In the category of How On Earth Did They Do This Study, comes this one from the University of Michigan. The investigators estimated that eating a single hot dog took 36 minutes off of one’s life.
Thirty-six minutes. The average package of hot dogs at City Market contains 10 sausages, which translates into 10 x 36 = 360 minutes down the drain.
That means that by eating 4 packages of these homicidal tubes I would lose an entire day.
Now there have been days in my life that I wish that I could have skipped, looking back, but we don’t get to choose, going forward. I do know what I have to do to hang onto those 36 minutes. I will just re-read this article.
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Mavis Staples was a big part of the musical history in the civil rights movement. She can still carry water, as this 2007 album shows. Ry Cooder produced it and does backup guitar. I love it when a cover of a song makes it new for me, and this one does.
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Yesterday Robin and I revisited the supper tables of our families of origin. While unsuccessfully looking for a certain condiment at City Market I noticed this long and tall pair of cans taped together. It was La Choy Chicken Chow Mein.
In my growing up years this stuff represented all of Chinese food to me, just as I assumed that Chef Boyardee was what I thought Italians ate every day. Our family palate was not an adventurous one.
So I bought it and we ate it and it was … okay. I think that I remember the “chicken “ as once being actual chicken, but the “meat” in this can was a dark brown thing which felt like a piece of sponge in the mouth. Its flavor was not of any food found naturally on earth.
‘Twas an interesting trip down memory lane, but I think we can easily wait another decade or two to serve it again.
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From The New Yorker
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I am re-reading Wherever You Go, There You Are, by Jon Kabat-Zinn. I found it to be an excellent guide to mindfulness meditation on my first read (although I’m not sure that I finished it back then). This time around I am even more impressed. The style of his writing is that of a good teacher at his work.
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We live near a golf course, not so close that one can actually see it but close enough that the fluffy seeds from its cottonwood trees soar over the houses and directly into my garage whenever the door is open even for a moment.
Attempts to sweep or blow them away only causes them to rise in clouds that now fly up one’s nose, into one’s mouth and eyes … anything that happens to be open.
I may be allergic to them, for if one seed brushes my face I instantly develop the horticultural equivalent of road rage. I scratch and sneeze and think the very worst thoughts about these lovely trees. It doesn’t help that there were “cottonless” varieties available when they were planted and if a little more money had been spent , well, we wouldn’t be having this conversation, for one thing.
It’s a princess and the pea sort of thing. Only we royals can truly understand.
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The best laid schemes o’ Mice and Men
Gang aft agley.
We’ve all had those days, when there seemed to be a lot more agley going on than there are schemes being well laid. Why, just the other day by noon I already had so much agley on my hands I forgot to scheme altogether.
It all made me wonder, so last night I looked up the origin of this famous quotation, which comes from a poem called To A Mouse.
To A Mouse depicts Burns’ remorse at having destroyed the nest of a tiny field mouse with his plough. He apologises to the mouse for his mishap, for the general tyranny of man in nature and reflects mournfully on the role of fate in the life of every creature, including himself.
BBC
All of this carried much more weight than I was expecting, while I was in my usual flippant mode. But I continued.
This poem explores the following themes:
- The heartbreaking futility of planning for the future in an uncertain world
- Extreme difficulty of life for poor people and the injustice of a world where they have so little
- Our life-enhancing, human duty to understand the importance of all life, however insignificant it might seem
Whew.
If you’d like, you can read the entire poem here, although I warn you, it was written by a Scotsman and although it is not in Scottish Gaelic, it might as well have been. Full of that “agley” sort of thing, you know.
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Little Home In The Valley 