Right. We don't believe in European Exceptionalism -- that is, Europeans behave exceptionally badly. We are all smart apes, and are all inclined towar...
The east/west boundary marking adequate rain for agriculture to its east has been moving eastward across the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and ...
Great book! I hadn't connected the Thompson piece with the dust bowl, so thanks for pointing it out. A lot of farmers planted wind breaks around their...
If you liked that snippet of Stein, you'll be glad to know that there is lots more where that came from! Here is a link to a sample of her opera, "Fou...
Pigeons on the grass, alas. If they were not pigeons what were they? et al From Four Saints in Three Acts by Gertrude Stein 1927 Pigeons on the grass ...
Invasion as distraction I can understand, but Venezuela already has huge oil reserves of which it doesn't seem to be able to make effective economic u...
What would we do without chatgpt? Heard a music program about Chanukah (commemorating the alleged miracle of 1 day's oil burning for 8 days) in the ne...
25000 years ago, some smart wolves saw that 'fucking adorable' would get them a lot farther in this world than howling and snapping. And so it is. We ...
That's one of the strategies -- take the dog out every 20 or 30 minutes and praise them lavishly for each act of excretion. Some dogs are easier to tr...
Your mother bought some sketchy off-brand envelope at a dollar store. The glue was made out of god knows what--maybe pangolin. Pangolins are nothing b...
"Honesty" is part of a person's character; we practice honesty. It's an optional behavior, not something we are born with. Where does it come from? We...
I've been drinking green tea that has a bit of turmeric and black pepper in it. Excellent combo. The pepper gives it a warm finish; not sure what exac...
[ Starbucks is to good coffee what McDonalds is to good food. Actually, the coffee at McDonalds is better. At least the dumb glass bottle was recyclab...
I'm sure you and everybody else has heard this joke... I first heard it in 1982. This guy puts his arm around the black guy next to him and tells the ...
Pick your poisons prudently; apply a cost-benefit analysis. The occasional good brew delivers more pleasure than the cheaper acrid taste of a cigarett...
I quit smoking about 28 years ago. I had throat cancer 4 years ago, but that was from human papilloma virus, related to something else that went away....
I remember 1999. Yeah, it was sort of exciting to enter a new day, new year, new century! A lot of people thought everything would fall apart on 1/1/2...
Are you saying that people go crazy in December just the same as they go crazy during the other 11 months? Or in addition to everything else, people g...
Hey, Jorndoe, no great interest in seeing this flick, but... How was the usual and customary malevolent overlord AI threatened? Somebody had the power...
Herr Arthur Schopenhauer had such a pessimistic view of humanity; did he consider himself as wretched a case as he apparently thought everybody else w...
Some questions about love: The body is wired for sex; we don't have to learn a sex drive. Is the body wired for agape? Storge? Philia? We seem to need...
In decades past (like... 1970-1990) many gay men maintained less exclusive sexual relationships than some gay men do now (now many gay men seem to toe...
I thought he was already dead. When Dorothy Parker (snarky poet of the 1930s) was told that former president Calvin Coolidge had died, she said, "How ...
I don't think it is at all a deficiency that people prize erotic love. As embodied beings who experience the world through the physical senses, we ARE...
This is all very interesting, but of one thing I am quite certain: theorizing about love will not get one laid. It probably won't lead to love either....
Paraphrasing Tolstoy, unhappy families have lots of permutations; happy families don't. We can be attracted to all sorts, but if there is zero attract...
"Love" is so overworked and so heavily romanticized (fictionalized, dramatized, hollywoodated) that it is difficult (impossible?) to say anything fres...
I totally understand your aversion to the way people reference Spanish imperialism. Consider English imperialism: North America, much of Africa, Great...
Blame the Spanish Empire. Had Spain been as successful as England in the Imperial Colonial Games, we'd all be saying costó, costaron, y costado. But y...
Or you can find it in the dictionary. verb verb: cost; 3rd person present: costs; past tense: cost; past participle: cost; gerund or present participl...
Another chapter in Hanover's progressive disclosure. A foot here, a plate of boiled okra there, a bare calf, a driveway, the corner of a chair. Many f...
"Play Misty for me" a young Clint Eastwood said. "Mist" is an unmodified Old English - Germanic word. It makes sense that north Germans and the Britis...
Nobody else has, either. The slightly irregular topography was enlivened with dramatic little hills by the use of an app that gives an air of verisimi...
The whole thing was Midwest to the max--wholesome but bland and mushy. A few years back, Green Giant came out with a frozen green bean mushroom risott...
Happy Thanksgiving, which is about over, merciful God. Actually it was pretty good. Many young adults who used to be toddlers were there. Free-floatin...
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