Archive for May, 2014

Dietary Cleansing

Friday, May 30th, 2014

I stayed in a hotel last week where the soap was “sugared citrus.” I’ve got a bar of “chocolate” soap with cocoa nibs at home that was given to me at a baby shower. My shampoos have had fruit in them for years and other household cleaners have been boasting about the “power” of lemons for as long as I can remember.

God is trying to convince me, even as I type this, that cleaning products aren’t behind the epidemic of obesity in America, but I’m not buying it. Now where can I find some reduced calorie facial scrub?

Cream of the Crop

Friday, May 23rd, 2014

God wants to know what is it we’ve got against cream?

We banish it from our milk. We whip it. We sour it.

And I’m not sure how it feels about having to compete with condensed milk, either.

The Green One

Friday, May 16th, 2014

I don’t like doing yard work but nonetheless I like to do my own. Sure it saves me money, but it also gets me exercise and keeps me in touch with nature. In spring especially but also in summer, though, it can seem like the yard work is never done. There’s always weeds to pluck, bushes to trim, leaves to rake, lawns to mow and any number of improvements that can be made.

That’s why God invented the modern trash collection system. Thanks to company provided containers, I now know when I’m done; I’m done when the green bin is full.

Now if I could just figure out when I’ve watered enough but not too much.

It’s Just Greek to Me

Friday, May 9th, 2014

When I read I pronounce things in my head. I don’t know the Greek alphabet. You might be as perplexed as God seemed when I made those two statements to her, but I assure you they actually are related.

Recently I’ve been reading things that toss in a Greek letter or two. Science articles and computer articles. They didn’t actually need Greek letters but they wanted a place holder for something, which really means they wanted to talk about something, but they didn’t want to have to give that something a real name. They pluck a glyph from the Greeks and call it a day.

Now I understand that it can be hard to come up with good names for things, and I can even kind of forgive the scientists who are using foreign letters because they want to stick their “thing” into equations, but hey, Einstein managed to stick to the Roman alphabet for his most famous equation, I think that much like Einstein every scientist can aspire to be.

Anyway, when I’m reading along and I come across a Greek letter, there’s this skip in my head. There’s a blank space where the name of the letter should go, because I don’t know what the name of the letter is. There’s still a thought connected to it, but it’s not a “verbal” thought. And for somebody that’s as hung up on words as I am, that’s a little unnerving. It’s sort of the mental equivalent of that stain on the movie screen, where somebody threw their drink, that makes you aware of the mechanics of projection whenever the action crosses over it. It takes me out of the moment.

The same thing happens when I’m reading a bad science fiction story and the author deliberately gives the aliens names that are unpronounceable. Perhaps the authors are thinking it’s a way to make their readers uncomfortable and they think that breaking people out of their comfort zones is what serious art is supposed to do. Well I’ve got news for them, it’s not uncomfortable, it’s just annoying and annoying is not art.

Seeds Upon the Wind

Friday, May 2nd, 2014

So Spring is in full force, at least where I live. That means eighty, even ninety, degree highs; trees and bushes that seem to want trimming almost every week; and lawns that cry out to be mowed.

And the bane of the urban lawn, dandelions, are popping up near constantly.

God seems to think that dandelions get a bad rap. They have beautiful yellow flowers. Every part of the plant is edible and some parts are also used in herbal medicines, not to mention dandelion wine. They’re puffy seed clusters are beautiful in their own right and are the stuff on which wishes are made.

So why do we hate them on our lawns?

I think it just comes down to the fact that it’s work to keep them away. Purging them from our lawns shows that we conform, and not just that we conform but that we care enough about conforming to work at it. Still, even knowing that, I went ahead and plucked them from my yard. God seemed both disappointed and amused.