Chicago Police Say: "Your First Amendment Rights can be terminated."

Posted on March 20, 2012 by bluedepth

The Chicago Police Department has a problem. One of their officers was videotaped stating “Your First Amendment Rights can be terminated.”

Here’s the article and you can watch the video for yourself. I wrote a little bit about it on Google Plus:

First Amendment rights can be terminated? That’s the first I’ve heard of that! Here’s the text of the thing: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

There are exceptions that the Supreme Court has installed which bear on this text, but nowhere does any of it bear on what I saw in this video.

This video is just Chicago Police acting shamefully. Perpetuating the stereotype that the police are paid thugs with no regard to citizens basic constitutionally-guaranteed rights. How can we petition the government for a redress of grievances if the central right that backs it up can be “terminated”.

Chicago has a problem on it’s hands. The police need to be put back under control before they think of themselves as somehow better or more than the rest of us.

Trampling on our rights, and worse yet, being recorded to trample over citizens rights is only going to lead to future unrest and a mounting pressure from citizens to reject these officers of the law as absurd simulacrums of what they are intended to be: To enforce laws, to serve the citizens and protect them.

The first step? Protect us from yourselves, Chicago Police Department. You are hazardous to our life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.

Pu'erh Tea

Posted on March 20, 2012 by bluedepth

Ever since we have been going to Chocolatea in Portage I’ve been drinking more and more tea. I’ve written about this in the past a few times and I’ve discovered a lot and learned even more. I couldn’t have done any of this without the wonderful people down at Chocolatea who take great pride in teaching the public about tea and guiding you along the route to really enjoying all the teas they have to offer.

I’ve enjoyed a good number of teas, from the classic Earl Grey which was the first black tea I ever tried and really liked to various green teas and Oolong teas. Each varietal brings something I never expected to my cup. The greens are very light and easy to drink and very healthy for you – but then again, they ALL are. The Oolong teas are interesting because they are full-leaf teas and there is a Chinese method called “gong-fu” which is brewing tea many times. Most teas can take up to three infusions before they peter out, but Oolong can take it and enjoys up to seven or eight infusions with hot water for progressively longer steeps. The flavors that are expressed in each steeping shift from instance to instance which makes Oolong a very interesting tea to explore. I’ve kind of Oolong’ed myself out of that tea after drinking it for a long while and so I decided to get back on the warpath and explore more types. There are some other tea-like plants that you can make “teas” out of, Rooibos and Yerba Mate. The first is nice, but it lacks any caffeine which is okay for a right-before-bed tea but doesn’t give me the kind of kick that I need during the day. Yerba Mate has a caffeine-like substance that gives you a lift without feeling jittery. All of this I learned at Chocolatea and online.

Amongst all these teas, I’ve found one type that really knocks my socks off. I really enjoy drinking it and can drink it all day long. This tea is called pu-erh tea and I put five grams of leaves into my infuser basket and boil water and set it for no more than three minutes. This tea creates a very dark brew that looks a LOT like coffee. The scent of the tea is very earthy and the taste, well that’s something special. Pu-erh tea tastes like vanilla and caramel and brown sugar. This particular tea is called “Caramel Pu-erh” so that’s where the caramel notes come from, obviously. This tea is what I love about really great coffee without the bitter astringency that I really don’t like about coffee. I regard it as the coffee-drinkers tea and I bet that if I brewed a cup of this and gave it to my coffee-obsessed family that they would be blown away as much as I was when I first tasted it. Since that first time I’ve bought 2 ounces of this tea which costs about $3.85 per ounce. That’s about 56 grams of tea, for about 33 to 44 cups of really awesome coffee-without-the-bitterness. It has all the rich flavor that you want from coffee, a nice small kick of caffeine per cup, not to mention a bunch of unproven-but-maybe health claims ranging from numerous phenols which are antioxidants and good for you, to appetite suppression (caffeine) and even increased fat breakdown (in rats, it suppresses a metabolic pathway that leads to the formation of fatty acids and triglycerides). WebMD even went so far to claim that Pu-erh tea can sometimes contain Lovastatin which some think is naturally created by one of the fermenting microbes as the Pu-erh is manufactured. This lovastatin is apparently one of the drugs in cholesterol drugs that suppresses LDL cholesterol and enhances HDL cholesterol, so once again you have a maybe-claim to lowering the bad cholesterol and enhancing the good. There were other maybe-maybenots that pointed to antimutagenic properties and perhaps even anticancer properties. Is it true? I don’t know. I don’t think there could be a study in humans where you could control to that fine a detail in the right way to know one way or another. So it’s nice to think that this tea might have these great properties and that it certainly won’t do you any harm. With a taste like this, in the end who the hell cares? If it’s not bad for you, and tastes this good, then any other benefits are just gimmes.

Amongst all of these teas that I’m trying, thinking about my past and what I used to think about tea does make me feel a little chagrined. Tea was awful because it was of crappy quality in a really crappy delivery mechanism. It was designed to fail. A nice cup, such as a Bodum insulated borosilicate glass cup makes enjoying tea very convenient, an infusion basket for holding the leaves, and most importantly really great loose-leaf teas are a must. Considering how cheap the per-ounce price is from Chocolatea and how you can infuse most teas at least three times if not more, your bang-for-the-buck is huge. Plus you don’t need a coffee machine, expensive baskets, filters, or the silly beans or grinds that are all going to die in your pantry of age-related death because coffee, unlike tea, just can’t last in the long-haul.

As I explore more I’ll blog about what I discover at Chocolatea. If you haven’t visited them, you really should. Even if you only drink coffee and think tea is awful, go there and tell them and ask them to impress you. I’m sure you’ll enjoy it!

Delicious Agony

Posted on March 20, 2012 by bluedepth

Oh how do I ache. I’ve switched my workout pattern to circuit training alternating with treadmill. So yesterday was circuit training with the Machines of Death (remember, Malki’s Machine of Death is different, don’t get them confused). I’ve been doing 4 sets of 30 reps at 60 pounds for Lat Pulldown Front and Back and Chest Press, then the same pattern with 90 pounds for the Abdominal machine.

A few days ago I noticed that my muscles were bored with the machines, I wasn’t feeling much in the way of wear-down so yesterday I upgraded the lat and chest press to 75 pounds and the abdominal to 100 pounds.

Today my chest and arms ache so badly. It’s not the kind of pain that is unpleasant, this kind of ache feels great. Yes, it’s pain, yes it aches, but it feels like I did something that my body muscles noticed.

I’ll stay with this new plan for a while until I notice my muscles have gotten bored with that load and then increase it again.

Mopping Up

Posted on March 16, 2012 by bluedepth

At work we have moved to a new “Engagement Platform” called iModules. Some of you already know something about this as I’ve shared stories about it with some of you before.

The system is up and running. I have to admit that I’m quite glad that the implementation phase of the project has reached a conclusion, as it took six months to get this wobbly-legged foal up on it’s feet and bouncing around.

This entire project still has some pieces to mop up, most notably the mopjob that I have to do surrounding our old platform, WordPress. Honestly I’m sad to see our use of WordPress in this regard come to a close as WordPress has been a wonderful platform and still is for my personal blog here as well as my “Captains Log” blog. I still maintain the “Captains Log” blog, but there have been lessons in using that as well. That particular one uses WordPress’s own P2 theme and for a time I opened it up and made it publicly available. This turned out to be a great mistake. I got heat from nearly every corner, mostly to do with keeping technical details private to non-maliciously violating an email clickwrap nonverbal unsigned unread agreement. I admit that the draw that the WordPress platform provides, free clouded hosting can’t be beat as far as I’m concerned. So for the “Captains Log” P2 blog, it’s gone private which makes all the previous gripers go silent as they can’t get past the “Please Login” barricade. So, once again thanks to WordPress I’ve found yet another way to “Have my cake and eat it too”.

We have moved the work stuff off to iModules and you all can see the efforts at our new site, MyWMU.com and thanks to our students and our staff who moved the contents off of our WordPress site and onto the new site, the speed of which was honestly shocking to me. Now the mopping up is all that remains. There were three blogs, Old WMYou, WMYou, and Western Express. The first and third have been backed up and purged from the system, but the middle one is stuck and I have a support ticket opened up with WordPress to help address it. We’ll see how that goes.

I will continue to update my personal blog, of course, and I will continue to enrich the P2 “Captains Log” and I really think other organizations should make use of WordPress for this great feature. It’s a great way to keep information handy, and takes the onus off the staff to remember the past as the system does it for you, time and date stamps, tags, categories, and the commenting system – not that the last part is really used for our P2 blog, but still. Not having to worry about hosting, cost, security, not to mention the ubiquity of ways to access the WordPress system make it the most compelling way to manage the working log of any business or help desk.

The only thing that I would like from WordPress, but would likely start running into real money (which I would pay, mind you) would be a Help Desk CRM overlaid on top of their P2 theme system. Some way for people to email problems or browse to the site and enter issues and the system gives them a trouble ticket number for tracking and we can lurk in the dark, hovering over this blog. That would leverage the logging goodness of P2 and it’s great usability and I don’t think it would be all that hard to code. I know there are Help Desk solutions for WordPress.org, but I really REALLY prefer to use WordPress.com. Perhaps someday in the future WordPress.com will get around to something like this. Time will tell.

Chocolatea

Posted on March 4, 2012 by bluedepth

Chocolatea

Chocolatea was originally discovered by Scott a while back and he recently introduced me to this new shop down in Portage. It’s located at 7642 South Westnedge Ave between Schuring Road and Centre Road. They have great hours, open during the early mornings on the weekdays, close at 9p and open at 9a on the weekends. It has become our preferred spot to begin our mornings during the weekends.

I never thought I liked tea, my maternal grandmother loved tea and she would always make tea via teabags and boiling water and it would make this bland brew in her white porcelain teacups. I drank it once and didn’t like it, it tasted like hot tap water with a plant in it. My folks, including the entirety of my paternal side of my family all prefer coffee. They are all very avid coffee drinkers, my mother prefers hers without additives and my father prefers his additives with a little bit of coffee. I will drink coffee if it’s available but I won’t brew it myself and I won’t go out of my way to obtain it. I find black coffee to be too bitter for me. Other people enjoy it so I don’t begrudge them their preferences.

So I drank a lot of soda pop, then tried to get it out of my diet due to the high fructose corn syrup that they use to sweeten it. I switched to diet soda and that was really not much better. I swapped out one unwanted chemical (HFCS) for another (Nutrasweet). So I gave up on soda pop altogether and once I got my HydroFlask, I’ve been enjoying my native element quite a lot (Cancer is a water sign).

It wasn’t until I visited Chocolatea did I re-discover Tea. They have two walls completely devoted to various kinds of looseleaf tea. Almost all of it is high quality full-leaf teas, with only a few powdered teas to speak of. They have apparently a full spectrum of teas from what I’ve been researching. They have White, Green, Black, Oolong, and Pu-erh Teas, some pure, some with additives. They have Earl Grey, with it’s delicious citrusey Bergamot oils in Black and Green varieties, which I really appreciate as that was (and still is) one of my favorite flavors of tea. They also have some Tisanes, Rooibos and Yerba Mate teas to round out the selection. Everything is stored in these glass spring-sealed jars that line the walls. The type of tea has it’s name and an index number and the price per ounce listed plainly on the label. Most of their teas are between 2-4 per ounce and while it seems not very much, tea is exceptionally not-dense, so you get a LOT of tea for the money.

Chocolatea also has a fully stocked supply area to explore tea and I never knew that teabags were a conceit to sell crappy tea to ignorant consumers. It doesn’t help that Americans rejected tea as a drink after the Boston Tea Party (and no, we aren’t going to honor the modern “tea party” whackjobs here) and Americans never recovered a taste for tea. This particular American however has. Chocolatea sells everything you need to make an exceptionally excellent cup of tea. They sell Bodum cups, which are double-walled and insulated so you can pour boiling water into them without scalding your fingertips as you try to drink. They also sell tea infusing baskets, which are cup-sized stainless-steel microfilter baskets that you put the loooseleaf tea into and then pour water on top of. The basket allows water and the soluble parts of the tea to pass in and out while keeping the leaves sequestered in the basket. Making tea this way is so much better than using teabags that I’m amazed there still are teabags!

Chocolatea is 80% about their teas and they sell as well as brew tea to order. They also have a great selection of lattes, coffee, and specialty tea-derived drinks as well that are quite nice. The other 20% of their business is selling supplies, food items and desserts, and their chocolate selection. If you like tea you owe it to yourself to visit Chocolatea, if you like Chocolate, you owe it to yourself to go. Even if you don’t like tea or chocolate (and frankly I don’t know if I want to know you if you don’t like at least chocolate) the atmosphere is incredibly conducive to writing. There is ambient music provided by XM/Sirius celestial radio, but it’s very subdued. The people sounds are the predominant feature in Chocolatea as they do a brisk business. The ever-present mishmash of people talking quietly is very soothing, at least to me. You can’t really make out individual conversations but the droning chatter is pleasant.

Chocolatea has a frequent customer program and if you sign up they ask you for your email, address, and birthday. I can only imagine that they have something clever, marketing wise up their sleeves when they ask for birthdays and email. The owners work their store and I’ve run into them from time to time and they are incredibly helpful and amazingly pleasant people. Their employees are very nice and are always free with kind smalltalk and smiles. One thing I did discover to my chagrin is after buying tea, which they have a little area set aside for dosing out the teas you want into plastic baggies – it’s important to write the name of the tea down as well as it’s index number! I had three baggies with just numbers and not a clue what was in the baggies. After calling Chocolatea they were very happy to help me identify what each baggie contained and now when I buy tea there, I always include the name.

So far, for my explorations I love their black teas, mostly “Paris”, “Earl Grey”, “Cream Earl Grey”, and the Green “Bangkok”. Their Yerba Mate blends are excellent and I just purchased sight-unseen some Pu-erh Tea and that is AMAZING. I keep on marveling at how good tea is now that I’m making it with high-quality ingredients and brewing it the correct way. The owners of Chocolatea are always pushing tea education even when you call them to get names of teas from just having index numbers. They are free with advice on how to brew whites, greens, oolongs, and black teas. Both the temperature of the water, how much tea to use, and how long to let it steep. If you go to Chocolatea, you will get an expertly crafted cup of tea and after you are done, you can hand them back the cup and ask for re-steeps. I had no idea that tea leaves could steep over and over again! The refills are complimentary! One thing to note, if you get an Oolong tea, apparently that particular tea can re-steep a LOT and the flavors in each cup unfold with each steeping. There is so much to explore there, and the prices will not break the bank.

If you have never been, I heartily recommend it! If you love to drink coffee then you really should ask for them to make you a cup of Caramel Pu-erh Tea. I bet you’ll fall head over heels in love with it and want more!

If you would like to get set-up to make tea I can make some good suggestions, first off if you have a tea-pot already then use it. If you don’t, then Rival or GE make a very nice electric kettle for $12 or $30 respectively. I bought a Rival electric kettle for work so I could fill it with water and heat up my water by my desk. The Rival is nice (as I assume the GE one is as well) in so far that when the water boils the unit pops off. When you hear the click, the water is just about at 200 degrees which is perfect for black teas. If you wait just a little bit longer, the water cools so you can make whites or greens too. The infusion basket is $10 and is permanent, so with careful cleaning you’ll never need another one. The Bodum cups are $10 as well. So right there for about $40-$50 of an initial investment you can enjoy tea the way it was meant to be enjoyed! After your initial investment you just have to buy the tea itself and as far as I can tell loose-leaf tea is shelf-stable for a long while, so it’s not like there are any timers that are running if you don’t get around to a particular tea in time.

If you go to Chocolatea and you discover that you like tea as much as I do, please leave comments about what teas you like. I’m always looking to explore more and the selection at Chocolatea is enough to keep you occupied for a very long time.

Beer and Skittles

Posted on March 3, 2012 by bluedepth

Beer and Skittles

There is a new shop in town called Beer and Skittles. We spied it as we were driving around town foraging for our weekly supplies a few weeks ago. They are located at 1912 Whites Road in Kalamazoo. The first time we spied the shop it was a drive-by and people were laughing how odd it seemed to have skittle-flavored beer, as we had made the fundamental mistake of confusing Skittles the board game with Skittles the candy. As it turns out, it’s actually an idiomatic expression in british english, “beer and skittles” which is supposed to be a catch-all phrase for going out and doing something.

The first time we stopped at Beer and Skittles they weren’t open yet, so we peered through the windows and the owner came out to talk to us. They were in the home stretch of opening and I was giddy with the notion that they turned a First National Bank of Detroit into an epicurean food and wine shop. What a reversal of banality for that building! We laughed and talked and wished them well and then a week or so later they were open, except for not having a liquor license to sell the beer, which is part of their name. Apparently Michigan has laws on the books that come from an earlier time when alcohol sales were strictly controlled. This state still has some blue laws on the books and from my understanding, Michigan runs a zero-sum-game with it’s liquor licenses. For one shop to get a liquor license another shop has to surrender theirs. There is only a fixed number of liquor sales allowed in this state and that sort of law has more to do with the troglodytes in Lansing than anything else. To keep a shop like Beer and Skittles wanting for a liquor license is just harming the local economy. It’s stupid.

As for the shop itself, in the beginning we noticed that they set up a sparse store. There is nothing wrong with that, but when you factor in the handicap of not having that liquor license it is a little worrisome. The products are all local, unique, or niche and play directly into the theme that Beer and Skittles publishes on their website. We found some notable treasures in this store that we really enjoy. They have deals with local food-preparers to distribute prepared pasties, pot pies, as well as bread, hummus, dips, mixes, spices, and a constellation of other products that appear to be an assortment of local food fare.

We tried pasties for the first time by buying two there and cooking them at home. We weren’t sure what to expect as we’ve never had pasties before. At first we were taken aback by how dry they were, but then we realized after talking with locals that what we experienced is what pasties are and that it’s not a flaw, it’s part of the design of the things. Scott wasn’t as awed by the pasties as I was, I would definitely buy another one since they are only $5 and one should be enough for a hearty lunch or dinner.

The meat pies are exceptionally good. Scott surprised me by swinging by Beer and Skittles on his way home from work as it’s somewhat on the way back home from Barnes & Noble in Portage. One pie is more than enough for a dinner for two and the price of $14 is excellent for what you get. The products at Beer and Skittles have very little carbon built up on them, as much of the food is from Kalamazoo, Grand Rapids, or somewhere else in Michigan. There are some notable exceptions, but they are few, like Demerara sugar, which comes from very far away and has a lot of carbon attached to it.

Baklava

The real draw for me is Beer and Skittles has a deal with a greek pastry maker in Grand Rapids and they sell little wedges of Baklava for $1.95 a piece. I’ve had Baklava from other places around town and while many locations sell okay Baklava, what they have for sale at Beer and Skittles is over-the-top-amazingly-good. I have plans to save up, and if Beer and Skittles is willing, buy an entire platter in one go. Whoever makes their Baklava makes little triangular wedges of sweet heaven.

One thing that I feel I have to remark upon is the hours for Beer and Skittles. The owners are pushing the envelope here, and going far above and beyond every other shop in town by being open until 10pm every night. This state is blue as hell and there are only a few places that are open after 8 or 9pm and Beer and Skittles is one of these places. I worry that their hours may reduce their chances for success but it’s what they have posted. Their dedication on running that business is notable and I think more people should go and give them a shot. Look in their cold cases, pick something out and try it. If you see the platter of Baklava, you have to buy at least one piece. You will not be sorry.

I hope that they get their liquor license soon and complete their namesake. It’s these sorts of shops that open up and play the risk that need attention from the buying public. It’s these shops we have to support. Excellent quality, fair prices, outrageous hours. What is not to love? Even if they don’t have their license yet I visit frequently and often times find something to buy there.

Too Much

Posted on March 3, 2012 by bluedepth

Anytime I walk into a library, a bookstore, or any other place where a lot of media is all concentrated together either for lending or sale or just browsing the same thought occurs to me: How can anyone have any hope of seeing what is to be seen?

I’ve mused about this for a very long time. It strikes me that the entirety of the human oeuvre could be represented by Teilhard de Chardin’s noosphere. That thoughts and ideas occupy another sphere overlaid on the Earth, created by thinking creatures. This is very handy as it brings the idea of a sphere right in to the concept at the center of my writing. Is it possible anymore for any one of us to possibly see the entire sphere from one side to the other? I think there is a personal horizon that each of us is chained to, we can only see that part of the noosphere that we are either local to or interested in. Ultimately this question becomes a concern for answering the really big and important questions. The sense that we won’t cure cancer, we won’t stumble into room-temperature superconductivity, or practical fusion energy without some sort of broad synthesis across multiple disciplines. The way it feels to me, and I don’t have any proof of any of this, it’s all just intuition here, is that humanity has created a huge repository of ideas and that if the right person at the right time had access to the perfect constellation of ideas that some of the answers to the really big questions would pop out in a kind of ‘eureka’ rush of creativity and development.

I’ve spoken of these things with some friends especially when I’m in a pensive mood and the situation for such deep discussions are ripe. One thing that is a recent turn is the advent of social networking. We are relating more and more to each other, communicating more, writing more, talking more, sharing more. There are structures that have formed like Wikipedia which to me resembles a coral reef of information more than how it’s plainly stated, a free online encyclopedia that is crowdsourced. I suppose it’s the romantic in me that sees information not being added to Wikipedia as a matter of some dedicated purpose but rather that it’s information that washes up onto Wikipedia and builds over time. In Clive Barker’s Great and Secret Show the principal characters had something very much akin to how I consider Wikipedia (and other sites, really, that operate like it) in the dead-letter office. That little chunks of Art wash up over the years and collect like cruft in this office. That information created by all of us washes up on Wikipedia and collects like cruft on this site.

It is important to get back to the beginning again, that when I walk into my local Barnes & Nobles that I have the distinct feeling that I won’t be able to read and understand the contents of that building. That’s just the start. Then you expand it out to Waldo Library, and then the Kalamazoo Public Library, and it keeps on going all the way out to the Library of Congress and then kind of crashes upon the concept of the Internet as a whole. There is no time, there is not enough energy in my life to do any of that and that life demands so much else from you that even if you wanted to do anything of the sort there just isn’t any time, hope, or inclination for it. In a way, I posit that the content that humanity has created has defeated humanities hope to encompass it. So there may be the answers to life, the universe and everything out there, it’s just that none of us have hope to put the threads together and start drawing some of those big conclusions.

Perhaps however there is some hope in social networking and Wikipedia, structures where disparate information washes up and because it’s concentrated the threads are closer, easier to tie together and maybe we can move forward using those systems to help us. A lot of this is covered by Wolfram Alpha as well as some other artificial intelligence projects where information scientists have sensed this potential problem and maybe a machine could encompass human content and help us understand what it is that we’ve created.

This all may be the pressure behind the next stage of human evolution. First we took care of the needs of our genetics, making survival a triviality. Then we exploded with ideas, creating a noosphere too large for us to handle, and then the next pressure is based on encompassing and cultivating that noosphere. We need to get to the next stage of development which isn’t so much expanding as concentrating what we have already discovered about the world and about existence. In a way, perhaps the next stage of human evolution, the continued pursuit of ever more complicated cortexes in our brains will come in the generations to come. Children born with the tools needed to begin the pursuit of collection and concentration, eidetic memory, highly efficient relationship cognition. Children able to walk into a library and in an afternoon consume every ounce of information contained within the walls. It’s going to be those with those innate talents who may be able to bring what we imagine and what we dream about into reality.

How about the rest of us? In that perhaps technology will provide us a shortcut, perhaps a preview of what is to come for us all. That we can get peeks into what may be to come through things like Wolfram Alpha, through the AI projects, hell, even through something as quaint as Wikipedia. If nothing else, it is interesting to think about and engaging to talk about.

Run Around The Block

Posted on February 23, 2012 by bluedepth

A few days ago I went out to lunch with Scott at a local restaurant and while we were waiting for our food to be ready I found myself looking at the other diners surrounding me. Adjacent to us were these two morbidly obese women, they looked like mother and daughter. It wasn’t just “fat” but rolling down between their legs and the chairs weren’t even able to support the extra wibbly flab that drooped over the side.

Generally these people do not interest me, beyond a twinge of pity for their unpleasantly short lives and the ruin they made of themselves. I unfortunately also caught an eyeful of what they were eating. Eating is a pleasant verb, what they were doing wasn’t that, it was more like shoveling. Burger, double-order of Fries, and a giant big-gulp cup of frozen custard. They were chowing down, not even slowing down enough to catch their breath as they matter-loaded. Witnessing this display of gluttony was incredibly disgusting and offensive to me.

What really bothers me is that the restaurant we went to HAS MANY HEALTHY CHOICES. These two women just weren’t interested in making any of them.

And this isn’t the first time I’ve felt this way about people like that. When we go to the local market and I spot one they almost always appear to me in the same way. Massively morbidly obese, more than just fat, but fat-under-pressure. They are in the little electric cart scooters slowly moving through the store. The poor scooters, unaccustomed to being under such duress make this agonized wimpy sqwuck-squick sound as they struggle to move the human elephant about the store. Then I see what they’ve loaded in their cart – and almost always it’s the same. A dozen frozen pizzas, and the edge of the cart is lined with six-packs of soda, all arranged so the six-packs are riding the edge of the cart. Then sometimes there are tubs of sour cream and butter. Not a single vegetable in sight.

I can’t feel anything but disgusted pity for these people. They just waddle through their sad lives and in a lot of ways it upsets me. It doesn’t have to be that way. They don’t have to always sit down everywhere they go so the fat rolls can just droop over the edges of their chair.

But there is nothing that I am going to do. There is no point, plus it would just lead to me getting in trouble if I tried to wake them up by rifling through their carts asking them why they bought such awful “food”.

And then I start to think about the markets and restaurants. It’s not their responsibility to ensure that people eat well, but they certainly don’t give a damn when someone who clearly does not need a big-gulp frozen custard waddles up to the register and orders one. A similar tack could be made for the market, so much “food” there that really shouldn’t be there at all!

People amaze me. They shovel in all this bullshit, all these product-lies and it does taste good, it tastes like food, but IT IS NOT FOOD. Food is mostly vegetation, fruits, nuts, proteins, and only a scant touch of fats and oils! How many people can trace their unhappiness in life to the fact that they haven’t had a proper meal in decades!

I don’t want to hear about the woe from congestive heart failure, from all the cancers that are eating us alive, at least not from people who could have chosen to live better lives! Everyone knows that certain things are bad for you and that you should avoid them! I just can’t be sympathetic to people who are for the most part on a very slow track to suicide. Eating yourself to death, slowly.

What should people do? There is one clear and easy strategy that works for me and would work for anyone else really. It works for anyone near a supermarket or a megamarket. Only buy things that are on the rind. Every store is designed in pretty much the same way, with the foods you really should eat on the exterior walls, and everything that is bad for you or is bound to kill you in the middle aisles. Spend most of your time in produce, to start! Learn to cook! Cook REAL FOOD from REAL INGREDIENTS.

And for the love of God, stop using the handicapped motorcarts if you aren’t handicapped! Being obnoxiously fat is not a handicap. It’s a suicide attempt.

People bother me. So much. Gah.

Bluedepth's Journal

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Author Archives: bluedepth

Pu'erh Tea

Delicious Agony

Chocolatea

Beer and Skittles

Run Around The Block