Speaking of Piaf, I've had several arguments with my coworker, who keeps insisting Marion Cotillard played Coco Chanel in something or other. Sight, it was Audrey Tatou. Entirely different French woman. But I divagate. I'm hoping to be able to blog roundups during my upcoming work trip, but I'm only bringing my iPad, so we'll see if that will happen.
This is significant because I got my smartphone a year ago. A week or two before it arrived, touch screens confounded me. I remember driving around with my coworker, trying to use her iPhone for navigation and to find restaurants, and I just kept losing things.
On a much less first-world-problem note: immigrants in solitary confinement. Also see Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's poignant short story, "Checking Out."
Renewable energy is not (no pun intended) a pipe dream.
I agree with Hoagland's message but I got lost in his verbosity and preachiness. He quotes Thoreau, but would that he learn from his style. I should have quoted Thoreau in Friday's ramble about industrial agricultural and the connection between consumer and prey. Take,
Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it.On the topic of industrial ag, I will quote another great man: Mark Bittman. There is so much wisdom in that column that it's hard to pick an excerpt. but I'm going with this:
Really: Would I rather eat cruelly raised, polluting, unhealthful chicken, or a plant product that’s nutritionally similar or superior, good enough to fool me and requires no antibiotics, cutting off of heads or other nasty things? Isn’t it preferable, at least some of the time, to eat plant products mixed with water that have been put through a thingamajiggy that spews out meatlike stuff, instead of eating those same plant products put into a chicken that does its biomechanical thing for the six weeks of its miserable existence, only to have its throat cut in the service of yielding barely distinguishable meat?
Why, in other words, use the poor chicken as a machine to produce meat when you can use a machine to produce “meat” that seems like chicken?and
I don’t believe chickens have souls, but it’s obvious they have real lives, consciousness and feeling, and they’re capable of suffering, so any reduction in the number killed each year would be good.
If that’s too touchy-feely for you, how’s this? Producers have difficulty efficiently dealing with the manure, wastewater and post-slaughter residue that result from raising animals industrially; chickens, for example, produce about as much waste as their intake of feed.
But do read the whole thing. And then roll your eyes at McDonald's' latest breakthrough.Then there’s the antibiotic issue: roughly 80 percent of the antibiotics sold in this country are given to animals, which has increased the number of antibiotic-resistant diseases as well as the presence of arsenic in the soil and our food. Work in meat and poultry processing plants is notoriously dangerous. In 2005, Human Rights Watch called it “the most dangerous factory job in America,” and nearly every test of supermarket chicken finds high percentages — sometimes as high as two out of three samples — of staph, salmonella, campylobacter, listeria or the disease-causing antibiotic-resistant bacteria called MRSA. Bill Marler, a leading food safety lawyer, told me he assumes that “almost all chicken and turkey produced in the U.S. is tainted with a bacteria that can kill you.”
On another food note: I've found my lunch for the week, minus the sauerkraut.
Oh, Grey Lady, are you begging for mockery?
GUYS, despite computers, people still use staplers, and The Times is ON IT. nyti.ms/11w0EbR***
— The Times Is On It (@NYTOnIt) March 23, 2013
I eventually decided against setting up a special blog label for posts that discussed comments regarding the size of my ass. But now I'm wondering if a label is warranted for posts that discuss animal sex?
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