If you are interested in a healthy diet, but have grown wary of the ever-changing advice of diet fads, and you appreciate an understanding of the food offered by the contemporary American industrial food system, then I heartily recommend a serving of Michael Pollan.
If you can afford a half hour for a healthy intellectual treat, then check out his article, “Unhappy Meals”, in the New York Times Magazine. If you prefer to indulge his prose for a longer, fuller understanding of the special challenges of America’s food culture, then you should definitely check out his novel, The Omnivore’s Dilemma.
For the less patient, or for those like me who like a handy reference, I’ll share a stripped-down version of his advice on eating well, adapted from the “Unhappy Meals” article, (more…)
I make a very modest amount of money from this web site. Most revenue comes from Google AdSense. On a few pages I have added links to Amazon.com Associates. Recently, I noticed that I had made a very modest amount of revenue from Associates. Alas, it seems that I found a topic that people very much want to read about:
So, at first I think “gee, I am profiting from the desperate misery of others.” Then, I think a bit more. Education aint free, and my blog shares my own separation and (failed) approach toward marital reconciliation, which for me was a hard-won learning experience. If I may provide (pointers to) some hopefully useful information for the next people who find themselves in dire straights, then I am pleased to know it. Following my recommendation, they go and purchase a book that I have found useful, or they find some other book, and some cash goes back to the authors writing the books that are trying to help people . . . much of it goes to Amazon.com, and then I get a little cut for being a part of the chain.
Dan Howard!! Put in a change of address!! (sunset / parkside)
hey dude, I am tired of having to take all your mail to the post office and doing the whole return to sender thing. you have not lived at this address in the 5 years that we have been here, wtf? who are you running from? we get cards from your relatives even, you could at least tell your family that you moved. we got a package for you the other day, and i am tempted to open it. what is it? i think its a vhs tape of something, is it child pornography? we even received your muni pass once. you paid for it, and had it sent here? what’s up, seriously? there are too many damn dan howards in the city for me to just start calling people, so if you are dan howard and you ever lived on –th ave, put in a change of address already.
sheesh.
In July I moved to San Francisco at xyzz –th Ave. But a few times I told people xxyz –th Ave. Well, for the past several months a neighbor on the next block has been receiving the occasional misdirected mail, and recently she got fed up and posted the above ad.
Within about two hours a friend forwarded the link to me, and I dropped off some address labels in exchange for a box of cherry cordials from my Grandma. :)
That’s awesome! My Alma Mater made a significant contribution to the modern Internet, but culturally speaking, we are still dragging ourselves kicking and screaming into the latter half of the twentieth century, when we the civilized world figured out that it was somewhat rude to use other peoples’ cultures to “honor” our sports rituals. Some of our fine White People took great offense when told that they must endure the shackles of political correctness. They responded that it was incorrect to call the Native American Mascot a Mascot, that the preferred nomenclature was that Chief Illiniwek is an Honored Symbol, following an Honorable Tradition, wherein the Illini people from whom our state took its name would be remembered by having a White Guy an Eagle Scout who is 1/8 Native American perform an exaggerated Lakota “war dance” during the half time performance at sports games. What better Honored Tradition could we possibly maintain for these people? (A Native American Studies Program or a Museum? Boring! You liberals love your museums and cultural programs–get down from your ivory towers and get with the team!)
The argument against retiring the Hollow Hallowed Symbol is that a lot of alumni would get freaked out and stop contributing money to the campus. That always struck me as silly . . . but just to be sure, I have been stingily holding back from giving anything until we adopted a new mascot Honored Symbol. Right? If some alumni are going to stop giving when the Chief goes away, then other alumni ought to be waiting for the Chief to go away before they give.
Got a sweet little darlin back in my corner
But lo I know I love her but act like I don’t want her
Surrounded by the lovely but yet feel like a loner
Could be an organ doner the way I give up my heart but
Never know because sheeit I never tell her
Ask me how I’m feeling I holler that its irrella
I don’t get myself caught up in the Jell-o jella
And pudding pops that other sops who call falling in Love but
For the record have you ever rode a horse
Likely you could send me to Pluto I said of course
But if you aint a sweety indeedy I won’t endorse
Han Solo til I’m hit by the bullet so may the Force
Be with you and I reach you when better time permits
For now show me samples examples why you’re the shit
But how am I to know with the profession that I’m in
And if you do not know me then how could you be my friend?
Happy Valentine’s Day, and remember: when arrows don’t penetrate, Cupid grabs the pistol!
I was reading through 13 Photographs that Changed the World which is a fascinating and wonderful read, like visiting a great museum exhibit from my computer chair, and I got to Gandhi and His Spinning Wheel and I was thinking “that iconic spinning wheel looks like the heart of the Indian flag.”
I researched a bit, and learned that the wheel at the center of the flag is the Ashoka Chakra the ancient Indian “Wheel of Life and Cosmic Order” . . . huh, the spinning wheel association seemed so poignant. But then when I read the Wikipedia page for the Ashoka Chakra, I learn:
The most visible use of the Ashoka Chakra today is at the center of the National flag of Republic of India (adopted on 22 July 1947), where it is rendered in a Navy-blue color on a White background, by replacing the symbol of Charkha (Spinning wheel) of the pre-independence versions of the flag.
One of Gandhi’s causes was to champion “home spun” cloth in favor of imported machined textiles, thus the iconic value of the spinning wheel as an instrument of independence.
I like how every ingredient is Capitalized, that the principle ingredient is government-subsidized High Fructose Corn Syrup, and that it features both Purified Water and plain old non-purified Water.
I received three movies today. I purchased each one because I enjoyed them each a great deal. They are epic films–two are over three hours long–and they’re all movies I watched alone in Walnut Creek after Yayoi left last year. So, they have an extra layer of special to me. Looking back, I would say that long, dramatic historical epics are great “breakup movies” to watch alone while contemplating life. Or, well, they worked for me.
As memory serves, the first movie that I saw was “Lawrence of Arabia” in which an eccentric, talented, idealistic, and iconoclastic young man with blond hair and dreamy blue eyes gets mixed up in the Arab revolt against British colonial rule. When you meet him as a young man in an office in the middle of the desert somewhere, he is explaining to his companion, in the third person, how boring his current job is . . . he extinguishes a match against his hand, just because, and when his friend hurts himself copying the move, and wants to know the trick, Lawrence explains “the trick is not to be bothered by the pain.” The movie is about three and a half hours long, which is insane, but then so is the subject matter, and three and a half hours is not so long to find yourself lost in the mystery of Arabia. I believe I watched this movie twice, and my description doesn’t do it justice.
The next is “Doctor Zhivago”, that movie we’ve all heard about but none of us has ever watched. Well, I watched it. I don’t remember it as well as Lawrence, but I do remember that this was another epic 1960’s film in which you could get lost in the lead actor’s face, his eyes. You again have the impression of a remarkable man in remarkable times, and the three and a half hours is spent guiding the protagonist through the vagaries of the Russian Revolution and World War II, ending up in this enchantingly weird “ice palace” toward the end. I look forward to an occasion to re-watch this . . .
. . . the third film–and there’s a good chance that you have never heard of it–is Zhang Yimou’s “To Live” . . . at a modest two hours and thirteen minutes, you witness the story of a guy whose wife leaves him because he won’t stop gambling, and he gambles everything away, and then he’s drafted into the war to fight the Japanese, then he finds himself fighting the Communists, then he finds the Communists have pretty much won, he makes his way home, is rejoined by his wife, and it turns out that having lost his material wealth is a good start for Communism . . . the film just barely starts there, and you travel through another decade or two of their life together under the various kinks of Chinese rule. In that it is an epic that brings you through WWII and a Communist revolution, this movie is a lot like Zhivago, but more focused on action and narrative than on the character of the protagonist. I think it is more approachable.
And, more precious. It is out of print and the DVD was over $50 on the Amazon.com Marketplace!
I am thinking I will have to have friends over some nights for epic movie watchin’. If you happen to be interested in getting in on a viewing, let me know, right?
My last camera had a special sensor in it so it could mark the picture it took with Exif metadata indicating the correct orientation. I set my Flickr account to “auto-rotate” the images and everything was groovy, except Windows and the Macintosh screensaver don’t know for EXIF metadata, so some pictures stay sideways when viewed on my computers.
In my new camera, I have to run through my pictures and manually set the rotation before I offload them to my computer. Again, this because the Windows explorer and picture viewer doohickey, which is otherwise pretty neat, doesn’t grok Exif metadata, so if I use Windows to rotate my photos, I will suffer generational loss on my JPEGs.
Anyway, rotating images within the camera is pretty easy, so I just do that before I offload. For Windows, I Googled and found this awesome little utility, that will go through and rotate your images, losslessly, based on the orientation set in the Exif on the camera. You just right-click on an image, or a directory of images, and it will go through and rotate all your pictures just right once and for all!
Well, until you upload the rotated images to Flickr. If you have enabled auto-rotation in Flickr, and auto-rotate your images the right way beforehand, then Flickr will rotate your images again! At least, this happened to me!
So, I turned off Flickr auto-rotate, and from now on, I’ll set my image orientation in the camera before I transfer to Windows, and on Windows, I’ll right-click and auto-rotate before uploading to Flickr.
Of course, this would all be easier if the Windows explorer supported lossless rotation. At least it warns you that it doesn’t when you try to rotate an image. You would think that if they bothered to warn you they could have just stuck a summer intern on the project. Oh well.
In networking we refer to “the last mile” as the most difficult, time-consuming, expensive bit of the journey. I am waiting on a plane that has just traveled 2,000 miles across the continent. We are stuck here on the tarmac because our gate is occupied. I could get out and walk!
“Ladies and gentlemen, our ten minute wait has come and gone, and the aircraft at the gate has called for maintenance. We know there are people making connections from this aircraft and if it looks like the wait will go too long they’ll get us another gate.”
“Why don’t they just get us another gate?”
“We now have a new arrival gate: gate kilo-1. Well be starting that way shortly.”
Anyway, we call it “the last mile” because for the most part, long-haul network routes are like air travel, which moves pretty well between the hubs. It is getting from the local phone company “central office” through the copper wires on the telephone poles and neighborhood junction boxes that sometimes calls for improvisation and creativity.
We are headed toward the gate . . . but now we are stuck again, waiting on the new gate to be readied. However, the engines just started whirring and we are again rolling so . . . I should be at Grandma’s house for Christmas very soon now!
“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Chicago. Please enjoy the holidays . . .”
Well, I owe a plug, here . . . and a reminder note for myself if this happens again!
My third Canon camera has suffered a death comparable to my second Canon camera. So, I ordered myself a Christmas present today: a Fujifilm FinePix F30 — should be here Wednesday!
Anyway, one thing my second Canon camera did for a very long time was to EAT pictures I had taken. I tried multiple cards but they would just randomly get corrupted in the camera, and Canon went to great lengths to presume that the problem was with me, and not with their camera. (They got sued for doing that–yay class actions!) I am still bugged that I lost pictures of Clapham Junction and of the Eiffel Tower! Grr! Anyway, when I got to Thailand I slowed down enough to find a work-around to the problem of my second Canon: PhotoRescue! (more…)
A toe-tappingly titillating trade, which demonstrates that if you’re going to be a player hater, you should do it with a smile, and hopefully a strumming guitar, so we can be reminded of awful things while chuckling despite ourselves:
Do do do do doo dee do / Clinton got a blowjob!
ObWordPress: If you want to enable embedding of YouTube videos, disable the stupid GUI editor.
Thanks, gapingvoid for a Friday Afternoon Diversion. :)
A little while back, I had the chance to meet Jenny Yee, a fellow dot-com professional who, like me, has also recently moved to San Francisco. I was impressed by the quality of some of the portrait photography she has taken. She explained that she was working to set up a studio at her new place. I have been thinking that as I become comfortable with single life and begin looking forward to finding that special lady, it will be more and more important to look pretty: to put my best face forward.
I am still getting in to the whole projecting-a-self-image thing, and I’m not ready just yet to pay much to look glamorous, so I approached Jenny to volunteer as a “test model” to help her get up to speed with her new digs. She smiled warmly and agreed, and it is time I returned her favor by sharing the experience online. I will start with a melodramatic before-and-after, of High School Danny versus Jenny’s Web 2.0 Danny:
I smile, because while my shoulders have filled out and I have grown the goatee, in both images I see the same basic, good-natured geek. Fortunately for me: geek is now chic! (Some even feel fondly toward the old Napolean Dynamite look.)
Fun, huh? Well, so was the time spent with Jenny. (more…)
The loveliness of Paris seems somehow sadly gay
The glory that was Rome is of another day
I’ve been terribly alone and forgotten in Manhattan
I’m going home . . . to my city by the bay . . . . . .
I left my heart . . .
In San Francisco . . .
High on a hill . . .
It calls to me . . .
To be where little cable cars
Climb half way to the stars!
The morning fog . . .
May chill the air . . .
I don’t care!
My love waits there . . .
In San Francisco . . .
Above the blue . . .
And windy sea!
When I come home to you,
San Francisco
Your Golden Sun will Shine for me!
The song oozes longingly from his lips. And yet, the song itself is easy-going, like the city itself.
The problem, in a paragraph-shaped nutshell, as described by George Packer in The New Yorker:
It is true that the presence of American troops is a source of great tension and violence in Iraq, and that overwhelming numbers of Iraqis want them to leave. But it is also true that wherever American troop levels have been reduced–in Falluja and Mosul in 2004, in Tal Afar in 2005, in Baghdad in 2006–security has deteriorated. In the absence of adequate and impartial Iraqi forces, Sunni insurgents or Shiite militias have filled the power vacuum with a reign of terror. An American withdrawal could produce the same result on a vast scale. That is why so many Iraqis, after expressing their ardent desire to see the last foreign troops leave their country, quickly add, “But not until they clean up the mess they made.” And it is why a public-service announcement scrolling across the bottom of the screen during a recent broadcast on an Iraqi network said, “The Ministry of Defense requests that civilians not comply with the orders of the Army or police on nightly patrols unless they are accompanied by coalition forces working in that area.”
I know that I don’t know what the solution is. I think “bring the troops home now” is irresponsible. And nobody likes “stay the course” either, any more, which is a good thing: we need to get our collective brainpower together to find some less-bad solution to the mess. (more…)
