http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/05/business/05smart.html
Don’t be fooled by a stupid label. The foods that are best for you, generally don’t have any packaging or labels!! Fruits & Veggies!!! DUH.
Archive for The Absurd
Sleep post test
Check out the Sleep pose test . I found it pretty accurate, witty and fun 
My [couples] sleep pose is “The Excalibur”
Enjoy!
Sharing a piece of Rumi
A Delicate Girl
The terrible grief of being human! Let
us drink it all, but with a difference.
We sit with Junnaiyd and Bestami. The
moon rising here cannot be covered with
cloud. There are no deaths for lovers.
Who is the self? A delicate girl that
flows out when we draw the sword of
selfless action. This earth eats men
and women, and yet we are sent to eat
the world, this place that tries to fool
us with tomorrow. Wait until tomorrow,
which we outwit by enjoying only this
now. We gather at night to celebrate
being human. Sometimes we call out low
to the tambourine. Fish drink the sea,
but the sea does not get smaller! We
eat the clouds and evening light. We
are slaves tasting the royal wine.
—————————————-
Right now it is snowing heavily on Pontiac. Makes me miss upstate a little … trying to figure out the immediate future is slow going. Each little thing dependent on the next on the next on the next … etc.
—————————————–
Some Kiss We Want
There is some kiss we want with
our whole lives, the touch of
spirit on the body. Seawater
begs the pear to break its shell.
And the lily, how passionately
it needs some wild darling! At
night, I open the window and ask
the moon to come and press its
face against mine. Breathe into
me. Close the language-door and
open the love-window. The moon
won’t use the door, only the window.
———————-
Someone who does not run
toward the allure of love
walks a road where nothing
lives. But this dove here
senses the love hawk floating
above, and waits, and will not
be driven or scared to safety.
the intersection of crafting and killing
This is not usually what we think of when the topic of humane fiber art is raised (i.e. using plant based fibers instead of wool or silk), but I found it interesting:
Knitted Frog Dissection 
- as long as you don’t use wool (as this crafter did), you’re not hurting any animals with this dissection kit. Of course it still flies in the face of a purist animal rights argument b/c we are still positioning animals within a scientific hierarchy where humans dominate…
Crocheting the Hyperbolic Plane
Think crochet is mindless? Link here for all the brainiac crafsters out there . . . Intro to the interview with the mathematician and the, uh, other mathematician (who crochets, and who happens to be married to him).
Until the 19th century, mathematicians knew about only two kinds of geometry: the Euclidean plane and the sphere. It was therefore a deep shock to their community to find that there existed in principle a completely other spatial structure whose existence was discerned only by overturning a 2000-year-old prejudice about “parallel” lines. The discovery of hyperbolic space in the 1820s and 1830s by the Hungarian mathematician Janos Bolyai and the Russian mathematician Nicholay Lobatchevsky marked a turning point in mathematics and initiated the formal field of non-Euclidean geometry. For more than a century, mathematicians searched in vain for a physical surface with hyperbolic geometry. Starting in the 1950s, they began to suggest possibilities for constructing such surfaces. Eventually, in 1997, Daina Taimina, a mathematician at Cornell University, made the first useable physical model of the hyperbolic — a feat many mathematicians had believed was impossible — using, of all things, crochet.
Redonkulous
I just have to put a link to this redonkulous website found via CuteOverload.com. Admittedly, I laughed pretty hard at the images at first but . . .
I mean, really, wigs for cats? The photos are fabulous and these domesticated felines don’t seem to mind the attention, but please, DON’T buy one for you cat, even if part of the proceeds go the ASPCA.
Worth the laugh though.
Politicians who don’t like their vegetables
I found this little article pretty interesting in light of what I’ve been reading in The Sexual Politics of Meat: a Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory, by Carol Adams . . . regarding the history of meat as a symbol of patriarchy and vegetables as a metaphor for ‘feminine passivity’.
(AP) John Edwards has to be a mighty hungry man before he’ll touch that mushroom on his plate. Mitt Romney says he’s never met an eggplant he’d eat.
Presidential candidates do not seem to be fussy eaters for the most part. Yet they have distinct dislikes, mostly from the veggie kingdom.
Read more here.
I don’t think I need to point out that for men to eschew eating meat is still considered emasculating (remember that commercial about the wimpy tofu-eating boy?). Mostly, as Adams points out, this is tied to economics and distribution of animal-food resources: when that distribution is controlled by men there is more relative dominance on the part of men. Vegetables/plant foods, on the other hand, are often classified as ‘women’s food’ and Adams provides a lot of examples of this – from 1950s era American cookbooks to certain tribal societies to the 1988 Presidential Campain where practically all the (male) candidates were compared to vegetables- arguing that “Colloquilly [vegetable] is a synonym for a person severly brain-damaged or in a coma” and is used to express distain, criticism, and weakeness and passivity. Meat, on the other hand, equals action, strength, dominance and macho-ness – and “men who choose not to eat meat repudiate one of their masculine privileges.”
So it’s not really a surprise that Mitt Romney or Barack Obama wouldn’t wan’t to seem like a sissy. Interestingly, they didn’t ask Kucinich, who is a vegan, but we all knew he’s about as weak on principle as a fresh zuchinni … and what about H. Clinton’s response? “I don’t like the things that are still alive.” How vague is that ? and as is typical, Clinton has to appear middle of the road, non-threatening and not too masculine or feminine.
The candidates answers are perfectly crafted in response to the public perception and institutionalized ideas about what our food represents -patriarchy.
