Big fish eat little fish who eat the plankton radioactive
shrimp are cockroaches of the sea
shells peeled, poop chutes removed from their backs chefs sauté, boil and broil them for tech bros, doctors, lawyers and other PMC types servicing the top floating scum thus recycling garbage
who’s serving whom and to what purpose?
it all turns to shit in the end so why make a big deal about it?
it’s what we do, who we are
all embodied beings gots to eat—
predators each and every one
high low and gradations in between
prey and pray
redemption’s just a call away
ask your doctor for a prescription and
be kind to your web footed friends for a duck could be somebody’s mother
and if none of this makes sense that’s intentional
sometimes you’ve just got to let it go…
it would be surprising if anyone bothered to read or relate to this ramble given short attention spans and literal thinking, and the person writing this would have no way of knowing how it is received, which is fine if it even passes moderation filters.
working for the welfare of others we all fall down
With hard times comes more physical tasks (more do it yourself projects like home repairs or growing your own food) and with more physical tasks comes more aches and pains. It’s important to have some tools and techniques to deal with pain other than taking pain meds.
To that end I will share something I do after a long day of work. I fill a basin with luke warm water (at least ankle high but right below the knees is the ideal amount) and Epson salt (up to 3/4 of a cup, I never use much so feel free to go with less) and soak my legs for 10-15 minutes. This greatly reduces the aches and tightness in my legs and is often enough to get me from one tough day to another.
I think I remember from several threads ago that you had/have done chef work/ food work? In case I remember correctly, here are a couple of interesting things I have found out about a few particular food items.
One year I let parsley plants overwinter and regrow for flowering and seed the next year. When I picked very immature flower bud bunches off the parsley plants and used them for cooking, they tasted “like” parsley but sweeter and more vegetable-seeming flavored. To me, it seemed that they would go well with any combination of potatoes, onions, butter, etc.
And for fennel flower buds, when still immature and soft, they gave a fennel flavor to food but sweeter and more vegetable-seeming. They would go well with any onion-tomato-etc. cluster of flavors.
One time I mixed a little blue cheese into a bunch of crumble-chunk feta. The blue mold spread rapidly through the feta and gave it a blue-feta ( or feta blue) taste. If not eaten fairly quickly , the mold rapidly grew too much and it wasn’t very good anymore.
( I wonder if freezing it at peak feta-blue would keep it there and let you thaw and use measured amounts till it was all gone).
I do not know what the deep state plans to do next in the Ukraine once the Ukrainian offensive is over. The reports from the Ukraine are so contridictory that it is hard to tell who has the upperhand there. Though the released calsified Pentagon documents seem to indicate that Russia has the lead for the moment anyways.
More importantly it seems that the US is losing on the global stage. The civil war in Sudan seems to be an attempt by the US to reverse that trend. I heard that the Sudanese Government recently signed an agreement to allow the Russians to build a naval base on their shores. That came from a Russian source, the youtube site Military Summary, though. So I can not be sure that is true. But the the same source said that the Russians back the government forces and the US backs the militia forces. I so no reason for the Russian military summary site to lie about that.
As I said I do not know what the deep state pans next. But I do know what I would do next, if I were in charge of the deeo state. I would send Polish, Lithuanian, and US forces in to western Ukraine to take up positions along the river that unevenly bisepts the country. And I would have the US Air Force impose a no fly zone over the entire country of the Ukraine. Of course that means that only the US Air Force would be allowed to fly there.
China is not going to invade Taiwan any time soon. The only thing that could cause the Chinese to attempt such a thing would be a decleration of independence by the Tiawanese authorities. So US air power is not needed in the Pacific any time soon.
If the US did that, and I were Putin, I would attack Poland and Germany and maybe France with Scud Missles or something like that. If NATO attacked Russia in retaliation I would go nuclear with what ever forces I could launch, and hope to destroy Europe for acting like the Vichy French if I could not destroy the US for imposing this war on Russia.
my previous submission should probably have included this quote, for an interest teaser:
“Revising The “Social Class” Thesis
While I still feel there is some inherent truth in this “social class” thesis, it needs updating. First, I feel strongly that the idea of construction being perceived as low-class work is not everyone’s reality. It’s a social construct born out of a long history of public education choices, which I detailed in my previous article. A key marker in this history was the Smith-Hughes Act of 1917, which provided matching funds to states for vocational training and, however unintentionally, set up conditions for tracking students along two career paths—one for the college-bound and another for the manual trades. This law remained in place until 1963, long enough for America’s social strata to become deeply etched by the separation of an academically trained “professional class” and a poorer, marginalized “working class.” Some of us have been conditioned to continue accepting this separation even though meaningful public vocational training is no longer widely available. (It’s important to recognize that some effective school programs persist or have been made anew; we will come back to these.) What’s important to understand (and that I was slow to acknowledge myself) is that this social pattern is largely ingrained as a historical condition and might not be true for everyone today. The U.S. Census sorts the population by profession but does not track the career paths that led to those professions, and in the absence of wide-scale institutional trades training, the career paths for our industry’s workforce are immensely diverse.”
@different clue re: parsley flowers or buds, I would try making a pesto if you have a sufficient quality to do so. You could mince them by hand or use a small food processor, adding garlic and pine nuts, or walnuts or even pumpkin seeds, along with olive oil and salt. You can use that in diverse ways from eggs to vegetables to mayonnaise and sauces.
Freezing cheese wrecks the texture and is inadvisable for other reasons.
Thanks for this. If freezing ” fetablue/bluefeta” cheese is inadvisable, then the answer will have to be making small batches and eating them fast enough to get them all eaten at near ” peak blue “.
@different clue, if you really want to make a decadent sauce to mix with pasta, do this:
Toss chopped shallots into a hot sauté pan, spritz with brandy then toss in the cheese combo; add heavy cream and a shot of Tabasco. Reduce to a sauce consistency as in it just slides off the spoon.
It happens quickly.
So remove the sauce pan from heat muy pronto.
This sauce can be used with all cuts of noodles, whether fat like fettuccine or delicate as in capellini.
Smoked salmon adds a nice accent to the sauce.
Add some herb pesto, homemade or not.
Ok. Gotta go nosh on something or another after all that.
Buen provecho, bon appetit and ita takemas to all embodied beings
That reads real tasty. If I feel my abilities are up to it, I may try it. And it can be taken in different directions depending on “what” cheese combo and “which” brandy and etc.
Here’s something I discovered by accident and it turned out better than it will sound.
Years ago when I still bought occassionally pieces of Copper River sockeye salmon, I neglected a piece in the fridge for quite a few days. When I came back around to it, I found it coated with a thin smelly layer of nasty bacterial bio-slime. But given what I had paid, I washed it off pretty firmly and thoroughly till there was zero slime-feel left on the still solid salmon surface. The smell lingered there, of course. But I flash-fried it anyway in real hot olive oil to just approaching crusty on the surface and still “rare” on the deepest inside.
It had a real nice taste between salmon “cheese” and a nutty flavor. I have never done it again on purpose or by accident, but maybe someday . . .
a whole slew of articles about what folly it is to grow all of that food, feed all of those cattle and build all of those crapshacks in the arid regions.
I once read a book called Killing The Hidden Waters about the operational philosophy behind several approaches to living in the Desert West, ending with the current approach being peaked and sunsetted there nowadays. Here is a NOmazon source for that book. https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/killing-the-hidden-waters-charles-bowden/1122997104
I read somewhere that the first planners and boosters of this water-mining approach to Western development had in mind right from the start the following end-game strategy . . . . that when the water ran out, the Desert West would contain so much money and so many voters and so many lobbyists that the Desert West would be able to extort more water for itself from the non-Desert rest of North America. They planned on being able to extort water from Canada and Alaska via NAWAPA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Water_and_Power_Alliance
And they planned to extort all the water in the Great Lakes.
And they planned to extort all the water in the Mississippi River.
They must never be allowed to get any of that water. None of it. They must be forced to accept the choice of either all moving away from the Desert West or all staying in place and living or dying there with what little water remains to them from within their own watersheds.
The Aqua-Subsidy Desert West does not grow any necessary food for anybody. Every bit of food they grow there is recreational fun-food which nobody needs to survive. Our ancestors lived without fun-food almonds, artichokes, melons, etc. all through the winter and spring, and so can we.
If the post Aqua-Subsidy Desert West confined itself to growing mesquite beans, tepary beans, nopal cactus pads ( as their vegetable), etc., pinyon nuts , acorns, etc.; then they can survive into the future right where they are.
mago
Big fish eat little fish who eat the plankton radioactive
shrimp are cockroaches of the sea
shells peeled, poop chutes removed from their backs chefs sauté, boil and broil them for tech bros, doctors, lawyers and other PMC types servicing the top floating scum thus recycling garbage
who’s serving whom and to what purpose?
it all turns to shit in the end so why make a big deal about it?
it’s what we do, who we are
all embodied beings gots to eat—
predators each and every one
high low and gradations in between
prey and pray
redemption’s just a call away
ask your doctor for a prescription and
be kind to your web footed friends for a duck could be somebody’s mother
and if none of this makes sense that’s intentional
sometimes you’ve just got to let it go…
it would be surprising if anyone bothered to read or relate to this ramble given short attention spans and literal thinking, and the person writing this would have no way of knowing how it is received, which is fine if it even passes moderation filters.
working for the welfare of others we all fall down
someofparts
https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2022/04/jon-foreman-new-land-art/
Favorite website for glorious art.
While so many of us rightfully fret about the calamities around us, someone somewhere still has enough energy and hope to produce astonishing art.
GlassHammer
With hard times comes more physical tasks (more do it yourself projects like home repairs or growing your own food) and with more physical tasks comes more aches and pains. It’s important to have some tools and techniques to deal with pain other than taking pain meds.
To that end I will share something I do after a long day of work. I fill a basin with luke warm water (at least ankle high but right below the knees is the ideal amount) and Epson salt (up to 3/4 of a cup, I never use much so feel free to go with less) and soak my legs for 10-15 minutes. This greatly reduces the aches and tightness in my legs and is often enough to get me from one tough day to another.
Chuck Mire
How long you can use your vintage Tupperware and other plastic food storage products
https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/14/health/tupperware-safety-tips-plastic-containers-wellness
different clue
@Mago,
I think I remember from several threads ago that you had/have done chef work/ food work? In case I remember correctly, here are a couple of interesting things I have found out about a few particular food items.
One year I let parsley plants overwinter and regrow for flowering and seed the next year. When I picked very immature flower bud bunches off the parsley plants and used them for cooking, they tasted “like” parsley but sweeter and more vegetable-seeming flavored. To me, it seemed that they would go well with any combination of potatoes, onions, butter, etc.
And for fennel flower buds, when still immature and soft, they gave a fennel flavor to food but sweeter and more vegetable-seeming. They would go well with any onion-tomato-etc. cluster of flavors.
One time I mixed a little blue cheese into a bunch of crumble-chunk feta. The blue mold spread rapidly through the feta and gave it a blue-feta ( or feta blue) taste. If not eaten fairly quickly , the mold rapidly grew too much and it wasn’t very good anymore.
( I wonder if freezing it at peak feta-blue would keep it there and let you thaw and use measured amounts till it was all gone).
Curt Kastens
I do not know what the deep state plans to do next in the Ukraine once the Ukrainian offensive is over. The reports from the Ukraine are so contridictory that it is hard to tell who has the upperhand there. Though the released calsified Pentagon documents seem to indicate that Russia has the lead for the moment anyways.
More importantly it seems that the US is losing on the global stage. The civil war in Sudan seems to be an attempt by the US to reverse that trend. I heard that the Sudanese Government recently signed an agreement to allow the Russians to build a naval base on their shores. That came from a Russian source, the youtube site Military Summary, though. So I can not be sure that is true. But the the same source said that the Russians back the government forces and the US backs the militia forces. I so no reason for the Russian military summary site to lie about that.
As I said I do not know what the deep state pans next. But I do know what I would do next, if I were in charge of the deeo state. I would send Polish, Lithuanian, and US forces in to western Ukraine to take up positions along the river that unevenly bisepts the country. And I would have the US Air Force impose a no fly zone over the entire country of the Ukraine. Of course that means that only the US Air Force would be allowed to fly there.
China is not going to invade Taiwan any time soon. The only thing that could cause the Chinese to attempt such a thing would be a decleration of independence by the Tiawanese authorities. So US air power is not needed in the Pacific any time soon.
If the US did that, and I were Putin, I would attack Poland and Germany and maybe France with Scud Missles or something like that. If NATO attacked Russia in retaliation I would go nuclear with what ever forces I could launch, and hope to destroy Europe for acting like the Vichy French if I could not destroy the US for imposing this war on Russia.
anon y'mouse
Untangling the Skilled Labor Knot, from the Journal of Light Construction.
https://www.jlconline.com/training-the-trades/untangling-the-skilled-labor-knot_o
anon y'mouse
my previous submission should probably have included this quote, for an interest teaser:
“Revising The “Social Class” Thesis
While I still feel there is some inherent truth in this “social class” thesis, it needs updating. First, I feel strongly that the idea of construction being perceived as low-class work is not everyone’s reality. It’s a social construct born out of a long history of public education choices, which I detailed in my previous article. A key marker in this history was the Smith-Hughes Act of 1917, which provided matching funds to states for vocational training and, however unintentionally, set up conditions for tracking students along two career paths—one for the college-bound and another for the manual trades. This law remained in place until 1963, long enough for America’s social strata to become deeply etched by the separation of an academically trained “professional class” and a poorer, marginalized “working class.” Some of us have been conditioned to continue accepting this separation even though meaningful public vocational training is no longer widely available. (It’s important to recognize that some effective school programs persist or have been made anew; we will come back to these.) What’s important to understand (and that I was slow to acknowledge myself) is that this social pattern is largely ingrained as a historical condition and might not be true for everyone today. The U.S. Census sorts the population by profession but does not track the career paths that led to those professions, and in the absence of wide-scale institutional trades training, the career paths for our industry’s workforce are immensely diverse.”
mago
@different clue re: parsley flowers or buds, I would try making a pesto if you have a sufficient quality to do so. You could mince them by hand or use a small food processor, adding garlic and pine nuts, or walnuts or even pumpkin seeds, along with olive oil and salt. You can use that in diverse ways from eggs to vegetables to mayonnaise and sauces.
Freezing cheese wrecks the texture and is inadvisable for other reasons.
Sounds about right for the fennel buds.
Hope this is helpful.
different clue
@mago,
Thanks for this. If freezing ” fetablue/bluefeta” cheese is inadvisable, then the answer will have to be making small batches and eating them fast enough to get them all eaten at near ” peak blue “.
mago
@different clue, if you really want to make a decadent sauce to mix with pasta, do this:
Toss chopped shallots into a hot sauté pan, spritz with brandy then toss in the cheese combo; add heavy cream and a shot of Tabasco. Reduce to a sauce consistency as in it just slides off the spoon.
It happens quickly.
So remove the sauce pan from heat muy pronto.
This sauce can be used with all cuts of noodles, whether fat like fettuccine or delicate as in capellini.
Smoked salmon adds a nice accent to the sauce.
Add some herb pesto, homemade or not.
Ok. Gotta go nosh on something or another after all that.
Buen provecho, bon appetit and ita takemas to all embodied beings
different clue
@mago,
That reads real tasty. If I feel my abilities are up to it, I may try it. And it can be taken in different directions depending on “what” cheese combo and “which” brandy and etc.
Here’s something I discovered by accident and it turned out better than it will sound.
Years ago when I still bought occassionally pieces of Copper River sockeye salmon, I neglected a piece in the fridge for quite a few days. When I came back around to it, I found it coated with a thin smelly layer of nasty bacterial bio-slime. But given what I had paid, I washed it off pretty firmly and thoroughly till there was zero slime-feel left on the still solid salmon surface. The smell lingered there, of course. But I flash-fried it anyway in real hot olive oil to just approaching crusty on the surface and still “rare” on the deepest inside.
It had a real nice taste between salmon “cheese” and a nutty flavor. I have never done it again on purpose or by accident, but maybe someday . . .
anon y'mouse
weren’t we just talking about this?
a whole slew of articles about what folly it is to grow all of that food, feed all of those cattle and build all of those crapshacks in the arid regions.
https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/23682697/colorado-river-drought-100-year-old-mistake-thats-reshaping-the-american-west
different clue
@ anon y’mouse,
I once read a book called Killing The Hidden Waters about the operational philosophy behind several approaches to living in the Desert West, ending with the current approach being peaked and sunsetted there nowadays. Here is a NOmazon source for that book.
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/killing-the-hidden-waters-charles-bowden/1122997104
I read somewhere that the first planners and boosters of this water-mining approach to Western development had in mind right from the start the following end-game strategy . . . . that when the water ran out, the Desert West would contain so much money and so many voters and so many lobbyists that the Desert West would be able to extort more water for itself from the non-Desert rest of North America. They planned on being able to extort water from Canada and Alaska via NAWAPA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Water_and_Power_Alliance
And they planned to extort all the water in the Great Lakes.
And they planned to extort all the water in the Mississippi River.
They must never be allowed to get any of that water. None of it. They must be forced to accept the choice of either all moving away from the Desert West or all staying in place and living or dying there with what little water remains to them from within their own watersheds.
The Aqua-Subsidy Desert West does not grow any necessary food for anybody. Every bit of food they grow there is recreational fun-food which nobody needs to survive. Our ancestors lived without fun-food almonds, artichokes, melons, etc. all through the winter and spring, and so can we.
If the post Aqua-Subsidy Desert West confined itself to growing mesquite beans, tepary beans, nopal cactus pads ( as their vegetable), etc., pinyon nuts , acorns, etc.; then they can survive into the future right where they are.