The Girl Who Could Talk to Birds

I think so? I used to browse the site over breakfast, and one morning, Apollo couldn’t connect. I don’t want to cause trouble by trying to log in, if I’m banned, so I have not tried to log in another way.

🤭

In the same vein as A Short History of Wine, there’s also And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails by Wayne Curtis, Salt: A World History and Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World by Mark Kurlansky, and A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. The last one goes way, way back, and focuses on scientific topics, but it’s an entertaining read, and helps provide context to the pre-modern era.

That doesn’t sound like anything like a problem. We had a similar discussion on a local winter biking group, and there were some people who had issues from washing their face three or more times a day, exfoliating regularly, and such. Yikes!

Hope the hyaluronic acid helps!

Bigger picture, what’s your current facial skin care routine? If it includes a lot of cleansing, exfoliating, hot water, strong soap, multiple daily washings, et cetera, dial that all wa-a-a-ay back. All of those things strip away the natural oils quite effectively, which leads to that red, inflamed look in the cold. The best way to keep your skin moisturized is to keep the moisture it naturally has from escaping, and that’s 10 times more important in cold, dry climates.

Be sure to drink enough water, too. It’s deceptive, you lose a lot of water through breath in cold, dry air, so you can be dehydrated even without sweating.

Indeed, and I realized in the process of writing that comment that the famous graphs showing the growth of productivity vs. the growth of real wages explain a whole lot more about people’s experiences than the consensus generational divisions.

A couple of factors: Back in olden times, before Douglas Coupland applied the Generation X moniker in 1991, they used to talk about the Baby Bust generation. The Baby Boom was when all of the GIs got back from the war and all started getting jiggy at the same time. Then, the birth rate dropped significantly. In my elementary school, we had combined grades 2/3, and grades 4/5, because there weren’t enough kids enrolled for full classrooms otherwise.

Also, the Baby Boom generation is defined as 1946 to 1964, which is 19 years, compared to the 16 years of what we call Generation X now, from 1965 to 1980.

Granted, is not a huge difference—71 million Boomers and 73 million Millennials vs. 64 million Gen X—but there’s fewer of us. But also, the name and the generational categories are pretty recent developments. When Coupland’s book came out, I was too young to be Gen X, the people he was writing about were adults out into world. I wasn’t part of the classic Gen X disaffected-slacker culture, and its touchstones don’t really resonate with me. It wasn’t until years later that the definition of Generation X definitively included me. That’s why you’ll often see a lot of younger Gen X identify with the Xennial label, because we have a lot more in common with “elder Millennials,” which makes the whole cohort less cohesive.

It’s almost like the generational cutoff years are arbitrary, and that society changes continuously, and not in discrete jumps. It’s almost like, too, that something unspeakably neo-liberal happened in 1980, and the real division is between the people who came of age before they pulled up the ladders to prosperity behind themselves (Boomers and older Gen X) and the people who came of age after (Xennials, Millennials, and so on). Nevermind, sorry, that’s just some anti-capitalist hogwash. /s

Somebody installed a sump pump fairly recently. There’s plenty of evidence that the basement used to be partially finished, but it was probably all ripped out due to water damage. It’s dry now, thanks to the pump.

Not just obesity, but also the loneliness epidemic, since mental health is boosted as much by the weak relationships of the people that one sees regularly, day-to-day, whose name one might not even know, as it is by close, intimate relationships. (And even the latter are suffering the loss of social contact.)

The Cannibal Sandwich, which doesn’t actually use human flesh, but is also not a sandwich. Anyway, you take a slice of rye cocktail bread, spread on some raw, ground beef, then top it with some sliced onion, salt, and pepper. You can’t get it ready-made, because nobody likes e. coli or salmonella poisoning. In fact, you have to make special arrangements to get the beef ground by a butcher in a clean grinder, and pretty much eat it the same day.

Do you have some suggestions for a novice sharpener on how to get started?

I was looking at Insta posts from August. Difference of opinion, I guess.

I did, and I would still say that. You wouldn’t happen to have her confused with Rep. Cindy Crawford, the Arkansas politician?

The quality triangle format obscures the truth: U.S. health care is only fast and good if you can afford to pay for it. So, for the rest of us, since it’s not cheap, it’s also not fast and not good.

That’s why we’re so pissed off.

As a bicyclist, I see that we have Schrödinger’s Cyclist: Too poor to be able to afford a car like “normal” people, but also a rich elitist who can afford to commute by bike.

Also, Schrödinger’s Bike Lanes: A conspiracy by car-hating politicians to punish drivers, but also an amenity that only rich elitists get in their neighborhoods.

Just by random chance, I saw a Toynbee tile in the street in St. Louis. I’d heard about the mystery on the Internet, and was quite excited to see one in person.

Oh, I also saw Thong Cape Scooter Man several times.

Kinda tongue-in-cheek questions, but: Honey isn’t an animal body part, it isn’t produced by animal bodies, so if it is an animal product because bees process it, is wheat flour (for example) an animal product because humans process it? How about hand-kneaded bread? Does that make fruit an animal product because the bees pollinated the flowers while collecting the nectar?

But have we tried feeding a human infant 24kg of fish per week? Y’know, for science.

Found the physics teacher.

Pulao, I’m assuming Punjab-style: Brown half a chopped onion in oil in the pressure cooker, toss in some spices from the dabba to let them get fragrant, then add basmati rice and chopped veggies. Put the cover on, get it up to pressure for a couple of minutes, then natural release. Top with a couple spoonfuls of curd (yogurt), and it’s delicious.