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Author Archives: Jon
Stop thinking, and end your problems. What difference between yes and no? What difference between success and failure? Must you value what others value, avoid what others avoid? How ridiculous! Other people are excited, as though they were at a parade. I alone don’t care, I alone am expressionless, like an infant before it can smile. Other people have what they need; I alone possess nothing. I alone drift about, like someone without a home. I am like an idiot, my mind is so empty. Other people are bright; I alone am dark. Other people are sharper; I alone am dull. Other people have a purpose; I alone don’t know. I drift like a wave on the ocean, I blow as aimless as the wind. I am different from ordinary people. I drink from the Great Mother’s… Read more
Why Am I Vegan?
People seem to be asking me a lot recently why I am vegan. This is likely because I have recently been around people socially a lot more than I have in a very long time. My problem is that I have no idea how to answer that question. I know what my reasons are, but I am also pretty sure that no one actually wants to hear them. I am particularly sure of that when I am asked during a meal why I am vegan. Since I have no desire to cause a scene or freak anyone out, I never know what to say. You see, at this point, asking me why I am vegan is like asking someone why they are Muslim or Hindu or Feminist. It is such a part of my ethical and moral DNA that it is almost offensive to be asked. For me, being vegan means doing all that I can to make sure that other animals (human animals included) do not suffer because of my arbitrary choices. It means reveling in being able to, in great degree, live my life without causing suffering to my fellow creatures. On the other hand, it is also… Read more
Posted in Pondering
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Alex is an illustrator from Barcelona with poor spelling and grammar skills. He has started telling the… Read more
Thru-Hike Postponed
Well, my Appalachian Trail hike isn’t going to happen this year. Time and money come and go faster than I anticipate sometimes, and this is one of those times. With less than a week until I was planning to leave, I have to call this off for now. Strangely enough though, I am not as bummed out about this setback as I thought I would be. It just is what it is, and I have another year to prepare and further hone my trekking skills. Since I originally posted my plans, quite a bit has changed in my life. I have moved back to my old stomping grounds in the Appalachian mountains, adopted a dog that was near death, hiked some of the Mountain To Sea trail, reconnected with a lot of great folks from my past, and started working on some long-term plans beyond my hiking goals. Hopefully I will be able to post a bit more now and chronicle my year of preparation for a 2011 thru-hike. Stay… Read more
Posted in Doing
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Backpacking Shelter
It’s hard to say what piece of gear is the “most important” when putting together backpacking gear, since most long-distance backpackers are cutting it down to the bare minimum anyway, and every piece of gear is actually essential. That said, the psychological first step in my gearing up quest was to take care of my shelter. Small and light are the watchwords here, and shelter seems to be an area of backpacking gear that tends towards the heavy and overbuilt, almost as much as rain gear. My search for light and fast shelter quickly pushed me out of the standard outdoor store and into the world of cottage gear makers. These folks, when faced with the problems of super-heavy, overbuilt gear, decided to do something about it, and began making their own gear, and then selling the better designs to others that were, like them, annoyed at how heavy most camping gear is. I started compiling a list of my options for shelter, and it basically boiled down to three broad types of… Read more
Georgia to Maine
I suppose this will make it “official”, or at least utterly embarrassing if it doesn’t actually happen, but whatever. I’m going to hike the Appalachian Trail this coming Spring and Summer. I plan to leave Amicalola Falls State Park and hike up to Springer Mountain and the start of the Trail on March 16th, give or take a day or two. With any luck, 2,168 miles later, I’ll climb Mt. Katadhin in Baxter State Park in Maine sometime in the second half of July. I will walk an average of close to 20 miles a day, taking a day off once a week or so to resupply, eat non-dehydrated food and clean myself more thoroughly than I can in the woods. I will carry everything I need (or at least everything I need for a week at a time) with me. It weighs less than 15 pounds, not counting food and water. Food will weigh about 2 pounds per day, and I will carry two liters of water (4.4 pounds for the conversion-challenged). All told, on the heaviest days of my trip, I will be carrying 33 pounds of… Read more
A New Direction
For the few of you who read this blog regularly, you have undoubtedly noticed the paucity of posts over the last several months. This is attributable to many things, but mostly it is because this blog, and all of my online doings, have become part of a wholesale reappraisal of my life (getting a jump on that old canard the mid-life crisis). During that reappraisal, I spent a good bit of time reading the things I have posted here over the years, and decided that I didn’t like the direction my writing here was moving in. It had become too reactionary, too temporally topical and in some cases downright silly. Instead of continuing on in that vein, or simply walking away completely, I have decided instead to refocus my writing on subjects near and dear to me, but to shift the emphasis from that of critique to something more like reportage; focusing on things as I encounter them, making sure to keep in mind that watching them on television or reading about them on the internet is… Read more
Posted in Pondering
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So, in addition to being a smug bourgeois know-it-all with a shaky grasp of history, it seems Pollan is also a raging… Read more
I don’t really have words for how annoyed I am by the sanctimonious Mark (needs-to-get-a-dictionary) Bittman’s Vegan Before Dinnertime. Fortunately I don’t have to, because Dr. Mary Martin has them for me. Maybe Bittman, Michael Pollan and Peter Singer could all get together over a nice pile of foie gras and butcher the meaning of vegan a bit… Read more
Out of the Kitchen, Into the History Classroom
The favorite bourgeoisie food scribe, Michael Pollan, recently published a whining screed about how people don’t cook anymore, they just watch other people cook. Of course, as with all Pollan articles, by ‘people’ he means the bourgeoisie; white, upper middle class social strivers with disposable income and well-examined navels. These people, the bourgeoisie, have always aspired to NOT cook. Julia Child, who Pollan appreciatively credits with his mothers, and his, “culinary awakening”, is not so disingenuous as to pretend to be a defender of some sacred social ritual. In a 1989 interview, Child states simply that “I grew up in the teens and ‘20s, when most people had—middle class people—had maids or someone to help.” She goes on to say that her mother only knew two dishes, and herself, none at all. None of this should be surprising. The aristocratically wealthy have always had cooks amongst their servants, and the bourgeoisie have always longed to emulate, as far as… Read more
Stoned wallabies make crop circles says Lara Giddings, the attorney general for the island state of… Read more
There are not words to express the horror of Essex Ganguro… Read more
Ever wonder why you’re fat? This Is Why You’re… Read more
Some Outdoor Activity Definitions
Reading through a bunch of hiking and backpacking message boards brought up an interesting subject recently; namely, what is “backpacking”? After some pondering, I think I have arrived at a satisfactory answer, to me at least. Hiking is walking (and only walking) in natural environments, often but not always, on trails specifically for foot traffic. It is the natural environment bit that separates it from walking. Camping is living outdoors temporarily(?) , often in the wilderness and generally in non-urban areas and may involve the use of a tent, primitive or natural shelter, or no shelter at all. Backpacking is the convergence of hiking and camping. To be backpacking is to hike while carrying all of the gear one needs to camp (shelter/cooking facilities/etc…).In my definition, it is also necessary to actually use those camping items to camp (or intend to). Synonyms to my definition of backpacking would be trekking, tramping (in NZ) and bushwalking. So, one can hike for… Read more
Gearing Up For Long Distance Backpacking
As many of you know now, I have gotten bitten by the backpacking bug after almost a decade away from any kind of outdoor adventure at all. One of the great things about this hiatus is that the state of outdoor gear has improved by leaps and bounds since I last had any interest in it. It is now within the reach of most folks to backpack long distances well outfitted carrying less than 15 pounds of gear, and sub 10 pound loads (food/water not included) are becoming commonplace. Excited by this turn of events, I set out to see what I could do to outfit myself with everything I would need/want for long distance backpacking while keeping the weight under 30 pounds From Skin Out (FSO). FSO weight includes not just gear, but all clothing worn and all food and water needed. Why thirty pounds? I came to that number based on an initial calculation of my Lean Body Mass (LBM), which is your body weight minus all body fat. For me, it comes out to about 143.5 lbs. Once that was established, I… Read more
Are you guys vegetarian? Why? Yes, we are all vegetarians (more specifically, our diets are “vegan“), which means we do our best within this insane framework of capitalism to live cruelty-free lives. That said, we do encourage people to slaughter and devour organically-fed, free-range human corpses. Especially those of “post-vegetarian” crusty-punks and university students. The planet will thank you for it. (from the Propagandhi… Read more
Due to an unnamed legal dispute with EMI, Danger Mouse & Sparklehorse are releasing their new album (with 100+ images by David Lynch) anyway, sort of. The “Dark Night of the Soul” album is available as a book and blank CD-R package, “to use however you see fit.” hat tip to… Read more
What’s In Season?
I try to eat as much as possible with the seasons – getting fresh local produce when it is at the height of flavor and nutrition, and the difference that has made in my diet and my (at least perceived) health has been enormous. However, getting a hang on just what is good now and what isn’t is pretty difficult when you are just figuring it out, given how disconnected from our food and the seasons we have become. As I went down that path and started to figure out what to be buying when, there were several outstanding resources that helped me along and took a lot of the guesswork out of the process. Of course, the thing that helped most was showing up diligently at farm stands, markets, and groceries that stocked local produce and paying attention to what was available, but these websites helped immensely in getting the hang of eating seasonally and locally. Epicurious has a fantastic tool to determine what is in season all over the United States for any specific month. About.com… Read more
If it can run on Straight Vegetable Oil, I have to have one of… Read more
Marx understood that “the need for a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe,” foreseeing that the development of capitalism would inevitably be “paving the way for more extensive and exhaustive crises.” Leo Panitch leads you through why sales of Das Kapital have skyrocketed in the last… Read more
The Brief Origins of May Day
Most people living in the United States know little about the International Workers’ Day of May Day. For many others there is an assumption that it is a holiday celebrated in state communist countries like Cuba or the former Soviet Union. Most Americans don’t realize that May Day has its origins here in this country and is as “American” as baseball and apple pie. Eric Chase has written an excellent history of the origins of May Day as a labor holiday on the IWW website. I suggest you read it to get an idea of the radical roots of the holiday, as it relates to Labor Day. While the radical origins of May Day are not contested, as labor historian David Montgomery notes: Labor Day is more a complicated affair. Only the United States celebrates Labor Day in September. Elsewhere around the globe, nations honor workers on May 1—May Day. And that historical quirk is no accident. Ironically, “May Day” was founded by U.S. workers—and taken away from them as a day to… Read more
Danny MacAskill – Inspired Bicycles April 2009
Danny MacAskill is a serious Trials (MTB) rider from Edinburgh (tartybikes.co.uk) and has been working on a new video for some time and it’s finally been released… We knew it would be good but nobody was prepared for this! Once you’re properly wowed, go check out his mates Sam Oliver and Joe… Read more
Vegan Hunting
Huh? “Vegan Hunting” you say? Isn’t that a complete misnomer. No, I haven’t become one of those horrid “flexitarian” wankers. I’m talking about foraging – the original vegan hunting, and a pastime I have recently become acquainted with, or at least re-acquainted with. Foraging has all the same thrills as animal hunting, at least for me, and yes, I was a hunter in a previous life. There is mushroom hunting; analogous to big game hunting where a wrong choice has a good chance of getting you killed. Berry-picking is sort of the canned hunt of the foraging world, with lots of ranger stations and Ag Extension agents willing to tell you exactly where to go to load up on blackberries, choke cherries, etc. Ginseng picking is the extreme end of foraging, analogous to stalking Sika or Leopard. In my neck of the woods, Sassafras is one of the main wild foods pursued by foragers, along with pot herbs and wild greens, making them sort of the Mule Deer of the foraging… Read more
Since Vermont and Cascadia are both ready to go it alone, with Texas not far behind, I think maybe it is time for a bio-regionalist nation of… Read more
Go Outside!
It’s Earth Day you know. That means you should step away from the computer, put down the cellphone,go outside and see what’s going on in the big blue room. Read what Gaylord Nelson has to say about the beginnings of Earth Day and then get out of the chair and out of doors. It will do you good. WHY APRIL 22? The huge amount of young activism in the United States in the 1960s caused leaders to choose April 22 for Earth Day. The story is that April 22 was chosen because college students would be likely to be available. It falls between spring break and final exams. Each year, however, somebody brings up the fact that April 22 was Lenin’s birthday. Senator Nelson’s response is pretty good, so we’ll leave it to him: “On any given day, a lot of both good and bad people were born,” he said. “A person many consider the world’s first environmentalist, Saint Francis of Assisi, was born on April 22. So was Queen Isabella. More importantly, so was my Aunt Tillie.” More Earth Day Facts… Read more
For those of you who are fans of Transcendentalist philosophy, you might be interested to know that the complete works of Ralph Waldo Emerson are available online for… Read more
The river in my backyard is the 2nd most endangered river in the US. GA politicians want to build more dams on the only river in the US with 200 miles of unimpounded flow instead of stop watering their golf courses in Atlanta. Help us stop reauthorization of these needless and expensive… Read more
The toddler Superman of 2007 returns, having learned to do the Iron Cross and move furniture around. This poor kid is gonna be a lab-rat and sideshow attraction for the rest of his… Read more
Eating red meat increases the chances of dying prematurely, according to the first large study to examine whether regularly eating beef or pork increases… Read more
You hate the crud all over the web, getting in the way of the (ever-shrinking) bits of it worth reading just as much as I do. Then you will be happy to know that the geniuses over at Arc90 have released Readability, a bookmarklet that can replace the “print view” button as the peace and quiet button of the web. Seriously, go install it, check out a loud site (like any news site) and hit the button. Instant calm. I love this… Read more
When I saw Primer in January, I called it: “Another fantastic ultra-low budget sci-fi movie. Okay, the sound and editing are not up to par, but willfully cerebral and fantastically mind-bending. This is time travel science fiction for people who have already contemplated the technical aspects of how such a thing would actually work and are ready to explore the moral and ethical dimensions of such a technology.” Now someone has put together a fantastic timeline to explain the “technical espects” of the time travel in the… Read more
Nomic is a game in which changing the rules is a move. In that respect it differs from almost every other game. The primary activity of Nomic is proposing changes in the rules, debating the wisdom of changing them in that way, voting on the changes, deciding what can and cannot be done afterwards, and doing it. Even this core of the game, of course, can be changed. (Peter Suber, The Paradox of Self-Amendment, Appendix 3, p…. Read more
First Sign of the Econopacolypse
Truly, the head-in-the-sand Ponzi party is coming to an end when even uncritical wing-nut neo-classical economist fanbois like Thomas Friedman are announcing that growth-capitalism American-style is bad. In his own words: We have created a system for growth that depended on our building more and more stores to sell more and more stuff made in more and more factories in China, powered by more and more coal that would cause more and more climate change but earn China more and more dollars to buy more and more U.S. T-bills so America would have more and more money to build more and more stores and sell more and more stuff that would employ more and more Chinese … We can’t do this anymore. Will wonders never cease? Will the CATO Institute come out in favor of replacing land ownership with usufruct? Will Ron Paul admit that he’s a power-hungry demagogue only interested in the socialized health care he gets as a high level federal employee? Maybe not, but as the econopacolypse… Read more
In advance of the HBO documentary film Death on a Factory Farm, TIME Magazine has a Q&A session with “Pete”, a 20-something undercover animal rights investigator who, armed with a hidden camera, surreptitiously got a job in 2006 at an Ohio hog farm in order to get the footage for the film. Bravo to “Pete” and the others like him who do the difficult work necessary to show people where their food comes… Read more
An interesting take on The Spectacular, Sudden Crash of the Global Economy. We often hear that U.S. consumer spending accounts for 70 percent of the economic activity in the country. Do the math: with 20 percent of the world’s economic activity, U.S. consumers — most weighed down with stagnant wages and maxed-out credit — make up about 14 percent of the planet’s economic demand. Add the other affluent countries (which were also heavily invested in our real estate market and related securities), and it’s easy to see why the economic meltdown has grown to global proportions. The dominoes are… Read more
Quite possibly the coolest piece of engineering I have seen in a long time, the Corpus Clock was invented and designed by Dr John Taylor for Corpus Christi College Cambridge for the exterior of the college’s new library building. The £1 million timepiece, known as The Corpus Clock, has been commissioned and designed to honour John Harrison, who was famously the pioneer of Longitude and inventor of the esoteric clock mechanism known as a grasshopper… Read more
Georgia Communities’ Rights to Protect Animals are in Jeopardy
If you live in Georgia, this is for you: Legislation (H.B. 529) has been introduced in the Georgia legislature that would prevent cities and counties from enacting any ordinance, regulation or resolution dealing with agriculture and farm animals on farms greater than 5 acres. This legislation could prevent local communities from making any laws dealing with animal welfare, food safety, or environmental protection. Instead, it would keep these issues in the hands of special interest groups that do not represent the majority of public opinion. This amounts to a power grab by the Farm Bureau in order to give immunity to factory farms, and would tie the hands of local communities from making their own decisions. If you live in Georgia, please urge your state senator and state representative to oppose this legislation. Please make a brief, polite phone call to your Representative and Senator to oppose H.B. 529. When you call, you will likely speak to a staff member who will… Read more
Generations of children have been spellbound by Robinson Crusoe’s exploits, but few are aware of the real-life figure who inspired the classic. Now, 300 years after he left his island prison, scientists have pieced together how the real Crusoe managed to… Read more