Tectonic Triviality

"Nobody ever made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little."

Edmund Burke 1729-1797

I once wrote that “There are no trivial tasks. Your every action - every word, every gesture - shapes the future. You are the god-like prime mover of all that comes after. You are the Ancestor. You create posterity's ripples.”

Bread Agony and Ecstacy

Aw, geez. Mere days after I complained about my favorite rolls being baked so sloppily that raw flour sometimes spills out, I got a bag of them like this. So gross. 

The Old Country

Every American within a couple generations of their imigrant ancestor has experienced this, regardless of ethnicity: Conversation turns to the family's homeland, and grandma rolls her eyes and dismissively waves her hand, tartly exclaiming, with vast exasperation, "the old country!"

This is a conversation stopper, not starter, which makes it tantalizingly unsatisfactory for the rest of us. But, to her, no further explanation is necessary. Either you know or you don't know, and she knows, and one person knowing is quite enough. Enjoy the land of opportunity, and...better you shouldn't know.

Whether you're Belgian or Australian; Jewish or Egyptian, if your family's been in America less than a century, you'll have witnessed this scene. And, weirdly, the phrasing is always the same. There are so many ways to express it, but all Americans of a certain age use this precise term: "The Old Country!" Also the hand wave and eye roll. It's more American than eagle pie.

So then you go live in Europe for a year, and something peculiar happens. It gradually dawns on you what grandma meant.

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That last paragraph was the natural place to end this slippery posting, but you'll surely want examples. What, exactly do I mean?

Alas, I'm as tongue-tied as your grandma. Either you know or you don't. All I can do is to roll my eyes and wave my hand (though with an affectionate grin which never arose on any American grandparent's face, because, unlike them, I have mere months invested in this experience) and exclaim "The Old Country!"

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Ok, ok, how about this: if you don't get lunch at the exact same time as everyone else, you'll either starve or be forced to resort to Burger King. No slices or falafel or egg/bacon/cheese on a roll; that stuff's all garbage here. You sit down at the appointed hour and take an expansive hour to attentively dine, exchanging templated pleasantries with your career waiter, or else eat like a rat.

But that's just one thing. And grandma didn't build you a list because she knew that any handful of things would have made you focus on those specific things...when she was really referring to the entire weighty bundle of things.

I'll always retain my affectionate grin, though, because I knew what I was getting into. The liberties, looseness, and lightness of America, of which I was keenly cognizant, stopped seeming persuasively worth it. At this juncture in American life, The Old Country, despite its institutionally heavy, creaky thrombosis, feels more salubrious.

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One exception: you don't hear African-American grandparents performing this rite, though more likely due to the wider generational distance than the barbaric conditions of their "immigration". I do know one recent African immigrant, however, who refuses to eat traditional African food with her fingers. Her eyes roll and her hand waves. The old country!

To me, she couldn't be more Jewish if she were bobbing her torso over an altar and droning in Hebrew.

London Aspirational Chow

So I've spent the last some odd months in a Portuguese fishing village with spectacular food. But it's all 100% grandma. No trained chefs. No flair, no touch, no training, no meticulousness. Just unrefined soul. That would be fine with you? Well, try eating that for the better part of a year without respite and see if you don't crave something more meticulous.

Here's an example of the problem. I'd never previously spotted what American restaurants term "Portuguese rolls" until I came across this pão d'avó from an obscure bakery on the grimmer side of town.

I've been slicing/toasting them to make panini, egg sandwiches, etc, and they're SO spongey and SO crispy - and, being naturally fermented, incorporate SO much English muffin tang - that I crave them like dope. But about every tenth roll I cut, a tiny trace of raw flour comes spilling out. This is not cool. Trained bakers would boggle at this amateurish error. But how can you not forgive it when the result's this stellar?

I grabbed a discount plane ticket to London, where I deliriously sopped up all the non-peasant chow I could find. Less soul, more composure. Starch in the collars and nothing to forgive.

I hit Kish restaurant for Iranian. Everyone knows tahdig, the crusty Persian rice, but this is its classy cousin, called tahchin: crusty rice cake filled with shredded chicken, yogurt, egg and saffron (so much real saffron!), pistachios, and barberries.

Then to Pique-Nique for a very proper French pheasant pithivier:

Do I know how to antidote or what?

Thanks to chowhound superstar Limster for the guidance!

A City on Mars

A new book, "A City on Mars” is getting a lot of attention, describing the less-considered downside of colonizing other planets.

I debunked living on Mars last year with my posting "Mars Sucks". And while it's hard to tell for sure from reviews, it doesn't seem like the authors have keyed in on the fundamental human comfort issues I noted.

But, regardless, it's good that humanity is starting to view this from a more realistic viewpoint than the cartoonish Buck Rogers SPACE EXPLORATION take. That's fine for highly trained astronauts for a limited amount of time, but you can't possibly support such a colony unless conditions on Earth are so unbearable that we're willing to grimly torture ourselves to survive as a species.


How do we fail to register the obvious here? It's a framing issue. We are so used to visualizing Mars as "cool" that we don't see how that's completely a head fake. We don't live in a cartoon - in an overarching dramatic arc. We live in our bodies, in an immediate place. Under certain circumstances, we can, via obsessive self-hypnosis, persist in peeering up at ourselves on an internal movie screen, basking in the "meaning" and the "glory" of our trajectory - i.e. inhabit the head fake. But that's for comfortable wealthy people (everyone in America is wealthy), and there would not be a nano-second of comfort on Mars or the Moon, ever. EVER! And there's nothing like egregious discomfort to bring one's framing back down to...well, back down to the relevant planetary body!

Declining to Perform the Agonies of a Changed Mind

Whenever someone convinces me of something, they invariably keep pushing - keep arguing their point - long after I've declared agreement. It's the darndest thing. And I just figured out what's going on.

We're supposed to change our minds ponderously. Painfully. Slowly. With weight and sighs and emotions. A change of mind is such a rare event in human society that we expect it to involve heft and solemnity. We watch for a process akin to mourning, where a person struggles to let go of an old assumption and be reborn into some unimaginable new identity.

So we expect to see the signs of titanic inner struggle. Without that evidence, how would we know there was an actual change?

Answer: because I just told you! I told you I was convinced! You chose not to believe me because I failed to undergo the expected agonies. My face didn't contort, my eyes didn't dim and refocus, there was no gasping or groaning. I just accepted the change! I reframe and get on with it. And this seeming witchcraft is freely available to you, as well. The kabuki rituals which signal reframing are empty drama!

If you simply change your mind, your veracity will be doubted. You appear to be lying; merely pretending to have accepted a change. Or patronizing. Anything but simply changing your perspective. Because reframing is presumed to be rare and difficult - though it's literally the easiest thing a human being can do.


In one of my most-ignored postings (which is saying something!), I noted that it's phenomenally easy to teach a young child to arbitrarily adore red lights, arguing that there are gargantuan implications for our latent reframing faculty.

Situational Awareness

Situational awareness is a term devised by narcissists to offer an excuse for failure to recognize the meaningful existence of other human beings.

Sorry I failed to give a crap about you, ma'am. It's that I lack situational awareness! Yet another exceptional "me" thing, hahaha. Thanks for understanding!

Non-narcissists (the four or five of them who still exist) don't deploy some special ability to pay attention to their fellow human beings and avoid getting in their way. Such consideration is foundational. Instinctual. It's as ingrained as any human faculty...unless you're a complete narcissist, in which case it needs a name because it's not the default setting. It's something to "work on". You know, like kleptomaniacs need to work on not swiping the candy (given their lack of "transactional diligence").

"I get it! Human beings deserve not to be impeded by me, so I should make an effort to recognize their existence and adjust my movements to take them into account! I need SITUATIONAL AWARENESS! Hey, is there a seminar I can take? As a tremendously caring person, this seems like something I ought to develop. Another skill to master, another triumph to proclaim!!"

Here are all postings labeled "definition".
The definition of "Soul" kind of echoes this one.

Re-linked Mis-Linking

I fixed the (previously) messed up links in the posting below.

Voltaire on Certainty

“Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.” — Voltaire


Another perspective on my hobbyhorse about how one can either feel smart or be smart (a choice with all sorts of rippling consequences).

Recent Info on Diverticulosis

Bad news: If you're middle aged, there's a significant chance you have diverticulosis (30% of U.S. adults between 50 and 59). If you're over 65, you have a 65% chance. And, scarily, there is increasing incidence among individuals younger than 40 years of age. And you won't know without a colonoscopy (or other scan).

Good news: Diverticulosis is not harmful in and of itself.

Bad news: Diverticulosis puts you in peril of diverticulitis (I can't keep the terms straight, either), which is ghastly, and may be easy to mistake - at least at first! - for more pedestrian lower gastro symptoms. It's no joke: in Europe, diverticulitis accounts for about 13,000 deaths annually.

Good news: Your odds are good. Even if you have diverticulosis, you probably won't get diverticulitis. Incidence is 4 - 15%.

Bad news: Traditional medical advice is to completely stop eating nuts and seeds. No more granola, poppy-seed bagels, berries, tomatoes, tomato sauce, etc. In the fast breezy read you're doing now, that sounds bearable. But when a doctor actually tells you this, it's shocking. Tomato sauce covers a lot. And being told to never eat another strawberry feels like walking through a portal into a new reality.

Good news: Latest research shows dietary restrictions don't affect your likelihood of diverticulosis turning into diverticulitis. Gastroenterologist Dr. Lawrence S. Friedman, a Harvard Medical School professor says (here), citing recent research:

"Yes, nuts and seeds — foods once thought to trigger diverticulitis — are actually full of fiber and are tied to many aspects of good health," Dr. Friedman says. "You can eat a handful of nuts and seeds every day and your gut will thank you for it."

I showed the article and study to Slog technical advisor Pierre, who, for 30 years running, has perpetrated the longest shaggy dog joke in history by never once failing to declare any scientific/medical link, headline, or study I've sent him to be "NONSENSE!" He has broken his perfect run, stunning me by quietly accepting this one. "New evidence trumps old wisdom,” he shrugged. “That's science."

Here's the money quote from the study: "The evidence does not show a higher risk of diverticulitis in people who eat a lot of those foods, compared with people who don’t". Pierre notes that it says nothing about getting diverticula, it is only concern with the incidence of the disease. It does not address the possibility that seeds may or may not cause diverticula, only that the diet does not affect the probability of their getting inflammed"