After the Binge

Been on a blog binge.

Not dissin' none of y'all, jes went to wanderin' around to see what else lives and moves and breathes.

Like Alice, I fell down the rabbit hole an' like to have never found mah way back--but that wouldn't be too bad. It's a zig-zag digital trail wif' no intelligent sign of design. Jes' a'wanderin we will go....

(A title, snip or photo is linked, so iffin' ya wanna visit yoreself, jes move cursor over snip/ title/ photo.)

Nothin' is in any logical order...but fallin' into the blogosphere is chaotic by definition.




Habeas Brulee
I’m not particularly fond of guns, in theory, but I am fond of learning new skills. And as another friend put it, I’m now entirely prepared for the collapse of civilization. I can shoot, I can spin, I can cure meat, and I can litigate.

...I pounded the pigeons through the food mill. We make a good team, me and him, splitting up the tasks to create fun, tasty monstrosities just because I saw the phrase “pigeon essences” and decided it had to be done.



Country French Antiques
















“Stop translating French to English in your head,
you’ll loose the bloody moment, associations,
make associations, form a picture of the object
with the word!” he would say, banging his
pipe on the dashboard.



* * * Old Farm Almanacs
"Let no one think meanly of an economical habit, but rather let every one esteem it a Christian virtue worthy of a high place in the Christian character. Indeed it is one of the results of uprightness of heart, for only the unfaithful steward wastes his Master’s goods."



* * * * Shelf Love


And a few were so good that they could break through no matter what my mood. “The Best of Betty” is a series of letters and responses in an advice column, and as the letters go on, we see the columnist lose her patience and her grip. It starts with letters like this one to a regular correspondent who suggested that readers use the cups of their old brassieres and set them out in your annual garden as little domes to cover fragile seedlings in their gardens.



* * * The View From the Farm

I'm awfully tired of a steady diet of doom. Frankly, I don't think the doom-meisters know what they're talking about. I mean, take Big Oil. A hundred years ago, everyone bitched and moaned about John D. Rockefeller and the Standard Oil monopoly. A hundred years later, everyone still bitches about big oil. What does that tell us? Bitching about big oil doesn't do anything, even if you do it for a hundred years. So knock it off!









***The Common Weeder




Botanical art comes in many flavors, but it must always be botanically correct, and when exhibited each item must be identified. The general ID here is black beans and an apple. Also notice the little butterfly. Many of Beverly's paintings include an insect. She is so fond of these 'little creatures' that she collects dead bugs, and sometimes freezes them until she needs a model for a painting.





****Why Travel to France?

“Over the centuries, the French have cultivated the fine art of rebellion.

The list of targets encompasses tyrants, wars, colonialism and, above all, capitalism in its many manifestations. The latest enemy may seem unlikely: billboards.

The Dismantlers, as a nationwide group of anti-ad crusaders call themselves, aren’t violent or loud or clandestine. In fact, they invite the police to protest rallies where they deface signs. With a copywriter’s flair, one of their slogans warns: “Attention! Avert your eyes from ads: You risk being very strongly manipulated.”

****The Onion

Is it Valentine's Day already? My word! How the time does fly. I might have missed the day entirely had I not caught a glimpse of all the young couples walking hand in hand this evening, filling the tables of every fancy French restaurant in town. And what better way to celebrate this fine holiday than sharing a scrumptious, fixed price, three-course menu with your beloved? Lord knows that's what I'd be doing tonight if my head hadn't been severed from my body in the third century!

I'm sorry. I hope all this talk about my gruesome martyrdom doesn't put you off your moules du jour.

* * * Red-tailed Squirrels are common in the cloud forests of Costa Rica, and we observed several of them in and around the town of San Gerardo de Dota, Costa Rica. Apple orchards surround this mountain town, and the local birds and squirrels were happily feasting on the abundant apples.

****The Road is Life

There are no airplanes, no helicopters, no cars just the occasional camel or berber drums echoing off the sand dunes at another camp off in the distance. With the silence comes an awesome tranquility within the people, within the land and my thoughts are miles away from anything in the past-- I am keenly aware of the moment








****Childeric

Oh god, there are times when you're going into work and you see something that turns you from the fairly laid-back chilled sunny sort of individual you broadly aspire to be into a foaming frothing torrent of rage and hatred and spleen venting that wants to fire off severely-worded letters to the BBC . There are, of course, many things that might trigger this response, but in my case this morning it is the van of a company that describes itself as offering 'foodservice solutions'. 'Solutions' on its own is quite bad enough and horribly over-used, but what new horror is 'foodservice'? The poor old English language has suffered some horrible indignities in its time, but 'foodservice solutions' makes me want to set up a sort of English equivalent of the Académie Française. This one, though, would have real teeth: heavily-armed teams equipped with copies of Fowler and the OED and perhaps also a portable scaffold would roam the streets hunting down and wiping away such solecisms: 'Sorry, sir, you knew the penalty, but you have a notice here advertising "apple's". Unless you can show pretty hastily that you are a vendor of products that belong to an apple or an individual named Apple, then justice must have her due.'

Even through the red mist, however, all my rational being is saying annoying, sensible, things like 'You're just being a linguistic conservative. A healthy language isn't preserved in aspic but embraces the new. English is a more enthralling mistress for her many and lusty couplings with all who will have her, not to mention the new and exotic excitements her lively and productive imagination has dreamt up, than ever she would be as some pure and unsullied spinster, shrivelled up in her lofty (and lonely) hauteur (oops, that's French, but that rather illustrates the point, doesn't it?).' Then, my irksome rational being continues, 'And isn't it rather shameful that of all the things in the world that there are to get worked up about, the one that really brings you out in a tearing passion is some idiot caterer riding a neologistic bandwagon?'

But oh god, still, 'foodservice solutions': you want a shotgun handy.
(yep, the Brits are a bit weird.)



Fell down some serious holes too....

updates on Frankenfoods unnerved me...expect posts in near future on same.

****Joe Organics

Until recently, the agricultural biotechnology industry has insisted that there is no evidence linking the mid-1990s commercialization of GM foods with the rise in childhood food allergies, asthma, and related immune-system mediated disorders that have become much more prevalent since the late 1990s. These four studies collectively constitute such evidence.




So, natcherly, I'se hopin' y'all will git interested in eatin from yore local folk's hard work of growin and ranchin'--in our new world of "change" yore neighbors will apprciate yore patronage:
EAT LOCAL FOODS!


An (now really, ya din't think I skipped pass polly-ticks did'ja?) the really serious stuff:


Most of us imagine the transformation of a free society to a tyrannical state in Hollywood terms, as a melodramatic act of violence like a military coup or an armed insurrection. Tocqueville knows better. He foresees a slow death of freedom. The power of the centralized government will gradually expand, meddling in every area of our lives until, like a lobster in a slowly heated pot, we are cooked without ever realizing what has happened. The ultimate horror of Tocqueville’s vision is that we will welcome it, and even convince ourselves that we control it...

We will not be bludgeoned into submission; we will be seduced. He foresees the collapse of American democracy as the end result of two parallel developments that ultimately render us meekly subservient to an enlarged bureaucratic power: the corruption of our character, and the emergence of a vast welfare state that manages all the details of our lives.




Then, of course, I need an' escape from reality --ot political reality. So I see what's doin' Down Under wif the Bushwalker--who politics and mine ain't always in no concert, but his photos os Aussie land is fun!