In the kitchen, I’m likely to reserve expressions of passion for serendipitous encounters of a spoony and barely-culinary nature or with an ingredient striking and rare. Kitchen gadgets? Not so much. That said, though I have the deepest respect and appreciation of the design of my instant pot and all it’s done for me, it’s the black digital ( Read more... )

I listen, I listen, and I listen more. I listen for years on end, unmoving and unmoved. … millions of words, my own and others’, drumming seismic surveys into the soil of spirit upon spirit, convolving echoes, building images of what lies within. Most returns are simple and quick- karst structures and hollows, frozen waves of grey sediment and rock ( Read more... )

I can only shake my head when I hear grown-up physicists talk about "dark matter". The extent to which people in this field will go to avoid dealing head-on with two simple realities-the extraordinarily challenging nature of coupled nonlinear differential equations given our current mathematical tooling, and the inadequacy of the same when it ( Read more... )

Consenting adults are still going to prison in the US for thought crimes. The greatest tests of freedom unfold at the boundaries of taste and convention, in realms that many might be tempted to consider the backwaters of human behavior (if they consider them at all). If the battles for your freedoms and constitutional rights are not fought and ( Read more... )

-noun Psychiatry.

an irrational fear of touching virtual musical instruments (see Rock Band, Guitar Hero) and never getting laid again, sometimes accompanied by horripilation and nausea. Often confused with the well-founded fear of social-sexual rejection that comes from actually playing virtual musical instruments in the presence of potential

I've never been much of a pro wrestling fan, but I can't say I have anything negative to say about the enterprise. Fans, for the most part, understand that what happens is scripted. They part with their money and/or time willingly and buy into what, to them, is an entertaining illusion. Sponsors very transparently pay for their share of the ( Read more... )

I predict that over the next few months the Miami real estate market is going to go into an unprecedented meltdown, with prices rapidly dropping as panic sales begin to unfold. I've seen sales happen wherein banks are pricing repossessions at just over one-third their previous sale price. These don't tend to stay on the MLS long just now because ( Read more... )

Is this the edge of language? Love me, quickly, before I've gone. I want to be spun into this memory; become it. My belief in this existence finds me blind for years on end, until I unthink myself, forgotten, unprofessed and undivined- a smiling crystal buddha with a glass eye open, ringing out, unmoved and unmoving. Threadbare habits, falling ( Read more... )

From Reuters' Hey-you-stole-my-Johnson-department...

"I'm sorry sir, we're all out of witches, but we do have a fresh and sprightly supply of penis thieves. Also, the lemon grass-scented candles are on sale."

With estimates for the total direct cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan ranging upwards of $2 trillion (these direct costs, of course, do not include the cost of the massive economic "side-effects" of the wars), it's worth noting that the average college graduate in the United States can expect total lifetime earnings of about $2.1 million ( Read more... )