Time to take this bull by the horns and milk it.
So Oprah’s been at it again, and the big new buzz is a book and a movie called The Secret. It’s basically just a rehash of a bunch of old stuff like the law of attraction, positive thinking, affirmations, and karma. No great harm, but as my mentor Jim Rhon says, “Affirmation without labor is the beginning of delusion.”
Well, here’s a great big bashing review over at skeptic.com:
The Secret behind The Secret
(Scroll down when you get there.)
“He who works with his hands is a laborer.
He who works with his hands and his head
is a craftsman. He who works with his hands
and his head and his heart is an artist.”
–St. Francis, religious leader
Here’s a long NY Times article by Michael Pollan, the author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma that I recommend you read, a further diatribe on the shortcomings of the American Diet.
His conclusion? Try to eat more food.
Our 2nd-grade daughter Emily was given the assignment to “Write a story about a soldier who sees a horse behind a tree — use all the words in the box [soldier, story, behind]. Here’s how it turned out:
Once I was a soldier in an old old fairy tale and in that fairy tale I saw a horse that got out of a farm. So the horse hid behind a tree so I ride it back to the farm. And that story was a good one wasn’t it? The End.
(The teacher’s red pen says “Yes.”)
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Gosh it’s been so long, I could list hundreds of links here, but to keep it short, I’ll just do a few recent favorites:
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I’ve been reading The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams, who, besides being friends with Henry and William James, and the whole Emerson family, was the grandson of John Quincy Adams, and thus the great grandson of John Adams. Speaking of himself and school, he said:
“He hated it because he was herded together with a crowd of boys and compelled to learn by memory a quantity of things that did not amuse him.”
I think that’s a real gem, but to unearth one of these, you have to wade through hours of tedious first-person history of the Union’s legation to England during the Civil War.
Last Thursday, we had our once a year every few years snowfall that actually amounted to enough to play in. I went out late in the evening and took this picture of our pool in the snow – it’s a little grainy looking because it’s a long exposure with available light. Click for a bigger version. (It was much prettier in real life.)
This is pretty cute – there’s a whole series of stop action animation skits using old Star Trek action figures. (This is also my first You Tube post.)
OK, so they tried to drop some planes by blowing up some Gatorade™ bottles.
I balked a little when Mr. Bush said that if we change our way of life, they win. Now given, he was talking about things like not going to Disneyland™ or your local shopping mall, or the Olympics(™?), and that would have really screwed up the party next summer at the Bohemian Grove.
But, really, we have to grow up about this. Don’t get me wrong — we should never fail to pursue and prosecute the “perps” to the full extent of justice (and please notice I did not say, “the law”).
We can’t accept terrorism, but neither can we paralyze ourselves by locking down airports or disallowing “all liquids” on flights.
I have been criticized here at home for saying stupid shit like, “Hey, I’m not worried about flying back from Washington D.C. on my birthday, ’cause if you’re on a plane that goes down coming back from D.C. on your birthday, what a great story!” I mean, everybody dies (you knew that, right?), so, compared to a long and drawn out cancer-without-medical-marijuana death, not that bad?
Assume the attack had been successful — there are about 6000 flights in the air at any given time (they showed a map on Primetime™ with a little red spot for every plane in the air that looked like that famous satellite shot of the cities all lit up), so those “as many as 3000 civilian deaths” would be way fewer than people who are just dying anyway from stupid shit like car accidents and old age.
I’m really really glad that those assholes were thwarted by the system, but they screwed up thousands of people a day every day for years, and I had to watch a Primetime™ about it, so they won.
And that’s my rant.
One of my recent reads was The Omnivore’s Dilemma, a fascinating book written in the same spirit as Fast Food Nation that helps us examine how and what we eat.
The book is presented in three parts, where each part ends with a meal reflecting that section’s theme. In the first section, the author follows a bushel of corn from an Iowa cornfield to a meal at McDonald’s. In the second, he investigates “big organic,” culminating in a meal built around a “free-range” chicken from Petaluma named “Rosie,” then contrasts that with a real organic meal from a small grass-fed chicken farm managed in the true spirit of organic agriculture, recycling waste, maintaining the viability of the land, and keeping the livestock healthy and relatively happy. In the third and last section, he serves a meal composed of only those things he either killed, grew, or gathered himself. (It confused me greatly this evening that the book has only three big sections, but the subtitle is “A Natural History of Four Meals” — but then again, I read it a few weeks ago, and I eventually figured it out.)
I think the greatest lessons I brought home from this book are:
As an Iowa non-farm boy, I also grew up believing that corn-fed beef was the best beef money could buy, but it turns out that cows evolved to digest grass, so in order to fatten them up quickly on surplus corn in vastly overcrowded CAFOs (Confined Animal Feeding Operations), they have to keep them on antibiotics and nurse them along on hay whenever they get too sick to keep eating the corn. Not to mention the sewage problems.
Bottom line is he has a meal he cooks himself of meat from a wild boar that he shot (turns out Northern California has them, let loose to forage by the Spanish settlers), cherries from a neighborhood tree, mushrooms from a fresh burn in the high Sierra pines, lettuce from his garden, etc.
I just had wild boar in his honor at a local restaurant in Lotus, CA a couple of weeks ago when The Lady Janet and I went out for our 14th anniversary, and it was interesting, but not that special, as opposed to say, rabbit, when it’s done so that it doesn’t just taste like chicken, free range or otherwise.
I am not a huge worrier about foodstuffs – I’ll pretty much stick anything in my face that tastes good. But if you want to worry about food, my advice is simple: try to eat as low on the food chain as possible and don’t eat anything unless you take the time to learn what it’s made of — see, it turns out that Soylent Green™ is actually corn! Co-o-rn! (Yes, thank you very much, Mr. Heston.)