Reason 1,689 why I love the God Emperor!

Donald J. Trump

✔@realDonaldTrump

 · 15h

Lebron James was just interviewed by the dumbest man on television, Don Lemon. He made Lebron look smart, which isn’t easy to do. I like Mike!

The God Emperor tweeted this out when loser moolie Lebron James went on TV to trash him. The President told it like it is. The mix of contempt and mockery is just sublime.

The black athlete is just at sea these days. Did you see what happened to the black quarterback of the Cowboys. He said he would never kneel for the anthem and was attacked non stop by the press and the social justice warriors. These fuck-wits are all about an athlete expressing his opinion as long as it is bullshit liberal claptrap. Step out of the box and they are all over you trying to end your career.

Sports like regular broadcast TV are on a tightrope these days. They are no where near as important as they used to be. In fact there core audience is old white guys like me. As they alienate me they alienate the people who put money in their pockets. The young whippersnappers of today are more interested in their phones and Instagram they are in Sports Phone and what the score is. The urgency of watching baseball or football is gone just as the urgency of watching your favorite TV show. You don't rush home to watch "Who Shot JR" or the finale of Mary Tyler Moore. Because everything is on Youtube and is streamed to your phone. Soon the only people who will follow sports are the degenerates who are betting on it. Sports bettting is being legalized in every state. That is what is going to destroy it. Just like horse racing.

Must be nice

"Illinois is broke and continues to flirt with junk bond status. But the state’s financial woes aren’t stopping 63,000 government employees from bringing home six-figure salaries and higher.

Whenever we open the books, Illinois is consistently one of the worst offenders. Recently, we found auto pound supervisors in Chicago making $144,453; nurses at state corrections earning up to $254,781; junior college presidents making $465,420; university doctors earning $1.6 million; and 84 small-town “managers” out-earning every U.S. governor.

Using our interactive mapping tool, quickly review (by ZIP code) the 63,000 Illinois public employees who earn more than $100,000 and cost taxpayers $10 billion. Just click a pin and scroll down to see the results rendered in the chart beneath the map."

https://straightlinelogic.com/2017/07/27/why-illinois-is-in-trouble-63000-public-employees-with-100000-salaries-cost-taxpayers-10b-by-adam-andrzejewski/

Maxim X+2 Advice Against Overeatingoba

This is purportedly advice that vizier gave to his children but it's most likely the production of a priest presuming to instruct all of society how to behave and using the authority of a fictional vizier for its gravitas because people are less likely to listen to some random priest. The book didn't say that. I made it up.

Who were these viziers and priests? I'm making this up too.

The priesthoods gave legitimacy to the king as representatives of divinity on earth. Each king was like his own Jesus, a son of god living on earth. Without the priesthood, the king couldn't pull that off. And without the king the priesthood would have no reason for being.

The viziers were like Trump. They were the sons of large landowners who inherited their wealth and who controlled the means of production and all labor on their land, they organized society on their land. They supported the king by supplying him with labor, the surplus of labor, and armies.

The whole place was a fifedom.

A vizier wouldn't bother writing this down for prosperity except for on the walls of his own tomb. He's too busy controlling society. A priest, idle except for his continuous rituals, and parasitical upon productive society, would have the time and the interest and contempt to attempt to boss everybody else around and insist they behave certain ways that they'd like to see. Like Confucius. Much like a pope.

What does this priest pretending to be a more important vizier say people must do regarding eating the food they produce for themselves, for their viziers, for the priesthoods, and for the king? What does this priest say in his fiction about a vizier instructing his sons that his sons must do?

We don't care!

He's a bullshit artist. A presumptuous bossy bos cow.

All we care about is penetrating the weird way they spoke.

He says:

When you are with a crowd, hold off from stuffing your pie-hole. That little bit of self-restraint pays off because people are watching and they point out pie-hole stuffing pigs. A little bit of water and a little bit of food will hold you over until you're away from the crowd. This includes when you're a guest at someone else's house. People dismiss gluttons.

We know, right?

We notice our own obsession and our impulse on remarking on the strange things Obama pushes into his face [obama eating]. And then when Obama is no longer pharaoh we turn our attention to what kind of food Trump eats, his two scoops of ice cream, his déclassé well-done steaks, his bizarre taco salads that aren't even real, and his Coca-Colas and hamburgers [trump eating]. Let's only mention Clinton's nearly obscene eating habits [bill clinton eating], and [bush eating].

He says it like this:

If you sit down with a multitude, hate the bread that you love.
Suppressing the appetite is a little moment, gluttony is a taboo, for it is pointed at.
For a cup of water quenches thirst, a mouthful of herbs settles the appetite.
For a good thing substitutes for goodness, for a little bit substitutes for much.
He who is untimely voracious for his bely is a wretch: those forget one whose belly made free in their house.

How convoluted. But point taken.

On the other hand, when someone prepares you a feast in your honor, it's good to show some appreciation and not disparage the goods laid out for you. Avoid being an annoying pissant gluten-free, GMO-free, no MSG having, vegetarian, low-carb eating, locavore, I'm-on-a-special-diet picky eating fussy little bitch.

And they said this in chicken scratches, ink marks representing symbols, representing sounds in their language but with no official spelling, and with more chicken scratches throughout to sort through the mess of marks they made across lumpy woven paper and on broken pieces of pottery.

These are their chicken scratches, reverse-engineered back to their original symbols, best as possible given the remnant broken bits.

I just caught "I'm Dying Up Here"

I recently started streaming Showtime and I caught a series about comedy called "I'm Dying Up Here."

It tells the story of the "The Comedy Store" in the 1970's where a bunch of big time comedians got their start. Richard Pyor. Robin Williams. Andy Kauffman. Jay Leno. David Letterman. Elyane Boosler. Richard Lewis. The list goes on and on. Jim Carrey is a producer and he got his start there as well.

I am a big comedy fan. Of course I follow most of the younger guys that have podcasts these days. It is a fictionalized account so it is interesting to guess who is who. I binge watched two seasons and I reccomend it. It is well done and entertaining and the seventies details are right on to coin a phrase.

pickles, sauerkraut

It's on.

We'll see if the claims are true. And for the first time, lo these many years, I'll have the original deal that people had all through history.

But then, they died younger back then than we do now, so there's that.

I flavored the h-e-double cinnamon sticks out of these.

Oh man. I just realized, I could have tried cinnamon sticks.

I used garlic and ginger because that's classic combination, and dill because pfffft everyone does. It's a thing. Daikon radish, mustard seeds, peppercorn and some of the jars have fennel seeds. Coriander seeds, and bay to keep them crunchy.

I still have a large daikon that could fill a jar, and a big honking ginger root, and five more jars, so I might try those and see what happens.

One English cucumber fills a jar. Sliced in half the lengthwise to get it out of its plastic, then in half the other way so they fit in the jars, then each fourth sliced into thirds so twelve wedges for each cucumber. The other kind of packaged cucumber (not Kirby), a whole package fits in a jar. So total, five jars of cucumber.

One medium cabbage, 3 lbs., 6oz., filled only two jars.

Did you know that you can plant ginger root from the grocery store just as you do an iris rhizome?

The thing is ... sometimes ... I'm telling ya, it's nearly impossible to get a straight answer from the internet.

Ginger blooms are exotic as bird of paradise flowers except dark red. But turns out that's a specific type of ginger not the type ginger from groceries.

Bummer!

YouTube videos show people sprouting them and growing plants but they don't show the blooms.

[ginger flowers]

Turns out the grocery store variety is "Chinese ginger" or "Common ginger." A screenshot from a YouTube video of Chinese ginger production in Fiji shows an uninspiring flower, lost among the farm foliage. The whole farm is a total mess.

See it in there? Huh? Do you see it? Do you see it? Huh? Huh? Huh? Do you see it. Do you see it? Do you see it? Do you see it? Do you see it? Huh? Huh? Huh? Huh? Do you see it? Do you see it, do you see it, do you see it? Huh, huh, huh? Do you see it? 

Well, LOOK!

Oh, bother. 

Amazonia

We have been getting a lot of rainfall lately, we have had flash flood warnings and watches every day for weeks now. We had thunderstorms for five hours yesterday, one right after the other. The lightning strikes were so close I didn't even work in my shop until that train of storms passed over. A river now runs through my yard and down my driveway. My front yard is becoming a swamp. My trees now live in a rain forest. What I am trying to say is:

Thanks to a friend of mine for that meme. He's a funny guy.

I did manage to build a box the other night:

Looks like a hunk of wood. But wait:

Lift the lid and there you go. Red mulberry natural edge top and red mulberry block for the body. I am not real big on joinery around here but since boxes sell I figured I would make one that matched my particular inclinations - simple, natural, functional, and made out of local wood. 

But that's not what I am here to talk about. Nope, as always, there is more to the story. Years ago I read an excerpt from Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. I found those few paragraphs fascinating - chocked full of detail and written in a manner that reminded me of Tom Wolfe - very energetic and fast paced. So once I got my new Kindle I looked for that book, but at 9 bucks, no thanks, I'll save my money and I passed it by. Then I espied another book by Stephenson entitled Snow Crash for $1.99. I bought it. And next thing you know, before I have even made it halfway through the latter book I got an email from the racket boys over at Amazon. They are mind readers, you know, and they offered me Cryptonomicon for $2.99. They know that I am cheap. That my resistance to buying that book prior to receiving their new offer was totally based on the price point. Being clever money grubbing, er, business geniuses they figured that out and knew that if they dipped that bait in the water I would bite. Like a freakin' piranha. Nom nom nom. They reeled me in. So far I am not disappointed. That boy can write. Which brings us to something else - so there I was readin' the book, relaxin', and on page - aw hell, Kindle does not number its pages, but at 1% of the way through the book I was stopped dead in my tracks. There, bigger than life was the name John Vincent Atanasoff, listed as a Bulgarian working at Iowa state. I read the name and had to close the book. I knew J. V., knew his brother Theo, his sister-in-law Lily, his nieces and nephews, one of whom was best man at my wedding. He was a patient of my father. He lived right outside of town in a house that he designed and built - it was, I guess, in the brutalist school of architecture - poured concrete walls, no ornamentation, brutal in a word. Fortress-like.

John Atanasoff

That's five syllables right there

What else can you do?

But enough about that - that is borderline gossip. I will resume reading the book and reminisce about times gone by some other time. But damn, bam, that is an odd thing to encounter in a book, just sayin'.

We know the answer to this question.

Massive MAGA rally in Wilkes-Barre, PA.

I love these things.

They've developed a life of their own. Something noticed that's not quite so fun. As usual, detractors have cause and effect backwards. They apply what they know and what they know is top down direction. They know astroturfing. They know their crackpots joined a larger more encompassing group of expanded crackpots that then they must follow and defend all of the crackpot directives, because they must to maintain cohesion. They end up defending things they didn't sign up for. So it's natural to assume that Trump is leading his crowd to disrespect American media, that's all that they've actually heard, where the opposite of that is the case, Trump is tapping into that disrespect that preexisted his presence,  and Trump is channeling it. Most excellently. It appears to detractors that Trump is leading the charges against American media. Without Trump these charges were already there but unfocused and diffused and dismissed. Now these same people are dismissed again as mindless brainwashed cultists. Because that's what the detractors know of people. That's what surrounds them apart from the rallies. That's what they recognize. That's why they will always be wrong.

Then contrary to that the crowd actually does behave as mindless cultist brainwashed mob when Trump names Democrat Senator Bob Casey "Sleeping Bob." Hang on ...

I gotta laugh.

And the crowd chants "Sleepin' Bob! Sleepin' Bob!"  [Gateway Pundit]

It's funny. But it also fits the description of them.

Meanwhile Acosta draws attention to himself as focal point of disillusioned American. He tried to get Sarah Sanders to disavow Trump's tagging American media as enemies of American people, then flounced out of the briefing room because she wouldn't do what he wanted. Instead, she listed attacks that the media made against her.  [PJ Media] [Daily Caller] More at [Gateway Pundit.]

But not so disillusioned to be kept away from Trump's rally where Trump's supporters shouted directly to his face, making Acosta feel that he's not in America anymore. Acosta said he was sorry his little girl had to see that. [Townhall]

She didn't have to see that. You should know better than take her into your enemy's territory, Stupid. Now you're using her as human shield in a war that you started.

Speaking of not being in America anymore, Madonna claims she moved to Portugal over Trump because "this is not America's finest hour."  [Breitbart]

Yes it is, Stupid. Shut up and sing. I want to practice another language to your music. Since I can no longer dance to it.

Isn't that a bummer?

Boy, my legs just don't obey me anymore. They have to be coaxed and cajoled and then they behave poorly. I lost the race down the block. The pizza delivery guy didn't know we were racing, but he beat me fair and square anyway. He got to Floyd's before I did, and I really tried, that was my top speed. I saw him go in, so I entered to mass confusion. Nobody knew who ordered the pizza. The workers were puzzled, the customers waiting were curious, the pizza guy was all wtf? And shopping today I was stumbling all over the place. I got off to a very bad start, and I knew the whole thing would be a trial, scuffing, and dragging, and tripping, not responding, not feeling, being unsteady, feeling heavy as cinderblocks. And there goes my dream of being a ballet dancer. Good Lord, what a workout. Like springtime skiing where light to shadow changes ice to slush and the effect passing through it is your skis are grabbed as if by a menacing hands. Instructors call it snow bunnies grabbing your skies. That's what it feels like without skis. I bought every cucumber they had and all the dill that they had. So today I'm going to make pickles. And feel glee while I'm doing it, at Acosta and Madonna feeling so miserable, their own strides disrupted by their pathetic and vicious ignorance.

Do these people in the video look toothless to you? Marc Caputo with Politico described them amusingly, "if you put them all together you'd have a full set of teeth." Very funny, Marc. Now, go f yourself, that'd be pretty funny too. [everywhere]

NYT

They did it again. You don't have to read them to know they just hired an upfront straight up racist. And they did this to be provocative. And it works. Their present defense of her is standard nonsense. The sound we hear is the band playing as their Titanic sinks. 

The deets are all over the place. Actually, everywhere. If you haven't seen them then you're simply not reading. And the bird says to that, "Good for you." 

The instructions of Kagemni's Father and Ptahotep

This is going to be a drag.

It's two pieces of literature preserved on a single Middle Kingdom papyrus. It is 214 lines of hieroglyphs on a scroll that was cut up into eighteen pages. The first two of those pages are the end portion of instruction of some vizier to his children. One of the instructions mentions a man named Kagemni, apparently one of his children who becomes a vizier himself. Then there's a blank page and the rest of the papyrus is devoted to the instruction of another vizier named Ptahotep. These viziers were like mini kings themselves. They controlled vast stretches of land, and everything that happens on them, nomes, such as feudal baronies. These were very important people, way up there on the pecking order, and their behavior had to be exemplary so they produced these instructions, maxims to live by very much like Confucius and Machieveli together.

They're boring as hell.

But what is interesting about them is something Deb noticed. If you choose to bother with it, you'll see similarities here and there with Jewish and Christian sacred books and you'll start to wonder just how much of the old testament has its source in the early Jewish enslavement. These stories, histories, philosophies, proverbs and psalms came from somewhere. What we see is a kind of syncretism. They took the best of what was around them and claimed it for their own. Blended the best into their own culture. And then under another period of slavery their culture began falling apart, dissipating into the larger and stronger culture so their priests re-worked their collected writings and created for themselves an historic national hero by amalgamating the feats and the history of several biblical characters into one. David. Do you honestly believe it was David who killed Goliath? The septuagint leaves traces of another name. The priests weren't 100% careful in their redactions. And they were using scrolls, you can't just flip back through pages. Nor use the computer's "find" feature. It's impossible to keep track of every detail. Do you honestly think David wrote all of the psalms? The same songs appear elsewhere in other languages predating David.

The Egyptians are doing the same thing here. Within the works they are  claiming  origin in an earlier dynasty, an earlier era,  to give their new work back then the authority of being classic, while the style and the language, the phrasing, the usages, pegs the work at late Middle Kingdom.

Fine. We'll go along with your propaganda just to see how you said things over there and back then. Because we're curious how you got on.

This first bit exists in only one copy while the Ptahotep portion exists in several other copies. The first portion contains four maxims, and the second portion contains a long introduction and thirty-six maxims, and then a long conclusion. Both are difficult of comprehension in places and translations are uncertain.

In the modern book, this goes on for sixty-five pages.

That's a lot of pages for pedantic instructions. Kind of like living on Air Force Bases, rules all over the place. Every minute of the day. Every building you go into. For everything. Including washing your car and cutting your lawn, and cleaning your windows, and rolling up your garden hose. What a drag. Being a viziers son, being a courtier, was a total drag. We know that by all their stinking rules.

More fermented food.

Just skip it if you're not into this. This video was suggested by YouTube algorithms and displayed at the end of another political video, and I go, hey! I like that guy.

Maybe you'd better not watch it. He picks at his face all the way through then sticks his hands into the fermentation brine and the whole way you go, gross. Gross. Gross. Gross. Gross. Quit grossing me out.

But aside from that he does impart very useful information. He apologizes for it being so long. His subscribers are thrilled to have these ideas.

I never liked sauerkraut. But I think that's because I've only every had the vinegary kind. I'm sensing I'd like this, if I can only get over his persistently describing it as "funky." I'm not sure I'll like funky food.

Oh!

He disparages Tabasco as plain straight chile sauce. The chiles are aged for three years in barrels. They don't use the word fermentation, but that must occur as part of their similar process.

There are better and longer videos about Tabasco sauce on YouTube, but this one does show the basics. 

I thought they grew all the chiles on their little island, but now I learned they send their seeds to Latin America. The place where the chiles are grown will make a bigger difference in taste than the genetics of their seeds. And now that Latin America grows them, they have their own seeds. And those seeds, all the seeds, will change over time. So, protect the genetics all you like, the taste of the chiles will still be different, and they'll even vary at the same location over different seasons. It's bringing all that together and blending all of it, that makes a stable product over time, like Budweiser, you can count on it being consistent. If that's what you want.

Charcuterie plate

Does this look good?

What clever marketing.

I didn't ask to receive this marketing from Yelp, but I must admit it's awfully clever. They're supporting area businesses.

Yelp has my address because I used them to gripe about an awful business who mailed to my brand new apartment in a brand new building before I even moved in. We are address to them, not names, yet we are all addressed individually and charmingly as, "Dear valued neighbor." We're valued as objects for marketing. Their product is old fashioned newspaper that tells of things that happened weeks ago, they're useless for current events and oblivious to upcoming events, but loaded with advertisements. But it was the exceedingly poorly written political opinion that turned me firmly against them. I've had it. I get that crap every day, all day long, delivered by political retards. Please stop. Then again. Please stop. Then again. Please stop. Again. Please stop. Then, I asked you kindly four times to stop, this is counted as the fifth. Then again. I'm telling you six times to stop. Then. Goddamnit stop sending me your stupid shit. Then. You godoxiasamned motehx3iwdking consck?xukers stop it. I'm going to return your crap with dog poo. Finally, after ten years, That does it. You cannot be spoken to. I'll put my complaints on Yelp with each future offense. *ding* That did it .

 Everyone else is responsive to request to stop mailing. But Glendale Journal was particularly unresponsive to requests. They figure I'll move soon enough. Or die. And someone else will be their dear valued neighbor.

So now Yelp is doing the same thing. But I gave them my address so that I could complain. So I have a connection with them. I guess I'm a member. But much different from Glendale Journal, Yelp's email fliers are inspiring. They do give ideas where to go, they do alert to upcoming things in which we can participate. Everything is local and targeted. And they're literally right up our alley. Like upcoming demonstration on how to make pickles.

And each time I go, wow, that's interesting. There are so many things we can do. So many places we can visit. And all so nearby. So many places to try out. Fresh ideas all over the place.

And their tremendous wealth of material is just given to them freely. Like a backyard fruit tree ripe for the plucking. The photographs that they use are pulled from the photographs that reviewers took with their phones and uploaded to restaurant pages on Yelp. These photographs are incredibly useful to comprehension of what to expect when you go there, should you ever decide to try something new.

This is the photograph Yelp selected this time to head their flier selected from user uploads to The Truffle Table. A place nearby that I hadn't heard about. Click on the photo and you're taken to the Yelp page where this photograph is one of a hundred forty-five available user photos.

And they're all very good photos. These smart phones are teaching people how to compose a photograph. How to capture the essential, how to eliminate the distracting portions. How to frame. How to create interest.

We hear that phones are making young people dumber, while here is example of phones making young people smarter, more creative. More useful. Thank you, Youngsters. I regard you as brilliant.

This photo makes me want to go there and experience this firsthand.

And while there I hope to meet people like you.

Yelp continues to Deep Root Winery and Bistro in nearby Lodo. I click on this picture to be taken to their Yelp page and scan the rest of their photographs. A new place apparently, there are only seventeen photographs.

Bleh. 

Wine. 

I sipped some wine a few days ago. From someone else's glass. Lauded as a fine and well balanced wine with interesting and delightful notes, well-regarded by connoisseurs, and rather expensive comparatively. I let it coat my whole mouth and let its fumes go up my nose and my brain reported back, don't drink that, Kool Aid is better for you, little dummkopf. I guess I'll just never grow up to wine. It's like a child inside me, a very old child, flatly rejects it each time I try. What a little bastard. Everyone else is enjoying something I can't even have. I resent myself sometimes. 

Yelp continues. 

The Truffle Table again. We already saw them.

Cheese + Provisions. The picture looks like a party plate that they sell at the grocery. A plastic platter with divisions. The owners look like fuddy-duddies in gray company t-shirts. Come on! You're running a business over there. Class it up a little bit, would'jya?   Seventy-three photos. Looks like a boutique deli.  

Bleh, wine again. The cheese and meats selections look very good. We could buy a bunch of stuff there, random but varied across densities and intensities, things you cannot buy just anywhere, go elsewhere and buy other stuff like grapes, and cherries, and fruits and berries and salted pecans and crackers and bread, then pile it all on a platter, or on a couple of platters, and by accident end up with arrangements more artistic than any of these. It would be a good place to start, but not a good place for artistic inspiration. 

See what I mean? 

A left-brain dominated type did that. I concluded that some people just don't have an eye or a mind for arrangement. Unless it's mathematical or geometric. 

There I was assembling fresh strawberries macerated with sugar over toasted pound cake with vanilla ice cream. Then the old fellow who previously tried to describe what he wanted but couldn't identify pound cake as the structural substance suddenly arose and appeared from nowhere to assist the assembly. Yes. He was having exactly what he wanted. I managed to fulfill his desire drawn from his poor description. The last step was touching each of the fifteen plates with mint sprig. 

Being helpful, he tore off a mint leaf and placed it on a mound of ice cream flatly as if it had died there on an isolated frozen mountain top. It looked like a victim of accident, wan, depleted of energy and dead. Poor little thing. Frozen like that, and gone to mint-heaven.  I go, "Give it life. Make it look like it's growing out of the ice cream. Make it look alive." I jabbed the ice cream mound with the stem portion holding three mint leaves, like a dart, and it did look like the mint grew from the mound as a little tree. And the visual effect was TEN MILLION PERCENT different. What the hell's wrong with you? Why don't you see that? 

Oh. 

Your right-brain never was born.

Your left-brain killed it.

The Loyalist Instruction

There are seventy copies of this text in different forms, carved into the back of a stela, papyri, and ostraca.

It's pedagogic, tautologic and boring. It says if you want a good life then suck up to the king, actually worship him. I don't like it.

But I try not to let that distract from its form, from how things are said, and its fascinating arrangement of ideas, about how it begins with instruction on living correctly then ending on a tercet about death.

It has thought to it, so it's easy to see why it was popular, although they're all thoughts I don't like. And it has strong arrangement.

The online Yahoo groups with their international following would take at least six months to go through this line for line. I did this in two days, with naps, and lot of goofing around on other things, and I got more out of it than I'd get from a university class. My method is immersive. Each symbol is researched for its properties and as I go I'm seeing their properties in combinations, how they're pronounced differently in varying situations. So this time their pronunciation or their function is listed then each line reviewed for its transliteration usefulness. On the second pass about a third of them are dropped, then they're reversed for their left to right reading, then translated to English. From that we can see how translators got from pictures to English sentences, and we see how they talk about language as they dissect it. It's only five and a half minutes if you care to watch it. As it runs I can see a few mistakes I made myself, but I don't care, it's not worth going through a thousand frames to pin them down and fix it. It's all scratch notes anyway. As I go my system improves.

I don't know how the other students are learning, but it can't be anything like this.

Fermented pickles

Again with the pickles. What am I on some kind of pickle kick?

Yes. I am.

The thing is, Yelp sent me an email suggesting a class offered at a pickling place nearby my apartment before this one, and I've been thinking about pickles ever since.

And the thing I keep thinking is why does dill have the lockdown on pickles?

I'd rather have sweet ones than those stupid old sour dill one. At the grocery dill style gets huge shelf space and sweet style gets hardly any attention at all.

Why doesn't anyone use ginger? That would be the perfect flavor with sweetness. That's what I want my pickles to be. Citrus flavored pickles would be worth a try. Pineapple-flavored pickles would be worth an experiment. I'd like to pickle daikon radish and see what happens.

Things that I learned tonight through other videos.

* Cucumbers ferment in four days. Other people let it go longer.

* Cucumbers have an enzyme at their tip that cause them to go mushy so their seeds germinate inside them.

* People use sea salt or kosher salt because they don't want iodine put in table salt.

* Chlorine in water is harmful to the process

* It's a lot easier and faster than I thought.

* You don't have to be fussy about sterilizing jars and lids and equipment.

* Everything wonderful involving yeast and organisms, fermentation, germination, and the like,  beer, bread, sourdough, kimchi, yogurt, cheese, and  Chia pets, pickles were probably invented by mistake, discovered by careless accident, and by sloven habits, by an attitude of "let's eat it anyway. We're starving."

Being human means being a complete mess. It means being part of the environment, even microscopically, and the environment being part of you. You are the environment.

This is so difficult for my spiritual self to accept.

Our physical reality is we are literally creatures risen up from the mud and the reason why we have so much difficulty with viruses and germs and invasive creatures is because fundamentally we are so much alike.

Fermented pickles are acceptance of our reality.

Four videos said that bay leaf has tannin that keeps pickles crisp. A few videos named other leaves that have it too, grape leaves and oak leaves.

All the videos I watched use the same flavor ingredients. Received wisdom. They're stuck. We should look to other cultures and see how they flavor things. India would be a great place to start. Talk about mistakes, careless accidents and sloven living, India is lousy with it and they do have extensive experience with spices and favors, and things that happen to food in hot climate.

Nobody flavored with vanilla. Nobody I watched fermented corn.

I bet soy sause, another fermented product, would work well with pickle flavors. I wonder why nobody tried sake or Madera, or vermouth.

I'm not sure if I've ever had fermented pickles. I wonder what they are like.

I'm going to do this. What the heck.

Change of subject right here.
I'm jack'n my own post.

We pop-up constructor types create problems for people as well as bring joy.

And I really should get in the habit of checking my mail even when I'm not expecting anything. The mailman has been bringing them up to my door. I thought he was showing a special interest in me on account of me being so doggone special, but now I think that's not the case. I think we get so many packages that the oversize package compartments get filled leaving him no place to put them. So, if there are no excessive packages then my mail builds up in my mailbox. Such was the case.

Ew, Lordy, colorful envelopes that are puffy. That means people are sending me pop-up birthday cards. But only because I sent them pop-up cards for years so now they think I'm obsessed.

Look. You cannot match my pop-up cards with ones that you buy. You just can't. So don't even try.

Still, they're awfully cute. And I love them so. I love the thought behind them. I'll bet they're expensive compared to non-pop-upable cards. I must say, don't support the card industry. They're no better at this sentiment expression than you are. Just put something together and mail it. A picture you draw yourself, buttons glued on, strings, pieces of metal arranged in design, combinations of ink and materials. Experiment with your innate creativy-tah, be bold, try different things, make mistakes, express some uniquely personal sentiment, and mail it.

But I was wrong.

One of the colorful envelopes contained a regular card, a very nice personal note acknowledging tribulation and trial, and wonder of being alive, and two $100.00 Amazon gift cards. That's what made the envelop puffy. Not one. Two.

Wowza!

I was not expecting that.

Got me.

Real good with that one.

The thing is, uncharacteristically, I don't have any immediate use for them. I just bought a boatload of stuff to get stupid shoes that I can fit my Alley-Oop feet into and shorts that I'm too embarrassed to wear in public, and short-sleeved shirts that altogether make me feel quite stupid wearing. How do men have a mature style sense in hot weather, without looking like a boy? All the men that I see on the street look like they have Peter Pan syndrome. They're ridiculous old men dressed as boys. I don't want to be that. I have to get it together with light fabric shirts and pants and light shoes that will fit, and that don't look like they come straight from the ballpark.

It's a problem.

Along with IKEA catalog, there was another one from Vermont shop where I bought vintage candy to send to the boys. Page after page of women's summer clothing on sale, page after page of skin lotions, and tonics, things for the face, for the body, for the feet, to keep insects away, for hair, for eyes, for lips, for elbows, page after page of summer dresses, page after page of summer shoes and slippers for women, page after page after page after page, it's a rather boring catalog targeting women, page after page, flip, flip, flip, how long is this going to go on? Flip, flip, flip, flip, flip, dresses, scarves, jewelry, flip, flip, flip, makeup, flip, flip, makeup remover, flip, flip, flip, more scarves, more slippers, more summer shoes, purses, pocketbooks, flip, flip, flip, AHA! One tiny square, "Our plaid shirts for men are wardrobe must-haves."

Fuck you.

We get one little square on a page of women's things. Smaller than all of the other ad squares.

Maybe I had just go around bare-ass naked except for an ordinary boring plaid shirt.

"But Officer, I was following the suggestion of Vermont Shop catalog."

Two hundred bucks could get me a couple pair of summer weight pants.

Of the shirts, I looked at hundreds if not thousands on Amazon and on Needless Markup, I meant to say  Neiman Marcus, Nordstrom, and elsewhere. On Zappos (also owned by Amazon) the Dockers shirts in plaid are modeled by one man whose image stays the same as the shirts change on him like a paper doll. He has a handyman look to him, thick black hair, scraggly 5:00 beard, hard working, hard playing kind of dude, but there he is modeling. I'll find the page for you so you can see.

Okay, here he is.

If you click on any shirt, then the same array of shirts displays below your selection. If you click through his shirt changes while his posture is static. Every single light colored pastel shirt makes the man look like a pussywhipped pussy-hat wearing little pussy. With cats. Except the black shirt makes him look like a big honking stud. It's a very good way to compare. (The black short-sleeved shirt no longer displays)

It's actually dark blue, not black. And it has a tiny dense red pattern in it that doesn't show in small thumbnail. It's a nice looking shirt especially for its low cost. I bought one and it instantly became my favorite summer shirt. It's very nice material, good buttons, extra buttons inside, very well sewn, great fit, and a very good proper look to it. I like it. When it arrived it was carefully packaged, as a significant shirt. It's much better than all of the others.

So I went to buy another for myself and one more for a friend. They're out. Bummer! Like I got the last one. I bought my friend a different one, different dark color and different pattern. He's a wealthy man and the shirts that he buys for himself cost at least 4X what this did, if not more. But he flipped right the f out. I told I didn't care what he did with it, use it for dusting of wiping his car oil dipstick, I don't care. Give to Goodwill. I don't care. But instead he kept repeating what a great shirt it is. He was tickled to have a gift delivered like that. He argued against my diminishing it.  It's unlike what he would buy for himself. And it works. Score!

I was going to use my new cash to buy a pickle related book on Amazon, but the YouTube videos tell me all that a book would. I don't think a book would be any more useful than direct demonstration. Who knows? Maybe the books have better ideas. Maybe a book would suggest ginger or vanilla, or citrus, exotic or alcohol flavors.

The videos prove that pickles are way WAY WAY overpriced.

KLEM FM

link

Here's a suggested study for climate change scientists:  Forget CO₂ for a moment. It seems reasonable (if not axiomatic) that global cloud coverage should track global temperature rises. More heat = more water vapor = more clouds. Is this testable?