Posts

Obituaries for Bad People: Rush Limbaugh

      I disagreed with Rush Limbaugh on just about everything, but even I need to concede credit where that credit is due, so thank you Rush, for finally doing something helpful and dying. Limbaugh died today at the tender age of 70 and when someone dies that young you often think about all of the good they could have done with their remaining years, but Rush was an iconoclast who defied conventional wisdom. Instead of, "what could he have done?" we are left thinking, "how much better would the world be if he died 50 years ago?" During his years on earth Rush took, disparaged, destroyed, and used everything and everyone he had access to for his own personal enrichment and gave absolutely nothing in return. He was the avatar of Ayn Randian-super man; utterly unconcerned about the health and well-being of anyone but himself and openly disgusted by the processes of a functioning society. His death makes all of our lives richer and his absence will be felt by no one. RI...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Cookbook of Irreproducible Results - A Miso Soup-ish

Image
     Welcome to the first installment of A Cookbook of Irreproducible Results - a series of recipes that rely on my specific ingredients, kitchen, and attentions. They are probably impossible to recreate, even by me, but that doesn't mean your specific ingredients, kitchen, and attentions, can't make a comparable or superior dish. They probably should, all things considered.     The unlisted first step in all of these recipes is: i.) do the dishes as you go - literally every recipe has one or two or five minutes here and there where you don't have to do anything. If you aren't doing anything, you could be doing the dishes. Regardless of how well this recipe turns out, you will be happier at the end if the dishes are done. Just do the dishes. A Miso Soup-ish      Miso soup traditionally begins with dashi,  which is a Japanese broth made from dried kelp and bonito flakes (smoked/fermented/dried skipjack tuna), but I don't have either of those,...
Post a Comment
Read more

Little Seasons - Short Meditations on the Weather - Royal Summer

Royal Summer        It’s so hot that you let the song finish before getting out of the car. It’s parked under a tree and there hasn’t been a cloud in the sky in four days. The cedar mulch outside the grocery store is smoldering and sitting in the car and waiting for the song to play out, all the way out, is the most comfortable you’ve been all day. On your way back home you take the county route, and take it slow, and when you park under the willow you roll your windows all the way down. The night’s coming and it’ll be cool, or at least cooler by comparison.  You sit out on the porch and look up at the night sky and don’t move, because when you don’t move you don’t sweat. The lights aren’t on and you can make out the thin specter of the Milky Way, though you’ve never been one for constellations. You let it blend except for a blink here and there from a star, or a plane, or a satellite. Out near the rock wall and the lilacs you also notice the blink blink blink b...
Post a Comment
Read more

Starting Onions - 92 Million Miles From the Sun

Image
       It's mid-February and while the daylight situation is improving, it is still total bullshit. I'm at about 42.6°N, which means that today we have around 10.5 hours of "daylight," but since this is winter in New York that daylight is filtered through a nearly ever-present gray cloak that renders everything a pallid shadow, myself included.       The sun is about 92 million miles away right now. That's pretty close in terms of both our own specific elliptical orbit and the general distance to just about anything else in the universe, but it is also a distance so great that it can't really be internalized by anyone. Ninety-two million miles isn't something you can close your eyes and experience second-hand, like a long drive to a grandparent's house, but in the winter, when it's dark when I head to work and dark when I leave, I think I can get a little closer to understanding that distance.
Post a Comment
Read more

Welcome!

Image
       Welcome to 1% Inspiration, a blog dedicated to my inefficiency and also probably typographical errors. It has no theme and it will not be shared anywhere. It is a waste of time, but it's a waste of my time, though if you've found yourself here through some sort of search engine witchcraft, I hope it's not a complete waste of yours. 
Post a Comment
Read more