- Bruce, 'We can't make it here anymore' - 1 Update
- My day alsways starts and ends with Bruce - 14 Updates
- I just ate a frozen meal :( - 4 Updates
- Quiche tonight - 3 Updates
- Caffeine, Capitalism and The War on Coffee - 1 Update
- Water - 1 Update
- Halibut for supper tonight - 1 Update
| Creme Fraiche <caf@lat.ta>: Apr 25 06:47PM -0400 James McMurtry, this guy has some good tunes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTW0y6kazWM |
| Creme Fraiche <caf@lat.ta>: Apr 25 05:13PM -0400 Bruce was whining very hard : > Sarcasm noted. Bruce, You put in like 18 hours a day with this anti-American banter in here. When do you find time to work? |
| Bruce <bruce@null.null>: Apr 26 07:16AM +1000 >Bruce, You put in like 18 hours a day >with this anti-American banter in here. >When do you find time to work? I work on this computer most of the day. Y'all are only an Alt+Tab away. Lucky you. |
| Creme Fraiche <caf@lat.ta>: Apr 25 05:37PM -0400 Bruce has brought this to us : >> with this anti-American banter in here. >> When do you find time to work? > I work on this computer most of the day. Someone pays you to spend your day in here? How can I get some of that paid RFC action? > Y'all are only an Alt+Tab > away. Lucky you. You live an alt lifestyle, there's no doubt about that. |
| GM <gregorymorrowchicago07@gmail.com>: Apr 25 02:38PM -0700 Creme Fraiche wrote: > Bruce, You put in like 18 hours a day > with this anti-American banter in here. > When do you find time to work? He has "Auto - erotic Posting Disorder" -- Best Greg |
| Creme Fraiche <caf@lat.ta>: Apr 25 05:46PM -0400 GM laid this down on his screen : >> with this anti-American banter in here. >> When do you find time to work? > He has "Auto - erotic Posting Disorder" Someone said you'll go blind from that. <shrug> |
| Bruce <bruce@null.null>: Apr 26 07:48AM +1000 >Someone pays you to spend your day >in here? How can I get some of that >paid RFC action? Become a freelancer who works from home, on the computer. >> away. Lucky you. >You live an alt lifestyle, there's no >doubt about that. Yes, an alt+tab lifestyle. |
| Creme Fraiche <caf@lat.ta>: Apr 25 05:54PM -0400 Bruce used his keyboard to write : >> You live an alt lifestyle, there's no >> doubt about that. > Yes, an alt+tab lifestyle. Tab? People still drink that horse piss with the foam farted off? |
| Bruce <bruce@null.null>: Apr 26 07:59AM +1000 >> Yes, an alt+tab lifestyle. >Tab? People still drink that horse piss >with the foam farted off? That must be something Anglo that I'm not familiar with, but enjoy! |
| Creme Fraiche <caf@lat.ta>: Apr 25 06:03PM -0400 Bruce wrote : >> Tab? People still drink that horse piss >> with the foam farted off? > That must be something Anglo that I'm not familiar with, but enjoy! Nasty diet cola, I'm not sure if they still make it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(drink) |
| Creme Fraiche <caf@lat.ta>: Apr 25 06:06PM -0400 Creme Fraiche wrote on 4/25/2020 : > Nasty diet cola, I'm not sure if they still > make it. > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(drink) Never mind that url, it miss-fired, at any rate it looks like they still do sell that piss water. https://www.target.com/p/tab-cola-12pk-12-fl-oz-cans/-/A-12953528 |
| Bruce <bruce@null.null>: Apr 26 08:09AM +1000 >Never mind that url, it miss-fired, at any rate >it looks like they still do sell that piss water. >https://www.target.com/p/tab-cola-12pk-12-fl-oz-cans/-/A-12953528 Yes, that looks pretty bad. |
| Creme Fraiche <caf@lat.ta>: Apr 25 06:28PM -0400 Bruce has brought this to us : >> it looks like they still do sell that piss water. >> https://www.target.com/p/tab-cola-12pk-12-fl-oz-cans/-/A-12953528 > Yes, that looks pretty bad. Should have named it saccharine sqeezin's. I remember my mom drinking that stuff to try and trim a few pounds and you know how kids are, I had to have some too. Yuk. |
| Bruce <bruce@null.null>: Apr 26 08:32AM +1000 >Should have named it saccharine sqeezin's. I remember >my mom drinking that stuff to try and trim a few pounds >and you know how kids are, I had to have some too. Yuk. Yes, I'd rather have real sugar and try moderation. |
| Creme Fraiche <caf@lat.ta>: Apr 25 06:41PM -0400 NOM >> my mom drinking that stuff to try and trim a few pounds >> and you know how kids are, I had to have some too. Yuk. > Yes, I'd rather have real sugar and try moderation. I'm not much of a cola drinker anyway now but yea I'll take a regular Pepsi or Coke over diet cola anytime. Rum and coke? Sure, with a twist of lime. |
| Dave Smith <adavid.smith@sympatico.ca>: Apr 25 05:34PM -0400 >> is a little disingenuous to start insisting now that vegetarians no meat >> or animal products at all. > Another hallelujah!! Thank you. I will self isolationally take a bow ;-) It was interesting to look at so many different sites that listed and described the numerous variations of vegetarians. There were a couple categories of vegetarians that they omitted, like the teen girl vegetarian who is vegetarian only in the company of their allegedly vegetarian friends, the temporary vegetarian who gives up meat for a couple years and then goes back to it and becomes almost strictly carnivorous. |
| Bruce <bruce@null.null>: Apr 26 07:46AM +1000 On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 17:34:59 -0400, Dave Smith >vegetarian friends, the temporary vegetarian who gives up meat for a >couple years and then goes back to it and becomes almost strictly >carnivorous. Yes, there are all kinds of vegetarians. Just like there are carnivores who don't eat lamb, carnivores who don't eat pork, carnivores who hate poultry, carnivores who don't eat horse, etc, etc. Nevertheless, vegetarians don't eat fish. This may be a confusion among older Americans. Vegetarianism and animal welfare are so alien to them, that they use the wrong words. Just like they call everyone who's more liberal than them a socialist. They're a bit simple. |
| Doris Night <goodnightdoris@yahoo.com>: Apr 25 02:27PM -0500 On Fri, 24 Apr 2020 23:00:36 -0700, "Julie Bove" >had one fly over his fire pit. He was doing wrong. Invited neighbors over. >They were all 6 feet away from each other but no matter. No gatherings of >any kind. The helicopter hovered until they dispersed. Do you have any idea how much it costs to operate a helicopter? They sure aren't going to be using them to monitor back yard fire pits. Doris |
| Doris Night <goodnightdoris@yahoo.com>: Apr 25 02:32PM -0500 On Fri, 24 Apr 2020 23:05:41 -0700, "Julie Bove" >> DUMBFUCK! >I am not polite when it comes to Inslee. And if you are making that claim, >then you don't listen to his press conferences or KIRO radio. Why would any of us here listen to KIRO radio? I've never even heard of it. Doris? |
| Dave Smith <adavid.smith@sympatico.ca>: Apr 25 05:42PM -0400 On 2020-04-25 3:46 p.m., Doris Night wrote: > I only have a couple in there at the moment, but when it goes on sale > I buy 4-5 packages. My husband does not allow me to run out of bacon. Some people might consider me a bacon snob. I really like good bacon, and IMO it does not come in a plastic wrapper. It comes to the butcher shop in slaps. Sometimes it might come in a box and pre-sliced. I had that Dutch butcher for number of years. When he retired I found another source, but it was more than 20 miles away, and then the couple who ran the place retired. Now I am reduced to getting it from a store that is locally known as the Meat Nazi. The guy is a prick and treats his staff like shit.I know a lot of people who won't shop there because of the way he treats his staff, and I stopped going there after an incident where I was shopping there and he came through and stopped and blasted each of the employees on duty... in front of other staff and in front of customers. However.... he does have really good bacon. I feel like Jerry Seinfeld at the soup Nazis where abandoned his cute girlfriend in favour of the soup. |
| Sheldon Martin <penmart01@aol.com>: Apr 25 05:47PM -0400 On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 14:46:56 -0500, Doris Night >I only have a couple in there at the moment, but when it goes on sale >I buy 4-5 packages. My husband does not allow me to run out of bacon. >Doris That's normal for bacon lovers. We don't eat bacon but our freezer always has 4-5 packages of Italian saw-seege, hot. Our pork loin bone-in roast is about to come out of the oven. We like pork, just not bacon We both think bacon is a giant rip off, a wee bit of meat and a lot of fat. Pork chops are our favorite. The only meat we eat is pork and beef, rarely poultry. We'll eat fish but only fresh caught, near impossible to find here... and we're not fond of fresh water fish. |
| Creme Fraiche <caf@lat.ta>: Apr 25 05:58PM -0400 Sheldon Martin explained : > We don't eat bacon That's not usually big on a Jewish guys diet anyway is it, wankstain? |
| GM <gregorymorrowchicago07@gmail.com>: Apr 25 02:36PM -0700 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/27/the-war-on-coffee The War on Coffee The history of caffeine and capitalism can get surprisingly heated. By Adam Gopnik April 20, 2020 "What would life be without coffee?" King Louis XV of France is said to have asked. "But, then, what is life even with coffee?" he added. Truer, or more apt, words for the present moment were never spoken, now usable as a kind of daily catechism. At a time when coffee remains one of the few things that the anxious sleeper can look forward to in the morning (What is life without it?), giving as it does at least an illusion of recharge and a fresh start, the charge has invariably slipped away by the time the latest grim briefing comes (What is life even with it?). Imagining life without coffee right now is, for many of us, almost impossible, even though the culture of the café that arose in America over the past couple of decades has, for some indefinite period, been shut down. The growth of coffee as a culture, not just as a drink, can be measured in a unit that might be called the Larry, for the peerless comedy writer Larry David. In "Seinfeld," which he co-created in 1989, coffee came as a normal beverage in a coffee shop—bad, indistinct stuff that might as well have been tea. (Paul Reiser had a nice bit about the codependency of coffee and tea, with tea as coffee's pathetic friend.) Then, on "Friends," the characters gathered in a coffee-specific location, Central Perk, but the very invocation of a percolator, the worst way to brew, suggested that they were there more for the company than for the coffee. Six or so Larrys later, by 2020, the plotline of an entire season of David's own "Curb Your Enthusiasm" turned on a competition between Mocha Joe's and Latte Larry's—the "spite store" that Larry opens just to avenge an insult over scones, with many details about a specific kind of Mexican coffee bean he means to steal. The audience was expected to accept as an obvious premise the idea that coffee was a culture of devotion and discrimination, not just a passable caffeinated drink. This change is real, and is reflected in the numbers. As Jonathan Morris documents in his recent book, "Coffee: A Global History" (Reaktion), epicurean coffeehouses in the United States numbered in the hundreds in 1989, and in the tens of thousands by 2013. A lot of that is Starbucks, but not all. Roasters in Italy went from exporting twelve million kilograms of espresso in 1988 to more than a hundred and seventy million in 2015. Not surprisingly, the growth of a coffee culture has been trailed, and sometimes advanced, by a coffee literature, which arrived in predictable waves, each reflecting a thriving genre. First, we got a fan's literature—"the little bean that changed the world"—with histories of coffee consumption and appreciations of coffee preparations. (The language of wine appreciation was adapted to coffee, especially a fixation on terroir—single origins, single estates, even micro lots.) Then came the gonzo, adventurer approach: the obsessive who gives up normal life to pursue coffee's mysteries. And, finally, a moralizing literature that rehearsed a familiar lecture on the hidden cost of the addiction. The most entertaining of the coffee-as-adventure books is Stewart Lee Allen's "The Devil's Cup" (1999), which helped establish the wild-man school of gastronomic appreciation. Allen, in a tone that marries Anthony Bourdain with S. J. Perelman, ventures jauntily on a pilgrimage to all coffee's holy places, from Ethiopia to Turkey, meeting everyone from the keeper of Rimbaud's house in Harar to someone who still knows how to make coffee from roasted leaves. Searching for the origins of the coffeehouse, Allen supplies much lively anthropological detail, dense with many stalwart sentences: "Everyone had warned me against taking the overnight train from Konya to Istanbul. They said it took twice as long as the bus (nonsense), that it was unsafe (rubbish) and so overheated that passengers' clothing caught fire (this is actually true)." There is also much lubricious detail: In the Oromo culture of western Ethiopia, the coffee bean's resemblance to a woman's sexual organs has given birth to another bun-qalle ceremony with such heavy sexual significance. . . . After the beans are husked, they are stirred in the butter with a stick called dannaba, the word for penis. . . . As the beans are stirred another prayer is recited until finally the coffee fruits burst open from the heat, making the sound Tass! This bursting of the fruit is likened to both childbirth and the last cry of the dying man. For all the book's Hunter S. Thompson curlicues, the essential information is communicated. The coffee bean comes in two basic families, arabica and the inferior (though easier to grow) robusta. It thrives in high terrains, and, like wine grapes, it does best in seemingly inhospitable environments—rocky and volcanic soil on mountainsides. An alternative to alcohol, coffee was central to teetotalling Islamic civilization in the Middle Ages, and spread from Turkey to points west, where the coffeehouse became the cockpit of the Enlightenment, and even up to little Iceland, where it became the national sacrament. Throughout, Allen's assumption is that everyone craves coffee, and that, while the craving may lead to many superstitions and black-market absurdities, the craving in itself is good. In the spirit of the time, craving was living. It was fun while it lasted. Now the strictures of a corrective literature have come for coffee. Augustine Sedgewick's "Coffeeland: One Man's Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug" (Penguin Press), as the title announces, tells a story not very different from the kind that might be told of Colombian cocaine production and narco-terrorism, with another product that offers simulated energy to money-driven people. Coffee got produced by something like slavery and was then pushed on a pliant proletariat by big business and the Yanqui dollar. Americans, under the pressure of mass marketing and pseudo-scientific propaganda, have been encouraged to drink ever more coffee while the peasants of El Salvador suffer and die in the brutally efficient coffee monoculture promoted by plantation growers. Both North and Central America became "coffeelands"—a peasantry making the drug, a proletariat consuming it. The first moral that this new literature brings out—a commodity that was a huge aid to the European Enlightenment was a huge drag on the people who made it—can be found as well in Antony Wild's 2004 book, "Coffee: A Dark History." Even Stewart Allen couldn't conceal the truth that growing and harvesting coffee is luckless and backbreaking work. A built-in divide separates things we hunt and things we grow: hooking swordfish and netting tuna have been the subject of romances, since the erotic aura of the chase still attaches to them. But there's nothing romantic about mass agriculture, no matter how prized its products are. Virgil's Georgics—a propaganda poem ostensibly in praise of farming—makes plain that frugality, austerity, and repetition are the farmer's civilization-supporting but lamentable lot. But, far beyond the hardships of farming, the story that Sedgewick details (and Wild sketches) identifies a system of exploitation powered by fine-toothed gears. It is much like the story of sugar told by Sidney Mintz in his epoch-marking "Sweetness and Power," from 1985: sweet are the uses of adversity, Shakespeare's Duke says, and adverse are the sources of sweetness, Mintz replies. What sweetened the cup of Europeans was bitter to the people who produced it. Extremely wide-ranging and well researched, Sedgewick's story reaches out into American political history, not to mention the history of American breakfast, but it is mostly set in El Salvador, where a large-scale monoculture of coffee began, at the turn of the twentieth century, under the fiendishly brilliant direction of a British expat named James Hill. Originally from Manchester, the birthplace of the British industrial revolution, Hill, in the nineteen-twenties, imposed a program of modern serfdom on the indigenous Salvadoran people in order to grow coffee on an unprecedented scale. Recognizing that wages were of limited value to a peasantry who largely didn't live within the cash economy, Sedgewick writes, Hill "used food rather than money to attract people" to work for him, "offering an extra half-ration, one tortilla and beans, for the completion of each task. The extra rations were always given as breakfast, which was a double incentive, for only workers who arrived at the plantations before 6 a.m. qualified for breakfast—serving stopped and work started at 6:00 sharp." Hill had the Fitzcarraldo-like obsessiveness of the European in Latin America: he wouldn't use child labor, but kids served as messengers between mill and plantation and were treated like something close to hostages, their welfare guaranteed as long as their parents worked; elderly people were recruited as spies, reporting on slackers among the working peasants. Sedgewick concedes that this program was less total than it might sound. Because coffee-growing was booming, peasants could usually find a marginally more humane deal in the next plantation. But given capitalism's inclination to cancel competition rather than encourage it—a truth known to John Kenneth Galbraith as much as to Karl Marx—coffee was handed over to an oligarchy that had coalesced by the nineteen-thirties. Eventually, a legendary "fourteen families" came to dominate El Salvador's coffee plantations, aided by a complicated program of American investment. When, in 1932, the peasants rose in a revolt, led by the Communist revolutionary Farabundo Martí, they were mowed down in the thousands, and their leaders, Martí included, were summarily executed. (A brigade of guerrillas fighting under Martí's name bedevilled Ronald Reagan's Central American policy fifty years later.) The originality and ambition of Sedgewick's work is that he insistently sees the dynamic between producer and consumer—Central American peasant and North American proletarian—not merely as one of exploited and exploiter but as a manufactured co-dependence between two groups both exploited by capitalism. "Cravings" are not natural appetites but carefully created cultural diktats. Coffee is sold less to provide an individual with pleasure than to support an industry with a skillfully primed audience. The objective of capitalist coffee production, in Sedgewick's view, was "the foreclosure of the possibility of unproductive eating, being, doing—ways of living that were not directly convertible into cash on the world market." American workers were compelled to drink the stuff as Central American peasants were compelled to make it. The coffee lobby bought scientific studies to sell American industrialists on the notion that caffeine was the ideal productivity enhancer. One manufacturer served free coffee, because, according to an industry advertorial, it insured that workers would remain in peak form, keeping "the standard set by the early morning hours more nearly stable" for the rest of the day. If faith is the opiate of the masses, then coffee is their stimulant. Sedgewick suggests that profit-seeking bosses deliberately addicted American workers to the beverage, in ways that recall the drug industry's dissemination of opioids to the same masses a century later. To be sure, Sedgewick recognizes that the actual history of caffeine and capitalist efficiency is more complicated than one might expect. Famous "rationalizers" of industrial work, including Frederick W. Taylor, saw coffee drinking as more distracting than energizing. Taylor, with his mechanistic take on human physiology, sided with the breakfast-cereal creators John Harvey Kellogg and C. W. Post, who had a dim view of coffee. At the same time, Sedgewick perhaps ascribes undue propagandistic power to the public-relations exercises of coffee producers. Like many radical historians, Sedgewick has a passionate feeling for detail, but lacks a sense of irony. Ordinary people saw through advertising campaigns then as readily as academic historians see through them now. No one, hearing that Chock Full o'Nuts is the heavenly coffee, has ever thought it actually was. Sedgewick's approach can seem dutifully leftist, but the evidence suggests that socialist models of production have hardly humanized the demands of agricultural labor. The problem, it emerges, is of a planetary enslavement to a monocrop existence. Agriculture, practiced on a mass scale, is the original sin of modernity. As Morris's history of coffee emphasizes, Vietnam, after its victory against the United States, made itself one of the world's chief producers of coffee, harvesting vast amounts of cheap robusta, first for the Soviet dependencies in Eastern Europe and then for a global market, with peasant labor and horrific environmental degradation of the country's highland coffee farms. Whatever else this was, it was clearly not an issuance of capitalist hegemony. Sedgewick, in a tradition of protest literature rooted more in William Blake than in Marx, sees mankind chained to a treadmill of obedience leading only to oblivion. His book is filled with nostalgic glimpses of prelapsarian Central America, the Eden before Columbus and Hill, and he concludes with a vision of a new order in which "food sovereignty" will emerge as "a direct rebuke to the core order of the modern world . . . pulling up the root of the international coffee economy, cutting off the principal mechanism of long distance connection between people who work coffee and people who drink coffee." Communities in rural El Salvador will then be left alone to attend to the business of eating and feeding, "picking wild fruit, tending tomatoes and blackberries, cultivating corn and beans, raising chickens, hunting and fishing, cooking with family, feeding children, sharing with neighbors, welcoming friends, eating anytime, and going back for more, again." A milder, milkier case against coffee advances from another front in Michael Pollan's new audiobook, "Caffeine" (Audible). After the evangelical, psychedelic enthusiasms of his last book, "How to Change Your Mind," he proves to be ambivalent about the jumping bean. Accepting the life-enhancing and surprisingly medicinal effects of coffee, he also relates how, in his own experience, breaking a coffee addiction can be a step toward self-discovery: it was the coffee that was waking up and doing all that writing. He sees it as a wonder energy drug—cocaine for the masses—but, where others have taken the coffeehouses of Europe primarily as seedbeds for the Enlightenment, he, like Sedgewick, focusses on caffeine's role in the regimentation of work. For all the good it does us, Pollan argues, coffee is also ruining our sleep. The caffeine addict—king or commoner—must decide whether sleep may be a more powerfully salubrious remedy than the coffee that ends it. Not much hope there for the coffee lover. One turns back to Stewart Lee Allen's work, which, though far from polemical, does contain a useful politics. It is the ancient politics of pleasure understood as something won eternally from pain—or, as St. Augustine would put it, from original sin. Most pleasures, after all, rely on someone else's pain, or the possibility of it. Sex has, historically, jeopardized lives through disease, abuse, and, for women, the high risks of childbirth. The goal of a good life should be not to denounce the pleasures but to minimize the pain. With some pursuits, the pain |
| Pamela <pamela.poster@gmail.com>: Apr 25 10:35PM +0100 On 21:53 25 Apr 2020, Bruce said: >>should say such a thing. He was at a loss. Perhaps you ask Ophelia >>what this is all about. > But do you have it in for Ophelia? Did you know her before RFC? Ophelia went on a spontaneous campaign of forging my posts in uk.politics.misc, so I came here and forged her posts. I have discussed this previously. Perhaps Ophelia thought I was Fat Tony and she had some score to settle with him. Here, at the very end, is an example of her confusion: http://al.howardknight.net/?ID=154859795300 |
| Hank Rogers <Nospam@invalid.com>: Apr 25 04:12PM -0500 Bruce wrote: > out and only good to light a fire with. > You need sandy soils, because white asparagus has to grow under > (heaped) ground. Druce, when those dutch fuckers bend over to cut the asparagus, you never sniff their asses? NOBODY would believe that. Keep sniffing amigo. |
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