Ned Harr

Elanor Gardner wrote:One thing that happens when you exercise is that all the toxins in your tissues that were stagnantly living in you, were stirred up to be released through your sweat or others means. Once you exercise regularly, this happens less and less as your body will expel all the stagnant yuck.
This also happens when you get a massage sometimes.

Also when you fast between mittents.

Next time instead of dragging the machine, try rolling it end over end. This should, due to the sausage-grinder effect, make grated ghost out of your household spirits. (Grated ghost can be sprinkled liberally over paranormal pizza, afterlife appetizers, spectre spaghetti, haunted huevos rancheros, and poltergeist potatoes.)

I believe repulsion or revulsion is a studied thing ("disgust response" would probably be the term to search on), with both genetic and learned components. Relatedly, psychologists, and in particular those who study personality, have studied the degree to which people are driven by seeking purity, and how this spills over from feelings about food etc. and into feelings about society and other people. I believe it's one of the Big 5 Personality factors or something like that.

I try to use stuff with a higher smoke point (canola oil and coconut oil have higher smoke points than olive oil or animal fats, I believe; I once learned that flaxseed oil has the highest smoke point? Not sure if I'm remembering correctly) but really I just use whatever type of oil was in it most recently or whatever's at hand.

BTW I don't mind heating olive oil, like if I'm adding it to a sauce, but I try not to use it for sauteing or frying, at least not without mixing it with a different oil that has a higher smoke point. I do sometimes break this rule, like if I saute fresh salmon in a mix of olive oil and butter though, because that's plain delicious.

Desmond Morris observed chimps in captivity and likened it to humans in city dwellings. I think that was a bit of a stretch, but he might have been on to something when thinking about prisons.

I saw a video once about a compound (a few houses and other buildings all part of one property) which survived a terrible wildfire even though all the neighbors' properties were wiped out. The survival of the compound was attributed to several things, including a lot of the stuff that is recommended in the links shared above.

One other thing that stood out to me was that part of the property itself, as well as some of the individual buildings, had masonry walls with ceramic tiles embedded in them for decoration, and it turned out this worked just like the heat shield on the Space Shuttle. The ceramic tiles absorbed the heat and did not let it pass beyond.

I think building such a fence or wall around the property, especially on the sides most likely to experience drafting--so, the downslope and windward sides, I think?--would be a wise investment in a fire-prone area. I'm thinking of a wall made of stone or brick, maybe covered in cob, and festooned with ceramic tiles on the outward-facing side. Would be beautiful as well as useful.

Since this thread has bubbled up again, I owe everyone an update: our trip to NM this year got cancelled for budgetary reasons (we are going somewhere closer instead that does not require plane tickets) and next year is already earmarked to see an aging family member in Europe, but 2028 or 29 maybe...

Interdependence (the "system" by which one person fulfilling his or her dreams requires helping another person fulfill their dreams in turn) seems to be an emergent quality of human existence, because we evolved in, and continue to develop within, and thanks to, complex social systems.

This is true whether a buddy is helping you hoist a wall of your hand-hewn log cabin into a vertical position, or whether you are working a job at someone else's company to pay a mortgage at a bank owned by someone else. And going it completely alone will make you go nuts, with loneliness if not just sheer lack of conversation.

Maybe one of the curses of being human is having the ability to envision the ideal of pure solitude, but not the ability to actually achieve it. I suppose our answer to this is to enjoy and appreciate the little ways we need other humans in our lives, despite the way this fouls up a serene primordial experience of being alone in the wilderness.

carl gibson wrote:you can get a propane chest freezer - no reason to burn up one electrical device allowance on that one.

Does it not have an electronically controlled thermostat?

I'm having trouble interpreting the OP question...does it refer to anything with any electrical circuits running in it at all, or does it refer to the stuff people normally think of as "electronic devices", i.e. where the "electronic" part is the main attraction: phones, tablets, gaming devices, GPS, etc.?

EDIT: I now see my confusion has already been addressed. Yeah for me, in an ideal world where I could chuck away my phone, it'd be my laptop, which was kinda sorta my only electronic device for a long time.

EDIT #2, having thought a bit more about it: I try to, like to, ponder and scrutinize my relationship with technology--not just electronic devices but any object, method, or system manifested from the application of intention to formerly inert or passively received inputs. Intention, as I see it, is central to technology usage; without intention you don't have technology, you just have the received environment. The question in the OP feels like it's prompting me to audit my technology choices: what electronic devices am I so dependent on or attached to that I couldn't give it up?

Trivially, the answer is nothing. In fact, I can go much further: I feel like if tomorrow I had to go live in a hut in the jungle, I could; it would be jarring but I would accept it and get used to it, and if I had experienced people to learn from and who could help look out for me I'd do fine living that way for a long while.

If on the other hand you kept me here in the world of cars and cities and products and jobs, and merely subtracted all but one of my electronic devices and forbade me to get any more, it would be terribly inconvenient, I would not be able to meet my professional obligations, and it would be sad too because I'd lose some of my hobbies and some of my ways of learning. Alas, electronic devices have a way of ratcheting into our lives.

But as long as I am being intentional about using them, and a flame of nonattachment to them is kept burning somewhere deep down, I think having electronic devices is fine.

Heard this one from a guy at Pollinator-palooza yesterday:

Why do chicken coops have two doors?

Because if they had four doors they'd be chicken sedans