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August 20, 2007
Lots and Lots and Lots of Water
I live near a great lake, and it doesn't do much for me. As far as I'm concerned, it's just a lot of cold, placid water, sitting in one place. I don't find it particularly dramatic or calming to watch; it doesn't soothe or inspire me to be near it. I mean, I don't pitch a fit if someone wants to go stroll along the beach; it's a perfectly nice way to pass the time. But I like strolling in other locations, too. Flat, calm water doesn't speak to my soul like a view of the Catalinas, the craggy, ragged mountains sheltering Tucson to the north, on a crystalline blue day as the shadows shift over the peaks and rocks.
But there's one part of the great lakes system I totally dig, and that's the part where Lake Erie drains into Lake Ontario, or in other words, Niagara Falls.
Niagara Falls is awesome. I don't care who says otherwise, including Oscar Wilde, who was right about so many things, but rarely wise or insightful about what was really going on with women or landscape; he dismissed the falls as "simply a vast amount of water going the wrong way over some unnecessary rocks." The falls are dramatic and majestic and awe-inspiring and just really cool. I think they're one of the better international border crossings in the world--Rainbow Bridge, which is, I'm guessing, half a mile downstream from the falls, sure beats Nogales, Arizona's major crossing point on the US/Mexico border. It's also cool that you get to use your passport and visit another country for a couple of hours, that you can go to Canada for dinner. (Though it did irritate me that while entering Canada is free, you have to drop 50 cents--quarters only--into a vending machine in order to get back into the US.) The view is much better from the Canadian side--the falls face Canada--but on the US side you can walk around these islands that jut out into the falls. I mean, that's cool.
I've been to the Falls at least once a year since I moved to this part of the country. Most recently--as in a few weeks ago--I went with my friend C, who had never been, despite the fact that for the past year she'd driven past Buffalo (gateway to the falls or some such thing) every few weeks on her way to visit her significant other in Massachusetts. I couldn't bear that she hadn't seen this natural wonder, and insisted she go with me. We had a great time, though the weather really sucked: it was cold and rainy and gray.
Here's a photo of me standing before Horseshoe Falls on the Canadian side.
I like this photo because down at the bottom you can see one end of one of the Maid of the Mist boats, which take you right up under the falls so that you have to wear a big plastic poncho if you don't want to get thoroughly soaked. (We rode the MotM with a bunch boys who were part of some religious summer camp and were not well chaperoned; some were too cool to wear the ponchos and none of the men who were there to supervise them told them to wear the damn ponchos anyway, so the boys were drenched, miserable, cold and even more poorly behaved on the boat ride back.)
Although it's kind of cool to stay and watch the light show on the lake, seeing that doesn't compensate for the fact that hotels in Niagara Falls are way overpriced and rather shabby. On my way home from the falls the next day, I stopped at Roycroft, an arts and crafts community started in the 19th century that I only recently heard about, in a town just outside of Buffalo. It's not especially big or elaborate, but it's interesting, and boasts an inn that is really beautiful, reasonably priced, serves very nice food and is staffed by some of the nicest people I've ever encountered. Next time I visit the falls, if I plan to spend the night, I'll drive 30 minutes to Roycroft and stay there.
Posted by Holly at 7:50 AM | Comments (2)
August 19, 2007
Avocados Again
I love avocados. I love them just about every way I've tried them. I love them in guacamole and milkshakes. I love them in this very easy appetizer a woman from Japan once served me:
Slice an avocado into thin but not-too-thin segments. Fan out on a plate. Douse in soy sauce, then sprinkle liberally with freshly ground pepper. Provide toothpicks for spearing.
I also love them in sandwiches. When I lived in Iowa City, home of the marvelous New Pioneer Co-op (which was only one of the many reasons it was much easier to be an almost-vegetarian there than in NW PA), I liked ordering the vegan Rock & Roll Avocado Tofuwich (scroll down to find this sandwich). I tried recreating this sandwich myself, and made an acceptable substitute. And then I just started making avocado sandwiches.
Currently my favorite sandwich is this:
Avocado and Jam Sandwich
two slices wheat bread
raspberry jam
one half of an avocado
white cheese of your choice; I used swiss for a long time but currently prefer a nice sharp cheddar
cinnamon
Spread the raspberry jam on one slice of bread. If you want to melt the cheese, put it on the other slice. (I melt the cheddar but didn't melt the swiss, mostly because the swiss came in big slices but the cheddar I buy comes in little wedges and the slices fall off the bread unless I melt them.) Mash or slice the avocado up and spread over the cheese if melted or on the other slice of bread if it's not melted. Sprinkle cinnamon liberally on the avocado. Smash both sides together and eat.
The flavors are all fairly strong but they blend together well. It's really good. I think I'll make one right now.
Posted by Holly at 11:07 AM | Comments (5)
August 17, 2007
No Surprise for the Dickster
via Salon
Posted by Holly at 10:04 AM | Comments (1)
August 16, 2007
Bourgeois Rap
I found the link to what is probably destined to be my all-time favorite rap song on The Egalitarian Bookworm (who also provides a pretty fabulous send-up of Becoming Jane which I haven't seen and probably won't see until it's out on dvd because it's not playing where I live because I live in a city in a ditch). Anyway, this rap song is so funny I can't believe there are references to it everywhere on the web, but there aren't. Anyone know anything about this? Not much turned up when I googled it.
Later.... a smart friend provided me with this article, which led to website for The Heist--but even there, you don't find many references to the song.
Posted by Holly at 1:10 PM | Comments (2)
August 12, 2007
Itty Bitty Shoes
Long, long ago, when I went to Toronto and saw We Will Rock You with Dale and stayed in the room with the giant blue bathtub, I also visited the Bata Shoe Museum where, I bought these spiffy souvenirs:
The one in the middle is, as you can tell, a key chain pendant. The one on the top is, as you probably can't tell, a hammer: the heel is weighted so you can use it to pound nails, though the friend who visited the museum with me bought one too and said it broke almost as soon as he got it home, when his toddler dropped in on the carpet, so it probably won't work well for hammering nails. The one on the bottom has no function at all; it's just a pretty thing I admired, which, after all, is what Oscar Wilde said is what art really is.
Posted by Holly at 9:46 AM | Comments (4)
August 10, 2007
The Scourge of the Plastic Bag
I've already written about how much I HATE those flimsy plastic bags you get at the grocery store or wherever, and my efforts to avoid using them. But there's a piece today in Salon about how truly harmful and awful those plastic bags are. Entitled "Plastic bags are killing us," the article states
The plastic bag is an icon of convenience culture, by some estimates the single most ubiquitous consumer item on Earth, numbering in the trillions. They're made from petroleum or natural gas with all the attendant environmental impacts of harvesting fossil fuels. One recent study found that the inks and colorants used on some bags contain lead, a toxin. Every year, Americans throw away some 100 billion plastic bags after they've been used to transport a prescription home from the drugstore or a quart of milk from the grocery store. It's equivalent to dumping nearly 12 million barrels of oil.Only 1 percent of plastic bags are recycled worldwide -- about 2 percent in the U.S. -- and the rest, when discarded, can persist for centuries. They can spend eternity in landfills, but that's not always the case. "They're so aerodynamic that even when they're properly disposed of in a trash can they can still blow away and become litter," says Mark Murray, executive director of Californians Against Waste. It's as litter that plastic bags have the most baleful effect. And we're not talking about your everyday eyesore.
The article includes a video shot at a recycling plant, discussing how plastic bags screw up all other recycling efforts. They gum up the works and generally create a nuisance. They're really, really bad.
But there's hope--not that we'll get rid of the plastic bags that already exist; they're most likely going to last longer than the human race. But there's hope that we can stop producing, using and discarding so many of them. There's a Campaign Against the Plastic Bag and some countries are either banning the bags outright or creating a surcharge than encourages people to bring their own bags.
If you don't already shop this way, go get a couple of canvas bags and use them every time you shop.
Posted by Holly at 9:02 AM | Comments (3)
August 8, 2007
Justin Timberlake and Salt-N-Pepa a Turn-On for Sharks
This story, about sharks being turned on by certain kinds of music, was too goofy for me not to post a link.
Posted by Holly at 6:08 PM | Comments (1)
August 6, 2007
What I'm Reading Meme
I started this blog entry more than two weeks ago--in fact, in a conversation about this book, I told someone I'd finished the entry and would be posting it the next day--and that was two weeks ago. At the time, I really did plan to post this the next day--but then I looked at what I'd written and decided this book deserves a more interesting and thorough write-up. Here it finally is.
Anyway, here's a meme I've seen going around, along with its rules:
* Grab the nearest book.
* Open the book to page 123.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post the text of the next four sentences on your blog along with these instructions.
* Do not dig around for the 'cool' or 'intellectual' book on your shelf. Do not go to the other room to find an old textbook. Just pick up whatever is lying at hand.
I grabbed the book I was currently reading: Shoes: A History from Sandals to Sneakers, edited by Giorgio Riello and Peter McNeil. It is a thoroughly fabulous book and I plan to blog all about it eventually, but for now I'll focus on the chapter in which page 123 occurs: Chapter 5, "War and Wellingtons: Military Footwear in the Age of Empire" by Alison Matthews David.
I have to fudge a little: page 123 is actually an illustration of some French "support the troops!" propaganda poster from World War I, so I'm providing four sentences from page 124:
Another telling design feature is the heel of the boot, which has a small, inverted metal horse-shoe shaped reinforcement hammered into the leather itself. Unlike officers, soldiers were beasts of burden who carried packs weighing up to sixty pounds. Like the horses that served in wartime, they were literally "shod" to protect their feet from lameness. The thin, smooth sole with a few small, invisible nails were the hallmark of a man who sat on a horse, rode in a carriage, or wore his boots on newly paved urban streets.
And there you have it: the origin of the term "well-heeled" as a descriptor of superior wealth and up-bringing: it literally refers to the well-crafted, solid, carefully maintained heels on an officer's boots. Because not only were the heels attached to expensive boots, they were also equestrian in style and function (even for officers in the navy), which announced their wearer as a man who owned (or aspired to own, with some chance of success) horses, as well as stables to keep them in and land own which to build the stables.
The beautifully photographed and presented illustrations (this is both a coffee-table art book and a collection of scholarly essays) demonstrate just how cloddish, clumsy and unattractive were the boots of working-class and enlisted men. In other words, the contemporary belief that men should have big feet, because "big feet equal big other things" did not hold true for earlier times. Rather, men
who had them were proud to show off their "neat" small feet and suffered accordingly from corns, hammer toes, bunions, ingrown toenails and other painful conditions. Toes were crammed into the tips of boots that alternated between exaggeratedly square and round-toed models.... Medical men compared fashionable male footwear with the barbarous practices of tight-laced corsets for women and Chinese footbinding.... While the British "Tommy" [of World War One] was said to have a "special affection for his boots" because they were his "best friends" in wartime, his boots still marked him as a working-class man. They had thick, metal-studded soles and laced up to the ankles. Most importantly, they had an unfashionably broad toe. A small, narrow "smart" foot held cachet. By the early 20th century, infantry soldiers complained not that their boots were shoddy, but that they were too large and wide.
Chapter 5 was one of my favorite chapters--after all, I have this thing for war literature and maritime history, so it was already on a topic that would interest me, but there were other reasons I really liked it: it was smart and informative and like the video about cannons I describe at the end of this post, taught me stuff I hadn't known I didn't know.
In particular, it taught me about military marching. Maybe because of the trauma of being in marching band in high school (someday I might be able to address the pain I still experience when I think about how horrible that was), I always thought that all that regimented, precise marching soldiers had to do was just a form of torture, a way to fill hours and make men so bored and unhappy and tired and frustrated they'll be ready to kill just about anything, given the opportunity.
But no! I mean, that's ONE reason soldiers march, but it turns out there's another:
Martial movement was highly specialized and ritualized. Generals and superior officers had to know the exact pace of their men for tactical reasons. By knowing how many miles or kilometers a troop could cover in an hour or a day, they could calculate how much time it would take to deploy battalions or bring in reinforcements.In order to achieve this end, recruits were drilled until they could move with mechanical precision. Soldiers never "walked" in formation: they marched. Both pace and cadence were crucial.
I also learned that it was only in the 20th century that western military powers regularly supplied soldiers with socks, and that the miseries of the Crimean war were exacerbated by the lack of decent footwear--both socks and boots--among British and French troops. Tell me if this general scenario, if not the details, sounds at all familiar:
Unscrupulous military contractors had supplied shoddy goods to the French and British armies. The shoemaker James Devlin railed against these abuses of power and equated the plight of the underpaid shoemaker with that of the soldier: both were forced to suffer physical and economic misery on account of military footwear. Writing after the deadly winter of 1855, Devlin singled out firms such as Messrs Almond of St. Martin's Lane in London, experts in leather equipment, who had been awarded a contract for footwear they had no experience in making, or corrupt army inspectors, who overlooked manufacturing defects in order to send some boots to the Crimea rather than none.
And then there was this, which I'd also never thought about, but which is completely obvious now that I consider it:
Much of the male (and also sometimes female) wardrobe has been inspired by military styles. Cravats, lapels, pocket flaps, khaki pants, camouflage gear, even the simple T-shirt, worn as an undershirt by American troops in the Second World War, have all crossed over from military to civilian dress.
I will have more to say about this book--it's truly, truly remarkable, but I could never write about the whole thing at one go, so I'm happy to provide this introduction here. And I hope someone else will rush out and buy a copy as well. I originally got it from the library, but about half way through I decided I had to own my own copy. Even now that I've finished reading it, I keep picking it up to flip through and look at the photographs, and the layout of the pages--it's a beautiful, beautiful book.
Posted by Holly at 2:01 PM | Comments (2)
August 4, 2007
Dream Interpretation Manual
The other morning I woke to find a barely legible note I’d written to myself on my desk in my office. Seems I’d awakened from a dream and thought it was interesting enough that I should write it down.... I stared at the note and could vaguely remember getting up to write up, but the dream was pretty foggy, though as I contemplated the matter, a few details did start to return to me....
I dreamed I was at a hamburger making competition. A bunch of guys were trying to produce the very best burgers, as quickly as possible, and they had to make them to order for the audience. It was in some big tent on some lovely summer day and everyone was in good spirits, laughing, shouting, chatting, and the tent was therefore extremely noisy. Because I hate raw tomatoes (they’re vile, you know?), I kept shouting, “No tomatoes! Hold the tomatoes!” to the guy making my burger.
But he absolutely couldn’t understand me. No matter how I shouted, no matter how I varied what I was saying, I couldn’t make myself intelligible.
Finally, however, some light seemed to dawn; he nodded to himself, and started looking under some counter for something. And then, with evident satisfaction, he pulled out a book on interpreting dreams, because he knew it would help him make sense of what was going on.
And that’s when I woke up, and that’s what I thought was worth writing down.
So not only do I often know I’m dreaming inside my dreams, but the OTHER people in my dreams know it too.
Posted by Holly at 12:53 PM | Comments (2)
August 1, 2007
Some Pretty Nasty Shit
Warning: read no further if you have if don’t want to be grossed out, because frankly, my title should be taken literally. This entry includes a link to a site with thoroughly disgusting photos, as well as references to bodily functions many people prefer not to discuss.
In other words, don’t get to the end of this entry and leave me a comment about how I gave you too much information, because I’m telling you right now, if you don’t really want to know what I’ve been doing for the past five days, don’t read on.
So here it is:
I’ve been cleansing my colon.
Yep. A few weeks ago in an entry about lucid dreaming, I mentioned that one trick in the new age bag of steps to enlightenment is colon cleansing--the idea is that toxicity in the bowels impedes both physical and spiritual health. Not too long ago my acupuncturist recommended some outfit called Blessed Herbs--said they sold a mean colon cleansing kit. I had nothing better to do during the final weekend in July than drink a load of apple juice and trot to the bathroom, so I figured, why the hell not?
The specifics of this cleanse involve, as I say, apple juice. And packets of some toxin absorbing powder you mix with said apple juice five times a day. And some powerful digestion-stimulating herbs packaged in handy capsules so you can swallow some right before bedtime. And six to eight glasses of water. And, ideally, nothing else. Which is a basically a juice fast, and you do it for five days.
Before I go any further, let me say that I HATE FASTING. I HATE IT. I have ALWAYS hated it. Even when I was anorexic I hated it. I did it, but I hated it.
I especially hated it as a Mormon. Don’t know if you knew this, but all Mormons in decent health are supposed to fast for 24 hours the first Sunday of every month. Now, fasting can be good for you in moderation, provided you drink enough water while you’re doing it to keep your organs lubricated and healthy. But the thing about fasting as a Mormon is this: you go without water for 24 hours too. And that’s just bad for you. It’s not only onerous and boring, it’s flat unhealthy.
But even fasting as a regular Mormon wasn’t as bad as fasting as a missionary. Because as a missionary, you had to ride around on a bike and sweat and get dehydrated, and you still weren’t supposed to drink anything--or if you REALLY needed some liquid, you have a very little bit of water, just enough to wet your mouth.
Plus it made Sundays really long not to be able to go home from Church and cook dinner. The only good thing about fast Sunday as a missionary was that when we finally did get to cook dinner and eat, we usually just stayed in for the rest of the night, instead of going back out to work for three more hours like we were supposed to--we called that P-Day eve, because the next day was our Preparation or P-day, the one day a week we go to do things like listen to music or write letters.
Anyway. Back to the fact that I hate fasting. It’s painful and boring. I personally don’t have much energy when I fast--something about not consuming food just does that to me. But I do recognize that at times, being bored and uncomfortable is worth it.
This was one such time. Fasting got easier the longer I did it, partly because I wisely cleared my refrigerator of actual food before I started, partly because I kept reading the website and the instructions obsessively and learned that I could consume things like vegetable broth and miso if I really wanted to, partly because my stomach shrank (boy did it shrink) and partly because, well, the process was producing satisfactory results.
Now I’ve done colon cleanses before. But I’ve never seen results like those I got with this system. I won’t bother to describe them, because if you really want to know what they were like, simply go to a page aptly titled It’s Gross and It’s Mine! and see what happened.
There was a point when I wondered how I could have six bowel movements a day (hey! I told you not to read on if you weren’t prepared to encounter grossness!) when I wasn’t consuming any solid food, but according to the experts what I was expelling wasn’t anything I’d eaten recently: it was “mucoid plaque.” I got out an anatomy book and read up on the colon: turns out one of the main things the colon does is produce lots and lots of mucus, and it doesn’t always go anywhere. And when it just sits in your colon for over four decades, it becomes caked with very old feces and all sorts of nastiness.
By the end I had to wonder how there was room for my food to pass through when there was all that other stuff in there. Which is pretty much the point: clearing all that out so there’s room for your food, so nutrients are absorbed more easily, etc etc.
Overall I am quite happy with the results. I lost several pounds and my stomach is MUCH flatter. I feel like my complexion looks healthier--I might be making that up. But it’s really nice to know that all that stuff is just GONE.
In other words, I actually recommend this, and I might even do it again.
Now, one question you might be having is why doing that would prevent me from blogging. It didn’t, really; I just didn’t feel like it. I felt lethargic and vulnerable and all I really wanted to do was monitor my body and its various functions. But now that’s all done and I’m back to clogging up my gut rather than clearing it out. But who knows. Perhaps some new lightness and clarity will be reflected in my writing.
Posted by Holly at 6:41 PM | Comments (6)