Friday Hodgepodge
Friday, January 31, 2020
Four Things
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| Image by Leilani Angel, via Unsplash, license. |
I get away with a small, hand-held cooler by using the wagon I mention at the link above. (There is a Walmart near the park, but it is invariably an extremely crowded time sink. The cooler allows me to pick things up at home as part of a shopping trip I'd do at home, anyway.)
The hard-boiled eggs, which I recently noticed in the dairy section, are a great product. I don't know when those first came out, but what convenience!
2. In the vein of "all publicity is good publicity," I note the appearance of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged on a list of "Most Loved and Hated Classic Novels" at Goodreads.
3. According to a story at Fast Company, It's comically hard to make a secret phone call. Here's step 3 of 6:
After storing burner phone in a Faraday bag, activate it using a clean computer connected to a public Wi-Fi network[.]Needless to say, the last step is to destroy the phone.
4. The following comes from a first-person account of eating a destroying angel mushroom and living to tell the tale:
They honestly did not taste that good, rather bland in my opinion. I thought to myself, "Gee, I don't think I'll ever pick and eat these again."And that was the high point of the experience: It goes way downhill from there. The man is lucky he didn't need a liver transplant.
Unlike the account of a man who allowed himself to be bitten by a black widow spider for the sake of science, this is a cautionary tale. Not that I needed it: Although I am good, given time, at catching myself when I miss the kinds of details this guy did, I will never tempt fate by taking up mushroom hunting.
-- CAV
4 comments:
The mushroom thing reminds me of moving to my house....There are wild vines with berries on them, and a palm tree that drops fruits. I did a LOT of research, including reading guidebooks on the local flora and consulting an expert, before I tried them. Too many horror stories about poisonous plants for me to feel comfortable testing my luck. And we know that poisonous plants do grow in our area--we had hemlock growing along our fence until my wife insisted I remove it (it looks beautiful, but we have small kids), and I found some other plants I know are poison thanks to spending time in the woods with my grandfather.
A bit of research, and a bit of consulting with folks who know more than you do, can be really helpful! Now we have a good-sized blackberry patch and my kids eat dates in the summer the way most kids eat grapes.
Dinwar,
You bring back memories. We had wild blackberries growing on vacant lots near our house where I grew up. We once picked enough for my mother to make a pie from it.
Neat about the dates, but, yeah, identifying a safe-to-eat fruit from a palm tree is way above my pay grade.
Gus
Yo, Gus, regarding the most loved and hated novels, it's interesting how much of both lists I like. Indeed, the only ones I truly dislike are Catcher in the Rye and On the Road. (I like to irritate people with lesser tastes by saying, ideally in a thick Texas accent, that the main take-away from the former is that Holden Caulfield needed a good spanking until he snapped out of it. Suffice it to say that provokes exactly the intended response.) But yes, those lists are definitely heavily weighted toward the high school curriculum. So, yes, it seems prima facie like high school is the last place where masses of people read classic literature, but I suspect rather that it tells us a lot more about the crowd reviewing novels on Good Reads. (That sounds snarky: "People who write Goodreads reviews are like the people who scribble banalities in the margins." Maybe, I mean more that it probably reflects the fact that they have lots of people with a vast range of tastes, and these are the books they're all likely to have all read.)
It is certainly true, however, that many of them I wouldn't have liked in high school: Jane Eyre, Moby-Dick, and Madame Bovary I am sure of (sort of like how I despised Middlemarch then and quite like it now, just as I hated the Faulkner I read then but greatly admire his novels now), and suspect it for some of the others (Little Women especially). In this line, it reminds me of this essay I recently read in praise of Paradise Lost, which I read at the right age, in the sense of not too young, and utterly loved. In high school I would have abhorred it, but three or four years later, when I had developed a love of poetry, it was enthralling.
Finally, I'm glad to see overrated sub-mediocrities like David Foster Wallace and unmitigated crap like House of Leaves aren't on the lists.
Snedcat,
I encountered the list, thanks to a link post at Marginal Revolution. There, Tyler Cowen went so far as to say that the ten most hated were overall better than the ten most loved.
I like the idea that the list, as far as what appears on it goes, might be heavily affected by high school curricula -- except for the fact that it may make any relief about the absence of the sub-mediocrities and worse you mention premature: It would mean that people are actively choosing to read or pretend to have read them.
Once, after hearing the title Infinite Jest enough times, I considered reading it, but quickly concluded that I had better uses of my time. Hooray for online book reviews and Wikipedia.
Gus
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