Saturday, January 30, 2021

What Meats the Palate, a Rumination

 Owsley Stanley was the Grateful Dead's sound man. He created the famed wall of sound with a giant stack of many many large large speakers. Now those speakers are scattered around. Some of them were kept outside a home on a few acres next to John Tarrant's home where we lived for years. Owsley was also known as a manufacturer and distributor of the purest form of LSD available in the Bay Area and beyond. He moved to Australia in the nineties. When he was visiting the Bay Area, he frequently stayed at the Panama Hotel where Katrinka worked. He was an old friend of the owner. Owsley ate an all meat diet or that's the word on him. He must have had some other food in his diet. I remember reading once that he considered vegetables to be poisonous. Later in life in had, as I recall, a quadruple bypass, and did not attribute the need for it to his meat diet. 

Thinking about Owsley's diet, I imagined a situation where we were stuck in a situation where we had to eat an all meat diet. Katrinka and I do not seek out faux meat but we've eaten it here in Asia where some Chinese vegan restaurants make faux meat dishes from soy and wheat and other vegetable products that are amazingly yummy.  But an all meat and dairy (I assume) diet does not sound enticing to me. I envision meals with faux vegetable dishes. Beef, pork, mutton, lamb, kangaroo, dairy - all creatively presented as eggplant parmesan, risotto, spinach salad, pea soup. What might help to make this possible is the imperative to move meat production from methane farting animals to laboratories. This is in the early stages but seems destined to be the butcher shop of the future, and home of an inventive rebirth of nouvelle cuisine. 

Friday, January 29, 2021

Monday, January 25, 2021

Nut Butter problem

The most natural nut butters and some butters which aren't nuts - peanut, sesame, cashew, almond -  usually come with the oil separated and floating on top. In some cases standing the jar on its lid will do it. But often that won't do it. To solve this problem I intend to look for a paint store going out of business to see if I can get a deal on a paint can shaker. Those things will take a can of paint that's totally separated and blend it all together like new. Once I get one, I'll have to take it to a shop to have it modified for jars and no more will we have to go through the tedious process of mixing it all back together by hand which is always sort of half done. 

That reminds me of when my son Kelly was a baby. I used to throw him up and down and shake him all the time. And then we learned that that can cause brain damage but he was already beyond the shaking age when that was in the news so the damage had been done. People got quite concerned about how he'd turn out. To add to their concern, I started confessing that I used to bring him to paint stores with me and to occupy him while I was shopping, I'd strap him in a paint shaker and turn it on and leave him there. I'd add that once I forgot him and drove off without him and only came back an hour later and he was still rattling away in the paint shaker. I was especially delighted that some would actually believe me - for a minute. 

Saturday, January 23, 2021

A Personal Favorite from the Online Past

Tom Mabe - Pranking a Telemarketer

To me this is one of the great moments in modern communications. I listen to this once every few years. - dc

Thursday, January 21, 2021

Oh Happy Day

I just looked at yesterday's post about the palindrome date for yanks and saw that it was full of errors and didn't read well. Now it's passable - though of such minor significance that it didn't really deserve to be mentioned again. However, it's too late to take back what I've written because I decided that this entry would be written Jack Kerouac style - no going back and I do have the digital equivalent of his endless ream of paper. I'm glad not to delete those past words and letters because I don't want to be wasteful. And they're making a great effort to do their duty,  Why were there so many errors to begin with, why more than the normal one or none? Because there were two events happening that absorbed my attention. One was that my country had a ceremony to install a new president. Filled with patriotic fervor, Katrinka and I kept Al Jazeera on for hours before and after that transpired. The other event was that the 20th was the last day to make any changes and corrections in two books that Shambhala will be releasing on July 13th - a new printing of Zen Is Right Here with a few corrections and small changes, and its sequel, Zen Is Right Now. I was so thrilled about how those two events worked out that I wrote the following to the noble people who help to run the engines at Cuke Archives (See Who We Are).

What a great day it is. ... (skipping internal details of the email) Went to sleep after sunrise - for four hours - then got up refreshed and pleased. We can still pretend everything's okay now.

Wednesday, January 20, 2021

For USA, Belize, and Micronesia

Today's date is a palindrome. 1-20-21 -  but only for those three countries where the date is written in numbers with month-day-year, though it's optional in the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, and Canada. Most countries write day-month-year. Personally, I like the way it's done in China, Japan, North Korea, South Korea, Taiwan, Hungary, Lithuania and Iran, and is also used secondarily in some countries in Europe and Asia - year, month, day. [see this page].  I like the year-month-day order because they line up in chronological order in digital lists - like with file names in a folder. If all factors hold constant, the next time a presidential inauguration happens on a palindrome day in the US, Belize, and Micronesia, it will be more than a thousand years from now.

Tuesday, January 19, 2021

Bananas

 From Market Fruit Fair dot com: Generally, it is agreed that bananas originated in Southeast Asia and the South Pacific around 8000 to 5000 BC. Bananas are believed to have been the world's first cultivated fruit. From Southeast Asia, the fruit was brought west by Arab conquerors and then carried to the New World by explorers and missionaries.

Monday, January 18, 2021

A Portentous Dream

I've been dreaming I'm playing tennis recently and I've been doing pretty well unless the person on the other side hits the ball short and then I can't get to it in time and it doesn't bounce much so that's the end of that point. The other morning I dreamed I was playing the Queen of England. She was doing pretty good and so was I - hitting the ball back solid and deep. But then she started hitting the ball short and I couldn't get to it. She beat me. And she's eighteen years older than I am. How humiliating. 

Thursday, January 14, 2021

Trust in Government

The Edelman Trust Barometer from their new report once again has China with the highest level among general public and informed public, then India, then Indonesia. The US is way down on the list. Globally, a growing sense of inequity is the biggest problem they site.

Monday, January 11, 2021

Harmless Ailment

 

I've got the weirdest puffy ball or sack of fluid on my left elbow. Katrinka said she had that too once as a result of banging it. I don't remember banging it but I also find myself bleeding in places at times - like my head or foot or hand and sometimes can't remember doing anything to make it bleed. I'm differentiating that from when I get a thin skin purple spot on the back of my hand which can bleed if I rub it wrong. That hasn't happened in a while. Anyway, I Googled the puffy ball of fluid and it came up with bursitis which is a word that never meant anything to me. But the descriptions of it are that it's painful and I can't feel a thing. It's just a funny little cushion.



Saturday, January 9, 2021

Too Much News

I've been following current events too closely. It's not helping but I haven't stopped yet. At least I'm not posting my opinions about it all. You don't need that because you of all people have the exact right way of looking at it and your solutions are perfect. If only someone would listen. Good luck to us all. - dc

Wednesday, January 6, 2021

Kitchen Episode

We have a filter that turns Denpasar city tap water into drinking water. The top and bottom compartments hold about five gallons. The top gets filled and it drips down to the bottom. I try to make sure the top part has enough water in it at night so that the bottom will be filled by the next morning. There's a plastic spigot that goes bad once a year or so and has to be replaced. It's cheap.  It gives warning before going bad by dripping more and more. That can be stopped by pressing on it but then all of a sudden it can start pouring.

Monday, January 4, 2021

Once Again Beaches swamped with Trash

 Bali's most famous beaches flooded with trash during the rainy season. - Guardian

Good short article. This usually happens till March. One good thing about the spokespeople Guardian talked to, they didn't blame the problem on other islands which is the norm here. A lot of the trash is from Bali folk dumping trash in creeks and rivers that comes down to the sea in rainy season. The hard hit beaches are on the other side of the southern peninsula. We don't get that much here in Sanur - too much but not daily and not enough so one doesn't want to go in the water except on rare days. It's a global problem but Indonesia puts more plastic waste in the ocean per capita than any other country. One thing that would help a lot is to have no charge for trash pickup. And then separate the massive amount of organic waste from the plastic. Good luck Bali.

Friday, January 1, 2021