Query

OK, I must say, most months, I really love reading Dr. Ursus. Sometimes I wish that some of my colleagues would read him more...

Q&A

I was reflecting today, you know, when it kind of strikes you, facts about people, or new insights that you never thought of before... and I thought: brilliant, brilliant blessings... ones who have 'awoken the sleeping giant'... like Gandalf commanding King Theoden to breathe the free air again... like in The Secret Garden when Mary and Dickon bring Colin there and start encouraging him to start to learn to walk again... and, of course, friends... maybe I should tell them...

Sheep or goat? Sheep or goat? Sheep or goat?

Curiously, one person (who shall remain nameless, as per his request) thought that male sheep were called goats. Had thought so his whole life. Was surprised to find out, in fact, male sheep are rams, female sheep are ewes, and baby sheep are lambs. Goats are an entire other species.
This, of course, leads to very interesting (though irreverant) theology: Were sheep female, and goats male, then Jesus' separation of the sheep and goats, with the sheep being welcomed to the Kingdom and the goats being relegated to weeping and gnashing of teeth, would actually be pretty funny....

James' fan club

So, two dear friends surprised me with LOTR tickets, which was all the more surprising considering that they actually humoured me in getting the synopsis of The Hobbit, and all three LOTRs before the show started.
Now, I'm no theatre critic (food critic, perhaps, but no theatre critic), and I know it's gotten some very luke warm reviews, but I liked it pretty OK, notwithstanding my bias. Certainly, there were elements that I think would be inevitably compared to the films, but I think they did quite well considering the limitations of the stage, without the benefits of digital imaging, special effects and casts of thousands. I think I appreciated the way that they did try to make it distinctly different, though still a bit familiar. I also appreciate how they stuck to the real storyline, rather than adding in elements that weren't even in the book. I also appreciate how they mentioned Tom Bombadil!
I must say that their most daunting challenge was that they had to compress several hundreds of pages (or 14 hours of film- which, even then, still couldn't do the book justice) into less than 3 1/2 hours of musical.
Overall, particularly if being a bit of a 'classic fantasy' freak like myself, this would be a nice show to go watch. I think if you have no clue at all what the story's about, I think it would be rather hard to follow, as the story moves at a very fast clip; it becomes even incomprehensible at times - and I actually -know- what the story's about. It doesn't have the time to go into the richness of the history, geography, politics, or legends of Middle Earth. Certainly, that takes away from the appreciation of the story. But, the set design and costumes were very good; I was particularly impressed with how they did the Balrog, Shelob, and the Nazgul. The songs were not terribly memorable, but then I figure I've got to give the singers a bit of a break; they had just done a matinee just prior...

Apocalypse Now

The Nightmares still persist....

Ambidexterity?

So I managed to meet up with a Greenpeace activist, attend a lecture about Millenium Development Goals and the value of our role in Afghanistan, AND get prepped for election to a non-profit organization's Board of Directors, all in one evening... I'm still not totally psyched yet, like I would've been a few years ago (a sarcastic grazie for that...)... I'm actually shocked that I had the energy level to actually do all that without wanting to keel over... I am not sure where this is all going, but I hope it's pointing towards the Kingdom...

60 year plan needs a makeover

So, yet again, I was trying to explain the 60 year plan to some people. Being an audience that was more sympathetic to my views made it much easier than usual to explain my rationale. However, they helped me realize it wasn't particularly vegetarianism, nor even veganism, per se, that I'm trying to accomplish. But I realize that there isn't a term that I'm aware of, to describe my eventual desired modality of diet. Factory Farm Fetishist (FFF)? Meatrixism? Organic Omnivore? Sustainable Snacker? Ecological Eater? Any suggestions?
I suspect at some time I should make some manifesto about how I feel particularly about this issue. I realize of course that I also am not currently in the optimal situation to be properly dealing with it either.

Alice in Wonderland

The big news today is that Qlong is in Canada. I think celebrations of gruel are in order... hee hee hee

Ten Little Indians

So, one of my creatures has already been decapitated, within two days of being brought home. That leaves me with ten now... what kind of steward am I?... we shall see how the war shall be waged... 4 days down, 68 to go.... Perhaps I shall invest in electrical fencing, if only for the shock value har har har...

FFT - literally

The Pleasures of Eating - by Wendell Berry
Many times, after I have finished a lecture on the decline of American farming and rural life, someone in the audience has asked, "What can city people do?"
"Eat responsibly," I have usually answered. Of course, I have tried to explain what I meant by that, but afterwards I have invariably felt that there was more to be said than I had been able to say. Now I would like to attempt a better explanation.
I begin with the proposition that eating is an agricultural act. Eating ends the annual drama of the food economy that begins with planting and birth. Most eaters, however, are no longer aware that this is true. They think of food as an agricultural product, perhaps, but they do not think of themselves as participants in agriculture. They think of themselves as "consumers". If they think beyond that, they recognize that they are passive consumers. They buy what they want - or what they have been persuaded to want - within the limits of what they can get. They pay, mostly without protest, what they are charged. And they mostly ignore certain critical questions about the quality and the cost of what they are sold: How fresh is it? How pure or clean is it, how free of dangerous chemicals? How far was is transported, and what did transportation add to the cost? How much did manufacturing or packaging or advertising add to the cost? When the food product has been manufactured or "processed" or "precooked", how has that affected its quality or price or nutritional value?
Most urban shoppers would tell you that food is produced on farms. But most of them do not know what farms, or what kind of farms, or where the farms are, or what knowledge or skills are involved in farming. They apparently have little doubt that farms will continue to produce, but they do not know how or over what obstacles. For them, then, food is pretty much an abstract idea - something they do not know or imagine - until it appears on the grocery shelf or on the table.
When food, in the minds of eaters, is not longer associated with farming and with the land, then the eaters are suffering a kind of cultural amnesia that is misleading and dangerous. The passive American consumer, sitting down to a meal or pre-prepared or fast food, confronts a platter covered with inert, anonymous substances that have been processed, dyed, breaded, sauced, gravied, ground, pulped, strained, blended, prettified, and sanitized beyond resemblance to any part of any creature that ever lived. The products of nature and agriculture have been made, to all appearances, the products of industry. Both eater and eaten are thus in exile from biological reality. And the result is a kind of solitude, unprecendented in human experience, in which the eater may think of eating as, first, a purely commerical transaction between him and a supplier and then as a purely appetitive transaction between him and his food.
And this peculiar specialization of the act of eating is, again, of obvious benefit to the food industry, which has good reasons to obscure the connection between food and farming. It would not do for the consumer to know that the hamburger she is eating came from a steer who spent much of his life standing deep in his own excrement in a feedlot, helping to pollute the local streams, or that the calf that yielded the veal cutlet on her plate spent its life in a box in which it did not have room to turn around. And, though her sympathy for the slaw might be less tender, she should not be encouraged to meditate on the hygienic and biological implications of mile-square fields of cabbage, for vegetables grown in huge monocultures are dependent on toxic chemicals - just as animals in close confinement are dependent on antibiotics and other drugs.
The consumer, that is to say, must be kept from discovering that, in the food industry - as in any other industry - the overriding concerns are not quality and health, but volume and price. For decades now the entire industrial food economy, from the large farms and feedlots to the chains of supermarkets and fast-food restaurants, has been obsessed with volume. It has relentlessly increased scale in order to increase volume in order (presumably) to reduce costs. But as scale increases, diversity declines; as diversity declines, so does health; as health declines, the dependence on drugs and chemicals necessarily increases. As capital replaces labour, it does so by substituting machines, drugs, and chemicals for human workers and for the natural health and fertility of the soil. The food is produced by any means or any shortcut that will increase profits. And the business of the cosmeticians of advertising is to persuade the consumer that food so produced is good, tasty, healthful, and a guarantee of marital fidelity and long life.
Eaters must understand that eating takes place inescapably in the world, that it is inescapably an agricultural act, and that how we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used. This is a simple way of describing a relationship that is inexpressibly complex. To eat responsibly is to understand and enact, so far as one can, this complex relationship. What can one do? Here is a list, probably not definitive:
Participate in food production to the extent that you can. If you have a yard or even just a porch box or a pot in a sunny window, grow something to eat in it. Make a little compost of your kitchen scraps and use it for fertilizer. Only by growing some food for yourself can you become acquainted with the beautiful energy cycle that revolves from soil to seed to flower to fruit to food to offal to decay, and around again. You will be fully responsible for any food that you grow yourself, and you will know all about it. You will appreciate it fully, having known it all its life.
Prepare your own food. This means reviving in your own mind and life the arts of kitchen and household. This should enable you to eat more cheaply, and it will give you a measure of "quality control": you will have some reliable knowledge of what has been added to the food you eat.
Learn the origins of the food you buy, and buy the food that is produced closest to your home. The idea that every locality should be, as much as possible, the source of its own food makes several kinds of sense. The locally produced food supply is the most secure, the freshest, and the easiest for local consumers to know about and to influence.
Whenever possible, deal directly with a local farmer, gardener, or orchardist. All the reasons lists for the previous suggestion apply here. In addition, by such dealing you eliminate the whole pack of merchants, transporters, processors, packagers, and advertisers who thrive at the expense of both producers and consumers.
Learn, in self-defence, as much as you can of the economy and technology of industrial food production. What is added to food that is not food, and what do you pay for these additions?
Learn what is involved in the best farming and gardening.
Learn as much as you can, by direct observation and experience if possible, of the life histories of the food species.
The last suggestion seems particularly important to me. Many people are now as much estranged from the lives of domestic plants and animals (except for flowers and dogs and cats) as they are from the lives of the wild ones. This is regrettable, for these domestic creatures are in diverse ways attractive; there is much pleasure in knowing them. And farming, animal husbandry, horticulture, and gardening, at their best, are complex and comely arts; there is much pleasure in knowing them, too.
The pleasure of eating should be an extensive pleasure, not that of the mere gourmet. People who know the garden in which their vegetables have grown and know that the garden is healthy will remember the beauty of the growing plants, perhaps in the dewy first light of morning when gardens are at their best. Such a memory involves itself with the food and is one of the pleasures of eating. The knowledge of the good health of the garden relieves and free and comforts the eater. The same goes for eating meat. The thought of the good pasture and of the calf contentedly grazing flavours the steak. Some, I know, will think it bloodthirsty or worse to eat a fellow creature you have known all its life. On the contrary, I think it means that you eat with understanding and with gratitude. A significant part of the pleasure of eating is in one's accurate consciousness of the lives and the world from which food comes. The pleasure of eating, then, may be the best available standard of our health. And this pleasure, I think, is pretty fully available to the urban consumer who will make the necessary effort.
Eating with the fullest pleasure - pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance - is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience and celebrate our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living from mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend.