Food has been much on my mind lately, as I seem to be dwindling away. It used to be that I had to be careful not to swell like a giant pumpkin, and adding pounds was as easy as looking at cheese. But these days the pounds aren’t sticking, and I have reverted to eating lots of carbs in the hopes I can join the Sumo wrestling team once again. Why we eat what we eat is not nearly as obvious as it can appear, and the history of food is fascinating (unless you read The History and Social Influence of the Potato, which my father-in-law has nominated for most boring book ever, which I question, having attempted to read Ospreys: A Natural and Unnatural History), and not just a question of taste. Public policy has come to play a remarkable and not so benign role in our diets, as we get nonsensical food pyramids thrust at a diverse ethnic population, and grow fat and diabetic listening to the advice of the “experts” who are frequently compromised greatly by their funding and academic in-fighting. At least according to the very convincing Gary Taubes and his excellent work Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health, which is a better title than his more recent Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It, and also considerably longer.
It was the inestimable Russ Roberts who lead me to Gary Taubes, and he has just interviewed the author of Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History:
Rachel Laudan, visiting scholar at the University of Texas and author of Cuisine and Empire, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the history of food. Topics covered include the importance of grain, the spread of various styles of cooking, why French cooking has elite status, and the reach of McDonald’s. The conversation concludes with a discussion of the appeal of local food and other recent food passions.
Most enjoyable, and as you root around like a pig eating potatoes, you will at least understand why. Bon Appetit.
A Mr Green request (yikes!, no emoticons)
Love his guitar work and lyrics too.
Lot’s of Stevie running around too.
somebody started the Joni tunes and gosh i love this one.
has re-appeared.!
See if this works. Trying to paste an astral projection link, even though I know.
And maybe some Van.
See if I can edit.
Xty, didn’t know if you knew about this. I’ve been taking the supplements for awhile and i think it helps.
http://umm.edu/health/medical/altmed/herb/turmeric
How can I make this clearer: I’m all right Jack is offensive. Internet narcissists are offensive. Never acknowledging other people is offensive. Passive aggressive behaviour is offensive. I think I might just finally slam that door shut.
But I did have a lovely day, as MouseCam can attest, that selfie actually being from yesterday, when I didn’t have as lovely a day. But today the old frame seemed much more sturdy. So we stretched the anniversary over two days … 29 years of unmitigated bliss, and we both forgot! I think that is important … every day matters, not just the ones marked on the calendar.
And I had heard about turmeric but forgotten. I certainly like curry … sounds like a simple and good idea and I will add some to the diet.
And good morning. That is a rousing tune. And here’s one for an old “friend”:
Well odd to say, that day when DP had trouble posting, that one comment ended up in spam. I have no idea why. Until yesterday the only thing that blocked a comment was having five links or more, or coming from an unregistered user. Now I have added a few things that would block a comment, but they are super specific, so we shall see. Mostly the spam is fake uggs, birkenstocks and gucci bags. Why squirrel salsa verde would trigger a spam call we shall leave up to the gods of karma.
Off to physical therapy, and trying to stay calm about the lesion on my x-ray, but having silly trouble getting the ultrasound booked. Therapy at the clinic where my doctor is, so I am going to get a physical copy of the requisition and take it in person to the hospital. Speaking of ughs.
Well, the therapist fellow was extremely pleasant as I had remembered, and also very positive about my progress. I feel that I know more about my injury, and how lucky I was actually to have such a clean break that didn’t fracture, how it heals, which muscles are atrophied and a plan to build me back up. He has magic thumbs as well. This is not part of our free health care, as one can imagine, but it shouldn’t be too brutal and most of it I can do at home with his guidance. Lovely man. And I have an ultrasound booked for Thursday to check that dratted x-ray. So as chuffed as I was likely to get. And a little
to brighten and de-stress the afternoon.
Good Morning.
Listening to my endless playlist, determined to enjoy my days, and here’s a song I really like:
And I don’t quite know why, but this always gets me going:
Why the financial news is worthless, all from Reuters:
“Wall Street posts worst day in four years” … that was this morning;
“Wall Street posts biggest rally of the year” … that was this morning after the open;
“Wall Street’s sharp rally loses its edge” … that would be now.
Like listening to the announcers on televised baseball, just meaningless statements of the obvious.
They are starting to construct this monstrosity, and it is even more hideous in real life. Here is the model:
Guess how much this “public” art cost and how much input the “public” had in choosing it? Guess first high and then low.
Previously we had these alarming fake marble (well, real marble imported from Italy for its classic notes, I kid you f&^%*^%$$^ing not) fire hydrants (yes, that part is fake, they are useless) installed throughout the neighbourhood that now mean the snowplows can’t clear the corners where they resurrected these tributes to Nero’s Rome during our 6 months of winter.
And don’t pretend you didn’t think for a second they were boobs. Even I want to tweak their damned nipples! And when I tell you these ten monsters cost 2.55 times the metal tree, you can imagine how I feel about my tax dollars being meaningfully spent.
i really should stop giving my art away for free.
Absolutely. Installation art is where it’s at. And you just need to know the right people, and think spending $100,000 on a metal tree is a public good. Like a library only ugly and useless.
Trinkets over infrastructure maintenance is commonplace here ,even at the city level. Rotten stuff.
Formulating a question.
Infrastructure … lately has meant a lot, and I mean a lot, of paint on the roads designating bicycle lanes, etc. You now cannot turn right at the end of this little street near us, leading on to a bigger sort of thorough fare on a red light, as we stop ten feet back before this large green square full of imaginary bicycles. I have yet to see a bicyclist wait for the light to change, as they just change from pedestrian to vehicle and go. And now where there is one lane for driving and one for parking on the main business street near us, Wellington, they have created “dooring zone” (better in French, EMPORTIERAGE, with an accent acute on the second ‘e’, and it is all painted bilangue in enormous capital letters) where the bikes get the main lane, and there is a no-man’s land where we think you are allowed to open your parked car’s door. But bicyclists are rightly afraid to take the main lane …. just nonsense and a job for painters. No one can understand the rules and there are signs everywhere to go with the paint. It really is bread and circuses, but they forgot the bread. And then I find out the deputy police chief got knocked off her bike in my neighbourhood, so we are the test pilot area. Did I mention there are beggars on the off-ramp three blocks away, every hour of every day? But now we have nice confusing paint everywhere, to go with the marble fire hydrants.
It took us twenty years of paying municipal taxes to get that one metal tree. Makes a mockery of the tax system and I think I might have a public fit.
Listening to Can’t Buy a Thrill … I think the album used to be out there on youtube, and I can’t pick a song … so here’s a few …
And now that we know this is about the writing and disobeying of Magna Carta, or at least that’s my read, I like this song even more …
I am really outraged by this metal tree. I took a picture of it today:
$100,000 dollars. What a boondoggle, and that just ate all the tax money we have struggled to pay the city year after year. It doesn’t even make shade. You can’t sit under it. It isn’t renewable, reusable, or recyclable. It is completely useless and an eyesore. And how will we ever get rid of it? Who are these people and didn’t they grow up through the same events I did? Do they drive electric cars and build metal trees? What about birds? I thought that we had learned not to behave like this.
Dang my blood is just boiling.
We would never waste money on stuff like that here. We buy nice stuff.
Every time I see these I think they are garbage cans with duct tape on them. http://johnrudel.com/gateway-towers.html
i’ll be the first to admit that the tree thingy is hideous. i recognized it instantly since i’m the one that birthed that hideous monstrosity.
i had to go to the swamp archives to retrieve this. it’s one of my early works back when i first was learning computer art programs. so please forgive me… it is so ugly that i cringe even posting it. but you must agree that the sculpture is a shameless rip off.
Xty, if my lawsuit is successful, i will return your wasted tax dollars, and with interest!
Pete, those gateway towers are so hideous that if they were mine, i’d never admit it. so sorry pal, you are on your own with those.
check your spam folder Xty. my posts are disappearing again. when i try to repost, i get the duplicate post warning.
I cannot figure out what is wrong … I found a history button that informed me that a built in wordpress function caught that comment but I can find no reason for it and no explanation. I have double checked the user settings, and there is nothing that should trigger that response. The only thing I have set up is that you must be logged in and have a previously approved comment, and no more than five links. I just recently (but after that first comment that went to spam) added a very specific block, but it wasn’t that I am sure. So I can but apologize and I will search again later to see if there is a flaw in the wp_blacklist_check that I can make head or tails of. Currently baffled.
And believe it or not, when I went for the ultrasound, they said that the tagged image seemed to show something superficial and might I have had something in my pocket when they took the x-ray! As if I have a clue what I was wearing or not wearing a few weeks ago, and whether it had pockets. But long and short of it (because today I was wearing shorts with no pockets) they did another x-ray first and then said there was nothing to see and no need for the ultrasound and have a nice day. Much todo about nothing. Whew.
Those beat up trash cans remind me of a story about a janitor who cleaned up an exhibit thinking it was abandoned trash. And they are painful to the eye, apparently deliberately, if you read the ludicrous explanation of the artist’s intent. I remember discussing with my musical offspring about the importance of an audience for one’s art and that self-expression is not necessarily interesting to anyone but the self doing the expressing. The whole idea of self-esteem has run roughshod over the upcoming generation who got A’s for effort but not for accomplishment. And those painted cans reek of self-indulgence. I was thinking about the creator of our metal tree and how she could possibly feel good about dominating the landscape with painted metal crap – there are these things we call the bowling pin people in the truly Italian neighbourhood near us, but the balls are soccer balls when you look more closely. I will search for a picture. They are super embarrassing and there is a field of large metal flowers somewhere in Quebec that always made me grumpy too.
And here are those Gateway Towers, that genuinely look like they have been whacked by cars and defaced by stickers. Astonishing and equally environmentally tragic.
I have asked the city for my money back.
Now don’t shoot me because I sometimes read National Review. Intelligent people disagree about many things. But this quotation really caught my eye. It is from a work called Hatred: The Psychological Descent Into Violence, and appeared in an article about the sad shooting in Virginia:
Mr Fix anyone?
i forgot to tell you that Fix quit posting on you-tube because he turned blue from drinking his homemade colloidal silver solution.
100!
I gotta go. Can’t explain.
Bye.
Some Neil.