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Age-ed Hiker Level 9000
I was thinking to myself as I was putting together my pack for some day-hiking, that you can go to some elite outdoors outfitter, and buy a pair of shorts for between $70 to $120, OR you could go to the Dollar General and buy a pair of basketball shorts for $10. Now, with the Continue reading
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Endless Mexican Sprawl
In the New York Times, I read (subscription may be required) about a man who lives in Mexico who was browsing the luxury items for sale on the website of the French jeweler Cartier, when he came across a pair of earrings priced at 237 pesos, which apparently is $13 US dollars. That pricing was Continue reading
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Jost Burgi and The Inquisition
In my free time, I’ve been studying a book written in 1620 by a Swiss clockmaker named Jost Burgi. The book was called Aritmetische und Geometrische Progreß Tabulen, and written in German, probably because the German language was an academic language in the 1600’s, and a lot of intellectual work was done in German at Continue reading
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Cats, Dogs, and Social Play
I was woolgathering about someone asking me if I was a cat or a dog person. People seemed to ask this question more in the past than they do now. In fact, the whole cat-dog dichotomy seems to have been more of an 80’s and 90’s idea than one that is popular today. I actually Continue reading
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Russian Dvoeverie and Public Applied Psychology
There is a generalization about Russian spirituality, which leaves out the exceptions, such as the Hindus and Muslims to the south, and the Buddhists to the east, and it is that the people of Russia have a simultaneous duel-faith, which is Russia Orthodoxy and the pre-Christian Paganism. But to cut to the chase, ‘Paganism’ is Continue reading
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Odysseus, Faust, Hannibal Lecter, and Reverse Meanings
“All that glisters is not gold“ – William Shakespeare I have this funny idea that the previous centuries and even the ancient world, used to warn of a type of vanity by describing how it seems, rather than how it is. Now imagine this: Say that Odysseus of The Iliad was not as smart as Continue reading
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Not As Wordsworth Intended
I just finished a poem by William Wordsworth called ‘Lucy Gray; or, Solitude’, and was reflecting on it a bit. Taken literally, a wonderful little girl goes missing in the snow, and they search for her, find her footprints in the snow, follow them to a bridge, and then the footprints stop precisely halfway across Continue reading
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The Biltonganator Mark III
I first learned about Biltong, which is a kind of dried and preserved meat in South Africa, from a video on YouTube by a chef named Ben Kruger. In the video, he shows how to make a biltong drying box that uses a computer fan to circulate air inside the box, and the drying is Continue reading
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Speedy Turkish Coffee
These days I prepare Turkish coffee in the morning, which tastes much better than my ordinary coffee, and is easier to make because only the Cezve (Turkish coffee brewing pot with a long handle) needs to be rinsed out to make it ready for brewing again. I had been making coffee with a Vietnamese Phin Continue reading
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Crops and The Royal Game of UR
To begin with, many people ask me what UR means. It was an ancient city called Ur in the Babylonian Empire. This empire existed during the Bronze Age, which is related to this post. Babylon existed in what is now Iraq, and the city of Ur was at a place that used to be coastal, Continue reading
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