The Charity-Industrial Complex

Continuing my philanthropic social experiment. This is not a complaint! It's an exploration of the "Charity-Industrial Complex."

Having paid a whole bunch of charities with a concentration on animal rescue and starving children, I now get not only more solicitations but stuff from their mailing lists multiplied by each successful charity hit. I get at least a dozen begging letters every day (not Sunday) asking for my help in this CRISIS CRISIS URGENT DESPERATE any number of causes, not even political. We are stretched to the breaking point but we couldn't let these horses die! Shocking pictures  of animal atrocities. Miserable exotic species captive in awful prison-like zoos! Thousands of kittens experimented on (I knew they would get to the kittens sooner or later) PUPPIES TORTURED! Save the horses: the used-up race horses, Arabian horses, draft horses, abandoned donkeys! SAVE THE DONKEYS! Save the innocent donkeys (remember, all animals are "innocent"). Save innumerable "sweet" dogs and cats, blind dogs, laboratory dogs, helper dogs, vivisected dogs. Dogs for suffering war veterans....how did I get into the veterans section? Police dogs, armored vests for police dogs, 
and all of them worthy in one way or another.
I took a break from giving. There is only so much misery in our world. It won't go away, ever. They send me more stuff. Not only the begging letters, but coins (pennies, nickels, 50 cent pieces) trinkets, magnets, decorative gloves, material made to look "hand written" with an imitative typeface. Piles of paper, blank envelopes to draw us in by curiosity. A deck of playing cards with rescue donkeys on the back side. Please, we're desperate humans and animals, please help us! And the most prolific of all, the "FREE GIFT..." Decorative address labels, coming to me in the thousands like the leaves of fall. 
You've heard this all from me before. What I realize, is that this is...fun! I like reading about the infinitesimal possibility that some human or animal is actually helped by this. You did a good thing. Or maybe you didn't. All of this is carefully manipulated to produce the most emotional response. It's our world but the donkeys and horses are still the beasts of burden.

More Adventures in Kitchen Philanthropy

It was finally clear to me that Charity, with its endless stream of pseudo-transactional "free gifts," is actually an industry, just like the ones that shape our world day after day. Except that you are not expected to pay for your car or your bottled water by "voluntary" donation. I happened across a website for people who manage non-profit organizations (not cited here) and they were talking about the business of putting together "packages" for their clients. I think it goes: you have a cause, but you don't know how to market it. They put together a package for you with options to choose from like address labels, token coins, lists of tickets and vouchers, photographs and graphic design, etc. You just pay them to do it and you specify what you need. Am I right? I know there's at least one professional fund-raiser in this little Facebook circle of mine (Tim).

Another thing I learned is that these small-scale charities (and many of the large-scale ones too) repeat their mailings to me at intervals of about every other month, depending on how much I gave to them. Animal welfare....here comes Pickles the Pig again! Here's Randy the horse who we saved from the "Killer-Buyers!" Crisis! Urgent! Time is running out! How could you let these innocent animals be sent to the slaughterhouse? (All animals in these texts are "innocent" or "sweet," and the repetitive, emotionally intense texts all sound like they were written by the same person, which is probably true. "What do I do for my job? I write blurbs about abused animals for charities. Save the Koalas!")

Meanwhile the suffering only spreads and intensifies, both for people and animals.
I am sailing on a raft of stacked papers over a sea of pain and suffering and horror, hearing endless cries for help in the crisis! crisis! crisis! A few dollars more will especially help here! Your free gift is enclosed.

Kitchen Philanthropy

Kitchen Philanthropy

I decided to assuage my guilt by giving money to various charities. I was not going to actually volunteer to work there but I figured anything would count, even money. 

I picked my favorite concerns: helping starving people around the world, and helping save animals from abuse and misery. I sent my first check in and felt like a generous philanthropist. (I am not revealing how much I gave to anyone.)

Within a week or two I was inundated with a stream of papers. For most of these there is no “do not share name or address.” I found myself buried in the waves of literature and Stuff. I was awash in the outflow of the “charity-industrial complex.”

This is not a complaint, I’m certainly not asking for sympathy. I am just amazed at how much energy and material I received because I participated in charity. 

First was the literature, written with high emotion: CRISIS! URGENT! DESPERATE!  ABANDONED!  ABUSED! The solicitations contained heartbreaking stories of dying animals and people. Dogs beaten and left to die! Horses sent to slaughterhouses for their meat! Innocent little donkeys neglected and brutalized! Orphaned refugee children, Native elders frozen to death…if I read all the literature it blended into one endless scream. How could I not give? These were real, not fictional. 

Next, the charities sent me a dizzying variety of tokens, usually with the message of “how could you not give, now that we’ve sent you this calendar?” I received, paid or unpaid for: Calendars, world maps, “petitions,” “vouchers,” “surveys,” “membership” cards (I received eight Audubon Society cards for one membership), refrigerator magnets, pens, little note pads, a calculator, a manicure kit, tote bags, colorful socks and gloves, coins, a very soft grey blanket, childrens’ trinkets, and dozens of other “we gave you this” solicitations. And most of all was the “free gift,” which was always and everywhere…decorative address labels. Like the snowflakes of winter, the petals of spring, the seeds of summer and the golden leaves of fall, myriad repetitions of my hateful name, address labels by the hundreds, by the thousands. If I had kept them all they would fill my entire kitchen. They were decorated with animals, children’s drawings, mountain scenes, crabs, (I received five copies of  “Save the Bay”), eagles, patriotic motifs, in an endless stream. I wondered how many it would take to use in a campaign mailing. No, I’m not running for anything, except kitchen philanthropist. Can you imagine how many solicitations a real philanthropist with millions of dollars gets? And the small change coins affixed to the gift form paper, I probably have a few dollars' worth by now. And everything was “personified” with The H-Name I Hate.

Lest you think I have become deluded into giving my money into false or wrong charities, I set limits on all my giving. I toss most of them into the trash. I won’t tell you how I judge which one worthy, but I have been seen stuffing the hatch of my car with paper recycling. Those politicians are not going to respond in sympathy to abused little donkeys, and I’m not answering fake “surveys” which are only propaganda. And as soon as they received my donation, they asked for more - naturally…and they wanted me to give every month, too.

URGENT! DEADLINE ! IMMEDIATE ACTION REQUIRED! CRISIS! CRISIS! YOUR GIFT WILL BE MATCHED BY A DONATION…They’ve taken to having their gifts matched in  modest or unreasonable amounts. I have no idea whether that is real or not, or whether any of this is real. Again…have I cast all my money into some corrupt scheme? I have noticed that most of the animal rescue concerns originate from a single post office box address in Merrifield, Virginia. Hey, that’s literally around the corner from me! Should I visit?

My kitchen is full of papers. I am not feeding the hungry here and frankly I don’t know whether any of my payments get anywhere near the starving children. How many has my money fed? How much success is there? I would imagine that very few out of the thousands are eating because of me. But, well, let’s think of the proverbial man on the beach surrounded by stranded starfish. He is throwing them back into the sea so they can survive, one by one. A kid comes up to him and asks what he’s doing. On hearing about his mission, the kid says, But there are millions of them. It won’t matter how many you save. And the man answers as he throws another starfish back, “It mattered to that one.”

40th Anniversary as a Catholic

After more than a year I am returning to writing here on ELECTRON BLUE. Watch out for words. I will be posting commentary and other writing again here. This piece was transplanted from Facebook and will be available indefinitely.

Why I Stay a Catholic after 40 Years

An anniversary with much hesitation to announce here in public. 40 years ago today, May 24, 1979, I was baptized into the Roman Catholic Church. This was after eight years of struggle as to whether to join or not. I first found this calling in Rome, yes the real Rome, where I encountered the world of aesthetics, visual splendor, and a paradoxical faith for someone from an atheist-Jewish background. I think it was always the art, the color, and the stories, the rituals and the devotions, and the thousands of years of history that attracted and keeps me there. The aesthetic element is not trivial and not mere "trappings," it is the testimony of a church that believes that the divine entered the material world. I am well aware that for most people the Catholic Church is now revealed to be a place of atrocities rather than piety, and so it is, but the paradox is that I stay although I don't go to church at this time. I also stay because I believe that the Incarnate One, Jesus, is a real entity, not just a name. He is someone I could imagine as a real presence. I have always had wonderful friends and supporters in my faith so thank you, Michael and all the others I would rather not name. I hope this church, the creation of inspired people, can somehow regain its goodness on the planet Earth.

From the Archive: Clear Cut

This is my father, Harold Shapero, standing in what appears to be a barren desert. But actually, it is the future site of the house I grew up in, an L-shaped mid-century modern ranch dwelling where there is no ranch. The earth my dad is standing on is a clear-cut, the kind of complete forest and land removal that is currently done on mountainsides to strip-mine coal or other resources. In this case, the mine would house families. The year is 1955.

This ecologically devastating project, named "Wethersfield," would never be allowed in our more sensitive era. The developers tore out all the trees and leveled a hill to an acceptable grade (though the driveway of our house was always at a noticeable slant). They went into the sandy, rocky glacial soil of New England and built homesites on poured concrete slabs. These houses didn't have any basements. My father is standing where the slab is going to go. If you look carefully at the dirt plain, you can see little markers on rods marking out where each house will be.

The artificial prairie of our lots attracted unusual birds and wildlife. For a couple of years, horned larks built their ground-nests in this environment. These larks usually breed in the Arctic tundra. The developers planted tiny saplings by the open streets, hoping that the trees would survive and be a good habitat.

The tundra didn't last. Once people were there, they loaded in landscaping, extra buildings, more tree saplings, and flowerbeds. Nature did the rest. Native trees and plants re-colonized the clear areas, marching in from protected swampland. By the early 1960s, there were already shadows on the ground. By the late 60s, open meadow habitat birds had gone and forest birds like nuthatches had re-appeared. 

Nowadays you would not believe that this development had once been a clear-cut space of imitation tundra. It looks like a New England forest, shaded by grand maples (the little saplings of 1955) and tall white pines and spruces and yellow poplars. The flat houses which were built in an echo of the "Prairie" style have mostly been replaced by two-story comfort zones. And the home that would occupy the place my father is standing, has been re-built as well, surrounded by the remains here and there of the old mid-20th century settlement.

March 16, 2018

The Return of the Blue Electron

Greetings from the subatomic world. As many of you know, my orange Element, a heavy Element, was crushed beyond repair on January 16 in the particle-race of my urban neighborhood. I was only mildly hurt (bruises) and have recovered. It was necessary to get another car, and this is what I got. It is a Honda Civic with a hatchback door. I have driven Hondas for more than 20 years so I went with what I trust. Aesthetic values were also important; I wanted an orange car but the only orange Honda is the minuscule "Fit" which was charming but tiny. This Civic is basically Honda's smallish utilitarian car, with plenty of cargo space in the back,   a modernist Japanese-anime look to the exterior, and a brilliant metallic blue color almost identical to the original Electron Blue Honda CRV that I used to drive. So...say hello to "Electron Blue 2." (This blog is number 3. Confusing? Yes, like road signs in Fairfax, VA.) I am driving the urban labyrinth in this conveyance now and I'm taking some time to get used to it. It will be a while before I get over the accident but I need to do it. 

I haven't posted to this Electron Blog for quite a while but now that the new particle is glowing on the roads, I will be writing more for it. I will be "re-blogging" some of the material from "Art By-Products" which will remain mostly art-centered. This blog will show some of my photo-restorations and writing about the fascinating places and people from the family archive. And if I have more words to emit, I will do so as part of my "blue-shift."

I Was a Libertard

Blog readers - if any...this essay has taken me months to write. I have not abandoned the Electron, I've just had to look into my past and make sure the embarrassing details are correct. This writing will probably annoy some people, and amuse others. It's also quite long for an Electron text but I felt the need to tell this story given the current state of politics and the pervasiveness of the ideology. If you don't like what you read, feel free to go back to my "Art By-Products" which is a lot easier on the intellect. I would be glad if anyone read this effort. So: here comes the train...

I WAS A LIBERTARD

I used to be a “libertard.” What’s that, you ask, is it like what the unpleasant ones accuse Democrats and liberals with, a “libtard?” No, not what the gymnasts wear, it is not a leotard. I made this one up because it really needs to exist. It’s a name for a libertarian who is as convinced as a fundamentalist of his (or rarely her) beliefs and has proof for all of them. And would gladly lecture you on the subject but you’re not intelligent enough for them to waste time on.

I encountered Libertarianism in the late 1970s and especially in year 1978 when the national Libertarian convention was held in Boston. I had some good friends who were devoted Libertarians and I used to hang out and listen to them. Another major influence on me was reading the “Bible” of libertarianism namely Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged.” I read this instead of studying for my final exams in graduate school and nevertheless did well academically, though I hated every minute of it and was preparing to leave. 

All of the libertarians I knew were science fiction fans and worked in the tech industry which was a big economic factor in the Boston area. In 1978 the Internet belonged to the U.S. military and a handful of scientists who shared data. Engineering and space calculating folks, almost all of them male, hung out in Harvard Square and their center of attraction not to mention book collecting was the “Science Fantasy Bookstore” presided over by the owner, Bruce Robert “Spike” MacPhee. I  hung out there and listened to the conversations. It was not just politics they discussed, but “alternative”  religion. I first heard of Neo-Paganism at Spike’s store, and it scared and fascinated me. 

Rand was the prophetic author of the Holy Scriptures that no Libertarian can fully escape. The important thing is that Ayn Rand was a science fiction author, not a conventional novelist. She was succeeded by writer heroes such as Robert Heinlein, Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, L. Neil Smith, and other macho-techno scriveners. This is added to with conservative theorist authors like Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. These authors are on just about any Libertarian’s bookshelves. Their books often describe, as Rand does in “Atlas Shrugged,” a deteriorating civilization which can only be saved by brilliant engineering geniuses, “enlightened” military warlords, and capitalists of various sorts, reconstructing smokestack industries for the coming Millennium. Does this sound familiar? This is a fantasy by and for engineers and scientists. I listened patiently to countless conversations about how technology would save the world (this is the era of DARPA and the early Internet, after all.) The literary fans were the same people who dreamed of building themselves self-sustaining space or Moon or Mars colonies - with a libertarian social structure of course. Libertarians in Space! They were dosing themselves on Heinlein and Rand, a couple made in a philosophical techno-Utopia, “Galt’s Gulch” in space at the L5 equilibrium point.

If you assimilate (or are assimilated by) Libertarianism, you come into the domain of a weird variation on the clockwork world of the Enlightenment. The world, not just Earth but the Solar System, our Galaxy, and eventually the whole universe, is a great machine of turning gears, moving measured parts, action and reaction, check and balance. And the highest virtue is Reason and Logic, which Libertarians worship to this day. If you are intelligent enough, if you have enough reason and rationality, you can understand the system and see how one follows another, cause and effect, effort and result. And once you understand the system with your imperial wisdom, you can make it work for you.

In this view, there are no accidents, no mishaps, no inborn flaws or inevitable events. Everything has an explanation, and every problem has a solution, which you are responsible for. No begging for help from someone else - if you have the problem, you have the solution. Don’t have a job? Move to another place where there is work. Are you sick?  Maybe you didn’t live a “healthy lifestyle.” You should work harder and make enough money to pay a doctor. Did your car break down? You didn’t maintain it. The combination of reason, rationality, and hard work can turn the wheels of the world. At least, this is the way it is supposed to be. Basically, the world makes logical sense and behaves in a logical and ultimately predictable way. This is true not only for us struggling individuals but for the general social world. Is a company polluting the environment? Organize a boycott and lawful protests to oppose the company, or just ignore it as pollution isn’t that bad for you. Is a store selling inferior merchandise?  Is a provider delivering poor service? Don’t buy it and by the rules of logic, the store or provider will fail. In Libertarian World, not only are you the individual expected to take care of yourself, so is the wider social world. Sometimes, this works. But not all the time. What happens then? What happens if an accident or disability befalls you? You can organize help for yourself, find a job that allows for your disabilities, even seek help from a church or private charity. No one stops anyone from doing voluntary charitable work. But what if that is not enough? Government welfare? No way. “Taxation is theft!” The free market will solve all problems! Even if some poor soul is too disabled or old to work, you should not be forced to hand over your hard-earned cash to help them. You did the work, it was your mind and skill that earned the money. But…in that world how can anyone survive? Even if you did care about them? What if your best was still not enough?

No buts here, libertarian purists. Inexorable logic and reason will explain everything…maybe. Both in the social and the physics world. I often wonder what Ayn Rand would have thought about the findings of quantum mechanics, in which at the smallest level, there is no logic or chain of reasoning, only dismal, sizzling statistics. She actually lived at a time where quantum mechanics was well-known, but she didn’t choose to read about it or find out more about it. Where the “Objectivist Epistemology” depended on classical Greek or Medieval notions about an absolute rational-mind reality, anything that challenged that with a fundamental irrationality was simply unacceptable.

So you may ask me, What on earth attracted me, a typical miserable Eastern graduate student intellectual with a good background in basic knowledge…what on earth attracted me to Libertarianism and their prophetess Ayn Rand? It’s paradoxical. She ranted that “emotions are not tools of cognition!” but what attracted me was the way Randworld made me feel….powerful. I read Rand and wanted to be like Rand’s tall, hard edged blonde or red-haired heroes. I wanted to turn the world’s wheels, too. I wanted not to be an effeminate academic but a mind mover with the ideological wind blowing my cape behind me as the train passed by with a stirring horn blast. I knew the secret now. Rand’s Art Deco stylizing gave me a rush I can still feel today. It was part of why I left academia and became an artist instead…I wanted to re-create that rush in my own art work. And not picturing drippy mermaids or woodsy cottages or big-eyed puppies or girls in their nightgowns standing by golden pillars. I wanted to paint the images that would rev the engine of logic and industrial righteousness for you as well as me. 

The only problem was that it was all a myth. The greatest shame for any Rand-ite was that I could not make a living all by myself. I accepted the crushing shame of not having a high-paying job but instead taking money from my generous parents. The shame of FAILURE. Which I have never escaped. I will never be a slick entrepreneur making millions on some gleaming iconic contraption. Nor will I ever wear a steel-hued satin evening dress. But I still sneaked looks at “Atlas Shrugged” every so often, just for the rush.

It was only when I read Adam Lee’s three-year commentary on “Atlas Shrugged” that the rush was stopped by a concrete block of moral reasoning and practical analysis. Lee is an Atheist blogger under the “Patheos” label and a fiction writer himself. He undertook this chapter-by-chapter evaluation of the Rand Scriptures purely for the need to save would-be thinkers like me from being ground under the wheels of the Objectivist train. He posted faithfully every Saturday and for those years I couldn’t wait for each week’s installment. He brilliantly deconstructed the twisted morality, horrific kinky relationships, proto-Fascism, and other dark smoky labyrinths of violence and wrong thinking, as well as the steaming plot holes.

Adam Lee destroyed the Rand zeppelin for me, but rather than watch it crash and burn I re-integrated the feeling into a line of my own art. You’ve seen my bright-colored geometric abstractions for years. The designs originally come from Art Deco and the early 20th century Bauhaus and the works of Paul Klee or Wassily Kandinsky. But they also come from old Madame Rand, where I can take ruler, T-square, or Photoshop and cast colors into the darkness. They are my skyscrapers, my power plants, my rockets and oil refineries, my technological flames. Now that you know their origin, you may not like these compositions any more. That won’t stop them. There’s always something completely different for you. In the name of the best within us, as the Iron Rand would say.

Solstice Sunbeam

(This was started around the winter solstice so even though we are approaching the Equinox it may still be of interest.)

Electron Blue 18: Solstice Sunbeam

There is a seasonal phenomenon in my dwelling which I have observed with reverence ever since I noticed it. From December until mid-January, beams of sunlight from the solstice-lowered sun, stream into secret places in the apartment: the auxiliary bathroom and the hall closet. The angle of the sunlight in these winter weeks is low enough that it streams through under the eaves and finds its mark in my otherwise poorly lit apartment.

Here is the winter sunlight.

This sun invasion is something that human beings have noticed ever since they developed language and memory. If they stayed in one place long enough as settlers they would notice that the direction of sunshine and the elevation of the sun above the horizon followed a yearly cycle. When they knew how to predict these cycles, they set down markers to note it as a calendar. This is why the sun rises between the pillars of Stonehenge on the winter solstice, and why the sun only enters some monuments at solstice or equinox. 

This usage is worldwide, wherever people saw and observed the sun and its path. In Abu Simbel, Egypt, the Pharaoh Ramses II built a giant monument to himself and his divinities, the sun gods Amen-Re and Re-Horakhte. The monument was built so that on his birthday and again on the anniversary of his coronation the sunlight would thread its way through a pathway carved into the rock, and illuminate Ramses and his patron gods’ images with its golden rays. National Geographic has an excellent article on this monument, including the story of how modern engineers disassembled the stonework and re-built it out of reach of the waters of the reservoir Lake Nasser.

My apartment building is not a monument to any divinity that I know of, but nevertheless the sunlight comes in and illuminates a significant place: my bathroom. I can see and feel the warm sunlight and know that the season is turning. The sun will gain now, and winter will lessen. Let us honor the Sun Gods (Ra Ra Ra!) and the memory of Ramses, for the sun shines upon his throne.

Resisting Turnip: Boredom or Cuteness

Electron Blue 17: How to resist the Turnip

He’s here to stay, I’m sorry to say, our world and its media currently seem to orbit the misshapen roundish vegetable and all its satellites and its every perturbation. He and his antics get ratings, and ratings get money and clicks, so it will keep happening with nothing to stop it - except two things: Boredom and cuteness. Have you ever gotten bored with a “reality” TV show? Have you ever turned off a show because its storyline got dumber and dumber? Have you hoped in vain that something interesting would happen so that it would be worth watching again? I’m not saying it couldn’t happen, but the media universe is full of irresistible things which lost their inspiration, or their capacity to generate outrage, and ran aground on the stolid rocks of boredom and the channel switcher. I’d rather watch a pitcher rub a baseball against his butt than listen to political speeches telling me how great it is going to be. OK, it was great for the Cubs. Not so great for the rest of us, maybe. 

If you’re bored with baseball, try this strategy to resist the Turnip. This is something which happens constantly even if people don’t consciously promote it. You can trivialize the monster. I’ll give you some examples. When the first “Star Wars” film came out, the one now known as number 4, Darth Vader was a genuine villain. He was terrifying! Not only that, he committed genocide on a planetary level, when his “Death Star” reduced the entire planet of Alderaan, along with everyone on it, to space rubble. This was one evil character. He stayed evil until the very end of film number 3, when the film makers started giving him more sympathy, as long as he was dead.

During the decade following the Star Wars films, people started to see Darth Vader in a comic way, including parodies, comedy skits, costumes, games, collectibles, and a world wide wash of Darth Vaderiana. Even more, there were Darth Vader kiddie toys, lunch boxes, Halloween costumes, plushies, you name it. Here was the killer of millions, destroyer of planets, asking for candy at someone’s door.
And nobody blinked.

The same thing has happened with the eldritch horrors of H.P. Lovecraft, where the dread Cthulhu has been turned into a toy for babies and their parents. Cthulhu is soft and green, with tentacles and big eyes! And what of the toys made in the image of plague germs? Do you really want to take Ebola Virus to bed with you? I guess that some of this must be considered “avertence” behavior, trivializing and making it cute so that it will not kill you. But can you see the terror through the plushie? 

Then why not try it with the Turnip? I saw toys made from Hillary, with hideous “Hello Kitty” style oversize heads that looked like embryos. Did they do it with Turnip? Comedians are working overtime so let’s see the Donald Toys. They will be drooled on by babies, chewed by dogs, and kicked around the house by rambunctious kids. Can we make him funny so he will not hurt us?

The Return of Electron Blue

Electron Blue 16:  Changing color and returning

So it happened. The thing that none of us impotent rational pallid intellectuals dreamed of in their nightmares happened. The overweight orange Rutabaga has been selected as the leader of the free world, more or less. The vegetable has won. And in the word sphere, he is associated with the color Orange. How dare that Turnip take my brand away from me? He’s been called “His Orangeness,” “Orange Face,” “Big Pumpkin,” and other names of that sort and I won’t stand for it. I didn’t stand for Turnip then and won’t now. This means, among other things, that at least for a while, I am “divesting” (a word currently on the Buzzword List) from Orange. I pulled all the orange garments out of my closet and will fold and hide them. I can’t stop driving my Orange Honda Element, I do need the transportation. But I wish I had some sort of high-tech liquid crystal car paint job that could transform from Orange to another color with the press of a switch.

Then what will I use for my theme color instead? I already switch twice a year, in Advent (the four weeks up until Christmas) and during Lent (the six weeks before Easter). Priests in the Catholic and Anglican churches wear purple during these seasons, as well as blue sometimes. I have been purpling myself for years so why not now? I have plenty of purple stuff. 

And as for this Blog which was named “Orangeness” when I started it as a humorous screed, well, things haven’t been so humorous since I started it. But I still want to write. So how do I change colors here? By going back to the past. I had a blog called “Electron Blue” from 2004 to 2008. It was named after the brilliant blue color of my car at that time, a Honda CRV. I wrote “Electron Blue” to chronicle my self-driven project to learn mathematics and physics, so the original Electron Blue was science and math-oriented. Unfortunately, I ran out of time to study these things, due to pressure from the day job. A few years later I revived it as “Electron Blue 2” and that ran for a year or two. Now that I no longer have the day job, I have more time to write so why not just switch back to the bloggy colors of blue and violet, (with a little orange accent here and there) but without the exclusive emphasis on science. I fished the header art out of digital oblivion, changed the wording and a bit of design, and now I am ready to once again throw my little koosh balls of verbiage into the endless chaotic flux of the infosphere. If you are interested, the URL for this remains the same: http://elementorange.blogspot.com. I will be writing about a wider range of things than in the previous two iterations, as well as continuing my humor and rants when I feel like it. I’ll help you forget Turnip and his gang of vegetables, at least for a moment or two. Welcome to Electron Blue 3.

The Algebra of Madness

Orangeness 15: The Algebra of Madness


A does not equal A but B equals A. Three times AB is 1/3 of AB. A multiplied by -1 is 10A. If you repeat A does not equal A long enough and enough times, it will be true. And you can divide that by zero and come out positive. See? I'm good at math. I'm the best at math. I can tell those math professors at MIT plenty they don't know. I can turn a billion dollar loss into a billion dollar gain, because 1 billion = 1 billion. I know more about math than anyone. Believe me. So if you block off something with parentheses, which any high school kid should know, you get everything that’s covered in those parentheses. I know more about math than anyone, and I’ve got that all figured out, trust me. Multiply that by a fraction of 300 million and you get 600 million, all coming to invade us. Honestly, do the math. You’ll have math teachers begging on the streets.

Meanwhile, if you take your e-mail archive and actually look at it before talking about it, you will find important subjects like sales from Macy’s, L.L. Bean, Target, Home Depot, Staples, Safeway, and 10,000 ads, 20,000 demands for your time and money from an entire charity industry, even an entire economy. That’s important, right? So let’s do the math. 10,000 + 20,000 = 30,000. Plus or minus about 3000 extra ones from the prolific “Dot and Bo” online fake furniture store, which sent out so many e-mails that the company went bankrupt. So that’s it for the e-mails, add it up and it’s nothing. Right! 

Believe me, I know what numbers are. After all, a woman is from 1 to 10! They call those “real numbers,” which means they’re not fake. Not fake at all. I only want women who are 10s, that is number winners, decade girls, orders of magnitude, baby. But after 30, forgeddaboutit. There’s a linear equation here matching age with hotness, inverse proportions. Trust me, you start at 10 and go up from there till you get to 30 and that’s the end, you’re off the graph. Career over.

Remember to only trust the polls that have me ahead. I’m a winner and cannot lose, do the math. Is the math rigged? You tell me. I’m good at math. I’m the best at math. I can tell those math professors at those fancy colleges what they don’t know. Believe me, we’ll put them all out of business. Nothing will count any more, only me.

Rent A Helper

Orangeness 14: Servant

I want a servant. Not a slave or some poor soul in debt bondage, and not a nanny. I want someone like the person who took care of me while I was mired in the House of Mildew. She was not just a house cleaner, she was a multi-star general of home economics. She could tell you where everything was going and contact the people who would disappear it. But the best was that she took care of me while I dashed around meeting with lawyers and realtor and CPA and e-mailery on my laptop. She brought me food she made herself, nice stuff like salads and pasta, since there was no food left in the Refrigerator of Dismalness. And she did my laundry!  And made my mildewy bed!  And she bravely swept up the mouse droppings. And all this work from a lady who just celebrated her 80th birthday!

I am now totally spoiled. I am waiting for someone to do all this household work for me, now that so much of the contents of the old house are now sitting in my apartment exuding that lovely perfume into my enclosed urban atmosphere. What would I like this person to do? She and her team will clean off all the baked-on mung and greasy dust in my kitchen. She will help me move the stored materials into another room. She will vacuum my rugs when my back hurts too much to bend over and do it myself. She will make my bed with fresh sheets which smell good! She (or they) will clean the cavelike deposits from my bathrooms. And so much more. So why not make it so, as the Captain says? I have done it, contracted a professional service agency who is going to come to my apartment with a cleanliness team and make a first stab at cleaning the joint up.

But this isn’t all I want my caretaker to do. I want her to actually like me, in a tenuous and idealized version of what a nice relative might be like. Like, bake cookies or look through my books with me preparing to send them out, or just have a conversation. I grew up in a world of sarcasm. I’d like to have just a few non-sarcastic moments in my life, especially in our current twisted atmosphere. I would pay for it. Just a few hours every few days, maybe. Pathetic, you’ll say. Make your own friends. Would you believe there are companies with “Rent-a-Grandma” service? And personal assistants ready to help you? I don’t trust it, but the concept is out there. With no nagging voices about how socially inept I am. You arrange and pay. This whole thing existed with the “lady’s maid” in the nineteenth century and earlier, but it is culturally dangerous in our modern era since the maid will probably be from another country and have different customs. Right now I’ll settle for cleaning and less dust, and hopefully a smile.

Dust and Ashes

Orangeness 13: Dust and Ashes

I scattered my mother’s ashes at the site of the old family house. You might think that Massachusetts is a barren sub-arctic place inhabited only by granite boulders and evergreen trees, but that isn’t true. There are jungles of vines and scrubby swamp trees wherever people do not cut it back. And that was where I poured out the ashes. “Fertilize plants, Mother,” was my liturgical blessing. After all, my mother drew tree forms constantly, so she might as well have her remains (or “cremains” as the funeral home called them) turn into trees. Whenever it rains, the water will percolate my mother’s atoms into the soil along with the roots and the mushrooms. Good enough for Nature.

I was nervous about opening up the little dark blue box of Cremains. What if it looked kind of like mulch, all stringy and roasted and dark, with leftover things in it, like eyeballs and fingernails and bone bits and the metal pin that they attempted to fasten her together with, what if there was still something recognizable in the pile? Fortunately, the funeral people had ground it all up or cleaned it, so that the remains of my mother looked like a fine mass of greyish-white powder, easy enough to undo the plastic bag and sprinkle it here and there in the jungle. A neighbor was kind enough to witness this, so I wouldn’t have to do it all by myself.

I was wearing high boots so I could walk through the brush and leaf piles, but since there was a wind the ashes blew from the places I poured onto the new polish of my boots. We wiped the ashes off but now no matter what, my fancy outdoor high footwear will have some atomized remnant of my mother’s existence on them as long as they exist. But were the ashes to speak, they would complain that I had paid too much for the boots.

This harmless dust resembled no less, or more, than the heavy deposit of sticky powder that had accumulated in my mother’s bedroom over the years and years of neglect. It was on the windowsills, the tables, the jewelry boxes, the cabinets, the tschotschkes on the shelves, the shelves, the TV, the video cassette player from the 1990s, the annihilated unplayed cassettes, and almost a thousand books, piled up after reading and never touched. After seeing the ashes, I realized that my mother had already partially disintegrated and was turning into ashes even before she passed away. And now I look at the same thing happening on my cluttered shelves and in my cluttered dwelling and my cluttered living room filled with the pre-ashen detritus of the old house. I swear to the great Goddess Kondo (Japanese de-cluttering queen), I swear to the God of dust and ashes, DON’T LET THIS HAPPEN TO ME. Dust, dust in the wind, dust on the books, as my birthday approaches: Take it away, throw it out, blow the dust off before you become dust yourself.

Spring Verbiage

Orangeness 12:  Verbiage

The infogarbage spew is going full blast. You gotta love something that, to quote a Facebook post, sucks your brain juices. Now that we live in Turnipworld, we must emulate the Great Rutabaga and continue to forget everything we learned, even if we didn’t learn it till 2013. Wow, the celeb facts are flying at full speed. Jaw-dropping historical photos! Adorable celebrity moms! You’ll never believe what the Rutabaga said today! We may have to put up with this vegetable for years.

It’s not just social media (LIKE ME DAMMIT I NEED CLICKS), it’s sociopathic media. Another neck-snapping unexpected consequence of some Harvard dropout genius’ invention to ogle coed girls. Don’t you wish you had become an engineer instead of an artist? I still don’t know which way to insert the USB plug, which of course they knew all about back at MIT in 1968.

There is so much verbiage garbage that a mere paragraph on Facebook (CLICK ME I’M HERE ALL DAY AND ALL NIGHT) of BuzzLanguage will not suffice. Let’s take a trip through the May garden of buzzing words, while endangered bees grab pollen for their doomed honeycombs:

We are hoping that the Turnip will “pivot,” a choice word for changing your stupid ideas while still trying to sell them. Turnip knows only turning towards the sunlight of public attention. That’s all he knows. You will not beat him by out-thinking him. He is, if you really must think about it, an “existential threat” and “categorically wrong.” Now what again is an “existential threat?” I believe that it involves a chain-smoking, unkempt French philosopher coming at you brandishing a Communist hammer and sickle. The French have seen all this before. And what is “categorically wrong?” I think I heard Barack Obama use it (correctly, too) so that must be some of that intellectual talk we need to forget about.

Have you ever seen a Unicorn? Yeah, the white Little Pony that farts rainbows? Well this Unicorn is now defined as a start-up company that is already worth a BILLION $ before it ever makes or does anything! We must be entrepreneurs, folks, and chase that Unicorn! How will we attain start-up heaven? Be disruptive! Outthink disruption: innovate new possibilities with Analytics. Big Data is your friend, even as it is sucking out your brain juice! (I WANT BLOG PAGE VIEWS! READ ME! No, blogs are too long gimme Twitter tweets!). Big Data knows your secret consumer desires. Do you have a role model? I want a role model, even if the words are so Boomer. Millennials agree, but what is a role model? Here’s a (somewhat edited) excerpt from an article in a real paper magazine:

“My definition of a role model is someone who maximizes their potential to push the boundaries of their circumstances with passion, purpose, integrity, and the sensitivity to know they are setting an example for others along the way….I can relate to the underdog story. He is showing us all how through belief in yourself, hard work and dedication, it is possible to achieve your dreams, prove your doubters wrong, and go from an underdog to a (star).”

Tell me about it. 

Passion! Purpose! Integrity! Believe in yourself - and work hard! You, too can become a DJ or an emoji designer or a Unicorn….or a turd of impressive size, weight, and fiber content.

O.C.D. in the parking lot

Orangeness 11: Obsessive Compulsive Parking

“Park Prettily,” I read at a car park in England. Nothing pretty about it, Brits.

I am edging back and forth, forward and backward, trying to place my Dorkmobile into a rectangular parking place. Go forward, go backward, turn steering wheel a little bit…Too much! Back up. See those worn-out yellow lines on the asphalt? You need to be 1 foot away from them on both sides. 12 inches, that’s all you get. Open the door and see 9 inches between you and the line. No, that won’t work. Your fellow unpretty parker will open the door and bang a dent into your door. My car is pocked with these mini-dents, there’s no way to avoid them. And I’ve probably doored someone else’s car dozens of times. 

Park Prettily. Back up again. NO WAIT someone is coming down the parking lot alley at high speed (at least for a parking lot) and you can’t see them because you’re in between monster “mini” vans that look like enormous sweet potatoes on wheels. Mine is equally oversized but rectangular and boxy rather than ovoid. The designers of this parking lot did their planning in 1991, when it was built. That sounds like yesterday, but it was more than twenty years ago and cars were not giant vegetables back then. You could actually park in one of their spaces without smacking your neighbor’s car door with yours.

It’s mathematical, trigonometric if you draw the lines carefully. A change of just a few inches as you back up is multiplied into a large arc in the front. You are making parts of a 270-point turn and inscribing an arc that moves along a virtual circle trying to move your wheels sideways while moving forward and backward inch by inch. But those other drivers haven’t stopped, they’re whizzing by in back of you and you can’t see. Ah, but wait, potato driver to your right is stashing her grocery bags in the back of the mobile and she is LEAVING. Time for you to find your wallet (another commercial adventure) and escape. But no, another vehicle whose size dwarfs the blob that just left has pulled up into the space. Not a vegetable, this is the crate the vegetables got shipped in. Let’s see them park prettily. 

Donald Trump as Vegetable

Orangeness 10: The Big Turnip

Whenever I see the word “Trump,” it looks like “Turnip” to me. And, y’know, that Trump person who’s all over the news kind of looks like a large root vegetable, the rutabaga who for whatever subterranean dirty reason is running for the Presidency. Well you know about me and vegetables, so what is it with Rutabaga that appeals to so many people? They say it’s because he allows people to think and say nasty things and get away with them. “He’s not a politician, he tells it as it is.” Really. This is your role model? I lived with someone just like that for all of my young life, my father that is, he ran his mouth just like Turnip but didn’t have the advantage of being filthy rich which excuses all bad behavior. There isn’t much I can say about Turnip that hasn’t been said before, especially since he’s playing us all with calculated advancements of schtick that titillate the media in vibratory doses. Yes, he’s a vegetable with an electric info-dildo that causes frenzy and even violence, while he looks on sucking it up. 

The info-dildo’s stimulation, of course, comes from the energy of burning info-garbage which I elaborated on in the previous Orangeness post. When you burn info-garbage you get a toxic pollution of burning media fumes and an overload of smokin’ emotion. Because this is how Turnip is the root of our current culture of emotional whipping. Check out your buzzwords! Jaw-dropping! Eye-popping! Shocking! (Number 7 will astonish you!) Stunning! You need to see this! You’ll never believe what happens next!  He can keep you rolling and remember, all attention during a campaign is good attention. Wouldn’t I love to have that amazing dirt-proof quality, that no matter what I did or said, my followers would still be thrilled with me. But do I really want to be a celebrity? Do I really want to eat vegetables so that I could generate more methane for my info-garbage trash fires? Or perhaps, in some jaw-dropping turnaround, Turnip will finally fall into the boiling pot and get mashed.

Infogarbage

Orangeness 9: Infogarbage

The Internet is a vast ocean, spanning the whole globe, even where it is land. It is an ocean of electronic information, not water. There is a reason why moving from site to site is still called “surfing the Net.” Every time you turn on that computer and connect, you are exposing yourself to the endless circulation of metaphorical water and allegorical salt. 

And, just like the real ocean, the Net-Ocean (fishing nets, that is, to snare you and your fellow creatures) has regions and seas, some clear and balmy, others polluted and full of harm. The bottom is lined with the shipwrecks of “dot-com” companies, start-ups, service providers, search engines, and the remains of once massive lords of the sea….Compuserve? Altavista? Geocities? Whale carcasses, all of them now.

There is now so much plastic and other pollution in the ocean that it has spun together to form artificial islands and a permanent layer of compacted material, harmful to fish and sea creatures. And the Ocean of Internet is going this way too, but the polluting material is not physical but informational. I call it “infogarbage,” and by now there is no place either in the ocean or on the Internet that has not been somehow compromised by it, even if it is tiny and hard to see.

Much blather, sometimes true blather, has been written about the “monetization” (lovely word, that) of the internet, and the frantic competition for people’s attention. The oil of the information age is attention, that “made-you-look-and-click” thing. See where I’m going with that metaphor. Oil, fossil fuel, is so essential that people will drill the bottom of the sea to get it. On the internet, monetized sites drill to the bottom of your brain and suck out the oil of your attention. Their sole ambition is to get people clicking on the site and sharing it on social media in international cascades of infogarbage, “going viral,” and thus showing that it is a suitable drilling platform for more attention, more ad space, more info garbage. And it’s cheap and can’t break and exude awful goo all over the shoreline.

What, you say, my time is my own, and if I want to click on celebrity facts or cat videos, why shouldn’t I? Yeah, don’t we all. But then I discovered that these obsessive little entertainments are provided by an enormous industry of spammy sites, which underlie the ubiquitous ads. Back in the ancient days just after the millennium, reams and reams of spam was delivered to us under a bubbling coating of word salad, shredded civilization aimed at defeating the spam filters which kept the pollution manageable. Now there is no need to elude the spam filters - we readers have BECOME spam, and we take it in every moment of our blenderized attention span. An enormous industry uses thousands and thousands of pseudo-informative sites to extract from us. You are a resource to be mined and exploited. If petroleum had consciousness, it would be you, bubbling up the pipe along with countless exploitation web sites.

They have names often compounded with “buzz” and “viral.” ViralRecall, BuzzBombed, BlitzLift, Lifescript, Bite the Buzz, Mindbuzz, PeekWorthy, ViralWorld, Mind Pause, Distractify, Viral Hog, Buzzify, PopnHop,Viral Recall, ViralIgniter, CoViral, Viral Scoop, Shareable, BoreBurn, Bored Panda, Boredom Therapy, DamnBored, Lifebuzz, SetViral, GuiltyFix, Flipopular, Viral Mega, and on and on. This protozoic proliferation of infogarbage sites is managed by a few “content management” companies such as “Taboola” or “Outbrain.” From these sources, massive rivers of info sludge pour into the Net Ocean. They deliver the basic output of tabloids from history: celebrity gossip and facts, grotesque freak shows, lurid crime stories, cute animals, sports, medical quackery, and of course, female cheesecake. Boobs, ass, and more boobs. The more you click, the more boobs you see. And eventually you will be set upon by malware, the hook under the bait.

You can see the evidence of these myriads of catch-you sites as “by-lines” under “sponsored posts” or even in supposedly legitimate “news” posts on Yahoo or CNN. You have probably seen and consumed material from millions of them. These sites can MAKE MONEY by renting ad space, and may be the basis of what is advertised as “how to make a fortune working only four hours a week.” Yes, if you create and manage 100 or 200 garbage sites, you’ll get royalties from the ads. Maybe only one dollar per site or 1/10 cent per click, but you’ve got a lot of them and it mounts up, so let’s create ViralBuzz and its permutations and go off to our warm beach in the Caribbean! More celebrity boobs, baby. What is notable about this industry is that it produces NOTHING. No craft, no food or drink, no helpful gadgets, no books or medicines or furniture…nothing except money.

So we are back by the ocean. It’s clear, blue and sparkling, and the rum drinks with the fruit in them are on the table, and your laptop showing the output of your 700 info garbage grab-you sites is hidden under the pillows. That’s the same ocean you’re polluting, but in an informational way. In the world of information, there are no limits. It’s jaw-dropping and mind-blowing. You’ll never believe what can happen next.

Epic House Clearing

It’s been a while, we know that. My last  “Orangeness” entry was in early October of last year, 2015. A week after that, my mother broke her hip in a fall at home. Twelve days later, despite attempts to repair it and rehabilitate her, my mother passed away aged 94. 

Since then my life has been seriously disrupted since I am the only heir and executor of her estate, and she left a load of stuff behind which has to be taken care of. So in these months since then I haven’t had either the time or the energy to post to the Orange. But it’s 2016 now, and February, the dreariest month of our year, so I need to get back to what I like. A sip of orange juice if you might say, though orange juice reminds me of my late father who was rather unsavory in his addiction to orange juice. 

Let me tell you about what was left to me in this epic passage of generations. Plenty of money, enough to pay a lot of taxes on, so I am now for the moment one of the greedy parasitic inheritors of unearned wealth. And a decrepit house in a Boston suburb, filled with 60 years of hoarded parental material, ranging from ancient decaying coats and clothes and shoes, to 60 years worth of financial statements and check stubs proving that my mother bought a bottle of milk in 1974. And my father’s piano, which a piano technician has proclaimed un-repairable. It sounds like an otherworldly dulcimer and I have recorded some untuned piano sounds to use in later ambient compositions. Last but not least there is the archive of my parents’ musical and artistic careers, which includes my father’s music and media recordings. With great effort on my part and Maggie, the archivist at Brandeis University, we were able to stash all of my father’s music material into the Brandeis Department of Music archive, where it can be accessed by anyone interested in the music of my old Dad.

Much more difficult to curate is the large collection of unsold art of my mother’s. My mother created a large amount of art with no intention of selling it. She just made it because she was compelled by talent to do so. Talent unfortunately does not mean money and in her day it was considered completely crass and low for an artist to market his - or especially her work. So my mother’s output is sitting slowly falling apart in the two back rooms of the rather small house. I have gotten a couple of them placed or promised to museums or collectors but the majority remains with the old house…and the mice. 

Yeah, I haven’t mentioned the mice yet. Not computer mice, real rodents, in their numbers, infest the house. I heard them scampering in the ceiling and behind the furniture. I did not see one, which is good because if I had I would have immediately decamped to the less infested Hampton Inn. The mice were feeding on old birdseed left in the room behind other things we couldn’t see. Even when we removed the birdseed the mousies kept coming because they had left stashes in their nests which they built all around the house in hidden hoarded places. Now mouses are cute, right? Mickey and Minnie? Three Blind Mice? They are NOT cute. They are vermin. And what I didn’t know about mice is that they pee and poop all over where they go, for territory and path marking. And this mouse effluent stinks unbelievably - worse than a skunk, if you have ever smelled that. Mouse effluent is also transferable. In that it contaminates whatever touches it, which in turn contaminates whatever touches that, etc. etc. I have been spraying Febreze and other stink relievers and I still smell it more than a month afterward. 

It was Christmas time and I was re-enacting the Battle Against the Mouse King, but I had no Nutcracker or Toy Soldier Army to combat them. My helpers set up traditional snap-traps baited with peanut butter and seemed to put a dent in their numbers, but what we really needed was a fierce cat who would rid the house of them gladly.

Work has been done. I need to de-clutter my own place, and every time I remove something, I either stupidly buy something new, or find more stuff. I’m like my mother. I have check stubs from 1987 in a big space-filling box. 1987, you are going to be history, if I can get to you. That’s almost mid-century, though I think my mother beat me in the long-term hoarding department.

The old living room still looks mostly as it was when my parents lived there, mid-60s style. But the antique dealers are at work. I am selling off furniture pieces one by one, though I can’t do that while I’m not there. I managed to get rid of the most well-known piece, the chair known as the “Womb Chair,” designed by the famous Finnish architect and crossword-puzzle fill in word Eero Saarinen. This chair is a famous mid-century modern design but I always disliked it. Once you got in it you couldn't get out. Sort of like being in a womb I guess. You would struggle to get your butt out of the deep back of the chair and then you would pop out wet and screaming to pick up your drink from the round cocktail table which my father built to go with all the other mid century stuff.

As I have stuff removed from the house in advance of selling it, I offered the chair to a local antique store specializing in mid-century modern housewares and furniture. It is supposed to be worth some money but there has been some deterioration over the years so maybe not so much. At least someone will buy it and it will find its way to a better home. I'm still looking for a  home for the art, which is large and difficult to display, and also smells of mouse pee.

I guess you’re up to date now.

February 14, 2016.

The Pope on the Pot

I took the Pope into the bathroom with me a week ago, when he was touring the Mid-Atlantic States region. It was sort of an audience, but not arranged by his protocol directors. The Pope went into the bathroom because he was on the cover of TIME magazine that week. As we all know, we want to take reading material into the bathroom when we, uh, plan on spending some time there rather than making a quick papal visit. We would like this to be quality time, but that quality depends on the diet, productivity and output of the sitter.

So I look at the kindly visage of the Holy Father, and I cannot quite shake the notion that he is looking back at me, even though his eyes aren’t directly focused on me. It’s like all those magical media items in the “Harry Potter” movies, where not only do pictures and prints move and make noise, but they interact with you personally. No! Don’t let the Pope see me on the pot! I’m so embarrassed. I put my hand over the Pope’s printed face. To use a more religiously appropriate situation, like an Orthodox ikon this picture is a “window to the soul.” Pope Francis’s image, clad in clean white tissue, made smoother by the work of holy Photoshop, is a transparency. Would I take an Orthodox ikon into the loo? Would I take a lavishly illustrated cooking magazine into the place where the post-digested remains of its recipes ends up? 

I have always had the primitive notion that things have consciousness. Depiction is communication. It is listening to me. And as our culture and technology get closer and closer to Harry Potter’s magical world (Internet connection for your dishwasher! For your underwear!) we will reach a point where the Pope could give us a blessing in our private quarters, and really mean it. If things have consciousness, can you insult them? I once said “Go away!” to “Siri,” the robotic voice of my iPhone, and she answered back, “What did I do to offend you?” I hurt a robot’s feelings! I know of people who take their Kindles and iPads into the W.C. with them, endangering their pristine shining screens with the splash of ritual pollution. 

I fold up the magazine. TIME is out of time and I will have to attempt another devotional session, helped by more prunes and an apology to Siri. Yes, sorry….I’m TOO POPED TO POOP!

Food Rave

You've heard Rants here. A Rant is a complaint, delivering negative feelings. A Rave is the opposite of a Rant: it's an enthusiastic declaration of positive appreciation. So here's a Rave, this one about the foods I love.

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I am holding a little slab of pure deliciousness. It is Orange, of course, but it is not a citrus orange. It is a dried apricot, known as a “slab” because during the drying process the fruit piece settles into a flat puddle of sticky sweetness. You have to forcibly remove the slabs from me or else I eat the whole package contents and get a wicked bellyache. Same with prunes and other items of dried delectability.

I’ve talked about foods I hate (any green vegetable), now I’ll talk about foods I love. Start with appetizers. The “appetizer” word just makes me feel good thinking about it. It is not an “app” that you load on your smartphone, despite how hipster menu-makers describe it. It is a collection of nodules of happy flavor that you and your friends devour first. Whenever I hear the word “jalapeño” in any food description, I know I’m in the right place. The time-honored thing to say when you get a plate of appetizers, especially nacho jalapeño appetizers is, “It’s a whole meal on its own!” Which of course is more than true, but you’ve already eaten it and are going on to the main course. Take a swig of your micro craft draft brew and continue.

Meat! Let’s meat up! There is no food more satisfying for me than meat. I am a confirmed carnivore. I tried being a vegetarian for 6 weeks one year and by the fourth week I was ready to slaughter the next Whole Foods customer I saw. I will never do that again (not slaughtering the customer, that is purely theoretical my friends!). You can prepare meat however you want it, and I will slink up to it on silent paws, waiting for my share. But it’s not just meat that occupies my plate ‘o’ plenty. I will eat potatoes done any old way, even though I hear that a potato comes from a plant. The secret is….cheese. 

Cheese! Wonderful fermented curdled crumbly slimy moldy essence of the primal whiteness of dairy! I will eat any food over which cheese has been applied, even tofu. Bleu cheese looks like zombie remains, smells like a swamp, and I adore it. Brie is covered by white fungus: More please. See how the Cheese melts its way through everything I love to eat! I am never without it, except while traveling, when I cannot keep it cool on the road. 

We are therefore building to a display of gourmand logic, built upon not those dreary food pyramid groups but on the feastable moment of my favorite treat foods. What has cheese, meat, starch, fried stuff, and peppers all at once, in one magnificent oozing cylinder? The CHEESESTEAK of course. Let me meditate upon this a while. It is a serious matter.

I simply won’t mention dessert. That is for another posting, another time.


I am holding a large container in my hands. It is my Offering to the Gods of Snack. (Or Slack, if you prefer.) It contains mixed dried fruit, almonds and cashews, and a few bits of milk chocolate. It is something I can always eat, as long as I don’t eat too much of it. (See above.) It looks like an old-time lottery or Bingo container from which tokens were picked. I hold the cover down and shake the container vigorously. Then I place it on the Kitchen Table and reach within. Behold, I have won the lottery. I have selected a PRUNE!