Word Cloud

The following link takes the last 3 days posts from any site with an RSS feed and turns it into one of those word cloud things. I did one on 1000 & 1 things, but because it only covers 3 days, it was mostly text from my editing. Which got me thinking... you can copy and paste random text into http://www.wordle.net/.

Might it be cool to post your book - or a chapter of your book - and see how it came out. The neatness of the result warrants a visit, in my opinion.

http://www.wordle.net/

Hungry for some Pansies - Part II

It's the summer doldrums.

And then lightening strikes.

It comes in the form of two new interests. I had off Friday and began listening to the Pansy Division CD I had been given. I'm about half way through now, having listened to most of the first half twice. There are a couple of real gems on the CD. The first song in particular has gotten 3 listens, just because I find it so funny. The James Bondage song is a winner, as well. I like the song - and I'm going to mess up the name/topic - about the beautiful boy who is the singer's dream guy, as well. But that first one about - love love love love love, blahblahblahblahblah cause its all about sex sex sex sex sex- is a classic.

And I'm reading Hunger Games. Its a book I first heard about in a Slate.com headline (but didn't read the story or anything about it). Then I saw a post on Facebook about it. So I picked up a copy at Target. Its fantastic. A little fatalistic, a lot violent, but an awesome read. Very well plotted. It's kind of 1984 meets Lord of the Flies, in a way. I haven't been reading much; I just haven't had the strength. But I'm reading away at 50 pages per day on this and loving it. That might not seem like a lot to you, but I've had a 60 birthday party to prep for at my house - and clean up from - and 100 things going on. And like I said, I've had trouble reading of late. But this book - I hate to put the book down. I find myself wanting to get to the next page, next event; only then I'm sad that I've read so far.

The book is the first in a trilogy that I definitely plan to read.

Hungry for some Pansies - Part I

Its' been a hot and humid spring & summer. And then August happened. So, I haven't been much but ducking in and out of buildings avoiding the soup-like heat. Consequently, there hasn't been much to post about. I'm ordering new windows for the bedroom today, and once they arrive in two-to-three weeks, I'll be installing them. But I hardly think you much care, and that feels more like a "Hooray, it went well, I'm sorta kinda handy" or a "I have plywood for a window" kinda post down the road.

I'll be working from home by Nov. 12. Supposedly. This is, by my count, the 12 plan they've had for us, so I'm not holding onto that too dearly until it happens. In the meantime, its got me nervous and excited and worried. It's much better than not having a job, but I'll miss the social aspects of the office. Plus, I may never shave, shower, dress or socialize with anyone ever again.

The UPS guy will drop off a package - probably of tea - and will be confronted with a mountain man looking fellow, pizza crusted in his beard. Flies will buzz around the man, and, despite it being 3 p.m., I'll be in my robe and swat them away with the cuff .

It's the summer doldrums.

Two great posts

A hilarious one about meditation at a Buddhist resort; and one on agnosticism that seems to me to be spot on.

It's the trifecta! The trifecta, I tell ya!

Its not exactly the technological singularity, or even the other, more sciency, singularity, but still.

This reason.com post and the accompanying video (well worth a watch in my opinion - but I wouldn't have posted it if I didn't think that was the case) hits all the interests: government programs, health and food. And there is a TED mention, to boot.

Schmarmapuke

If you've ever wondered what the appeal of the comic Marmaduke is, well, this site won't help you much in figuring that out.

But it is pretty funny in a somewhat mean-spirited way. So, if you don't find Marmaduke funny, and you are looking to waste some time, and maybe laugh a little, and find someone to commisserate with, well, this is the site for you. It certainly won't help explain its popularity - in fact it will do just the opposite.

I for one have always wondered about the appeal of the oafish beast. And I have a dog that is biggish and sometimes mishaves in spoiled ways, so you'd think I would be the prime friggin audience.

Read Joe Mathlete Explains Today's Marmaduke and you'll realize that not only is the comic not funny, its not very well drawn, either. And pretty dated.

The funniest thing about any of the 88 strips on the blog are the blogger's analysis and some of the insights by the commenters. Cosplay gets a shout-out at one point that I only partly understood.

These are a few of my favorite things

Black tea: Yunnan Jig, followed closely by Assam Melody
Green tea: Sencha

And I should note that after, oh, 3 or so years of brewing, I've managed to coax a subtle sweetness out of it to go along with the usual bitterness.

Life without the Web

This guy here is doing what all of us have probably wondered about but would never really ever be crazy enough to dare to do: Go without the internet.

Not just for a day.

Or a week.

But for more than a month (he's cheating somewhat, in my estimation, but that's a discussion for another time).

Its a well written piece, and if you have the time and the inclination, I suggest you take 10 minutes and read the first piece in the series. As I said, well worth your time.

Anyway, this was originally intended as just a "what I'm interested in RIGHT NOW" post, but it got me thinking. Over the last year or two or three, I've gone from reading large quantities of books, to being a voracious reader of online content. Most of its news. Probably about 55% straight news, actually. Another 20% is political news or analysis.

But the remaining 25%, like the piece discussion above, is only news adjacent. Its more of a feature. Sort of a short story, almost. Or a series of short stories. Is that the result of immersion in the InterTubes? Or is it just a change in reading habits that accompany age and the nature of my life at this point in time?

Good question.

Tea tree for me; tea tree for thee?

So, Adagio has this pretty neat thing going on for Earth Day. You can plant - i.e., reserve space - a tea tree on a tea plantation in one of three locations. An area of China - known for its white teas; and area of India - known for Assam; or an area of Sri Lanka - known for its Oolong.

Click here, Captain Planet, to save the world - one tea tree at a time.

Now, I'm pretty sure the farmer/Adagio would plant the tree anyway. They let you pick the spot in the field you want to plant the tree, but something tells me if you pick a spot way in the far corner and no one picks the ones near you, they aren't just going to forego planting in the rest of the spaces and then go out and tend to your tree standing 200 yards away by itself. My hunch is the whole field is going to be planted anyway - probably with or without you and possibly it already has been.

So, from an Earth Day stand point, its might really be a wash. If the tree is going in the ground anyway, my selection isn't really doing very much. But it seems like it couldn't hurt.

Oh, and you have to digitally care for your tree. Like a Digipet, except its a Digiteatree. I assume that means watering and weeding, probably along the lines of the god forsaken Farmville crap that is on Facebook, but whatever. The actual instructions weren't all that clear. But hey, its not actual weeding and watering, which is kinda hard work, so again, no harm, no foul. Or at the very least, little harm, little foul. Certainly little enough to ignore.

And last but not least: If you ditigally care for your plant to maturity, they will send you four free ounces of tea from your plant.

This last part is just not believable, and is somewhat makes me question the whole program, even if it is for a good cause and blah blah blah. I can believe the tree will be planted. But am I really to believe that a poor/poorish farmer in a little regulated tea plantation in India os going to label my tree and keep track of it and then when it comes time for harvesting seperate my tree's leaves from the others to ensure that I get tea from - again - my tree?

Sure, why not.

Anyway, I planted a tree. Its in India. Its the third plant from the left in the first row in the second field. If you want to know why I chose the third planting spot, you haven't been paying attention. Three. Triangles. Pyramids. Strongest, least likely to tip over? Ringing a bell? Don't get it? Ask in the comments and I'll explain.

A tea tree takes 3 years to reach maturity. Which means in all liklihood I will have long since forgot about digitally nurturing my little tree and foregone the free tea. But I thought it was neat, cool and worth a try.

My hat, is a very very fine hat

The headline has to be sung to the tune of Our House by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young to sound anything but arrogant.

So, as promised, here's a look at my new hat!

And from a different angle:

Hate it? I don't much care.

Maybe this is more your flavor: I also bought myself a kind of birthday present/necessity item (if you define necessity as the need to have like 100 of an item). A new tea cup.

It was the second one I picked out, after worrying that first one was too feminine. Tea stuff can be so girly sometimes. But this seemed masculine enough. Masculinish, at any rate, I suppose. And I like it; despite the fact that it appears to have, for no discernable reason, a Maple leafesque leaf on it. I'm familiar with tea leaves, and this one would be something I'm not all accustomed to seeing as a tea leaf. Maybe it is and I am just not aware. You can kinda see it above the large "a" on the cup. Its not the single, slender leaf that I usually associate as a tea leaf.

Anyway.

Fat-free fools

It turns out, all that "fat-free"/"low-fat" food you see on store shelves might not only not help you lose weight (which we've known for a while), it might also be dangerous to you. All because the original understanding and testing didn't account for the particle size of LDL cholesteral.

The original thinking went that since eating fat raises cholesteral, and those with high cholesteral are at general risk for heart disease, eating fat raised your risk for heart diseaes. Turns out, only eating certain types of fat actually leads to an increased risk of heart disease. And this helps explain why cholesteral tests can predict only about 70 percent of those at risk for heart disease. Some people with heart disease might have LDL level completely within the "normal" range, but primarily comprised of the wrong type of particles.

So says this slate.com story.

I say this as I eat sunflower seeds, after having had almonds yesterday, and olive oil (the oil, not the girl) Wednesday. Oh, the good LDL comes from olive oil and nuts/seeds.

And these people want to run our health care? Oh joy.

My Theory

I've started The Art of Happiness. The fact is, I generally respond to questions of "how are you" with the response "excellent." Honestly. There are times when I'm so overwhelmingly happy that my insides feel like they will burst. Or melt into some kind of cosmic glow. And not just when I'm drunk - though I'm an exceedingly happy drunk.

Not to brag, but I really feel like I've had almost no bad breaks in life. Good jobs that I've never lost and always loved. Great wife who has a good job she likes and who is just as silly and generally as, or more, optimistic than me. Sufficient income. Nice house. And perhaps most importantly - good to great health. It really is all about having good health. If you are in pain and sick all the time, all those other things mean mostly, well, squat.

Maybe some of that is the choices I've made. Certainly some of it is luck and birth place and family. Some of it is that I'm a master at exclusion. I simply exclude that for which I have little time, or interest, or which is a drag on my happiness. I'm also a pretty good at parrying. I think I have a keen ability to to take most of what would derail me and - like a good karate block - us its own momentum to safely direct it away and around me.

Having said all this, I should note that I'm also sometimes worried that this means that I've got something very dark in store for me down the road. Hopefully it just means that I appreciate what I have and can block out bad stuff. But I'm still sometimes suspicious. And frankly, typing this isn't helping. Its making me nervous. Its like saying Beetlejuice three times. That summons him, right?

So I'll now move onto the real purpose of my post. I was a strong Republican through high school and into the early parts of college. From the last half of college onward though - and I don't remember the exact moment, but Ayn Rand was a key part - I have slowly moved further away from Republicans and more firmly into the Libertarian/libertarian/liberty camp. Some of my distancing from childhood beliefs is probably just natural growth into adulthood from a conservative upbringing. But some of it is the feeling that some of my childhood beliefs were based on lies.

So much so that while I was a huge anti-drug advocate in high school, I've now become disallusioned with the entire anti-drug crowd and now support drug legalization. So much of it seems like lies now that I have the whole truth.

Anyway, that isn't even the real point of the post. I've really come to believe that any use of force, except in self-defense, is a bad idea. Force - and force is almost always the taking something from someone for yourself - represents evil and darkness 99% of the time. Whether it be theft, or preventing gay marriage, or drug prohibition, or book burning, or racism. Sometimes the force is obvious - as in theft - and sometimes its just implicit - drug prohibition, book burning - and sometimes its just covered by a thin veil of morality - racism, preventing gay marriage.

Anyway, my theory: You should strive to be as liberty and openness loving as possible for your own personal place in the world. Maybe you can't bring yourself to support drug legalization for whatever reason. But you should always be open and accepting of those more open than yourself and mostly reject those more restrictive than yourself.

Maybe you don't support drug legalization, but you should always consider it a goal and possibility and option. Maybe you can't get comfortable with gay marriage (and shame on you, if you can't - that's me rejecting the more restrictive point of view) but you should allow it for the sake of liberty and openness.

I know - pure acquintances, mostly from message boards - some anarchists, or minarchists. And while I don't think anarchy has any chance of being imposed in any reasonable, not world destroying, way, I can accept their position and can see it and can wish that it would be possible. I wouldn't support its application here today, as we stand, because I don't think it would work, but I have no problem working toward its implementation. I reject all efforts at more restrictions, however. Its funny, because I've always rejected the "Indians knew best and were perfect" thinking. Until recently. When I've come around to the idea that maybe, just maybe, we would all be better off if we lived, not like them, but more like them. Keep the technology. Lose the subsistence living. Keep the dispersed, underpopulated nature. Its actually quite Jeffersonian, who believed we should be a nation of yeoman farmers and warned against cities.

Anyway, that's where I stand. I know this was long. And somewhat rambling. And somewhat pendantic, perhaps. And somewhat preachy. And not at all peachy - though click-and-sniff internet hyperlinks would be awesome and absolutely have to be the next thing people work on. I hope you managed to read all this and didn't quit. I feel like it was something that I needed to say and put out there. If only to have said it and explained it and made it clear to myself.

Also, I'd kinda like a critique or thoughts about my "more free than you" theory.

I love walks (A respite from the ordinary)

I'm posting this as a short respite from the usual ranting, somewhat stream of consciousness, often nonsensical crap I usually post. Though its not a deviation from the blog's general meandering course - that's what you get from a conglomeration of 1000 & 1 Things packed into a bag built for 100 & 1 things.

I gotta say, I love walking.
There is just something about it.
The still quietness of it, interrupted only by the scuffling of sole on pavement and sometimes only by the softest whisper of shoe on earth.
The way the exact same space on a walking path changes - almost as if the walking a path itself is doing its own walk - going from the vibrant green of new life to the yellow, gold and brown of mustard, into the drereast of solemn browns and greys and back into the lime green shoots.
One day the sky is an uncapturable blue. The next an inexcusable grey.
I love the way, no matter how many times we've been down that EXACT same path (what must it be now - 70, 100 times?), Duke runs here and there, exploring this and that individual blade of grass as if he's never seen it before. Searching for God, or God knows what.
I love how, despite 70 or 100 trips, the ever-changing path always holds something new for me as well.
I love how Duke never seems so content as it is when we are walking. As if this is the greatest time he could be having.
I love that I feel the same way.
Maybe behind one of the scents he is following is the collected works of the greatest wisdom of all time.
I love how in the spring, the earth smells new and the breeze carries with it a promise of growth
and warmth and makes you want to run - and is that a hint of summer and the shore?
And yet one day, the path will bluster and blister you cold wind.
I love how in the deepest, silentest quiet, your thoughts are loud, and yet its still perfectly quiet.
I love to watch the people.
The runners.
The dog walkers.
The meanderers.
The old ladies.
The friends.
I like how the ground seems hard and safe and concrete, while the sky seems broad and abandoning and limitless.
I love how in 6,000 steps, you can feel as if you've seen the entire world, yet you've only gone 2 miles.
But mostly, I just love the seeing. The walking. The oneness. The aloneness of it all. Even if Duke and R. are right alongside me.

OK.
/CHEESY, embarrasing crap