On the whole I prefer not to eat fake meats, but Rachel got me this 100% vegan “beef” jerky. Flavorwise it's nothing unusual, but texturally and visually it's quite freaky (it's some kind of spun vegetable protein or seomthing) so I wanted to post it. The pictures are kind of gross:
PS. Who's your ideal president?
According to this someone like me should be voting for the Reverend Al Sharpton (before you laugh it up, he has a general anti-war, pro-civil rights platform), with my least likely candidate (7% agreement) being (surprise, surprse) Bush — and that includes people who haven't even announced an intention to run…
Thursday, January 22, 2004
…I have to get caught up on two-weeks of email backlog (or at least the essentials), do an image update (wishful thinking), and then I have a bunch of supper plans as well. I have to also get a DV-DV (all my cables are DV-MiniDV) cable to hook up my Avid Mojo, and pick up my (backordered) drives. I'm already falling behind on that!
I was talking to Ed last night about what it means that chimps and other animals use folk medicone, often the same remedies as humans (ie. when chimps are sick, they find and take herbal medicines; other animals do it as well). An ultra-simple example is a dog eating grass when it has a stomache ache. Instinct, or something more? Tapping into a global consciousness, or simple biological response?
Here are a couple links on it (c/o Ed):
Wednesday, January 21, 2004
I'm trying to write the review right now for Håvve's book Ten Years of Pain. It's actually a very tough review to write because I think this may well be the best body rites book I've ever read. It's incredibly engaging and intimite. Anyway, I will have it written today!
Tuesday, January 20, 2004
Well, the President lied about almost everything, promised to demolish civil rights, up military spending and expand to new wars, and continue to siphon money from Americans to the ultra-rich, while claiming losses as victories. The audience was split evenly between open disgust and blind cheering. A strange sight America is these days… I've got to admit I'd be somewhat scared if I was an American as to what's going to happen next.
Well, I just got this email (laid out as shown), perhaps it lightens the mood.
Date: Tue, 20 Jan 2004 21:10:37 EST
Subject: dick + piercing
u should add a picture of how its done
i was wondering how its donr n how
it looks like so my man can get it
thanx
I thought Daschle did surprisingly well by the way. It would have been funnier if Al Sharpton had given the response, but still… It'll definitely be an interesting election. With America sharply divided, and one half threatens to plunge the world into outright war, this may well be the one that dictates the next twenty years of world history.
Tuesday, January 20, 2004
A small (120 story) experience update has been posted. As always thank you to the writers and the review team. I really appreciate your help. If you'd like to join the review team and start deciding what experiences get posted to BME, just click the “HELP IAM” link on the main IAM index.
Thanks as well to Metalheart for being the rather odd cover model…
I know I should haven mentioned this earlier, but I think this it's important to note something about Martin Luther King. We hear a lot about his civil rights contributions and speeches, but you should be asking yourself why the four years leading up to his death are all but censored by the national media (more). To quote FAIR,
National news media have never come to terms with what Martin Luther King Jr. stood for during his final years. In the early 1960s, when King focused his challenge on legalized racial discrimination in the South, most major media were his allies … but after passage of civil rights acts in 1964 and 1965, King began challenging the nation's fundamental priorities. He maintained that civil rights laws were empty without “human rights” — including economic rights. For people too poor to eat at a restaurant or afford a decent home, King said, anti-discrimination laws were hollow.
Noting that a majority of Americans below the poverty line were white, King developed a class perspective. He decried the huge income gaps between rich and poor, and called for “radical changes in the structure of our society” to redistribute wealth and power.
“True compassion,” King declared, “is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”
By 1967, King had also become the country's most prominent opponent of the Vietnam War, and a staunch critic of overall U.S. foreign policy, which he deemed militaristic. In his “Beyond Vietnam” speech delivered at New York's Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 — a year to the day before he was murdered — King called the United States “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”
In foreign policy, King also offered an economic critique, complaining about “capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries.”
You haven't heard the “Beyond Vietnam” speech on network news retrospectives, but national media heard it loud and clear back in 1967 — and loudly denounced it. Time magazine called it “demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi.” The Washington Post patronized that “King has diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people.”
Puts his death into a very different context, doesn't it?
This keeps happening (and I thought they'd see the humor…):
People submit the stupidest fake stuff to try and scam a membership…
I just walked Leeta, and on the way up the elevator to the 27th floor there was a little French boy and his mother. The boy was really fearful (please, no jokes about
cheese eating surrender monkeys), and didn't understand that Leeta was shaking wildly and quivering because she loves kids. He clutched his mother's leg the whole ride up, but to get off he had to walk past Leeta.
As he stepped in front of her she lunged forward (thinking she'd finally get to play with him). I was holding her, so her collar didn't move more than an inch, but the child must have thought she was flying at him. He leaped backwards and smashed his head full force off the side of the elevator — if he'd been facing the other way it would have been enough force to break his nose.
Anyway, I think he's OK, but it sort of sucks because that's the sort of thing that would result in a death sentence if the authorities were called… Seeing as this is a dog-friendly building, my feeling is that if you have a little kid (3 or 4 year old is my guess) that's not comfortable around animals you should probably carry them in this sort of situation, or at least hold their hand…
