Category: vegan

…don’t say anything at all

Bill, you have crafted the perfect post title. Please take you own advice — say nothing…at all

 

Nice and Kind

Random acts of niceness?

One of first posts I wrote for this blog is Nice People Explained — 22 months ago. It’s about a philosopher who is tut-tutted in many circles: Bertrand Russell. That particular essay introduced me to the very concept of what it means to be nice in polite society — a form of expedience that keeps the wheels of industry churning and chugging, becoming accustomed to certain niceties. Leo Tolstoy was ahead of his time and ours.

Leo-Tolstoy-Quotes-27-I-Sit-On-A-Mans-Back-Choking-Him-And-...-Quotes-768x756

Yesterday I read great stuff on a great  blog that I recommend to you. May I direct your attention to the eponymous ShelbyCourtland. Great and timely stuff there IMO. Coincidentally, some people would not think Shelby very nice. Speaking up for the exploited doesn’t get the job done. Well, that’s nice, BUT.

Well, there’s a wide chasm between nice and  kind. Kurt Vonnegut did not say be nice, the word Kurt chose was “kind.” Many do not consider him a very nice person either. I once met an unkind person who had met Vonnegut once, and reported that he was not very nice.

You are wasting your time, my friend. By the way, have you ever heard the one about the nice nun who, let’s say ‘got the job done’ in certain elementary school classrooms of the 1950’s?

By “getting the job done” I think you mean training classroom bullies on the nicer points of humiliation? Yes. Thought very nice, very nice indeed.

nuns.with.rulers

Here’s my hypothesis: Nice people conform to the expectations imposed by authority to perpetuate the way it’s always been done and the ways that always work. They never rock boats or speak out of line. They don’t laugh at crap hounds like Jeff Sessions, lest they be likewise incarcerated. There’s nothing remotely fascist about that, is there?  Boats are not for rocking — unless the boats are carrying refugees from profitable wars initiated by the nicest country on Earth. Endless war to stop all those wars that end inconveniently: for armament suppliers. Endless slaughter of fellow sentient beings in technologically advanced death camps — it’s what’s for dinner.

Perform random acts of kindness when they are totally unexpected. Do them often. Do them creatively, even playfully. Get off someone’s back?

Smart and Pleasant

I’m asking Elwood P. Dowd to take over here while I visit the restroom. Please be kind to Mr. Dowd, who knows both smart and pleasant:

“Years ago my mother used to say to me, she’d say, “In this world, Elwood, you must be” – she always called me Elwood – “In this world, Elwood, you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant.” Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant. You may quote me.”

Here is a clip from the 1950 version starring Jimmy Stewart featuring the snippet above.

elwood.p.dowd

My mother, in addition to always calling me Billy, used to say to me “If you don’t have anything…nice to say…”

Or was it “…good to say?” Well let’s find out what good old Google reports on good and nice:

  1. Hits for nice: About 793,000 results (0.93 seconds)
  2. Hits for good: About 220,000 results (0.46 seconds) 
OK, let’s divide 793 by 220 and see if we obtain a result. Right.
Nice Defeats Good
Rather dour fare for a Saturday morning, don’t you know? Your really should have followed through with “… don’t say anything at all.  
Quite right, time for something restful and delightful, in full measure 🙂
The best place I know for taking a breather is upon a sentient cloud. Let’s jump in for a worthy discussion on the proper use of the ellipsis, to whit one written by Esme.

I understand that the shortest distance between two dots is another dot. So let us lose ourselves  in aethereal clouds; particularly after sloughing through this dour post.

Hey, did you know that fog is a cloud resting on the ground? We live just south of Cincinnati, I once saw the tallest building in town pointing out above a wonderful white cloud one morning while driving to where ever the heck I was working at that time.

Thanks for reading.

LEGO, AUDIO, VIDEO: I Read, I Hear, I See

As April 30 yielded to May 1, I recalled that Old-Time Radio will have passed the wand over to New-Time Television exactly 55 years ago this coming September 30; in fact, the final two shows turned their microphones off on the same day.

JD_Button

In the unlikely event that you have already guessed which two programs made it curtains for that classic era, I roll the timpani — or cue the crickets.

Und so:

  1. Suspense
  2. Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar

Three suggestions for those new to the realm — a land wide, deep and satisfying.

  1. Vic and Sade
  2. Pat Novak for Hire
  3. Inner Sanctum
Vic-And-Sade-mp3
Paul Rhymer was the genius behind Vic and Sade

I have a soft spot in my heart for programs that settle into my psyche by way of sound waves — words existing on the printed page give your mind the means to fashion words to worlds. To use my sagacious father’s favorite phrase

“Well, let’s put it this way” — I prefer lego (I read) and audio (I hear) to video (I see). Reader or listener rather than viewer, what gives? Reading and listening demand more of the imagination. Theater of the Mind. Not my coined phrase, but dramatically accurate.

 

vacuum.tube.radio.deviant.art

Personally, viewing alone is like drinking alone — the experience doesn’t end well. It might work splendidly for thee, but not for me. In other words, judging my readers is never my aim (file under marginalia).

On with the show.

Watching TV with others involves participation. Joel Hodgson is the genius behind MST 3000 — an absolutely brilliant concept that sets Hodgson’s haplessly condemned yet innocent victim off planet, and forced to watch amazingly bad movies, a torture you may have experienced personally. Joel and his Bots (his own creation by the way) breaks that fourth wall too, perhaps a fifth wall.

Full disclosure: Lisa would rather shout VIDEO, ERGO SUM to my AUDIO, ERGO SUM. Well, let’s put it this way: we complement each other. So there!

video-ergo-sum-680x400
I view, therefor I am

During my years in West Germany (1971 to 1973), watching television was only good for language learning. Here is a recommendation for the next time you surf 255 channels — set subtitles to another language. Better still: watch a foreign film and set the subtitles to a language you want to learn. Experiencing a world without English language is a rare delight. I recommend it most heartily.  🙂

Advertisers want to make you think that the volition is entirely yours. IMO (only?), we do not live in the best of all possible worlds. Though you might be surprised to read that veganism is an effective remedy for that  imposition of schizophrenia upon readers, listeners and viewers. Blood-toothed marketers wish to either introduce or reinforce product loyalty. FTS say I. Out damned blood! FWIW, I pay an annual fee to keep this site advertising-free.

Addendum: I didn’t know that FTS was a sports term, so I pass that torch to my sports broadcasting alter ego. It was intended as a term of frustration directed at frustrating the darker side of advertising. Channel to ESPN-42 for more 🙂

Thanks for reading.

 

 

Vegan to Veganism — the Followup

N.B. This post was inspired by a very kind reader’s comment on my previous post. It’s my way of thanking an anonymous reader for the inspiration to create this article 🙂

I often add deprecating words of imagined critics to challenge my writing — they appear as italicized green-text segments. This time I turn those naysayers away and add complimentary words to complement the genuine words of a non-naysayer. 🙂

Thanks for this Bill! But my curiosity is not yet fully quenched! How did your family and friends take your change?

Though the green sheep in the family, I was blessed, or kindly ignored, by family and friends. They have allowed me the space and penchant to follow the way of the iconoclast. Tilt damned windmill! I try to reciprocate in kind, but when you stand up for eliminating THE entree from the plate 24/7, you must expect onslaught and outrage:

Vegan protein icons

Whaaat?

You’re kidding.

You’re not serious.

Whaaat?

A reflexive response to homo sapiens’ rejection of all things never questionable.

You dare countenance baser instincts, to sin against the natural law? Beasts naturally sacrifice their corpus by dint of birth. It’s frail folly to eat the fruit from the tree of knowledge.

animal-rights-ego-vs-eco-hoodies-men-s-hoodie

I also imagine that back then veganism was much harder and much less accepted than it is today.

Graduating from university in the year of Woodstock 1969 and Earth Day occurred the following year. Insanity by political edict in Vietnam would never occur again. Nixon flew away in a disgrace that many of my peers vowed to avenge. Whiplash by pendulum swing was inconceivable — but it was only five years away.

A certain nihilism set in with what I call “Mourning in America” 1980.

Whiplash happens.

Did you join an animals rights group?

Peter Singer (Animal Liberation) rocked the planet with his unspeakable recommendations in 1975. E.F. Schumacher suggested that small was beautiful.  It seemed the conventional wisdom would follow in steady due course — but not politically and not personally. My wife died in 1983. I became a single parent until Lisa showed up to rescue us. She got the chance to shop for groceries with a vegan in 1993. TVP and canned vegan fare were tucked away in an a nondescript top shelf. Those cans got lonely up there.

And about the detoxifying, I agree. When I first went vegan, I had detox symptoms too, but then I also gave up coffee, sugar and alcohol completely.

I successfully detoxed from alcohol after a single rehab week in Falmouth, KY. Heroin peers began to outnumber the alcohol-devotees. Break time at the picnic tables there led me back to cigarettes for some months. I was the only person to show up at a smoking-cessation series — my last puff was taken in the parking lot of the hospital sponsoring the series. I’ve saved the certificate of completion.

ToxicSpiceLatte-e1414120720331
I have mine without the above. What’s it called?

Let’s say that coffee ‘never hurt me none’, so I’m still with that Kodachrome. Sugar that doesn’t come with real and true fruit, sugar in empty-calorie form remains a crutch that I haven’t discarded. It’s bad news without a single redeeming social value, but I stock up on figs, dates and the such to counter the sugar molecules.

Thanks again for this post!

Thanks so much for the prodding. It’s been enormously helpful to answer your thoroughly wonderful questions.

Thanks for reading.

From Vegan to Veganist and Beyond

A fellow blogger recently submitted a question to this desk, actually it’s not a desk but a dining room table without dead animals on it.

el.dolor.es.igual
Animal liberation. human liberation

How long have you been vegan?

So I decided to ramble on about it right here…

…in a bid for garish aggrandizement, Bill?

No, in consideration of all the fellow sentient-beings that I have not killed by proxy several times today and several times tomorrow. Enlightenment brings more than inspiration and a healthier lifestyle — it entails (not entrails) a responsibility for passing the word forward for a better world.

It started with a flyer on a nondescript table in a university hallway 30 years ago (now three-sevenths of my life) — reasons for adopting a vegan diet. It was as dramatic as it was nonchalant.

During the first ten years I discovered that vegetarianism (keeping eggs, dairy and cheese in your diet) kept my body supplied with animal-derived molecules that fueled a craving for animal byproducts — the organs that excrete toxins, including your skin, were self-sabotaged. Detox is not pleasant, but there is no alternative. Not tossing meatables into a shopping cart results in fewer factory-farm orders for meatables.

I also discovered that fermented liquids might be a perfectly vegan alternative lifestyle choice, not all poisons come in animal-laden packages. That detox was also not very pleasant — just speaking from experience.

This great little saying is still my favorite for its truth and pithhood:

Every time you eat or drink

 

lunchables.uploaded.taco
W.T.F.!

Search the internet for ‘vegan’ and ‘health’ to find statements from people who tried to become vegan but suffered from fatigue until they went back to meat. It takes as long as a year for toxins and craves to leave the body. “Out damned toxin!” But it literally liberates your mind and your brain.

In your opinion, Billy. Spam brought the Philippines into this modern world. Capiche? 

I have discovered personally that your brain seeks alternate paths when not blogged down by crap. Check out the ingredients on fast-crap that people chew and chug all day. Dozens of long-named laboratory labels are strange, but not as loathsome as their crave-inducing effects. But who am I to question trillion-dollar industries?

 

meatables
Veganism is brain friendly

How can 97% of the consuming public be wrong, Bill? Think about it and shut up.

I’m just paranoid I guess. Sorry ’bout that.

Thanks for reading.