking habits, I'm no stranger to that phenomenon. Las month I spent a few days with my brother- and sister-in-law and it's interesting that, while most people (to my knowledge) who don't have an abnormal relationship with alcohol tend to drink less as they get older, here I observed the opposite phenomenon -- they both drink way more than they used to in their younger years, and it's hard liquor too, and they start early in the day... and don't think twice about pouring a glass for their (adult) daughter to the brim -- first thing they do when she comes to visit. And since they all have different tastes in alcohol (gin, cognac, whisky respectively), the house is choke full of every variety. And of course you have to partake -- every bottle is advertised by its aficionado as something special that you simply have to try. I think I consumed way more alcohol in three days than I usually do in three months. Hang in there while your brother is visiting.

Julian used to be famous for its apple pie (still is but read on). But a while ago (2019?) when I was there the last time, I was half disappointed ordering a slice in a cafe, and then when I went to the bakery specializing in those pies to get a couple that someone asked me to bring, I spoke with the owner and she told me that they are not allowed anymore to buy (or get donations of) local apples from residents with orchards the way they used to. They now get buckets of pre-sliced apples from some corporation -- she showed me those plastic buckets with wilting pre-cut apples of some uninteresting variety or other. Oh. So that's why I was half disappointed -- I did seem to remember better Julian apple pies from a while before...

I also have some dit da jow on hand, but only the kind that works best with immediate rather than recurrent or chronic or old problems. I've read some fascinating info on different traditional varieties of dit da jow and even thought of making my own "real deal," but it requires more patience than I have (e.g. they are aged by burying the bottles in the ground for 3 to15 years, among other things). Apparently analysis has determined that in those aged ones, the molecules keep getting smaller and smaller as they age, so you wind up with a kind of natural nanorobots doing the repairs. There was a huge difference in molecular structure of those super performing ones compared to the shortcut ones. Maybe someone still makes the old school dit da, but who knows where to look for them... In any event, that honey-mustard thing cured my left knee after a nasty altercation with a giant agave that landed me on that knee smack on a boulder, at high speed at that. (I have no allergies, so it was the only time in my life that I was attacked and injured by a plant... which is why it's my least favorite plant of them all. Celery which I don't care for is second, but a very distant second, not a close one, since all I have to do to avoid it is refrain from biting.)

I cured several people's knee pain over the years with this old country home remedy pack (BTW originally recommended to me by an old country MD, not an old wife ): 1T good quality honey mixed with 1T mustard powder (Colmans is the only one I found working outside the old country) mixed with 1T flour (mine is rice, but it doesn't matter which, it's used just as a thickener in this recipe, and the amount can be adjusted depending on the thickness of the honey.) Mix into sticky paste, smear over the knee and also apply to a piece of linen or cotton cloth (or wool flannel, which is best but not necessarily on hand, so an old cotton sock, cut lengthwise and to size, is a sensible substitute), wrap over the knee, secure with saran wrap or parchment paper (which I prefer), wrap an old wool scarf around and secure with some safety pins (or a bandage if you don't feel it's safe to use pins) -- leave it on overnight, every night until the problem resolves. (Usually between a couple of days and a week.) Maybe wear old pajama pants over the whole contraption (optional) for extra stability. By morning the mustard and honey will completely get absorbed.

Not at sea level. But you can drive for just an hour upward in San Diego County and at 3,000 feet elevation you get your snow -- every year.

Do you switch your wardrobe to season-appropriate clothes four times a year? I have to do it four times a day, every day.

The hurricane/tropical storm is a couple hours away from us per latest predictions, but some fire hydrants in downtown decided to help it along ahead of schedule. Video: https://packaged-media.redd.it/k703vjwl1bjb1/pb/m2-res_1280p.mp4?m=DASHPlaylist.mpd&v=1&e=1692572400&s=6d053c7ae8deeab4e038fffffacb9f5afa090978#t=0

The US is 4% of the world population, accounts for over 70% of worldwide pharmaceutical profits, and ranks 60th in life expectancy.

I got two bottles of Saint-Emilion Grand Cru, one for personal consumption and another for a Christmas gift to a neighbor. The one for personal consumption hit the spot. Now I keep looking at the other bottle. I don't even know if the neighbor drinks wine. Or if she does, if it matters to her that it's an excellent wine, maybe she can't tell the difference, most people around me can't. But I owe her a favor. But maybe I can get her something else. But that's a hassle to think of something else when I already have a bottle of wine and some cookies for her. Cookies aren't a temptation because cookies aren't a temptation. But Saint-Emilion is. Time will tell.

One thing leads to another, and somehow I wound up on Youtube listening to Rasputin by Boney M. A blast from the past. One of the songs I used to ice skate to... Then I got curious to read up on Boney M. on wiki and among other things discovered a strange fact. Bobby Farrell, the male face of the band at the time, died on the same day (only 106 years later) and in the same city -- St.Petersburg, Russia -- as Grigori Rasputin.

Cats are strange. Artists are also strange. The best of both are incredible at tiny details that actually mean a lot if you observe very closely. A twitch of a whisker, a stroke of a brush... Microscopic examination of the light reflecting in the left eye of Vermeer's famous Girl with a Pearl Earring reveals what it is exactly that's reflected there, illuminated by the light It's this exact sleeping position, only here the cat's head is on the left and the pearl girl's cat's on the right.

I read the Epic of Gilgamesh several times over the years, but I don't remember it suggesting that. Do you have the passage(s)? That one I read in my teens. Never had the urge to re-read, so I don't know what Zarathustra (or rather Nietzsche) would think about it. Me, I thought the best part of the book was that "also sprach" bit which was the closing statement of every little chapter-parable, a lovely literary device, always inserted predictably and still unexpectedly as though a train of thought would suddenly come to a halt instead of dragging on and on (as it tends to in many philosophically slanted writings), a version of sapienti sat. At the same time it added to this flair of solemn pomposity characteristic of the whole book, and I sometimes add it to my posts in a tongue-in-cheek manner if I suspect that I sound proselytizing or something in that post.

That's exactly (well, almost exactly) what's happening here now, chiefly in New Jersey but they're being spotted elsewhere too (including here in CA, close to my neck-of-the-woods). Massive unidentified crepuscular drone activity and no one knows what they are, but the Pentagon made an official statement yesterday asserting they know what they aren't. They aren't our military, they aren't another country's, they aren't amateur hobbyists'. End of story. The drones, per hundreds of nightly eyewitnesses, are huge -- the smallest ones are the size of an SUV, and a journalist (who is also president of some birdwatching club and is always looking up) described the one he saw over Montclair, NJ as the size of a two-car garage or a school bus or something on that scale. Whether Jesus is involved is debatable, but according to the Pentagon which pretty much excluded all other possibilities (except maybe one more -- which I personally think might be the closest to the truth), in the absence of another explanation, the Jesus factor might be as feasible as any other. https://x.com/JimFergusonUK/status/1867131023827370350

One of the rivers where I once spent a month kayaking, from its messy beginnings amidst a jumble of reeds all the way to the city from which we took a train home, was a habitat to countless blue dragonflies that like to hang out near the water. They were a brilliant metallic sapphire blue all over, body and wings and all, and they were all around all the time. Messing with them seemed impossible -- they were incredibly fast, and their 360 degree eyesight prevented a snatching hand sneaking onto them, they always knew what you were up to. Look but don't touch was the credo they lived by.

Thanks for justifying the thread's title. It's one of the stranger conclusions for sure. No, anprim is a pipe dream, not a plan, much less a plan to cut the remaining trees and install parking lots. The dream is to restore all the forests in all their glory (not a theory in my case, been to many, lived a "primitive" life for a month at a time a number of times, loved every second of it... and not all of those forests and rivers even exist today and those that do are shrinking... or should I say being shrunk. By "progress," and also by war, an inalienable feature of civilization.) Restoring the forests, that's the dream, with all of their biodiversity. Living the way we did for a million years. Not in the cities. Not in the villages. Not in the suburbs. Not in apartment buildings, not in high rises, not in family houses that breed alienation, not the way we have been forced to live for the past 8 to 12 thousand years (a nanosecond in historical time) but the way we always lived before hostile takeover of the planet by something that is primarily anti-aliveness. A dream is a dream, I don't believe it's possible to reverse civilization, which I see as a one way ticket to a dead end. Maybe it happened before. There's supposedly some evidence that it happened before, maybe many times before. But if that's the case, it always ends the same way. Civilization is not sustainable. It is a nanosecond of skipped heartbeat in the rhythm of the planet, is all. Also sprach Taomeow.

That's very true. Although if dao is followed consistently, generation after generation, those things tend to coincide -- personal wants and gratifications become aligned with universal ones instead of clashing with them. Normal people seek what's good for them and their tribe and avoid what's harmful quite naturally. When huge masses of people are busy seeking what under normal lifestyles they would avoid while avoiding what normal dao-following ways would lead them to seek, we have a global lunatic asylum on our hands. Also I think a big contributor to the recent population expansion was deeply biological, namely the evolutionary response to WWI and especially WWII -- a phenomenon well studied in animal and insect populations but ignored in humans. It's a curious (and very sensible, come to think of it) fact of biology that many species respond to their peers being killed in large numbers by dramatically heightened reproductive patterns. This is always temporary, and once the killings stop reproductive rates return to sustainable. That's IF the killings stop. For some species they never stop (whether direct or indirect killings, e.g. via habitat deterioration and deprivation). Those become "endangered," not finding enough mates to reproduce and/or enough resources for their young to thrive, and most of the time eventually go extinct. I don't think the mass killings of humans ever stopped (though the scale was and is more scattered, less concentrated, than in a world war, and often less direct). So our first phase of biological response was to reproduce more vigorously, and now looks like we're in the second phase for the endangered species, where reproductive rates plummet. Extinction is the third and final phase.

Civilization is not sustainable, has never been, will never be. 'Growth" -- meaning incessant expansion of everything everywhere all at once -- is its only way to exist. Exhaust resources here, move there, rinse, repeat 'cause you need to compete. (Every "sustainability" scam is a scam in this setting, nothing more, no solution to anything, you just move on to straining some other populations and exhausting some other resources.) And population growth of yesterday which you cited is a fluctuation similar to the over-expansion of horse population dragging carriages in the 19th century. There were 4.3 million horses in the US in 1840 and 27.5 million in 1910. 7 times the number in 70 years. The main concern of environmentalists of the era was that our cities will drown in manure. They calculated knee high manure in the streets of New York in this and that number of years, thigh high in another number of years, stuff like that. Where are those horses now?.. A similar fluctuation in the human population has already proved to be short-lived. Currently most countries' reproductive rates (including in all "first world" countries) are far below population replacement rates, this is the biggest die-off in the making, bigger than in a nuclear war only slower. The record holder for the lowest birth rates today is South Korea and they calculated that if this rate stays what it is (doesn't even have to go lower), South Koreans will go extinct in three generations. Just like those New York horses...

Nah, they will just add a heap of sugar to dry cat food and call it cereal (the main ingredients are the same anyway), rebrand it as fortified breakfast of champions or healthy treats... or maybe market some of it unchanged to kids who identify as furries or therians, it's a growing trend. Which they can make grow bigger anytime if they decide it's commercially desirable. Not their first rodeo.