Odds and ends
The “not reading news” thing is really working out for me. I don't know if it's made me spend more time doing useful things, but I have spent less time ranting about the stupid things I had been reading almost constantly online. I honestly do not feel less informed about things. I suspect in a couple of weeks I'll get some Sunday paper delivered so I can keep myself “informed”, but for right now, I'm pretty comfortable getting my news from the Daily Show and whatever might float by from people linking or talking about things.
More generally, we're in the middle of waves of “bad” weather. There are waves of weather fronts - I refuse to call them storms - moving in from the Pacific which will keep me damp for about the next three weeks, so the days will be short, the weather dark and I won't be able to lift. Needless to say, this has amped up my seasonal affective disorder. Amped up sounds wrong. You amp up something that makes you feel down? I'm sure you get the drift. It's dark, I'm blue, suck! Still, better than Maine, where there would be shorter days and it was grayer longer. And in Maine during the winter, the clear days were the coldest ones, ugh. How about that for an antechamber to hell experience for a desert rat? When it's bright, it's windy and cold!
I might be getting a morbid fascination with traditional Icelandic food. Not to eat, no, because it might be the singularly most repulsive foodstuff that I've ever heard of. Hitherto, it had been Aztec food. The standard Aztec food was essentially this corn meal that you rolled a ball and let rot. Then you'd mix it up into a rotten corn ball slurry, throwing in some chili peppers, and (I assume) hold your nose and power chug that bad boy before you realized you were drinking rotten corn slurry with jalapeno. I mean, I understand that they lived in a hot climate and all but that sounds pretty fuckin' gross. Well, Iceland has them beat.
One of the traditional foodstuffs of Iceland is this stuff called hakarl - it has some squiggles in it that I'm not bothering to put in 'cause I don't have a Euro-keyboard and don't know how to make squiggles over things - which is described as “putrefied Greenland shark”. It was prepared, back in the day, by dressing a Greenland shark and burying it for six to twelve weeks, then cutting it into strips and drying it. It apparently smells like cleaning products, literally of ammonia. Eating it is supposedly a test of manhood. They need a better test.
Or stuff like the testicles of rams that are pressed into blocks, boiled and cured in lactic acid . . . let me 'splain about lactic acid curing. Because there's not a lot of salt in the horrorama that is Iceland, they would make this soft, yogurty cheese and then let the resulting whey ferment, which gets acidic, and then they'd boil stuff and put it in the fermented lactic acid. Apparently this technique was known, briefly, in mainland Scandinavia, but they gave it up pretty fast. I can only presume because it was so gross. So a lot of Icelandic food was preserved that way. Boiled and then put into a vat of fermented whey. Meats prepared in this fashion have a taste and consistency that is compared to those runny, stinking French cheeses - their MEAT was like this.
And just other stuff. Like when the warm period of the Middle Ages ended - five hundred years ago - they couldn't grow any grains. So they had to have their grains shipped from overseas (usually Denmark), which made grains sort of a luxury item. So when they made their bread, they had to do stuff like put seaweed and lichen in it to make the grain stretch. This is the kind of place we're talking about, where barley was a luxury item.
And the first vegetables weren't grown in Iceland until the late 17th century. Not “vegetables became common in the 17th century” but that some rich people built experimental vegetable gardens in the late 17th century. Vegetables didn't become reasonably common in Iceland until the second half of the 20th century. So, most of the population for most of its history never ate any fruits or vegetables.
Taken together, it makes that Aztec diet look pretty good. I mean, sure, the rotten corn slurry sounds loathsome and I'm sure it was. But the Aztecs had pretty good access to fruits and vegetables, not the least of which was various chili peppers, which were considered a staple. I understand this. They also had beans and a lot of squashes which were eaten in pretty normal ways. Oh, sure, in Tenochtitlan they also skimmed the foam off of their filthy lake to dry and season their food, but compared to rotten ammonia stinking shark or the rams balls made into cubes, boiled and tossed into the stinking whey fermentation vat until they turned a hideous white and smelled like a reject from a gooey Frankish cheese competition, hey, I'll take my chances with the Aztecs, y'know?
I kind of wish I could find a book on a food history of Iceland. Clearly, the harshness of the climate is what's responsible for these - to me - disgusting food habits. I bet how things got to that pitch would be a pretty compelling read for a guy like me. But, absent learning Icelandic, I'm pretty SOL.
The bio of Hegel is finally coming to an end. What I've learned is philosophers are boring people. Shocking, I know! The book is successful in the sense that it contextualizes Hegel's work with his life and the times he lived in, which is something I like because I feel (know in my own case) that when I read a philosophy text when I have a strong grasp of the time and culture in which the author lived I read it differently (and worse) when it's contextless. I know I'll never be able to get the feeling of a German living in 1830, having lived through Napoleon, the demise of the Holy Roman Empire and the various struggles between reaction and republican forces, but if I have some understanding about them I can more clearly comprehend the voice of the text. I might read Philosophy of History, again, after this (I don't know any force on earth could get me to re-read the Phenomenology or the Logic).
But reading it, I've sorta started to take the schools of literary thought that believe understanding the context of a work is irrelevant to the work as being self-serving. Like, you're some student in literature or philosophy and you've already got this crazy workload of books to read, like 200 pages a day of just boring, dry as dirt stuff. Oh, sure, it's important stuff filled with these really exciting ideas, but in general it's more fun to hit yourself on the head with a ball peen hammer than go through this stuff. If you're in literature, you get to read one good book and then punch through ten lousy books about it. If you're in philosophy, you get to read one good book ever (a couple more if you like Nietzsche; which is not praise for his philosophy so much as his incredible skill as a writer) and then a trillion ones that range from the mind bending to the inscrutable. Under such conditions, the need to understand the context of everything would be an added burden. (Which brings me back to Hegel. He's the guy who convinced me that philosophy and history can be understood together. Perhaps should be understood together. I'm not willing to go that far, normally, though I have thought it occasionally.)
I'm not saying that everyone should try to understand every context, but I find it sorta crazy to think that context isn't relevant. Literature has a history. Knowing that history is not a waste of time. I suppose I'm hopelessly backwards in some areas to think that, hehe.
Which is a long, rambling ass post about not too much in particular, mostly about horrible food. I can't really report much more because there's not much more to report. Other than the general blahs from the weather, I'm doing okay. Adrienne's doing okay at work. My biggest news is, in fact, more or less what I've reported on, hehe. Which means that my life is doin' pretty well.
More generally, we're in the middle of waves of “bad” weather. There are waves of weather fronts - I refuse to call them storms - moving in from the Pacific which will keep me damp for about the next three weeks, so the days will be short, the weather dark and I won't be able to lift. Needless to say, this has amped up my seasonal affective disorder. Amped up sounds wrong. You amp up something that makes you feel down? I'm sure you get the drift. It's dark, I'm blue, suck! Still, better than Maine, where there would be shorter days and it was grayer longer. And in Maine during the winter, the clear days were the coldest ones, ugh. How about that for an antechamber to hell experience for a desert rat? When it's bright, it's windy and cold!
I might be getting a morbid fascination with traditional Icelandic food. Not to eat, no, because it might be the singularly most repulsive foodstuff that I've ever heard of. Hitherto, it had been Aztec food. The standard Aztec food was essentially this corn meal that you rolled a ball and let rot. Then you'd mix it up into a rotten corn ball slurry, throwing in some chili peppers, and (I assume) hold your nose and power chug that bad boy before you realized you were drinking rotten corn slurry with jalapeno. I mean, I understand that they lived in a hot climate and all but that sounds pretty fuckin' gross. Well, Iceland has them beat.
One of the traditional foodstuffs of Iceland is this stuff called hakarl - it has some squiggles in it that I'm not bothering to put in 'cause I don't have a Euro-keyboard and don't know how to make squiggles over things - which is described as “putrefied Greenland shark”. It was prepared, back in the day, by dressing a Greenland shark and burying it for six to twelve weeks, then cutting it into strips and drying it. It apparently smells like cleaning products, literally of ammonia. Eating it is supposedly a test of manhood. They need a better test.
Or stuff like the testicles of rams that are pressed into blocks, boiled and cured in lactic acid . . . let me 'splain about lactic acid curing. Because there's not a lot of salt in the horrorama that is Iceland, they would make this soft, yogurty cheese and then let the resulting whey ferment, which gets acidic, and then they'd boil stuff and put it in the fermented lactic acid. Apparently this technique was known, briefly, in mainland Scandinavia, but they gave it up pretty fast. I can only presume because it was so gross. So a lot of Icelandic food was preserved that way. Boiled and then put into a vat of fermented whey. Meats prepared in this fashion have a taste and consistency that is compared to those runny, stinking French cheeses - their MEAT was like this.
And just other stuff. Like when the warm period of the Middle Ages ended - five hundred years ago - they couldn't grow any grains. So they had to have their grains shipped from overseas (usually Denmark), which made grains sort of a luxury item. So when they made their bread, they had to do stuff like put seaweed and lichen in it to make the grain stretch. This is the kind of place we're talking about, where barley was a luxury item.
And the first vegetables weren't grown in Iceland until the late 17th century. Not “vegetables became common in the 17th century” but that some rich people built experimental vegetable gardens in the late 17th century. Vegetables didn't become reasonably common in Iceland until the second half of the 20th century. So, most of the population for most of its history never ate any fruits or vegetables.
Taken together, it makes that Aztec diet look pretty good. I mean, sure, the rotten corn slurry sounds loathsome and I'm sure it was. But the Aztecs had pretty good access to fruits and vegetables, not the least of which was various chili peppers, which were considered a staple. I understand this. They also had beans and a lot of squashes which were eaten in pretty normal ways. Oh, sure, in Tenochtitlan they also skimmed the foam off of their filthy lake to dry and season their food, but compared to rotten ammonia stinking shark or the rams balls made into cubes, boiled and tossed into the stinking whey fermentation vat until they turned a hideous white and smelled like a reject from a gooey Frankish cheese competition, hey, I'll take my chances with the Aztecs, y'know?
I kind of wish I could find a book on a food history of Iceland. Clearly, the harshness of the climate is what's responsible for these - to me - disgusting food habits. I bet how things got to that pitch would be a pretty compelling read for a guy like me. But, absent learning Icelandic, I'm pretty SOL.
The bio of Hegel is finally coming to an end. What I've learned is philosophers are boring people. Shocking, I know! The book is successful in the sense that it contextualizes Hegel's work with his life and the times he lived in, which is something I like because I feel (know in my own case) that when I read a philosophy text when I have a strong grasp of the time and culture in which the author lived I read it differently (and worse) when it's contextless. I know I'll never be able to get the feeling of a German living in 1830, having lived through Napoleon, the demise of the Holy Roman Empire and the various struggles between reaction and republican forces, but if I have some understanding about them I can more clearly comprehend the voice of the text. I might read Philosophy of History, again, after this (I don't know any force on earth could get me to re-read the Phenomenology or the Logic).
But reading it, I've sorta started to take the schools of literary thought that believe understanding the context of a work is irrelevant to the work as being self-serving. Like, you're some student in literature or philosophy and you've already got this crazy workload of books to read, like 200 pages a day of just boring, dry as dirt stuff. Oh, sure, it's important stuff filled with these really exciting ideas, but in general it's more fun to hit yourself on the head with a ball peen hammer than go through this stuff. If you're in literature, you get to read one good book and then punch through ten lousy books about it. If you're in philosophy, you get to read one good book ever (a couple more if you like Nietzsche; which is not praise for his philosophy so much as his incredible skill as a writer) and then a trillion ones that range from the mind bending to the inscrutable. Under such conditions, the need to understand the context of everything would be an added burden. (Which brings me back to Hegel. He's the guy who convinced me that philosophy and history can be understood together. Perhaps should be understood together. I'm not willing to go that far, normally, though I have thought it occasionally.)
I'm not saying that everyone should try to understand every context, but I find it sorta crazy to think that context isn't relevant. Literature has a history. Knowing that history is not a waste of time. I suppose I'm hopelessly backwards in some areas to think that, hehe.
Which is a long, rambling ass post about not too much in particular, mostly about horrible food. I can't really report much more because there's not much more to report. Other than the general blahs from the weather, I'm doing okay. Adrienne's doing okay at work. My biggest news is, in fact, more or less what I've reported on, hehe. Which means that my life is doin' pretty well.