Tag Archives: food
And you think sequestration is going to be bad!
And you think sequestration is going to be bad!:
Do Sikhs eat meat?
How many of us do something against our wishes because it’s our “job”?
How many of us go against the wishes of others because it’s our destiny?
Yesterday evening, my wife and I drove to a food store chain called “Cheeburger Cheeburger” because a day or so before we had listened to “50s on 5,” a satellite radio station dedicated to the popular American rock’n’roll music of the 1950s, which put me in the mood for a ’50s style eatery.
Delayed gratification had us sitting at a two-topper, recently cleaned off by Russell.
Courtney took our food order and Mayra brought us our food.
As we were close to finishing our delicious ground-up cow meat patties on buns and basket of frings (sliced/fried onions/potato), a large group of teenagers entered all cheery, bright-eyed and photo-happy, obviously not having eaten at this particular fine dining establishment before.
Of the group of 27, four young lads sat next to us, one wearing a T-shirt with the words “KEEP CALM I’M THE DOCTOR” emblazoned below the emblem of a old telephone booth, affectionately known as the time machine called the Tardis to fans of an internationally-popular show on the tellie called “Doctor Who.”
The young gentlemen were quite polite, informing my wife, upon her inquiries, that they haled from across the Big Pond in a small burgh called Birmingham (pronounced BIRM’ing-hum as opposed to our local town we call Birmin-HAM’).
They and their pals had enjoyed a good time at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center before being whisked off to the local shopping extravaganza known as the Madison Square Mall.
In like fashion to my wife’s curiosity, satisfying us that they were interested in a future career of engineering when they entered university (one favouring mechanical engineering and the other civil engineering), they pressed us for our favourite fast food joint.
As we hemmed and hawed, they informed us that they had the international fast food chains such as McDonald’s in Great Britain but not ones like Wendy’s.
I told them I believed my favourite place is Steak ‘n Shake, similar to Cheeburger Cheeburger but without the one-pound special, closer in style to my alltime favourite, Pal’s, which was too small for them to know about. My wife believed her favourite is In-N-Out Burgers, which is concentrated on the West Coast.
The young men told us they were still in secondary school and that one of their chaperones, a woman with pink stripes in her hair, was their physics teacher whose specialty is astrophysics.
We wished them well and told them we hoped to meet them on the International Space Station one day, imagining these guys and their friends the future of space exploration and settlement.
After all, the enthusiastic pursuits of our youth often encourage us to expand our horizons.
These young men, some of them wearing what I believe to be the head gear of the Sikh religion, are part of our future, going on into fields of science and engineering along with their colleagues of many races, religions, genders and backgrounds, inventing new ways of observing our universe that we hardly imagine possible today.
I am happy that our ancestors put us on the path for Americans and Brits to meet at a small restaurant tucked into a shopping centre in the south part of Huntsville, Alabama, USA, Earth.
Even as early as 25 years ago, I would not have thought it possible for us to meet like that.
Fifty years ago, not long after I was born, it was practically impossible.
Can you see how much progress we’ve made, how much farther we’ll go in 25 and 50 years from now?
Can you see why I don’t believe in secret societies and never chose to belong to one, even though I know they still exist and contribute in part to my being here today?
The hacks, they keep on coming — are you a “one hack” wonder?
When you want honey, do you make the bees angry before you pull out a piece of the hive?
The universe is here because I am here just like a paper cone is only paper until it is a speaker and what is a speaker without an audience?
Take two groups:
- The first group believes in the open and honest discussion of scientific methods.
- The second group believes in the civil discourse of sly competitiveness.
Both groups believe in the betterment of their respective societies/[sub]cultures.
However, a little problem occurs when one group uses the other’s subcultural norms for advantages within their own group.
Is it miscommunication? Misappropriation?
How do they, together, benefit our whole species?
Because I believe the universe is here because I am here, I want, as long as I am happily able to think so, the species, our species, within our Earth-based ecosystem that has nurtured us for thousands, no, billions of years, to use this brief period of peaceful coexistence with the rest of the solar system to expand into the galaxy.
When I am gone, the universe is gone and none of this will matter to me because my set of states of energy as a recognizable entropic confluence will disperse but remain temporarily as memories in a small number of members of our species and even smaller number of members of other species, barely a footnote in the yellowed pages of old newspapers.
Does the universe make me happy as is?
I have learned that very few people change their behavioural patterns when allowed to wallow in their sorrow or anger, let alone convince other, happy, people to join them.
Yet, happiness for its own sake, like art and humour, does what, exactly?
If burning down a forest makes me happy, there will be a lot of people and members of other species who disagree, adamantly so.
If destroying an economy makes me happy, there will be a lot of people who agree as well as a lot who disagree.
What kind of happiness should we attain?
After all, we are a competitively cooperative species, sharing and hoarding, fighting and loving, all at the same time.
Our lives are short in length, some brighter and louder than others, some sadder, some happier, some kinder, some meaner, some in-betweeners.
Is there a shortcut to happiness that makes the universe beneficial to us all, regardless of our physical/mental condition(s)?
We are a nearly-fully connected species, the fractal spinoff of rudimentary central nervous systems, remodeling ourselves on bigger and bigger scales because we have no other workable model against which we positively compare ourselves within the known universe.
We talk about revolutionary and evolutionary changes in our socioeconomic activity on sub-sub-subcultural levels when the grand scheme hasn’t changed one iota: a species competing against itself because of a myopic view of the universe.
We realize, in rare glimpses, that we are part of the universe rather than living in an us-vs.-them scenario, “them” being you/self/God/universe/other.
Rather than bemoan, bedevil and punish people who hack computers/life/universe, let us look at the hacks from a species/universal perspective.
What am I gaining from those who circumvent my subcultural norms, the rules, both states and implied, that define me and the people happily living and perpetuating the subculture?
What am I losing, instead?
Can I turn the circumventers on their heads and reverse any damage they’ve caused?
How do I absorb the lessons they learned while they took/stole/[ab]used information from my open society?
Some people like clover honey and some people like sourwood honey.
How we get to the honey without disturbing the bees is the first step for any one of us to feed our wide variety of happy tastes and preferences.
Southern Living, rediscovered
While excavating further into the bowels of the hoards of our house well-furnished with modern antiquities (sounds better than junk or trash), we found a box of Southern Living magazines from around the turn of the century. Here are a few scanned samples for storing in our electronic pile of “historical documents”:
Presidential Meal
Thanks to Haley for her great service at Marketplace Cafe.
Meditative Moment
As the fresh, raw feelings of loss subside, more days between now and the death of my father than a week or a month ago, as I grow stronger because I savoured and relished the emotional states that passed through my body, I face the future in these words, more than in drawn images or recorded sounds.
As ethnicities spread across the planet and mix, their subcultures subsequently subsiding, the global culture defines itself spontaneously.
How do languages and their speakers survive in a homogenising dough machine, the yeast rising, the bread ready-to-make in the oven of a world in transition?
Do you like the flavours in an “everything” bagel full of wheat, pepper, curry, onions, potatoes, garlic and salt?
Where once the survival traits of one’s gene set ensured early death due to birth defects, lactose intolerance and gluten allergies, the current cultural fixation is to cure us of our genetic abnormalities when normality is a moving target on a Möbius strip of the toroid of life.
One may feel full of God’s love and empty at the same time — the louder one has to shout the words of one’s religion, the less one is believed to have internalised their meaning.
Thus, one may hate the world and love the world simultaneously.
The intersection of subsets of thoughts may clash but innovation and invention arise from the need to mate incongruities into harmonious patterns.
Humour is a single part of an artist’s palette if one is free to express oneself free of coercive commercial interests intent on generating more income than debt.
When a population is mostly freed from survivalistic needs, can the population long survive while pursuing selfish interests in opposition to population [re]generation?
Where are the protectors of the faith that the world is full of purveyors of the emperour’s new clothes that must be declared unsavoury and unhealthy to sustain a population which wants to be around thousands of years from now?
Humour for humour’s sake is a fool’s folly.
Art for art’s sake is a loser’s game.
An uninformed populace will obey the uniformed police without reasonable cause to question authority.
What are we producing to improve our future?
Every day, I wake up and ask myself, “What am I doing today that I’m here for because I didn’t die or kill myself yesterday?”
Some days, I don’t have a good answer so I research the reasons and ask again, knowing I’ll find the tiniest part of me that I improve that day to better answer the question tomorrow.
Some days, I state a plain ol’ platitude, let it sit for a day and look at it from a different perspective the next day, learning most often that I never know everything that I think I did the day before.
One day, I’ll die if I don’t kill myself first when I’m an old man whose tunnel vision prevents him from seeing the car heading into his path as he turns to drive across oncoming traffic on the way to his favourite watering hole, assuming I’ll be driving an antique automobile not retrofitted to stop me from making a traffic mistake in the first place.
There are a lot of days in-between to see how I, despite the errors of myself within the subcultural training I received along the way, can get from here to the Moon, Mars and beyond, one set of states of energy in a population of seven billion and growing.
Last night, my team of subsubsubbasement scientists showed me a new gun they had invented that senses the emotional wellbeing of the shooter and locks the trigger until one’s emotional state of misplaced anger has been subdued with neutralising pharmaceuticals embedded in the gun’s grip, thus preventing many murderous acts of passion by firearms.
Energy now and forever more energy
Just to show that energy studies have been studied for decades, thousands of years after our ancestors discovered fire is good for warmth and a good pot roast:
A Different Time
Love is…
Oops! I deed it again!
I woke up with a Brooke Shields Britney Spears song playing in my thoughts, the brief memory of a dream disappearing into the last hour — me, an author, at a book signing, sitting on stage as if at a rock concert in a large performance venue, people screaming my name at me for reasons I couldn’t fathom…well, who doesn’t like a good ego-boosting dream every now and then?
Thanks to Ashley and the “pretty in pink” tanned hostess at Peerless Restaurant in Johnson City; the owner/chef and daughter/server at Sweet Tooth Cafe in Rogersville; Aaron and Heather of U-Haul at Lender Services; Grace, Cody and more at Food City in Colonial Heights; Demetrice and staff at the Cupboard/BP; Ada at Capital Bank; Spencer and “Bacon” helping to unload furniture; Evelyn and David Carpenter helping to load furniture; Cindy giving lessons of International Folk Dancing [Greek style?] at the Legion Street Rec Center in Johnson City, aided by Brent, Marie and Lynn (with participation by Mark, Cindy, Julie and other smiling faces); Rogersville Sanitation Department; U.S. Dept. of Veteran Affairs; Rick Carroll; James Point; Annette at Sublett Insurance.
Soon, a house belongs to new owners.
Then, the story of our solar system as told to me by rolling the crystal ball down a shiny hardwood lane into bowling pins will play out here, the future safely looking back at us from that good ol’ 1000-year distance.
Thought taking me back into my dreams: why do I think that a salary is stealing from my customers instead of sharing the wealth of a healthy labour/investment credit barter system? — what is blocking me from profiting more than I have in the past?
treetrunkdings 