Thursday, August 18, 2016

on the road again

Yep, AGAIN.  We've owed my MIL a visit for at least a year now, so are having a little extra fun while fulfilling a pleasant duty.  :-)  We took off on Monday (leaving Pip the canary, the pond fish, and the houseplants to the care of our erstwhile dogsitter), and headed north- and west-ward into Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and South Dakota.

Along the way we saw field after field, mile after mile, state after state, of cornfield cornfield beanfield cornfield beanfield cornfield cornfield cornfield....  In one crop, maize provides ALL the major "neolithic agents of disease" -- grain, industrial-seed-oils, and the raw material of high-fructose corn syrup.

I like to think of it as the ultimate Native American revenge.

Friday, August 12, 2016

the pitfall of a hurried dinner

When we've been busy on a hot summer day like yesterday was, meal-preparation becomes a bigger chore than it needs to be.  We had no leftovers ready to nuke, i had thawed some "tenderloin tips" and so i decided -- what the hell, i'll just make stroganoff, and serve it on some rice-noodles J ordered:  THEORETICALLY fettucine, according to the amazon-dot-com description.

The stroganoff was good as usual, but the noodles were barely linguini-width, and despite all the good reviews, they didn't cook up as expected.  I boiled them the maximum time suggested, and though some were tender, others were unpleasantly chewy and they stuck together badly.  I do NOT recommend Tinkyada brand....

But here's the rub -- i had fries with my bunless lamb-burger at our favorite pub at lunchtime, thinking i'd work off the carb while shopping.  But the noodles added too much carb for one day.  I slept long and woke up dopey, almost as bad as in my pre-Atkins days.  This morning i've had that can't-find-the-word-i-want problem -- every comment i wrote lambasting idiots on FB, i wrote much slower than usual ... and you know how important it is to insult idiots with words they'll probably have to look up in a dictionary!  [evil grin]

Ya know all those Trumplodytes who can't handle vocabulary beyond the fourth-grade level?  The ones who display a look suggesting they live on beer and Doritos?  Do you suppose it IS the beer, Doritos, Little Debbies, and cheap doughy pizza which CAUSE them to be so dense and resistant to logic...?

On a more serious note, there HAS been some planned dumbification in this country.  Textbooks for much of the country are printed in Texas, where the head of the state school board is a home-schooler who is a young-earth fundamentalist and doesn't believe in evolution;  where REAL teachers protest listing MOSES as a founding-father of America, to deaf ears.  Despite the inefficacy of ingested fluoride in improving dental health, most of our cities STILL insist on poisoning its denizens with the stuff, which has been credibly shown to damage developing brains (it easily crosses the placental barrier).

It's very hard to get anyone outside the paleo/ancestral community to believe that malnutrition affects mental function.  Our credulous acquaintances have vague ideas about the virtues of protein, vitamins, minerals and fiber, but they usually get the details wrong.  I firmly believe that PART of our appalling national foolishness -- irrational fundamentalism and deification of firearms, among much more -- is the fault of bad nutrition coupled with improper mental culture.  Our society is encouraged to dope itself with "bread and circuses," mindless religiosity, absurd jingoism, and condemnation of "elitist" "intellectuals."

...In the country where Thomas Jefferson once praised our "aristocracy of Virtue*"....  [smh]

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*  By "virtue" TJ meant "great qualities" like intellect, upright behavior, etc.