Month: April 2021

That’s a Load Off My Mind

I can’t wait to go shopping. Wherever I want. Slowly.

I know, everyone else be all like, “I can’t wait to hug people!” And I’m all, “I can’t wait to shop somewhere with a better selection of whole wheat pasta.”

BECAUSE I’M A BAD PERSON, OK? We knew that, from a long time ago – I have the merit badge right here. And the business card.

I had actually been meditating on the following for some time before coming across the pointer to this research paper. I like to visualize the broad swaths of the planets where humans don’t live or else constitute a mere blip. Mountains, hills, deserts, national parks, tundra, HUGE tracts of land… Imagine the trees, the mountains, the photosynthesizing biosphere as the default, and us as the exception, a small collection of nattering primates that the great ancients suffer to live out our brief puny lives here and there among the constantly growing and shifting greenery.

Now here’s some figures to help you.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/humans-make-110000th-earths-biomass-180969141/

Fry: It’s no use. I wanna cry but I’m just too macho.
Bender: I’ll make you cry, buddy! You’re a pimple on society’s ass and you’ll never amount to anything.
Fry: What do you mean? I was Emperor of a whole planet.
Bender: Good point. But here’s a disturbing reminder; everyone you knew or loved in the 20th century is dead.
Fry: These things happen.
Bender: Okay, Fry, grab a Kleenex for this one, ’cause there’s no God and your idiotic human ideals are laughable!
Fry: Phew! That’s a load off my mind.

16

This was “emerald” from my birthstone series of dyeing last year.

I’m not going to take them all out of the drawer again. Trust me, it’s 16. I’m going to have quite a collection to sell at the probably-non-existent fair this year.

Noodle’s Blog Post Explodes with Color!

So, the Greener Shades dyes that I like to use have this big color card PDF, which is organized horrendously, sometimes with as few as 5 colors on a page. Unnumbered. I was always constantly flipping pages around, saying, well, do I like THIS one or THAT one – where was that one again?? Then of course I had to study the formula and translate it to a pound of mohair and hope I didn’t make a mistake, which I tended to do more often than not.

So I snipped all the colors and fit them all into two screen shots, and numbered them. Now I can see them all at once across my two screens. And, I typed all the formulas into Excel, with calculations to tell me exactly how many grams of each color to use to dye one pound of mohair! Now I can just look across my two screens, compare colors, and say, I want #142! Look it up in my spreadsheet, and say, why yes, #142 is .9 grams of Coral Reef Aqua, an excellent choice, madam.

Book Corner 2021.21

The Underground Railroad

by Colson Whitehead

This book was a horror show. I only read it for book club. I don’t watch horror movies, and I don’t read them by choice, either. If this book were a movie, it would be one of those super-R-rated violent guy movies that I wouldn’t go near with a ten foot pole. SPOILER – the climactic scene with the gunfire ripping through all the bodies at the happy gathering down at Lemondrop Farm on Lollipop Lane was almost a parody. But really, that’s not a spoiler, because if you think for one moment past the first few pages that this tale is going to have a happy ending, you must read some weirder books than I do. (  )

Book Corner 2021.20

Money: the True Story of a Made-up Thing

by Jacob Goldstein

I was really bored through all the early history of the first half. “Self,” I kept saying to myself, “I’m confused. What does this have to do with food?”

I perked up once the Fed came on the scene. 🙂 The Fed was “a horse designed by a committee of committees, a camel of a central bank.” We have 12 districts because the “central” part of “central bank” was too scary for people; and we were almost controlled by private bankers, rather than overseen by a board appointed by the president.

The financial crisis of 2008 is well explained from a different perspective. Learn (again for the first time?) how “money-market funds” came to be and what it meant when the most famous and long-standing one “broke the buck.”

Goldstein has good style. Each chapter is short, heavily sub-chaptered with often funny sub-chapter-titles, and ends with a lesson and/or premonition. His informality does devolve a little bit excessively at times (“It was a dick move”… “You know who knew? Irving damn Fisher”).

He has a great overarching lesson, though. We all known that money is “a made-up thing.” Of course it is – it’s just PAPER at the end of the day, after all. But more importantly, the way we “do money” is a made-up thing. It seems every time we make up a new way to “do money,” very quickly we forget there was ever another way; and that surely this way is the only “real” way, and we’ll all go to hell in a handbasket if we think about doing it some other way.

First go back to gold and silver coins. Why should they be money? They have rarity in their favor, and some utility, but why make them money? Because we said so. But we could say something else: next, consider the gold standard. Why did money have to be pegged to this element called gold? Because we said so. And now… there’s an interesting old-but-new-again theory called Modern Monetary Theory which says that basically, as long as we aren’t at full employment and experiencing inflation, it’s OK for the government to print all the money it wants. It really doesn’t have to be balanced with higher taxes; we don’t have to wonder how we might “pay for” government programs. Why not just MAKE money to pay for them? We make all this money stuff up anyway. Well… why not? (  )

What’s Your Superpower?

Extroverts are like cold-blooded animals. Cold-blooded animals can generate no body heat of their own; they must bake themselves in the sun to keep from freezing. Likewise, extroverted people cannot generate their own “heat”. Only by basking in the energy of someone else can they survive emotionally.

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Introverts are warm-blooded. Our fire comes from within.