this week i

ate four cheesesteaks from aunt ro for fireside thanksgiving dinner





 

type "i love you love you man" into youtube search, fail to find nina simone's song, recite some lyrics into a google search bar, find the name of the song, type "i love your lovin' ways" into youtube, listen on repeat.  next night, "i love you love you man" into youtube search gets me where i want

dined elkridge furnace.  clyburn arboretum, jimmy & rosalynn carter's, sasha helloed snapchatters cuz double upgrades.  tattoo the ambassadors!



received a big skink.  ben's since moved on to googly-eyed mini me gritties









read..


(1) into the antarctic night

future space expeditions will resemble sea voyages much more than test flights

as if the rats were scurrying through their brains

amundsen fulfilled his life's ambition on december 14, 1911, becoming the first person to reach the south pole


(2) ottoman selim's fascination lies in the equipose between his psychopathic behavior and his visionary statesmanship

entrench the sunni-shia divide

he no longer craves only sicily

to whom god grants the sultanate may lawfully put his brothers to death

place-names such as matamoros...moor-slayer


(3) financially pushing up tulips

attendees at an english rural fair in 1906 who competed for a prize to guess the weight of an ox came up with a median estimate that was very close to the animal's actual weight

bad is stronger than good

the company hails from silicon valley and blends techniques devised by social networks to attract users' attention with those of casino operators meant to keep people betting.  new customers are offered a free stock upon joining; the app sends them emoji-filled notifications and erupts in confetti after a customer places an order; digits spin up and down like a slot machine when share price changes; and an alert is sent once a price rises by more than 5 percent.  all these techniques are designed to draw customers back to the app

robinhood's customers don't pay transaction fees because the company earns money by selling information about their trades to financial firms, which are only too happy to take the other side of the bet



(4) deciding cases on the narrowest possible grounds

in one of those cases, van buren v. united states, the vote was 6-3, but the six were the three liberal justices joined by the three trump appointees, and justice barrett wrote the opinion

defying expectations and rising above party lines becomes more difficult as the stakes increase

 

(5) umami: a short cut to deliciousness

 for 1200 years meat had been banned in japan

parmesan (the umamiest cheese on earth)

a nice bit of hashtag lobbying persuaded merriam-webster to preface its online definition of 'chinese restaurant syndrome' with the note: 'dated, sometimes offensive'

mouthfulness

use kokumi to make the biscuit biscuitier

 

(6) wildfires in western north america

like an atomic bomb went off

a 1 degree celsius rise in the average temperature could bring up to a 600 per cent increase in the median area burned every year.  there are feedback loops to worry about

the conservative party of canada recently voted against recognising the existence of climate change


(7) peter thiel and silicon valley

 i'm not even sure what i'm supposed to say.  i want to publicly tell you i'm not a vampire

'my generation was promised colonies on the moon,' he said after being introduced by zuckerberg.  'instead, we got facebook.'  zuckerberg had once called twitter 'a clown car that fell into a gold mine'

 

(8) more on the food system

the philosophy underlying our global food system is often referred to as 'cornucopianism' - the belief that the earth's capacity to produce food is, as a result of planning and technological innovation, just about limitless

refrigerated shipping made new zealand mutton cheaper than mutton raised at home

in 1939 britain had 250,000 sweetshops

bread bulked with sawdust

domestic 'zoomass'..now outweighs wild 'zoomass' by a factor of ten

pomologists..are people who study fruit; oyster-eating is ostreophagy

 

(9) the dissociative psychedelic ketamine and other substances

how amazing is it..that so many kinds of plants have hit upon the precise recipes for molecules that fit snugly into receptors in human brains

i began to think of caffeine as an essential ingredient for the construction of an ego..to be caffeinated is an altered state.  it just happens to be a state that virtually all of us share, rendering it invisible

 

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