There are always people who would prefer to call you ill so they can feel strong. What a sad and pathetic way to build one's dignity. The reason for this is they are frightened and mistrustful. They are vampires. They wait in ambush to pounce and drink your blood for energy.
People often ask themselves the right questions. Where they fail
is in answering the questions they ask themselves, and even there they
do not fail by much. A single avenue of reasoning followed to its
logical conclusion would bring them straight home to the truth. But they
stop just short of it, over and over again. When they have only to
reach out and grasp the idea that would explain everything, they decide
that the search is hopeless. The search is never hopeless. There is no
haystack so large that the needle in it cannot be found. But it takes
time, it takes humility and a serious reason for searching.
―
William Maxwell,
Time Will Darken It
There is nothing so difficult to arrive at as the nature and
personality of one's parents. Death, about which so much mystery is
made, is perhaps no mystery at all. But the history of one's parents has
to be pieced together from fragments, their motives and characters
guessed at, and the truth about them remains deeply buried, like a
boulder that projects one small surface above the level of smooth lawn,
and when you come to dig around it, it proves to be too large ever to
move, though each year's frost forces it up a little higher.
―
William Maxwell,
Time Will Darken It
I have been (once again) experimenting with resisting all caffeine after my initial early morning coffee because maybe it might help with sleep, mood and hydration. Seltzer takes the stage when I crave a beverage. So far my dreams have improved.
The English language offers many registers, many levels of diction. King James English. Schoolyard slang. The elegant syntax of Robert Frost. But what I like most is plain old, come-as-you-are English, the language of my midwestern tribe. A modest handful of words captures the whole human procession. George Bilgere on Generations poem by Naomi Shihab Nye
Here the earth, as if to prove its immensity, empties itself.
Gertrude Stein said: 'In the United States there is more space where
nobody is than where anybody is. That is what makes America what it is.'
The uncluttered stretches of the American West and the deserted miles
of roads force a lone traveler to pay attention to them by leaving him
isolated in them. This squander of land substitutes a sense of self with
a sense of place by giving him days of himself until, tiring of his own
small compass, he looks for relief to the bigness outside -- a
grandness that demands attention not just for its scope, but for its
age, its diversity, its continual change. The isolating immensity
reveals what lies covered in places noisier, busier, more filled up. For
me, what I saw revealed was this (only this): a man nearly desperate
because his significance had come to lie within his own narrow ambit.
―
William Least Heat-Moon,
Blue Highways
A car whipped past, the driver eating and a passenger clicking a
camera. Moving without going anywhere, taking a trip instead of making
one. I laughed at the absurdity of the photographs and then realized I,
too, was rolling effortlessly along, turning the windshield into a movie
screen in which I, the viewer, did the moving while the subject held
still. That was the temptation of the American highway, of the American
vacation (from the Latin vacare, "to be empty").
―
William Least Heat-Moon,
Blue Highways
We sometimes forget that dysfunctional people never grow and that they
are still the same as they had been when we tore ourselves away from
them. We are not missing out on anything apart from more of the same old
dysfunctional behaviour.
It sucks to be an appliance serving a function in somebody else’s
dysfunctional life. You are a human being and you want to be treated as
such. And if you remember how unsatisfactory those relationships were,
you might figure out that being on your own doesn’t feel any worse than
that.
No matter how hurtful and unsafe that family was, during our early
years, it represented our entire world. Many of us still harbour a
deep-seated longing for reparation and for experiencing our family’s
love and approval. Many of us still think that our family might see the
truth and perhaps feel sorry and want to make amends for their treatment
of us. But the journey of recovery from growing up in a dysfunctional
family barely ever leads to that place. Tereza Pultarova
There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the
idealist most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. The rush and
pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its
innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of
conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit
oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is
to succumb to violence. The frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work
for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace. It destroys
the fruitfulness of our own work, because it kills the root of inner
wisdom which makes work fruitful.
The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy: the strange error that
our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions and applause of
other men! A weird life it is, indeed, to be living always in somebody
else's imagination, as if that were the only place in which one could at
last become real!
―
Thomas Merton,
The Seven Storey Mountain
The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be
perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own
image. If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their
potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love
the reflection of ourselves we find in them.
Keeping a journal has taught me that there is not so much new in your
life as you sometimes think. When you re-read your journal you find out
that your latest discovery is something you already found out five years
ago. Still, it is true that one penetrates deeper and deeper into the
same ideas and the same experiences.
―
Thomas Merton,
The Sign of Jonas
Finally I am coming to the conclusion that my highest ambition is to be
what I already am. That I will never fulfill my obligation to surpass
myself unless I first accept myself, and if I accept myself fully in the
right way, I will already have surpassed myself.
―
Thomas Merton
Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the
fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no
result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As
you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on
the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work
itself. You gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and
more for specific people. In the end, it is the reality of personal
relationship that saves everything.
―
Thomas Merton
“You do not need to know precisely what is happening, or exactly
where it is all going. What you need is to recognize the possibilities
and challenges offered by the present moment, and to embrace them with
courage, faith and hope.”
“My parents were disconnected from their parents,” he said in a 2006 interview with poets.org.
“We were middle class. There was no religion in my family. So there was
an absence of ceremonial knowledge, there was an absence of inherited
knowledge, there was an absence of family stories, and there was an
absence of instruction.”
“I
got deeper and deeper into the world of poetry,” he said, “simply
because it was the only thing that stayed constant in my life
continuously, year after year, and then decade after decade.” interview
caffeine, which is often in tea, coffee, chocolate, and energy drinks
alcoholic drinks, including beer, wine, and spirits
carbonated beverages
Fat is present in a variety of foods, including those below:
Processed foods
Processed foods can contain high amounts
of fat or oil, making them more difficult for people without a
gallbladder to digest. Examples of high fat processed foods include:
desserts, such as cakes, cookies, and pastries
fast food, such as pizza or fries
processed meats, such as sausages
Fatty meats
Some types of nonprocessed meat can also contain a significant amount of fat. Examples include:
lamb and mutton
pork, including bacon and ribs
fatty cuts of beef, such as T-bone and rib-eye steaks
Dairy products
Whole dairy products also contain fat. Following gallbladder removal, a person may need to avoid:
Including more of certain foods in the diet can be helpful following gallbladder removal. The Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2020–2025 set out the types of foods people can focus on eating.
Lean protein
People who eat meat can choose low fat cuts to avoid eating too much fat. Some examples of low fat protein sources include:
nuts and seeds, but only in small amounts, as they are high in fat
High fiber foods
High fiber foods can help prevent constipation. However, people who no longer have a gallbladder should reintroduce high fiber foods to their diet slowly after surgery. High fiber foods to try include:
Dairy products are a good source of calcium.
If someone has to avoid full-fat dairy after gallbladder removal, they
can substitute low fat dairy products, such as skimmed milk or low fat
yogurt. People can also get calcium from other foods, such as:
leafy green vegetables
tofu
calcium-fortified milk alternatives
canned sardines and salmon
According to a study in Nutrition & Diabetes,
low fat products often contain more added sugar than full fat versions.
A person can read the nutritional data on food packaging to check they
are not eating too much fat or added sugar.
I discovered this by accident trying to cure heartburn. I need acid and the seltzer was gone so I combined a cup of ice cold black coffee and a can of cola from the mini market next door. Perfect. It worked and somehow I slept.
“What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory--meaning
a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and
thereby rescued from oblivion--is really a form of storytelling that
goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. Too
many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be
wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to
rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In any case, in
talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.”
―
William Maxwell,
So Long, See You Tomorrow
We never really know what we're capable of until circumstances demand that we act. It's as if a stranger, a second self, resides within us, a kind of understudy, standing off-stage, just behind the curtains, hoping the lead actor doesn't break a leg. Or does.
Spotted in a Mississippi creek: The state’s first mammoth tusk
The state’s Department of Environmental Quality called it “an extremely rare find for Mississippi.”
Mississippi
Department of Environmental Quality geologists use plaster on Aug. 3 to
cover a mammoth tusk found in Madison County, Miss. (Eddie Templeton)
Eddie
Templeton traces his love of fossil-hunting to walks along a local
creek as a boy in central Mississippi, trawling for bits of fossilized
tree bark and shark teeth on trips with his father and sister.
None
of that prepared Templeton, now 68, for his latest find: a 7-foot-long
tusk from a Columbian mammoth that lived tens of thousands of years ago
during the last Ice Age.
The
lifelong Madison, Miss., resident was deep in river water on Aug. 3
when he saw something big sticking out of the mud in the distance. He
quickly realized it was something unusual.
“I
took photographs of what I could see and texted them to scientists that
worked for the state and got an immediate call back from one of them,”
Templeton said.
It’s
the first recorded mammoth fossil of its kind discovered in the state —
and it was entirely intact. That fact “makes it an extremely rare find
for Mississippi,” the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality wrote in a blog post.
“America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are
mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote
the American humorist Kin Hubbard, 'It ain’t no disgrace to be poor, but
it might as well be.' It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor,
even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk
traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and
therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales
are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their
betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man
who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking
this cruel question: 'if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?' There
will also be an American flag no larger than a child’s hand – glued to a
lollipop stick and flying from the cash register.
Americans,
like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously
untrue. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any
American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money
is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame
and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich
and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and
privately, than any other ruling class since, say Napoleonic times. Many
novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing
without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one
another because they do not love themselves.”
―
Kurt Vonnegut,
Slaughterhouse-Five
If you want to really hurt you parents, and you don't have the nerve to
be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of
making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or
badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the
shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even
a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an
enormous reward. You will have created something.
―
Kurt Vonnegut,
A Man Without a Country
It's like making a movie: All sorts of accidental things will happen after you've set up the cameras. So you get lucky. Something will happen at the edge of the set and perhaps you start to go with that; you get some footage of that. You come into it accidentally. You set the story in motion, and as you're watching this thing begin, all these opportunities will show up.
A commonplace about trauma, one buried deep in the psyches of American
men, is that it is noble to heal alone. What I’ve learned in recent
years, however, is that this choice sometimes becomes a path to further
isolation and trouble, especially for the family and friends of the one
who has been wounded. I took exactly this path, intending to bother no
one with my determined effort to recalibrate my life. It took a long
while for me to understand that a crucial component of recovery from
trauma is learning to comprehend and accept the embrace of someone who
has no specific knowledge of what happened to you, who is disinterested.
We need others to bring us back into the comity of human life. This
appears to have been the final lesson for me — to appreciate someone’s
embrace not as forgiveness or as an amicable judgment but as an
acknowledgment that, from time to time, private life becomes brutally
hard for every one of us, and that without one another, without some
sort of community, the nightmare is prone to lurk, waiting for an
opening. https://harpers.org/archive/2013/01/sliver-of-sky/
When
you go to another country and you’re dealing with a language you don’t
speak, and with customs around the consumption of food that you’re not
familiar with, and hours for sleeping and being awake, you can find some
other way than your accustomed way. And that kind of experience leads
you to what I think is one of the most important parts of international
politics now. That is the awareness of, and the accommodation of oneself
to, the existence of profoundly different epistemologies that should
not be changed. If you want everybody to have the same truth, or to
believe in the same things, then you’re talking about the loss of
tension and the collapse of the world.
Our trouble seems to be
that, you know, our primate heritage, which is apparent in watching the
behavior of chimpanzees and bonobos, is that we’re keenly interested in
ourselves and opposed to others. That’s deep in our tissues. And with
the kind of world we’ve built, that’s not going to work. So, those human
beings who have the very strongest residue of the kind of patrolling
behavior and violence that troops of chimpanzees have, those people
would like the world to be, I think, arranged in a way that suits their
habits and their desires. But a lot of people die that way. And we have
created a chemical environment that is killing people left and right,
quickly or slowly, through cancer, for example.
It just doesn’t
make sense anymore to have these ideas about “me” and “mine” and the
terrible burden that has been created by so-called advanced nations
about the primacy of ownership, the ownership of food. Or, you know, the
terrifying thing in the United States, this idea that nothing is exempt
from the application of a kind of economics that’s meant for profit. I
mean, how can you make the care of another, the professional care of
another person’s body, be informed by a profit motive? Even a
fifth-grade kid can see there is something that doesn’t really add up
here.
So, for me as a writer, I live here and I’m informed by this
place. And the way it informs me helps me understand a lot of the
things my species does that are suicidal. It’s not up to me to say that
they are suicidal, but I would feel like a traitor to my teachers here
if I never said a thing, never mentioned it.
The more you watch the river, the more you understand what it means to
apply the adjective “alive.” And it’s in those ways, just with regard to
the river, the birds, or other components of the place that we separate
out and name, that you begin to get an understanding of what . . . of
what this place is. I think for any writer, the place itself is not all
that important. It’s your intimacy with the place that’s really
important. You can learn about God anywhere is what it comes down to.
You just have to pay attention.
When I’m down at the river, I can tell stages of the river just by
listening. Its voice is completely different when there’s two or three
inches more, or two or three inches less water there, because it moves
over the rocks in a different way. And what some would, I guess, call
cacophony—and maybe it is—to somebody with a more sophisticated ear than
I, it’s not cacophony. It’s, you know, maybe a version of arhythmic,
atonal music. John Cage could sit here and say, “Oh, yeah, well,” and
see some deep organizing principle in the sound of the water, the way
you could see by shooting it in moonlight for twenty minutes. You could
see the deep resolution of the laminar flow of water. Then it hits one
of those rocks. And then it breaks up and goes around it. Heisenberg was
famously asked, “If you get to heaven, what would you ask God?” And he
said, “Well, I wouldn’t say to him, ‘Why relativity?’ I would say, ‘Why
chaos?’” Meaning that chaos is more complex, it’s more difficult to wrap
your mind around chaos than it is to wrap it around relativity. And
this is the orchestra of chaos right here in front of us. And it’s so
interesting to me always, that the world of commerce and vacations and
going to town is, you know, fifty feet away.
Nothing is more satisfying than to write a good sentence. It is no fun to write lumpishly, dully, in prose the reader must plod through like wet sand. But it is a pleasure to achieve, if one can, a clear running prose that is simple yet full of surprises. This does not just happen. It requires skill, hard work, a good ear, and continued practice.
Funniest thing that money does to your brain is trick you into thinking that you're good at *everything*. Tech billionaires are on here posting what they think are profound political insights and it's 8th grade level stuff. Internet Hippo
The most vulnerable stories I tell have no resemblance to their actual subjects. They are literary Trojan horses, carrying confessions I can’t bear to write. I wrap them in another tale entirely, roll them out to the gates of the world, hope someone else can accept what I cannot.
I have been walking along Edgecliff drive for over 20 years. Recently a few homes have sold and the new residents have decided the street is private. Since this town is small and there is no leadership or oversight they are getting away with it. Some people put out orange cones to prevent parking on the street. The police are called if you try to park there. These are public streets! It's like a bunch of vigilantes creating a private gated community. I am disappointed and infuriated but I am not going to fight it. I will step away and let the residents argue amongst themselves because inevitably that is the next step. Once you have chased everyone away there is no oxygen and the residents are left choking each other.
BREAKING: Banks, credit card companies, and more will be required to let customers talk to a human by pressing a single button under a new Biden administration proposed rule.
The
I call lap swimming my "yoga" because yoga means unity. I call it
my FULCRUM because it centers me. And the fulcrum is the center of the
Ferris wheel and the see-saw.
I swim to save my life! I will stop to show and explain swimming tips when people ask. But when I go to
swim I am restoring my sanity. Teaching lessons officially would be
as frustrating as decaf coffee. Unofficially it's fun!
I am so excited to give you sourdough starter. You will love it!! It's like having a pet!!
You might have a lot of fun, and have no worries because you can ask me anything and you can always get more from me.
Okay so what I gave you is sourdough starter mixed with dark rye
flour + water. It's a couple of days after being refreshed. It's ALIVE AND
HAPPY hence, the bubbles.
Feed the starter with about a cup more flour and 1 cup of water
today tomorrow or over the next week. Be sure to leave space for growth
in the jar.
I keep mine on the door of my fridge so I can spy on it every time I
open the fridge, which is also why I keep using it. You can use any
flour BUT it LOVES dark rye and (it also likes whole wheat) so if you
and your family want to get really thrilled about this pick
up a small bag of dark rye at Joblot. Bob's RedMill usually has it.
Then add a cup of dark rye and a cup of cold water and let it sit
partially uncovered on your kitchen counter for 2-3 hours. It will
GROW!!! BIG THRILLS! Then store it and put it in the fridge. Do not
tighten the lid because pressure could build up and explode and shatter.
TRUE! You can make bread, crackers pancakes waffles. Just leave some in
the jar a teaspoon or two from which you will cultivate your next batch. Add
flour, water, stir, let it sit out for a day and it will grow and you store it in
the fridge again.
Little Spoon Farm is a great website to visit concerning sourdough.
I am trying to resist saying too much except THANKS for your
interest and HAVE FUN!! I KNOW YOU WILL! BE A SOURDOUGH FARMER!! And you
know this is good for you too. BIG HUG for your open heart.
Making crackers from the sourdough is a breeze and well worth
doing with a silicone baking mat. I can explain that if you are interested.
If you like yogurt I can explain how to make that too. All you need is milk, a burner to heat the milk, a picnic cooler to keep it warm in, and a little bit of added yogurt to act as a starter.
I woke early and swam outside. It was glorious. The sun lit up the umbrellas and colorful chairs at the Bernon Family YMCA on Forge Hill.
This what it's like to shift from "receive mode" to my "transmit" head. This was inconceivable the past 10 weeks. I wake naturally early and OPTIMISTIC when my energy shifts. Now I might feel compelled to swim early these next 10 weeks. ONLY if it feels right. Who knows but swimming is my FULCRUM CENTERING on the SEE SAW no matter what time of day. Beautiful day. At 5:45 the mist was rolling off the green hills of Franklin Farms.
Then, on the way home I bought bananas and beef. Swimming= appetite and optimism and centering.
Shahbaz Raja · Imam at Masjid Al Islam · Went to North
Smithfield High School · Studied Biology at Rhode Island College · Lives
in Woonsocket, Rhode Island.
Experience
· City Council Candidate. Woonsocket City Council. Jul 2024 - Present 2
months · Imam. Masjid Al- Islam RI. Jun 2003 - Present 21 years 3
months.
There are two more full moons this summer. August's full moon, known as
the Sturgeon Moon, reaches peak illumination on Monday, Aug. 19.
September's full moon will reach peak illumination on Tuesday, Sept. 17,
just days before the start of fall.
I marinated 4 chicken breasts in buttermilk overnight and then I sprinkled each side with sriracha and Adobo. We grilled them outside and ate them with basmati brown rice, parboiled carrots and a spinach olive garlic stir-fry topping. So good.
“For what prevents us from saying that the happy life is to have a
mind that is free, lofty, fearless and steadfast - a mind that is
placed beyond the reach of fear, beyond the reach of desire, that counts
virtue the only good, baseness the only evil, and all else but a
worthless mass of things, which come and go without increasing or
diminishing the highest good, and neither subtract any part from the
happy life nor add any part to it?
A man thus grounded must, whether
he wills or not, necessarily be attended by constant cheerfulness and a
joy that is deep and issues from deep within, since he finds delight in
his own resources, and desires no joys greater than his inner joys.”
―
Lucius Annaeus Seneca,
The Stoic Philosophy of Seneca: Essays and Letters
“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a
lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has
been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well
invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good
activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize
that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are
not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied
but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.”
Be so strong that nothing can disturb your peace of mind. Talk
health, happiness, and prosperity to every person you meet. Make all
your friends feel there is something special in them. Look at the sunny
side of everything. Think only the best, be as enthusiastic about the
success of others as you are about your own.
Forget the mistakes
of the past and press on to the greater achievements of the future. Give
everyone a smile. Spend so much time improving yourself that you have
no time left to criticize others. Be too big for worry and too noble for
anger.
―
Norman Vincent Peale
I woke at 4 am swam at 6 and that means thinking about food earlier in the day. So now I am making spinach pies and I whipped up a sourdough semolina rye dough to be the vehicle. Happy Friday!
This recipe just became larger!!
Your Jewish roots with Italian inflection is coming through when you end up cooking for an Army on a normal day.--from my Italian cousin Gina
UPDATE: Tonight shaped some of the dough into a round pizza and topped it with the spinach olive anchovy onion wine mixture and added freshly grated Asiago. We baked it for 10 minutes at 550 F in the oven. Delicious. The edges of the crust stuck to the pan (oops!) but we dug them out. Delicious!
UPDATE: Next time I will add a bit of whole wheat flour to the dough to give it more weight to stand up to the strong flavors of the topping. Otherwise delicious.
I watched her apply a pale pink rouge in the large bathroom mirror. It was the wrong color with her olive complexion and jumped an inch ahead of her face.
Her best friend Denise had bleached blonde hair that clashed with her pink complexion.
This is like being visually tone deaf. I had to cover my eyes and my ears and hide under the dining room table. I watched their sandaled feet as the two women spoke over tall glasses of iced tea.
There's a sporty black Subaru sedan with a huge spoiler and white block
letters HOONIGAN on it's ass. There's a for sale sign in the rear window. I
suggested Bill buy it and add CAL to HOONIGAN and drive it to school.
As many dog owners can attest, our stress is contagious.
“Dogs
can pick up on our stress, and we wondered what effect that had on the
dogs,” said Zoe Parr-Cortes, lead author of the study, which was
released late last month.
Parr-Cortes
— a veterinarian and PhD student at Bristol Veterinary School in
Langford, England — ran a series of trials with 18 dogs. She started by
teaching the pups that a bowl placed in one location contained food, and
when it was placed in another spot, it did not.
“You repeat that over and over until they know that one side is food and one side is never food,” said Parr-Cortes.
Once
they know this, they run faster toward the bowl with the food vs. the
one without. Then, Parr-Cortes measured how quickly each dog would
approach a bowl placed somewhere between the two spots.
“Those
are the locations where there’s no previous association with a reward,”
Parr-Cortes explained. “You’re now asking them: How optimistic are you
that there’s going to be a food reward in there?”
If
a dog ran quickly toward the in-between bowl, it signaled to
researchers that the dog was optimistic or in a positive emotional
state. If the dog approached the bowl gingerly, it indicated pessimism.
“We
first ran that without any [stress] odor, so we had a baseline measure
about how optimistic they are about an unknown bowl,” said Parr-Cortes.
“Then we did it again introducing the stress odor.”
To
collect the stress odor, researchers used sweat and breath samples from
humans who had experienced a stressful situation, such as a timed math
test or a public speech. They also collected odor samples after a
relaxed situation, like listening to tranquil sounds or watching a
peaceful video. Before each situation, participants attached two cotton
cloths to their underarms using micropore tape. Afterward, participants
also exhaled a full breath onto each piece of cloth before sealing them
in separate specimen bags.
Researchers
used samples from three volunteers, all of whom were strangers to the
dogs in the study. They brought the samples to the dogs, allowing them
to sniff them before conducting the trial again. Dogs’ sense of smell is
at least 1,000 times stronger than humans’, so they could detect the scent very quickly.
“We
were able to see how the odor affected how optimistic or pessimistic
they were about receiving the treat in the unknown location,” said
Parr-Cortes. “And what we found is that dogs were slow to approach the
bowl that was uncertain when the stress smell was present.”
“It
suggested more of the glass-half-empty mentality with that odor, and we
didn’t see that effect with the relaxed smell,” she said, noting that
the majority of the dogs moved slower toward the bowl in an in-between
location after being exposed to the stress odor. “Similar tests are used in humans and other animals to measure emotional state, optimism and pessimism.”
The
findings were especially interesting, Parr-Cortes said, because the
canines involved in the trial did not know the humans who emitted the
stress smells.
“This
wasn’t the smell of someone they knew that was stressed. It was someone
they had never met before,” she said. “It implies there’s a common
stress smell that people have.”
It also demonstrates that dogs are able to sense emotions even of people who are not their owners.
“It
seems to indicate that they can detect the smell of stress in people
generally, and they don’t have to have a prior association with that
person being stressed,” said Parr-Cortes.
Other canine experts said they were intrigued by the study.
“I
am very impressed by the work; both the originality of it and the sheer
amount of effort that went into it,” said Clive Wynne, the director of
the Canine Science Collaboratory at Arizona State University. “I personally find it remarkable how easily dogs are affected by human emotions.”
Wynne said that while the study’s findings are interesting, further research is required to draw a more definitive conclusion.
“The
science of understanding dog emotions is very much in its infancy,” he
said. “I think it’s enormously important, because hundreds of millions
of us live with hundreds of millions of dogs in close proximity. … If we
can improve and build on how people and dogs understand each other,
that will help us.”
Emily Bray, an assistant professor of human-animal interaction in the College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Arizona,
said the results help to decode “all these pieces to the puzzle of
communication.” Neither she nor Wynne was involved in the study.
“Canine
cognition research in general is so important because the more we
understand how they’re perceiving things, the more we can set them up
for success,” she said.
While
the study focused on smell, “it would be interesting to see how other
types of cues play in,” said Bray, pointing to body language and tone of
voice.
Parr-Cortes acknowledged that the study used a small sample and said she hopes to expand on it in future research.
“We would like to do it with more dogs and different odors,” she said.
Still,
she said that the study “drives home how important it is to be aware of
your emotional state when you’re working with dogs.”
“When
you’re stressed, don’t expect your dog to be unaffected by it,” she
added. “Doing something relaxing before training your dog might reduce
any stress.”
In
future research, Parr-Cortes hopes to study how other human emotions —
such as happiness — impact dogs’ behavior, too. She suspects she will
see a similar correlation.
“It’s amazing how in tune dogs are with our emotions and how close we’ve become as species,” Parr-Cortes said.
Antonio's market opened up last night and we went over to say hello.
Welcome to the neighborhood! We've lived here 29 years! You have the best view of the neighborhood!
We walked up and down the aisles and I spotted the stove top espresso Imusa moka pot I might be back to buy.
Antonio told us he is from NY, Brooklyn, Bronx, Queens. He will be selling subs on Saturday and he will close the shop when he needs to make deliveries. Welcome Antonio!
I love to watch her hands move as she speaks. I love what she says and stands for. I love her voice and her beautiful face and poised body. We are lucky she is here.
But oh! the blessing it is to have a friend to whom one can speak
fearlessly on any subject; with whom one's deepest as well as one's most
foolish thoughts come out simply and safely. Oh, the comfort - the
inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person - having neither to
weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all right out, just
as they are, chaff and grain together; certain that a faithful hand will
take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then with the
breath of kindness blow the rest away.
―
Dinah Craik,
A Life For A Life
Last night after swimming I made lentil soup throwing a pound of lentils, onions carrots celery Chianti garlic bullion cube olive oil and a cup of leftover salsa into the instant pot with water. It's like doing a load of laundry. After 30 minutes it was delicious hot soup. It tasted like it simmered all day.
I am glad it's cool out because I get to wear my hoodie and feel the cozy chilly feeling I associate with New England.
A new shop has opened opposite us and they have a neon coffee sign in the window that lights up in red yellow and blue flashing sequences and a day-glow green oak-tag sign Deli Opening Soon in the other window. In the next block a Thai wings place just opened and the decorations out front are printed with Congratulations Grad and gold lame tassels.
I found an Admiral Nelson's Spiced Rum shot-glass on the sidewalk while walking my dog and I pocketed it and washed it. Now I drink my cold black coffee in it slowing me down to two ounces at a time.
A healthy diet is essential for good health and nutrition.
It
protects you against many chronic noncommunicable diseases, such as
heart disease, diabetes and cancer. Eating a variety of foods and
consuming less salt, sugars and saturated and industrially-produced
trans-fats, are essential for healthy diet.
A healthy diet comprises a combination of different foods. These include:
Staples like cereals (wheat, barley, rye, maize or rice) or starchy tubers or roots (potato, yam, taro or cassava).
Legumes (lentils and beans).
Fruit and vegetables.
Foods from animal sources (meat, fish, eggs and milk).
Here is some useful information, based on WHO recommendations, to follow a healthy diet, and the benefits of doing so.
Breastfeed babies and young children:
A
healthy diet starts early in life - breastfeeding fosters healthy
growth, and may have longer-term health benefits, like reducing the risk
of becoming overweight or obese and developing noncommunicable diseases
later in life.
Feeding babies exclusively with breast milk from
birth to 6 months of life is important for a healthy diet. It is also
important to introduce a variety of safe and nutritious complementary
foods at 6 months of age, while continuing to breastfeed until your
child is two years old and beyond.
Eat plenty of vegetables and fruit:
They are important sources of vitamins, minerals, dietary fibre, plant protein and antioxidants.
People
with diets rich in vegetables and fruit have a significantly lower risk
of obesity, heart disease, stroke, diabetes and certain types of
cancer.
Eat less fat:
Fats and oils and
concentrated sources of energy. Eating too much, particularly the wrong
kinds of fat, like saturated and industrially-produced trans-fat, can
increase the risk of heart disease and stroke.
Using unsaturated
vegetable oils (olive, soy, sunflower or corn oil) rather than animal
fats or oils high in saturated fats (butter, ghee, lard, coconut and
palm oil) will help consume healthier fats.
To avoid unhealthy weight gain, consumption of total fat should not exceed 30% of a person's overall energy intake.
Limit intake of sugars:
For
a healthy diet, sugars should represent less than 10% of your total
energy intake. Reducing even further to under 5% has additional health
benefits.
Choosing fresh fruits instead of sweet snacks such as cookies, cakes and chocolate helps reduce consumption of sugars.
Limiting
intake of soft drinks, soda and other drinks high in sugars (fruit
juices, cordials and syrups, flavoured milks and yogurt drinks) also
helps reduce intake of sugars.
Reduce salt intake:
Keeping
your salt intake to less than 5g per day helps prevent hypertension and
reduces the risk of heart disease and stroke in the adult population.
Limiting
the amount of salt and high-sodium condiments (soy sauce and fish
sauce) when cooking and preparing foods helps reduce salt intake.
Whether you are a seasoned
health advocate or just now committing to taking the first steps in
becoming more healthy, share your progress and inspire your friends and
family to do the same. While you are here, take a minute to sign up to
our weekly updates and we'll be in touch with more health advice and
latest findings to improve your health and wellbeing.
Writing is trying hard to do two things, as I see it. One is to be entertaining in itself. Any page of good prose has something of the quality of a poem. It’s interesting in itself even if you don’t know the story or quite what you’re reading. It has a kind of abstract dynamism. But also it is trying to deliver images and a story to a reader, so in that sense it should be kind of invisible. John Updike
“The most important conversations you’ll ever have are the ones
you’ll have with yourself. You wake up with them, you walk around with
them, you go to bed with them, and eventually you act on them. Whether
they be good or bad. We are all our own worst haters and doubters
because self doubt is a natural reaction to any bold attempt to change
your life for the better. You can’t stop it from blooming in your brain,
but you can neutralize it, and all the other external chatter by
asking, What if?”
―
David Goggins,
Can't Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds
We live in a world with a lot of insecure, jealous people. Some of them
are our best friends. They are blood relatives. Failure terrifies them.
So does our success. Because when we transcend what we once thought
possible, push our limits, and become more, our light reflects off all
the walls they’ve built up around them. Your light enables them to see
the contours of their own prison, their own self-limitations. But if
they are truly the great people you always believed them to be, their
jealousy will evolve, and soon their imagination might hop its fence,
and it will be their turn to change for the better.”
―
David Goggins
“Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is
something people take, and people are as free as they want to be”
―
James Baldwin
“People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have
allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the
lives they lead.”
―
James Baldwin
“Hatred is Not the Norm”: For a 1964 Multi-Faith Civil Rights Rally, Serling Pens “A Most Non-Political Speech”
One of the most gratifying aspects of being a Rod Serling fan is that
you never have to separate the man from his work. He was a gifted
writer, yes, but he was also an amazing human being — a man of high
ideals who used his talents to try and make the world a better place.
I was reminded of that yet again when one of his daughters — Anne Serling, author of “As I Knew Him: My Dad, Rod Serling” — tweeted this meme:
You may be wondering the same thing I did: What was the event? Was
this quote part of a longer address? And why did Dick Van Dyke read it?
I can answer two of the three, thanks in part to Anne herself. It was part of a multi-faith civil rights event called “Religious Witness for Human Dignity,”
and it featured a keynote address by Martin Luther King Jr. And the
quote above was from a 1,000-word address that Serling penned especially
for the event.
Unfortunately, I don’t know why he didn’t deliver it himself, and
neither does Anne. But when you read the address itself in full — which
is the point of this post — you’ll see that he obviously poured his
heart into it. It’s full of his unique mix of clear-eyed realism and
unflagging optimism.
It helps to know the backdrop, historically speaking. At this time,
the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had passed the U.S. House of
Representatives and was being debated in the Senate. It won passage
there as well, appropriately enough, on June 19 and was signed into law
on July 2.
As far as I can tell, this is the first time Serling’s full speech
has been published online. Anne was kind enough to send me a copy of a
transcript that was printed in the July/August 1964 issue of The Episcopal Review. I transcribed the text below from that copy. I hope you find it as moving as I did.
+++++++
Ladies and gentlemen, this may be the most non-political speech
you ever hear. And, indeed, if you look for controversy, what I’m about
to say conjures up little conflict.
We have reached a moment in time when restless men, dispossessed
men, angry and impatient men, and anguished men look up and reach out
for an elusive justice oft promised them, long denied them, but in the
eyes of God and man’s conscience is their due and should be their
expectation. I say this is non-political and non-controversial. We’re
not talking now about miscegenation. Or whether a man can fence his
yard. Or a hotdog vendor carefully select his customer. Or an innkeeper
choose not to accommodate a particular traveler. These are the
ramifications of the problem. They are not the problem. There have to be
some bridges built; but first we have to acknowledge the rivers.
This is what I think is basic. This is what I believe to be the
most common denominator in this spring of 1964. This must be first, the
recognition and then the admission — that the dignity of human beings is
not negotiable. The eminent worth of man has no pro and no con. And the
desperate need for an understanding and a respect between all men is as fundamental as the process of breathing in and breathing out.
On this spring night we look toward Washington, D.C., and hear
the the echoed overtones of a debate. We watch the struggle to invoke a
cloture. We hear the voices of the willful foot-draggers and the hopeful
sprinters as they trade and compromise and give battle for what they
believe. But again, there is something happening on this earth
transcendent of the Senates, the governments, the temporal voices of the
champions of rights and the filibusters of wrong.
What is happening is that a whole world has suddenly become
cognizant of its oneness. An idea of brotherhood has ceased to be an
abstract. It has taken on a form and dimension and breadth and meaning.
“Every man’s death diminishes me” — a lyrical stab at truth from another
century. But in this nineteen hundred and sixth fourth year of our
Lord, every man’s indignity, every man’s hunger, every man’s search for
freedom, every man’s life reinforces me and revitalizes me and
rededicates me. “We cannot be half-free and half-slave,” Mr. Lincoln
said. And now, a hundred years later, we find that we cannot be half
hungry and half content; half with dignity, half with shame; half with
freedom, half with a simple yearning to be free; half with prerogatives,
half asking for just a few; half superior, half denied the right to
prove even equality.
“You cannot legislate human love.” Have you heard that phrase?
“You cannot pass a law to stop people from hating“ — a battle slogan of
those who don’t want to be bothered. A statement of philosophy from 20th
century non-philosophers who would probably melt down the test tubes
used to look for the microbes and the bacteria and the virus that caused
cancer. Cancer is with us, so why fight it? Leave it to the individual
patients. But don’t make waves. Don’t stir the river bed. And above all,
don’t contemplate the beauty of this earth. The deeds of love. The
small, gradual, but inexorable move upward of the human animal toward an
enlightened moment in time when the person next door is the neighbor,
the Negro is the darker neighbor, the South American is my Latin
neighbor, the Japanese is my Oriental neighbor.
You can’t legislate against prejudice? You would rather perhaps
accept it as part of the innate personality of the homo sapien? You
would rather say that it’s with us, it’s here to stay, it’s part of the
social phenomenon of our time. If this is the premise to be lived with,
accepted, and — God help us — embraced, then let us throw away theology.
Let us unencumber ourselves of the premise of God. Let us tear up our
art, our literature, all of our culture, and let us retire to a rubble
of our own making and manufacture barbed wire instead of stained glass.
Hatred is not the norm. Prejudice is not the
norm. Suspicion, dislike, jealousy, and scapegoating — none of these
things is the transcendent facet of the human personality. They are the
diseases. They are the cancers of the soul. They are the infectious and
contagious viruses that have bled humanity over the years. But because
they have been and are, is it necessary that they shall be?
I think not. If there is one voice left to say “welcome” to a
stranger; if there is but one hand outstretched to say “enter and
share”; if there is but one mind remaining to think a thought of warmth
and friendship, then there is also a future in which we will find more
than one hand, more than one voice, and more than one mind dedicated to
the cause of man’s equality.
Wishful, hopeful, unassured, problematic, and not to be
guaranteed. This is all true. But again, on this spring evening of 1964,
a little of man’s awareness has shown itself. A little of his essential
decency, his basic goodness, his preeminent dignity, has been made a
matter of record. There will be moments of violence and expressions of
hatred and an ugly re-echo of intolerance, but these are the clinging
vestiges of a decayed past, not the harbingers of the better, cleaner
future. To those who tell us that the inequality of the human animal is
the necessary evil, we must respond by simply saying that first, it is evil but second, it is not necessary.
We prove it, sitting here tonight. We prove it by reaffirming our
faith. We prove it by having faith in our reaffirmations.
Horace Mann said, “Be ashamed to die until you have won some
victory for humanity.” Let’s paraphrase that tonight. Let us be ashamed
to live without that victory.
+++++++
I’m sure that many Twilight Zone fans will recognize that Mann quote. The slogan of Serling’s alma mater, Antioch College,
it had already been used in the episode “The Changing of the Guard.”
What a fitting way to conclude this inspiring address. Let’s follow his
advice and strive to light candles instead of cursing the darkness.
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