walked up weaverton cliffs, gliding turkey vultures, back down as the sun sank the same. confederate sharpsburg restaurant out of wings, not allowed to dice chicken tenders into the arrabiata. bonfire by antietam creek, one forkful pasta another fishnchip fries, owl on the way out
repeated trips + $2,000 to friends overseas, 14 vtsax to aclu & edf, 7 to archive, mozilla, weta & wiki. annus horribilis latin for asshole of a year
baked the tuna then smoked everything else in the house
read..
(1) decay before ten sixty six
nationalist english historians and novelists alike treated defeat at hastings as an emotional trauma. tolkien notoriously took the norman conquest so hard that he avoided every connection with the french: 'bag end' is a defiant response to the imported phrase 'cul-de-sac', which angered tolkien every time he saw it on a street sign
the whole english leadership class..had lived for decades in 'a nexus of scheming and manoeuvring..entangled in deceit and self-deception'. since the death of aethelred the unready, this had steadily hollowed out the morale of taxpayers and the county levies
(2) certain fetishistic election day gestures
the worst basketball game i had ever watched in my life - where one of the players was dribbling a human head and the other was being gently lifted by the mascot to help him dunk
but the desire to see the sitting president eat electoral shit was so powerful it had almost taken a place in maslow's hierarchy of needs, somewhere between reproduction and personal security
second amendment dog oral in the name of the deposed king
(3) the thurston howell the thirds of teton county
the top one percent of teton county residents make 233 times more per year than the bottom 99 percent
all kinds of studies exist of poor people, but not many of the rich. again and again he repeats how important it is to understand the rich because of their "immense influence"
in the outdoors the rich can pretend to be like everybody else
with their wealth that piles up on them unstoppably, like the chocolates coming off a speeded-up conveyor belt in that episode of i love lucy
in order to live on land, plants evolved complicated plumbing and energy-sensitive seeds, sacrificing the efficiencies of living directly in the sea. algae never left the primordial soup. they photosynthesize with every cell and reproduce exponentially
over 10,000 years, the gut flora of the japanese have uniquely evolved to digest red seaweeds
hypothesis that stone age humans settled the americas not by traversing the beringia land bridge but by navigating in boats a "kelp highway" of whales, seals, fish, and seaweeds hugging the pacific rim
a skilled sailor left to his own devices might have occasion to carve out a fine pornographic scrimshaw on sea ivory. one side of a carefully engraved walrus tusk might show a whaling ship in full sail, adorned by leaves, anchors, and cannons - the other, a naked lady sitting on the head of a sea monster
rectangular breasts made by loggers
consumerism eradicates the creative libido
(6) the giraffe through antiquity
'it bears the joint name of both animals.' camelopardalis
'necking' - swinging their necks against one another, seemingly to establish dominance. (there will surely be more to discover about necking, too, in years to come: it often leads to sexual activity between the warring males. indeed, most sex between giraffes is homosexual: in one study, same-sex male mounting counted for 94 per cent of all sexual behavior observed
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