So, I bought an Android phone

and joined the 21 century...

A mouthful...

Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso

Ironic

My sister is married to a Catholic.
My first cousin is married to a Muslim.
My second cousins: one married to an Episcopalian, one to a Russian Jew who hates Judaism and Jewish culture, one dating an Irish Catholic, one dating anybody as long as they're not Jewish...

It is somewhat ironic that the people in my parents' generation in my family emigrated from the Soviet Union, so they can freely be Jews in America, yet America seems to be the undoing of their Jewishness.

Bacteria Are US - A Novel Perspective

Sometimes I read something that seems obvious in retrospect, but sounds so bizarre upon first glance. From the Nov 22,2010 New Yorker article on fermented foods - "Nature's Spoils":

"There is no such thing as an individual," Lynn Margulis, a biologist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, told me recently. "What we see as animals are partly just integrated sets of bacteria." Nearly all the DNA in our bodies belongs to microorganisms: they outnumber our cells nine to one. They process the nutrients in our guys, produce the chemicals that trigger sleep, ferment the sweat on our skin and the glucose in our muscles. [] They work with the immune system to mediate chemical reactinos and drive out the most common infections. Even our own cells are kept alive by mitochonidria - the tiny microbial engines in our cytoplasm. Bacteria are us.

Tentacle Grape - The most delicious hentai soda on the market!

V'ha-mayvin yaavin :)

I'm sure that rejection during champagne snowballs has nothing to do with the fact that I am now a big fat dyke

Funny what you stumble across on the web....

Sometimes I wonder...

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Wandering Minds

A US study out Thursday suggests that people spend about half of their time thinking about being somewhere else, or doing something other than what they are doing, and this perpetual act of mind-wandering makes them unhappy.

"A human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind," wrote psychologists Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert of Harvard University in the journal Science.

Source

No, it's not St. Denis

Poland builds world's tallest Jesus statue...

Olá, bom dia!

Once in a while, something breaks the daily monotony... Like walking a mile to the Brazilian Consulate to pick up a visa for a friend.

The man in front of me in line was dressed in the robes of a religious order. Some type of Orthodox Christian. At first, I thought he was a priest, but he was not wearing a large cross on his chest, as is typical of the Orthodox priests. Perhaps he was a monk or a deacon. He had a small scarlet Orthodox three bar cross embroidered on his hat. He spoke unaccented American English. I wonder what brings him to Brazil.

There's a small chance of me heading down to São Paulo... Not looking forward to flying 10 hours to land in the same time zone...

Zaz Music Friday (Ha!) - Prends Garde à Ta Langue

Do you like jazz manouche? But of course, you like jazz manouche!

A Tatar tale

Long, long ago two mullahs and a peasant set off on the road. They went along and stopped at an inn. Once they had stopped, they cooked porridge. They made a hole in the porridge and set a great deal of butter in it. When they sat down to eat, one of the mullahs picked up his spoon.

"The path of shariah law goes this way," he said, and scooped the butter in the middle onto his own portion. The second mullah watched him do this.

"Our father’s mill used to turn in this direction," the second mullah said, and he scooped the butter onto his portion.

The peasant sat watching this and said:

"The world, mullahs, is constantly changing," he said. "In the future, the world might turn upside down like so," and he mixed the bowl of porridge up. The mullahs couldn’t fool the peasant.

Well then, on the second day they again stopped somewhere to spend the night. They had cooked a goose. In the evening as they laid down to sleep, they said to themselves:

"Whoever has the best dream can eat the goose tomorrow."

In the morning they got up and began to tell each other about their dreams. One of the mullahs went first:

"In my dream I was wearing a green robe and a pure white turban, and I had set off on the hajj," he said.

They thought this dream was pretty good. Then the second mullah spoke:

"I was a great swan," he said. "And I flew off towards the Qiblah."

This dream was also pretty good, they thought. Then they turned to the peasant.

"One of you wore a green robe and a pure white turban and set off on the hajj," said the peasant. "The other flew off as a swan. So I thought, well, they’re not going to come back right away, and I was afraid the goose was just going to spoil, so I ate it and that was that."

Washington Insiders

Nothing amuses me more when I hear politicians promise that once they get elected, they will challenge the "establishment". They label themselves "outsiders" who will take on the "machine".

The people are either fools or more likely just liars saying what they think is likely to get them elected. Anyone with a lick of sense knows that the only way to get things done is to become an "insider". You do favors for others with the expectation that others do favors for you. You get "pork" for your state. You become part of the old boys network.

Any "outsider" if they actually tried something would easily get stonewalled. The only way it could possibly be accomplished is if there was an overwhelming majority of "outsiders".

Joe Dassin -Marie Jeanne