Work?

Work?

I don't have to work.

I don't have to do nothing

but eat, drink, stay black, and die.

This little old furnished room's

so small I can't whip a cat

with out getting fur in my mouth

and my landlady's so old

her features is all run together

and God knows she sure can overcharge--

Which is why I reckon I does

have to work after all.

LANGSTON HUGHES

Was God In Tahrir Square?

Was She chanting for Bread? Was He shouting “Liberty”? Was It demanding Social Justice?

The majority might pretend to own moral values, but if it closes its eyes to hunger, dictatorship, and injustice, those values are not mine. The yes-men of the state might try to stand between us and God, but my God does not rub shoulders with dictators and their enablers. I worship the God of Bread, Liberty, and Social Justice.

Mona Eltahawy

From the Foreward in Occupy Spirituality by Matthew Fox and Adam Bucko

Beauty. The Invisible Embrace.

Yet beauty's visitation affects us and invites us into its rhythm, it calls us to feel think and act beautifully in the world: to create and live a life that awakens the Beautiful. A life without delight is only half a life. Lest this be construed as a plea for decadence or a self-indulgence that is blind to the horrors of the world, we should remember that beauty does not restrict its visitations only to those whom fortune or circumstances favour. Indeed, it is often the whispers and glimpses of beauty which enable people to endure on desperate frontiers.

This book by John O'Donohue, with the above title, has become my bible. This man has said everything in this one book that I couldn't express in a lifetime.

In Greek the word for 'the beautiful' is to kalon. It is related to the word kalein which includes the notion of 'call'. When we experience beauty, we feel called. The Beautiful stirs passion and urgency in us and calls us forth from aloneness into the warmth and wonder of an eternal embrace. It unites us again with the neglected and forgotten grandeur of life. The call of beauty is not a cold call into the dark or the unknown; in some instinctive way we know that beauty is no stranger. We respond with joy to the call of beauty because in an instant it can awaken under the layers of the heart a forgotten brightness. Plato said: 'Beauty was ours in all its brightness ... Whole were we who celebrated that festival' (Phaedrus).

Yes, It's Adulterated

For the last 5 years or so, I've been mixing coconut oil and butter in my coffee. And, I love it.

I use the highest quality ingredients I can afford. Grass fed cows from Ireland make the butter. Organic virgin coconut oil from trees in the Philippines. Arabica beans from Mataquescuintla, Guatemala.1 This is an effort I usually don't undertake with my other food choices, but the results have been great for me. I've lost weight, gained energy and feel sated until noon, which means I rarely eat breakfast. Go here if you want to know all about it.

I toss the 3 ingredients in a blender and get smooth, creamy latte-like coffee without milk or sugar. TRY IT.

1.Some trivia. Mataquescuintla played a significant role during the first half of the nineteenth century, when it was the center of operations of conservative general Rafael Carrera, who led a Catholic peasant revolution against the liberal government of Mariano Gálvez in 1838, and then ruled Guatemala from 1840 until his death in 1865.

Innocent Villagers

We, too, cry falling to the edge of
the earth. But we don't store our voices
in old jars. Nor hang mountain goats
on the wall. Nor claim the kingdom of dust
Nor do our dreams look out over the grapes of others
Nor do they break the rule.

Mahmoud Darwish

It Was A Good Cup-O-Joe

Cafe: Alleycat (closed)
Grub: Dark coffee of the day, black, served with sticky bun

Here's To A Weird July

This is the last day in a month you will never see again in your lifetime.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7
8 9 10 11 12 13 14
15 16 17 18 19 20 21
22 23 24 25 26 27 28
29 30 31

The month of July this year had 5 Sundays, 5 Mondays and 5 Tuesdays.

This happens once every 823 years !!!

My New Solar Oven

I usually don't like cooking in the Summer. Heats up my kitchen. Since I don't have A/C I want to avoid this. Here is a solution. It's kinda fun to play around with different food stuffs to cook. So far mostly it's been veggies and chicken.





It's just a glass tube, vacuum sealed with a dark coating, a simple reflector and a tray that slides inside the tube.

I'm also experimenting with cooking times and placement of the oven in my yard.

What Is Music?

We know that sound results from the vibrations of air molecules moving through the air to our eardrums, that the speed of those vibrations is referred to as frequency, measured in Hertz, and that pitch is the relative highness or lowness of a sound. But what is music?

I love this quote by T Bone Burnett, who I admire in spades. It’s a beautiful and elemental way to think about music.


“I view all instruments as drums and all music-making as tribal. A violin is just a drum with some strings attached, but it’s still a resonating chamber you attack with a bow or your fingers. A flute is a drum with holes in it that you blow through to make different pitches with that resonating chamber you attack with your breath. A band is, ‘Okay, we’re a tribe now. We’re going to be in this village right now and we’re going to tell people in the next village what’s happening over here.’ That’s all it is, really.”

Search for:

Found at C.A.N.

This seems tragic to me.

Roughly one third of the food produced in the world for human consumption every year — approximately 1.3 billion tonnes — gets lost or wasted. 

• Fruits and vegetables, plus roots and tubers have the highest wastage rates of any food. 
• Global quantitative food losses and waste per year are roughly 30% for cereals, 40-50% for root crops, fruits and vegetables, 20% for oil seeds, meat and dairy plus 35% for fish. 
• Every year, consumers in rich countries waste almost as much food (222 million tonnes) as the entire net food production of sub-Saharan Africa (230 million tonnes). 
• The amount of food lost or wasted every year is equivalent to more than half of the world's annual cereals crop (2.3 billion tonnes in 2009/2010). 
• Per capita waste by consumers is between 95-115 kg a year in Europe and North America, while consumers in sub-Saharan Africa, south and south-eastern Asia, each throw away only 6-11 kg a year.

Here's the source.