Where is your God now?

http://foodproof.com/blogs/view/post/bacon-man-435

Bon Appétit

What could be better than Turkey stuffed with duck, further still stuffed with chicken? All that wrapped in bacon of course.

http://bacontoday.com/turbaconducken-turducken-wrapped-in-bacon/

Destination: Blogosphere

... Is "blogosphere" even a destination?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blogspace

"The term was coined on September 10, 1999 by Brad L. Graham, as a joke... The term resembles the older word logosphere (from Greek logos meaning word, and sphere, interpreted as world), the "the world of words", the universe of discourse."

Almost makes you forget that most of the blogosphere looks like this.

I'm skeptical--but, okay, ICGYABL, I'll bite. No better time to experiment than college years, right? New doors, new windows, yeah! Optimism! For a better future! Yes we can!

...

Now, where the fuck's my pancakes?

i am really not sure what this means

we are either important, lost in the shuffle, or both.

Peep.

Dessert Tickets Life Enhancement Programme

The very next time you get a chance, take a new route home. If you find something new and interesting, post it here.

Compliment a stranger today.

Take the subway to a place you've never been.


Go to a lecture which is not required for a class in which you are enrolled. Tell us an interesting thing you heard.

The next time you see an old man shoveling snow, ask him: "Est-ce que je peut vous aider, monsieur?" (If you are in an English-speaking clime, like Toronto or Westmount, adjust accordingly.) If he declines, politely insist once.

The next time you give money to a homeless person, tell him your name and shake his hand. Wish him good luck.

Cook something new.

Tell someone you love them. Mean it.

Write something.


Make a quick list of things that make you happy that of all possible lives you might have lived, the decisions you made have brought you here. If you have regrets that make that impossible, consider the lessons you learned from those mistakes.


Learn how to say "hello" and "thank you" in a language you do not now speak.

Tell us a story.

Watchmen

God. If there has been anything I've learned, it is that with unwaivering certainty, you cannot cash out your dessert ticket(s) in hopes of having cake, and eating it too.

The world is tired and weary of a United States' hegemony. They claim that the days of their supremacy are over, and it is now more apropos than ever to gracefully step back, quietly, into that dark night. And yet, when its economic woes come to a peak: who does it call out to? Whose name does it regretfully utter when all other alliances prove themselves useless?

You don't want a watch dog anymore? Fine. We're tired of dieing for you, for us, for anybody, anyway.

I'm not pro-America, though I appreciate the puritan dream-land its actualized, I'm just anti-unappreciation. We all live in small door ways, with hardly any room for any of us--the least we could do every once in a while is get out of the way.

Greetings from the chihuahuan desert

sooooooo...

In continuing with the fine DT tradition of foreign correspondence I bring all ye alls an update from Albequerque, New Mexico. For those of you who aren't familiar with good old Abq. it is America's 6th fastest growing city (pop 500 000ish), the altitude is 5000+ feet, and the only things for miles from where I am staying are hippies and chickens and yet somehow I still get wireless internet from inside this adobe hut. Actually speaking of the internet a lady in a shop told me a pretty sweet joke... "Lady: So I hear they don't have e-mail in Canada?, Me:yeah..., Lady: they have eh-mail!!!!!!!!!!!"
Hilarious.
Albequerque is a very strange place. I am just outside of the "downtown core" right now and the neighbours on one side have horses and on the other they are breading chihuahuas... I you have never seen ten chihuahuas in one place I highly recomend it. Also the city began as an artistic community so a) everyone is a little crazy and b) everyone is peddling somesort of craft all the time. I am pretty sure that this place is just the worlds largest hippie commune.
Anyways this trip has left me with a number of reflections on both family and this country that apparently I am a citizen of (it's a good thing I have citizenship to, officer Ramirez wouldn't have let me on the plane otherwise) but it doesn't feel like I have time to articulate them as I would like to - I am do at a Bar mitzvah pool party in an hour, that's right suckers it's 20 degrees celcius here - so I think I will wrap this up.
I mostly wanted to tell you all where to put my light on all your imaginary maps... because I am far away but the internet is magical...and terrifying

Other fun things I have learned:

1. You don't have to pay tax here if you can pay cash
2. A peacocks cry sounds exactly like a cats
3. the roving herds of giant guinea hens do not in fact want to play with me
4. Instead of catching a bus somewhere here you catch a ditch
5. Reconstructionist judiasm is like nothing I have ever seen before
6. The jewish reconstruction has absolutely nothing to do with black people
7. I really like montreal... it is a pretty special place... even if there are no chickens

Lates kids, and much love

Random Thoughts II and A Call to Intellectual Arms

Currently listening to Walkin' Down the Line - Bob Dylan
- Obama is publishing all non-emergency legislation online for five days, and allowing discussion and what not on it 5 days before signing it. It says so on the new White House blog! I thought it was interesting enough, especially for those of us struggling with what it means to be a citizen. I signed up for white house email updates (also a presidential first), and will keep the blog informed if anyone wants to attempt to read federal legislation with me whenever it's posted.

- a really long and heated discussion took place in my house today brought back many of the thoughts and experiences that filled my 11 day trip across almost every southern state in the US. Now that i think about it, i have to write such thoughts on an entirely separate post, at a later time.

one of the best aspects of blogs, forums, and other forms of internet communication is the ability for dialogue. I recall an allusion 'Love made several months back about the act of a teacher lecturing being similar to a factory pouring contents into a jar.

Love and i have had this discussion before, and while i think some of his economic and utilitarian (i don't really know what else to call them) educational beliefs are valid, i think it's easy to forget what an accomplishment it is that such a high amount of university educated citizens exist because our north american system has evolved the way it has. The fact that so many Canadians have the opportunity and choice to study at several phenomenal institutions for a price that is affordable to much of the electorate is something i would certainly attribute to democratic progress.

However, because this system is as economized and accommodating as it is, the fantasy of screaming at one's professor over a cup of coffee is something that can only be achieved with $45,000+ dollars a year.

I guess what i'm trying to say, and it's almost 3 am so forgive me if i don't show as much enthusiasm and coherence as is needed, but the onus on us to ensure that we are maximizing this experience. We are our own teachers. The fact that all of my freinds attend class everyday and learn things entirely different but equally as thought provoking amazes me.

So please, post the inquiries, musings, and deliberations that you encounter throughout the day, or tell me and everyone else in person. And dammit greg, i better know something about rocks when this semester is done!

Like Points of Light

I'VE ALWAYS LIKED the idea that people could be plotted as blinking points on an enormous map, connected by gossamer wisps of concern and love. When I fell in love for the first time, that conception was an important part of it: not that I always knew where my beloved was, or what she was doing, or that I even wanted to know--but that our two lights were connected wherever we might go. Part of my attention had a home in something outside myself: and it felt, thought, moved independently of me. There is something about the metaphysics of separate-but-connected that I find profoundly appealing; that an object of concern has goals and paths to pursue without me is good poetry. For me, part of all human connection is geographic--locomotive--in nature.

These days, I'm connected--differently, but perhaps not less meaningfully--to many more people. It is no great task to fire off a text message and learn, in nearly real-time (subject to the recipient's idleness and consciousness), where on my map a person's light should blink into apparition. In a way, this extra information heightens the sense of the simultaneous: at the precise moment that I am engaged with a thing, someone else, remarkably, is invariably concentrating on something different--moving toward some other end.

Perhaps it should not surprise me, reading an article like this one, that technology is catching up with my vision. Oh, it may be that expectations of privacy will refuse to bend as far as realtime, synchronous updates--but the precedent is set, and privacy has yielded to convenience before. Not just in geolocation, but in many other ways, the advancement of technology will continue to change the way we live, work, love--in brief, what it means to be human. Web 2.0, whatever that means, decreasing bandwidth rates, and increasing processing power are all coalescing into something big. What will be the effects on our emotional lives? On our spiritual lives?

Twitter is already becoming incomprehensibly popular on the strength of people's desire to answer and have answered the question, "What are you doing?"

Indulge me: Where are you?

WE ARE IN HALIFAX

FNUR FUNR FUNR FNUR FNUR FNURNF FNURN FNURN


WE"RE GOING TO TPLWAY FOOSEBALL NOW PENIS PENIS


LOVE ME AND BERNICE


TILA TEQUILA

blaaaaaaaaah (Sunday Night Blues)

TO EVERYONE WHO WISHES they were still at home: you and me both. Remember we're all in this together. Do things you like. Help others. Get interested. I guess. Blah.


icgyabl is trying to find the part of him that actually wants to be back in school but isn't sure what he will do when he finds it

Blueberry Pancake Sausages

I am fascinated by American consumerism. Especially when I find myself hugging the boarder between Lumpkin and Dawson County, Georgia.

Here, like many small, rural, American towns, urban growth is largely dominated by grocery stores, outlet malls, and pocketed centers of fast food services. In recent years, Lumpkin and Dawson County have been subject to this wildfire spread of Krogers, Targets, and the like, but one especially influential addition has been the Super Walmart. The United States is home to 2,447 of these "supercentres," which provide the provisional goods that a regular Walmart would, along with a full-service "supermarket," garden center, pharmacy-- even a pet shop.

The Lumpkin County Super Walmart is a spectacle. It's the colorful uncle of Target, the circus-bound cousin of Trader Joes, and a freakshow of both products and consumers.

The few times a year I find myself in this pocket of the South, the Lumpkin Supercentre has my special attention (mostly because it's the only available option for an outing into the "city"). A monolithic structure of cheap thrills, the Walmart takes up well over 10, 000 square feet and is surrounded by a desert of concrete, with shopping carts for tumble weeds. One enters to an array of smells, immediately posing the question: is it the vegetable aisle or perfume counter that I desire most? Instead of being alluring, however, this battle of scents merely produces a heavy mix of smells neither inviting for taste nor application.

I usually find myself strolling through the aisles of the "grocery-centre," as it produces amazement most readily.

I am astounded, flabbergasted, and appalled by the selection. There are rows dedicated to mayonnaise (even that of the bacon kind), cheese balls covered in mustard-laden-meat, and everything that can imaginably be pickled. There are even sections dedicated to particular meal times. Breakfast seems to hold the most interesting specimens, with Jimmy Dean heralding the movement for a more quick-ready-weird morning. According to Mr. Dean, we should own neither pans nor oven tops. Breakfast is not a meal to be prepared, but one that comes in bowls, skillets, and patties. Almost everything is pre-made, including omelets and bowls stuffed with eggs, cheese and sausage. Jimmy has even eliminated the steps involved in combining your favorite breakfast foods, such as pancakes and sausages. This Frankensteinian corn dog was what frightened me the most, as I wondered if Walmart shoppers really did consume such "foods."

However, answers didn't need to be sought very far-- they were right in front of me!

The Lumpkin Supercentre is a mirco-culture of every Southern American stereotype in existence. There are morbidly obese couples, families of 10, missing teeth, full denim outfits, and more varieties of overalls than I knew existed. And, scanning each consumers' grocery carts, there lay some edible alien of a food product that couldn't help but astonish.
Well, at least from my perspective.

Is it wrong that I take pleasure in people watching? Scanning abnormal variety with disgust? Privately mocking good 'ole folks, in the store they can best afford? Probably, yes.

But, hey. I'm from here.
Technically, I'm allowed to be a little critical of my own kith 'n kin.

(But Yankees sure as hell 'ain't).

There's no exiting Albany any time soon.

Silly Sarte, hell isn't other people, it's the Albany bus terminal!