Category: Miscellany

More To Life Than Bacon – Meatloaf

Meatloaf
MeatloafChocBac

Learned this very simple recipe as a teenager working in a restaurant. Few years later I was pulling KP duty during Basic Training & was told ‘go start making the meatloaf’. Not knowing the entire USAF used a standard recipe book, I started making this recipe. The cook didn’t find out I wasn’t following the book until I asked for the Worcestershire Sauce. By that time it was too late to change. It was such a hit the cook used my recipe from then on.

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Changes in Time and Place

Times, they are a-changin’
Nothin’ I can do about it now

To see a World in a Grain of Sand,
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the Palm of your Hand,
And Eternity in an Hour.

– William Blake: Auguries of Innocence.

I read blogs and articles and books which provide lots of information, yet there is always a little niggling thought lurking in the back of my mind: What does this have to do with my life? Here? Now? Objectively, I know it all does effect me, but it seems to be at arm’s length, almost abstract and I’ll always feel this way until I am personally the person unemployed, foreclosed, wounded, PTSD’d, imprisoned, etc. On the other hand, the biggest thing on my mind on a given day might be juggling work and two doctors’ appointments, which are important to me but register only a shrug to the other seven billion people on the planet.

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Mitakuye Oyasin

That Lakota phrase reflects the Great Truth – We Are All Related.
The denial of that truth, the failure to honor it is at the root of most of our self-inflicted problems.
It permits us to commit all sorts of evils, injustice, rapine, fraud, bigotry.

Whether we like to admit it or not, we all have views we have internalized to become our beliefs; we each have our individual-specific ‘confirmation bias’; our own intellectual filters which affect what we see and how we see it.
If we’re lucky, we get a little glimpse of the truth, and for most of us that’s about all we can tolerate at any one time.

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Family Matters

English spelling has changed a lot over the centuries and there were often several acceptable spellings of many words.
‘Potatoe’ was one such alternate spelling, circa 1600s, so when Dan Quayle spelled it that way in 1992, I just figured he learned his spelling where he learned his politics.

Similarly, when I hear the blather of the Family Values crowd, it reminds me very much of the 1600s in New England:

In theory, the seventeenth-century family was a hierarchical unit, in which the father was invested with patriarchal authority. He alone sat in an armed chair, his symbolic throne, while other household members sat on benches or stools. He taught children to write, led household prayers, and carried on the bulk of correspondence with family members. Domestic conduct manuals were addressed to him, not to his wife. Legally, the father was the primary parent. Fathers, not mothers, received custody of children after divorce or separation. In colonial New England, a father was authorized to correct and punish insubordinate wives, disruptive children, and unruly servants. He was also responsible for placing his children in a lawful calling and for consenting to his children’s marriages. His control over inheritance kept his grown sons dependent upon him for years, while they waited for the landed property they needed to establish an independent household.

I think ‘authority’ is the key word here. And they too pretended their rights were God-given, didn’t they?
Sound familiar?
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Contemplating anonymity

What Turned Jaron Lanier Against The Web?

Whole article is worth reading – and thinking about.

Lanier was one of the creators of our current digital reality and now he wants to subvert the “hive mind,” as the web world’s been called, before it engulfs us all, destroys political discourse, economic stability, the dignity of personhood and leads to social catastrophe.

if you say we’re creating the information economy, except that we’re making information free, then what we’re saying is we’re destroying the economy.

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