Dosage

There was some healthy instructions given in a book that I did not read about the correct way to eat; it was simplicity itself: Eat food, mostly plants.  

It seems that every once in awhile, someone comes out and states that some food is better for people and that it holds the cure to whatever ails you.  Here is my advice: ignore them.  Eat everything in moderation, eat it as food and not as supplements.  Eat.  

People hear that one food is filled with antioxidants and they load up on it.  People hear that probiotics are good for you and they load up on it.  People hear that water is good for you and they drink liters of it everyday.  People hear that blueberries have micronutrients and they start eating blueberries by the pound.  People hear that bacon is bad for you and they pause and continue to eat bacon—which is the correct thing to do.

Anything that you eat should only be consumed in natural ways and in moderation, because everything is toxic if too little or too much is consumed and the best way to stop consuming too much is to eat it in food and to eat only when your body tells you to.  Drink water when you are thirsty.

Why?  Because dose matters.  Antioxidants are good for you, but too much will hamper your immune system, because your immune system runs using oxidants.  Water is important to allow chemical relations to occur in your body, but too much water will kill you, because the chemical reactions will stop.  Micronutrients are called micronutrients because you don't need much of them to survive and if you take too much of them you will die.  They are poisonous in too high a dose, but they are also necessary for you to live too.  

Fluoride for example, just a little bit delivered in your water will keep your teeth strong and healthy but too much will weaken your bones.  People say that you don't need Fluoride in your diet and that it is a toxin, but if what people don't know, because it does not happen anymore (because of fluoride in our diet) that people used to die from complications due to tooth decay, not to mention not having teeth.  There is iodine added to salt in many countries.  This iodine is an important health measure to prevent health problems like developmental problems and thyroid issues, but too much will cause other issues.

People use supplements to give themselves micronutrients and macronutrients, but this can sometimes result in an overdose of these nutrients—the devil is in the dose.  Additional problems with the supplement industry is that it is mostly unregulated and the companies will add other drugs together to create a pill.  Some of these drugs are added to give the impression that there is something working in the pill.  It might be as benign as a huge dose of caffeine, but it could be something else that makes your heart beat faster.  The added drug is not on the packaging, because the industry is unregulated.  It might contain only natural ingredients, but don't let that fool you because copper is completely natural, but too much will kill you and many drugs have natural sources and because they are not listed as ingredients, they may interfere with other drugs that you are taking.

You don't need much to keep yourself healthy, so just eat it in your food.  If you eat a variety of foods you will be getting all the nutrients that you need to live well without overdosing on others.

Women of Science

I just listened to a podcast this morning from Astronomy Cast on Women in Science.  I thought it was going to be talking about all the amazing women of science, but instead it was about the untold story about what happens in science and in astronomy in particular, to women.

Anyone that has read my blogs for a while knows that there are some themes that I like to talk about and a few that I don't like to talk about but do anyways. I don't like to talk about the repressing of a gender by another, obviously this is men repressing women and not the other way around.  There has been a lot of talk over the last couple decades of getting women into science and it seems like men in science want women in science so they can abuse them.  I don't think that is a fair statement, but I think it is a true statement.  

The host of the Podcast talked about how bad it is for women.  She told listeners about the things that happened to her in her career and she downplayed them, because she had heard stories from other women who had suffered from worse than she.  She talked about senior members of academia making it clear that advancement in their profession depended on pleasing them sexually and failure resulted in dismissal.  There was discussion on what it was like to be at a bar at a conference and have your colleagues grope you and then have to work with them in the future.   She talked about how fellow women made strong suggestions as to which of the male supervisors she should work with and which ones she should never be alone with.

She talked about how e universities are condoning this behaviour by settling complaints with non disclosure agreements which prevent the victim from telling other women and anyone else about their experiences, while the perpetrator remains uncensured and free to offend again.  

Women compose half the population of the world and they are as intelligent as men.  They think differently then men and so they approach problems differently then men and have different results.  Men are not inherently better than women, they are just different.  Science needs to have both perspectives for it to advance smoothly and the field needs to be level and allow either sex to advance as far as they can.  To that end, men cannot be allowed to repress women, in or out of science.  

Cat lives

I am living with someone who has cats.  Not for the first time, as I grew up with cats, but never where the assumption that the cats were the superior beings.  In order of assertiveness, Fae, Carol and Peter.  Cats are close relatives to Humans on the psychological level.  They have distinct personalities and are mentally unstable.  Cats have personalities based on their breeds, just like dogs, except there are not as many breeds of cats.  

Black cats long associated with witches and such are people friendly cats. If a black cat likes you it will follow you around everywhere.  Part of the reason why black cats were associated with witches because they were always around them.  And if you are living alone why not have a basically self-sufficient animal that likes to hang with you.  Solitary living women with companionable felines living in the Dark Ages were not exposed to the fleas that transmitted the Plague, because there were no living rats living near a self-respecting cat.  Not affected by Plague, you must be a witch.

Tortoiseshell cats are almost all female.  Fae is a tortoiseshell and she is a force to be reckoned with.  She is a murderer.  She kills all summer long.  She starts killing in the spring and doesn't stop until the winter snows drive everything away, then she sits under any local bird feeder and continues killing.  What she will kill depends only on its size.  Baby rabbits, through insects, but with preference for birds and flying squirrels, which she kills and rodents which she practises a catch-and-release program— she catches them brings them inside to the bathtub and releases them.  Bathtub releases have a life expectancy of a minute to hours, but it always ends the same way, dismemberment, blood everywhere and nothing eaten.  Mice, miles, squirrels, and chipmunks.  In the winter she just beats on the other cats to relieve stress.

Carol is a long haired black cat.  She is a killer as well, but she practises a different sort of catch and release program.  She catches a rodent brings it inside and and then goes away and hunts it later at night.  Sometimes she gets it, sometimes one of the other cats gets it and sometimes it reaches some hidden local and dies of its original injuries, quietly terrified.

Peter is a beautiful, docile, short-haired grey cat.  He, like all of these cats were strays, but he was abused.  Probably kicked in the stomach repeatedly and regularly.  He is scared a lot.  He is very well brow beaten by Fae and Carol, but it was the damage that occurred before her came to this house that most affects his personality.  He is overly shy and runs from new things and loud noises.  He is a glutton, he eats when ever there is food present, perhaps because food was so sparingly put out when he was young and he is especially frightable at meal times, perhaps that was when he was frequently abused.  Oddly he is a low eater, but he also will eat everything he can get too.  Despite being the youngest he has the least amount of kitten in him and plays the least. Partially it is due to his neutered status, but mostly the abuse.  The longer he stays in the safe place where he lives the more he comes out of his shell.  

That is the cats I am living with bite there is more; there are their idosyncracies.  Cats are all to one degree to another crazy.  Just like humans. It might be that house cats had a sever genetic bottleneck in the distant past.  All house cats can trace their family trees back to a plains cat that lives in Egypt.  While dogs are all technically wolves, cats have a less wild ancestor, with a less oppositional history with humans.  As I said, they are all crazy.  Carol is a light weight, her long hair makes her look bigger than she is and her personality is big too.  When she walks down the floor she practically stomps making more noise than her weight should do.  And she is affectionate and constantly tries to make Peter her boyfriend, but when Fae beats on him, she joins in.

Fae is truly insane.  She likes to get beaten.  No really.  And she has a ritual that goes along with it.  She waits for you in the bathroom.  She will then pull the floor towel from the tub and sit on it.  She wants you to put the towel over her head and body and pet her, pat her body hard.  If you don't hit hard enough she will meow at you to encourage you.  She can leave at any time, but she stays and she keeps coming back for more.  She will hiss and bite and scratch if you are doing it correctly, but she won't run away.  She wants to be beaten before you shower and afterwards, when you enter the bathroom for any reason actually, but she likes it around shower time especially.  After you leave the bathroom after a shower she will wait a bit and then she will climb on to the bathtub edge and lick up the water droplets; she will crawl along the lip of the bathtub against the wall licking up the left over water.  Early this morning I was using the bathroom, I closed the door and there was no cat visible.  I began to pee and I thought that I felt some pee on my leg.  After I finished I started to get things to clean the floor but I found everything dry and a cat off in her usual spot waiting for me to beat her.  I figured out that she was siting behind the toilet waiting for me to come in all night. Sometimes she asks to have other carpets rolled over her and to be beaten.  Reminds me of some people I know.

My mother says, "If you have a rodent problem, two spayed female cats will fix your house and neighbourhood."  it is the exception that proves the rule, as they say.  Growing up we had cats, as I have previously already said.  Our first was a stray going on its rounds after being relocated into the area.  It would stop at our place and get petted and fed then head on to another house before going home.  It lasted for a few months until its real owners came to pick it up from the place that was taking care of it while the owners were traveling the world.  It was named Muffin at one house, because it ate a muffin–so original, and we called it Tough Tom, because he was scarred from many fights and he was not neutered.  He was a short haired Tabby.

When he went home, another cat came and visited itself on us.  I got to name it and I liked to name things appropriately, so I called him Felix, because I thought it meant cat.  It doesn't but it was similar to feline that I thought it did.  I did not know there was a comic called Felix the Cat at the time.  Felix became ours and we became his, mostly my parents took care of the vet bills and his supplemental feedings and his neutering.  He proves the rule.  As a rule, female cats are mousers, Felix was too.  He was a Bird Cat actually.  He was a Long-Haired Tabby.  He was a killer.  He roamed and killed, killed and roamed.  The neighbour to the East warned us that they would shoot him as they were bird lovers, a different sort of bird lover than Felix was.  So my mom, belled the cat, first with round Christmas bells then with a larger clapper "cow bell" type as the smaller ones could be muffled in his fur.  None of these measures worked.  Next in an attempt to stop the death and distruction he was put on a leash and staked to a spot and given a shelter so at he could have some shade.  Still the bodies began to build up and litter the small swath that his leash could reach.  At this point it became clear that the difference in intelligence between a cat and a bird was a dozen orders of magnitude different; the birds deserved to be culled if they were going to be killed by a cat on a leash with a big bell around its neck.  

He next went to live with my mother at work, because the neighbours were upset by the mound of bird corpses piling up.  At my mother's work he could wander in her shop garden and illicit scratches and belly rubs from customers during the day, but close to closing time he learned not to be around so that he did not have to spend the night inside and could instead pretend to be a homeless cat accepting food for companionship at ten or so different stops during each night.  When we moved, he came with us and then when we moved again he came also came with us to a land where he could roam and no one got upset with him for killing birds and he did not have to wear a bell either.  There were many Felix stories.  He met a common end that most outdoor cats end with an anonymous death far from home while roaming.  A fisher or a bird of prey, we like to say an owl got him, revenge for all the birds that he killed.

Villains

The real question is villains.  I have been watching the television series 'Smallville' and it is great to see the many forms of a villain.  I need to know these forms because my stories lack them.  I find portraying a villain is difficult for me, because I do not believe in evil.  I don't think that there is someone out there trying to kill people for fun unless they are very insane.  Which leads me to the deadly sins.  Villains are just people who are doing things that they think are right, they may be doing things to help people but they are deluded in some way.

Pride, Greed, Lust, Envy, Gluttony, Wrath and Sloth.  Some of those are a little weak.  There is a modern version that goes along different lines, GMO, Experimenting on Humans, Polluting the Environment, Causing Social Injustice, Causing Poverty, Becoming Obscenely Wealthy, Taking Drugs.  Both lists have some merit and som do not.  Perhaps we should change them to Pride, Greed, Lust, Envy, Wrath, Causing Poverty and Causing Social Injustice.  Gluttony is imbodied in a few of these already as in anything taken to excess is gluttony.  Sloth could be letting anything bad of the above to happen when you could stop or slow them might be considered as a minor sin.  Genetically modifying stuff is neutral, unless it is a perversion or meant to cause harm, but would then fit into one of the ones above.  Experimenting on Humans also a gray area, experimenting on humans first before doing other lab examinations when there is time to do them is a crime for sure, but most drugs require human trials.  Taking Drugs see Gluttony.  Becoming Obscenely Wealthy by stepping on people and crushing others is covered already, but it is not a sin to become wealthy through work or chance.   Polluting the Environment is only a sin when it is encompassed by the other sins, otherwise driving a car is a sin as is using a cumputer, and breathing.

The television series shows us many villains who are Evil, but also those that are affected by the above sins.  Pride, Greed, Lust, Envy and Wrath.  They Cause Poverty and Social Injustice too.  But these are not the only villains.  Often the villain is within the person themselves.  Another is villains who are monsters who prey on humans for food; they are not evil, but are villains of the highest order.  Another common villain is the environment, where the foe is e natural world and the hero has to survive it, but again there is no evil there it is just what is— black holes do not kill because they're are evil, but because they are black holes.  Insert Avalanches, Winter, desserts, oceans etc. here.  

So what is a villain?  

In my game, The Nameless is a Solar Exalt who is trying to save the world.  His Villains are numerous: Slavery (social injustice), Corrupt Gods (pride, greed), the Wyld Hunt (social injustice), the Neverborn (wrath), Deathlords (greed, wrath), Demons and Yozies (wrath), the Underworld (environment), individuals (envy, greed, lust, pride) The Realm (greed, envy, pride).  Truthfully most of the environment is not a problem for him because he is powerful, but then there are secondary villains, the villains of his allies: god allies have villains who are driven by envy and pride, mortal allies have villains who are driven by all of them and including the environment, Bertrod his mortal lover has more deadly enemies because of power differences from Fae who seek her out for lust or because they wish to hurt Nameless (wrath).  Because he is powerful and very mobile, his enemies will seek out his more vulnerable intimacies and seek to control him with threats to them.  The Nameless's biggest villain is the Deathlord Black Sun, a ghost of unparalleled strength and power who was his the former incarnation of his soul (pride, envy, greed, wrath, social justice, cause poverty, environment and personal struggles).  What is more the Black Sun has a very large and wide reach with many allies and potentially many Death Knights as well.  He has pull and he is extremely manipulative of his mentally weaker and prideful peers– the other Deathlords.  The Black Sun is aware of the Nameless and knows that he is his greatest threat and so is working to corrupt and side line the Nameless as quickly as possible; in the least he seeks to use him to destroy his enemies.  So the question is, is he an ally or a foe?

'Smallville' the television series, starts off with a bunch of main characters, Clark Kent destined to be SuperMan, Lex Luthor destined to be the Super Villain, and a bunch of supporting characters.  Everyone knows who the bad guy is going to be and who is the hero as soon as they tune into the show, but if you did not know anything about the story arc, just looking at what is presented in the first two seasons, you would see a different thing.  Clark Kent is a hero, but he is secretive and betrays his friends confidence often.  Lex Luthor tries hard to be a good person but the pride of Clark Kent, the lust and wrath is driving a wedge between him constantly.  Clark lies to him and these lies are driving wedges between him and e other characters especially Lex Luthor.  At one point in the series, Lex states clearly that whoever stands up to a super powered alien coming to this world, using only his mortal powers against immortal powers, that he is the true hero.  He is right.  Clark Kent is the hero of the story, but he creates his most potent villains himself.

I know now what I have to do in my Story with my friend.  The Nameless must meet the agents of the Black Sun and the first Death Knights of his enemy's rivals.

Smallville update

Back in Smallville and I hate it.  I like Smallville and the surrounding region, it is not the place.  I like some of the people.  I don't like the some and like most places I don't know the rest.  What I really don't like is the feelings that I left behind me that have been coming back.  Things like the situation in my old workplace and how if I cam back I would be in the same place that I was before with the same wage.  But then a useless fuck who left at the same time as I did was being offered way more to come back and do the same job as I can do, but less.  That is not the only thing, there are the personal stuff.  I left this place and I stopped thinking about the twenty something girls— the only girls in Smallville who are single.  I stopped thinking about them and I am happier for it, but I come back here and it is back in my head again, like I never left.  The loneliness that I had is back and the need to fill it with anything is back.  I don't like it.  A year without thinking about SuperGirl and suddenly I think about her all the time and the angst that it brings.  It is like the angst that I had in high school all over again.  I evolved away from it gradually in BigSmoke, and then I am back in it again when I come back, move away and it goes away slowly, come back and it is back.  I wonder how many months it will take to disappear this time?  I need to go, to leave, to only visit, nev to live here again.

Back in Smallville

I have moved back to Smallville for a couple months because a friend suffers from seasonal anxiety and I hoped that my presence might help them.  They asked me to stay the winter and I accepted.  What I have found is that I am not really affecting my friend's anxiety and my own anxiety is coming back.  

My friend commented to me that I seemed relaxed and confident, that my demeanor had changed; I was a better person.  But now, after less than two weeks, I feel like I am becoming more obsessed about the relationships that I don't have.  This is not a good thing.  I want to be that guy who did not particularly care what other people were doing and I wanted to be the guy that was cool with everything.  

I had a conversation yesterday, a couple of them, with GardenerGuru.  The first was about the nature of relationships and the second was about relaxing. I feel like both are things that happen to other people.  And GG explained them using analogies, because she said, it was the only way to describe them.  She said that the difference between friendship and relationship is chemistry.  "But what is Chemistry," I asked.  She was vague about that.  I don't ever really feel chemistry like she described it.  "You just know when you have it" was not good enough for me.  It might be the Autism x Deminess in me that makes this impossible to understand.  For me, any time there was "Fizzle" there was time and a body of personal connection built up prior to the "Fizz".  Any time there was no build up, there was no fizz.  Any time there was a lead up to meeting there was Fizzle.  It made me think that GG did not know what she was talking about.  

But then I am demiromantic and demisexual, so maybe it works different for me than other people.  It seems that other people can engage in a brief conversation and desire a relationship, I have heard that they can just look at someone and want to have sex with them.  That mystifies me.  Most people it is a date, a coffee or actually a dinner, but it is not a dozen conversations over months of time.  It is not through a series of short awkward meetings; I feel like a teenager dating for the first time, every time and I feel like there are very few women who want to do that anymore.  There must be some, I have met a few, but then they might be attracted to me and are just trying to wait to see if I will like them too.  

There was PolyGirl who read this blog front to back and then contacted me.  She knew me and wanted to date me, but I knew nothing about her.  I did not know how to handle it.  I tried to date her, but it was all rushed and tagged on to the end weekend trips.  I met her twice and was going to meet her a third time, but fucked it up because friends told me that after three dates she would be expecting something more.  Something more I did not feel, but I knew she was a great person so I pushed myself because I wanted to be normal.  I wasn't and there was not a third date, because it got creepy.  

GG told me that I should not tell people right off the bat my eccentricities.  She thinks that I should just go out with them and let the chemistry decide things.  Tell them that I am Demi after they get to know me.  Tell them about the Autism after they get to know me.  I see the wisdom in what she says, but I also know that this would be a certain failure too.  If I don't know them well enough before I meet them I will be wooden expression-wise and uncomfortable; I would not have the comfort level to be relaxed around them.  Telling them that I am Demi and explaining what it means, that I need more time to get to know people before I develop an attachment, would let them know what to expect and why. 

If I pretend that I am 'normal' I will prove that I am not and there will be no second date.  

This year I had two good dates this year, two more good dates than I have had in any given year since 2012 and really excluding that and when I dated MPTR, any other year.  I think I could avoid talking about the Autism, because it is not bigger than the Deminess.  I still think that Autism created my demiromantic and demisexualness.  

What I wish I could get is references from PrettyKitty and the other persons in my life that could attest to the fact that I am worth the wait to get to know.  I am worried that every person I meet will want to make a snap judgement as to whether I am a good date based on the chemistry of a quick date, a brief meeting.  I have been down that road too and it does not end well.  If I rush something based on how much 'chemistry' the other person feels, the result will be another relationship where I feel things were rushed and things did not grow right.  

The other conversation was about relaxation.  GG told me that when she gets a massage she feels the energy release and when she relaxes the same.  I told her that I have had exactly one good massage.  One.  When SuperGirl gave me one, all the rest were physically painful.  GG said that the energy just flows out of her when she relaxes.  I told her based on that, I must never be relaxed.  It does not happen.  It might be that I don't trust the masseuses.  If I trusted them, I would feel what I felt with SuperGirl.  I wonder if that is why sex for me is sucky, because I don't really trust my partners.  If that is true, than what does that say that I trusted MPTR and I did not trust the others.  That sex with SuperGirl could have been fantastic, but on that score I will never know.  For that matter how could sex ever be good with MPTR now?  

What do I need to know to trust someone enough to relax around them?  Is this about Deminess?

You see I am back to where I was a century ago, last year.  I need to get out of Smallville, before I lose all the ground that I have gained in the last year.  I can't come back.

Missing link

I have been thinking for a while now, quite a while, that I really don't know what a "Relationship" is.  The theory is that it is when you are with someone that you like who you are having sex with.  But then it all breaks down.  I think that there has to be more to it than that and my inexperience with such things is becoming clear.  It has been so long and before that and before that.  I think that I am missing something.  

I think that my friendships are relationships without sex and then I have a hiccup— there must be more to it than that, I must be missing something.  I just don't get it?  I love my friends.  I do stuff to make their lives better, or I try to.  I talk with them on subjects we share, I do stuff with them.  Just no sex, and I wonder am I missing something.  There must be something more to relationships than just that, there must be because I do all that with my friends, but I can't seem to inspire anyone to have a "Relationship" with me.

And PrettyKitty, I said I have been thinking about this for a very long time.

Food diversity

I was making eggs for breakfast the other day.  I don't just have eggs.  There is toast and tea, but I was not referring to that, I was referring to the eggs.  When I have eggs, the eggs are typically the last thing that I add to the breakfast.  There is something to be said about the flavour of eggs, but I don't care about that.  Eggs are nutritious too, but I like more than eggs in my breakfast.  I look in the refrigerator and look around it for a while and then I start pulling things out then I put the frying pan on the stove and heat it up.  

First goes in the lube, margarine, butter or olive oil.  Next goes what I find in the fridge.  If there was nothing much it is mushrooms and cheese and maybe some spinach.  If I am lucky and there are leftovers like chilli, bean salad or just any salad, they go in first.  Then I add the mushrooms, cheese and the spinach.  Lastly I add the eggs, usually two.  Then I turn the heat off and let the heat of the other stuff cook the eggs.  I have to let the other stuff heat up, so they are nice and hot.  When the eggs are cooking I can drop a slice or two of bread in the toaster and spread some peanut butter on top before the eggs are cooked. Sometimes it is almond butter or a reject from my friend like pumpkinseed butter.  Then I take the hot water that I had in the kettle and I pour it over the tea and it is breakfast time.  Lately this has been getting blasé, but when I make it for friends, they think I am imaginative.  It is healthy after all.  

When you look at what was in that meal you will see more food stuffs than the typical person in the planet eats in a day and some in a year.  Let me count: eggs, cheese, red onions, white onions, vinegar, lemon juice, kidney beans, pinto beans, black beans, chickpeas, avocado, olive oil, butter, mushrooms, spinach, peanut butter and bread (which contains: wheat flour, rye flower, the flour or seeds of ten other grains, yeast, salt and sugar).  I don't typically have juice with my breakfast, but I have been known to add a few grapes or an apple.  I counted thirty-two different food stuffs before I got to the tea.  That is just breakfast.  Depending what you eat for lunch and dinner, you could eat a total of fifty different foods and that is not counting junk food like Doritos and other stuff.  I am a vegetarian, but if I were an omnivore then there would be meats and mixed meats and slurry meats (like hotdogs and chicken nuggets that are made of many different parts).  

What was my point?  I was just making you aware what a first world person eats and how it proves that I am wealthy, even if I am technically living under the poverty line or near to it for most of my life, in my country.  There are countries where people will eat maybe fifty different food items over the course of the whole year and usually many less.  There are places that less than twenty-five different things over a year and mostly just a few like rice.  

When I eat Doritos, I am eating probalblly close to fifteen food items and chemicals and all of them break down and are absorbed by my body and provide resourses for my to grow.  Most people think that if it is a chemical it is bad, but the truth is they are usually neutral to the body and they almost all break down and get used.  Aspartame is one that gets worked over by the body like that.  They body is quite efficient.  Fiber and othe indigestables breakdown and pass out and through much faster but clean your body out and the lower intestines.  It is kind of crappy (pun).

I suspect the poor majority of the world eats similarly to my pre industrial ancestors.  With a few exceptions and modifications.  I learned about the diet of these Ancien Regime peoples years ago in school.  They farmed. Their fields and tended their flocks for years eating the flocks and the harvest from the fields.  They had one set of feilds and they had learned that they needed to rotate their crops and allow the feilds to recover.  They could not add fertilizer except the natural kind.  They did not have pesticides and they could not or irragate reliably; they were dependent on good weather to have good crops.  They planted their fields with rye, wheat, barley, oats and whatever grain they had availible, not in seperate fields, but all in the same field.  The weather would determine which crop did the best in the field and in any case, you cannot survive on one grain alone.  When the harvest came, all the grains were harvested at once and the grains were ground together and since storage technology was poor, they were typically baked into bread right away and stored to dry out in the attic for a years time, until the next harvest.  The typical breakfast, lunch and dinner was basically the same.  Pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold, pease porridige in the pot nine days old, as the rhyme goes was not an exaggeration.  That was the way of things.  Pease porridge, gruel, soup and a portion of dried harvest bread dunked in to soften it and make it digestible.

Today's poor are poorer than the people in the past, the wonders of mono culture and pesticides and a market economy mean that farmers plant one crop and sell most of it to make money to buy other food.  But they typically mostly eat just that crop, unless there is something cheaper to buy than the crop they are growing.  The staple foods are the majority of what they eat though.  Rice, potatoes or something else.  Not like us in the wealthy West.

Why is diversity even important?  One might ask that, food is food.  Every plant has different levels of different nutrients, some have nutrients that others do not have.  Eating a less diverse diet increases the chances that you will miss one or more of these nutrients and it could affect your health a lot.  Vegetarians know that most plants have incomplete protiens and that more than one plant should be in every meal to get a complete protien.  There are only a few plants that have all the protiens that we need to live and grow.  Eating more diversely ensures a good diet.  Rice for instance does not have a complete protien.  Potatoes do, but only if you eat the skins and then there is not much protien in the skin, there is not much skin.  Both are mostly carbohydrates and very little protien anyways.  

What about the quality of the food?  Quality food tastes better, but that is it.  A lot of people think Organic food is better for you.  If taste is important for you, then organic is the way to go.  If you are looking for a healthy diet on a small budget, don't go organic.  If you have the time and the space, grow your own food, but it is expensive, both in time and start up.  When you plant a garden, if you do it from seeds, it can take a while for the plants to get to maturity, if you buy them bigger from the garden center, your have plants that may already be producing food without the long wait, but you have to pay more.  Either way you have to pick the crop that you want to get the most bang for your buck.  It does taste better, but the tasteless food in the supermarket is just as nutritious and there is more diversity there than you can get in your garden.  

Of my diet, I fear that the diversity of it is unsustainable.  Diversity means that it must come from far away and often very far away.  Diversity means that there is hundreds of kilometers if not thousands, for the food to travel.  It means that there is a foot print associated with it and it also necessarily means human blood shed or poverty as well.  Is that a price that we people in the West think about when we eat our food?  One day we will have to.  One solution is for superfoods to be created, foods that have lots of nutrients in them that can be grown in very small spaces.  Like a potatoe that has more protien than carbohydrates or a grain that is a complete protien or several foods that are complete protiens that we can add to our industrial mash to create a sustainable populous with good health and little disease.  It is coming.  The Earth needs it, well the humans on it need it.

Is Islam Evil?

I had to do a bit of research for this because I found the names on this subject a little confusing, because it is out of my usual context.  But then it is something that we all need to understand in this world.  This is Islam.  It is looking like there may be another war over this and this time it will be with Saudi Arabia and Iran and we should know why.

I don't see much difference between Sunni and Shiite sects and for that matter I had to determine the difference between Shi'a and Shiite.  The last one is easiest as Shi'a is the noun and Shiite is the adjective for the same sect.  Sunni is e same either way.  The difference between the two different versions of Islam is now quite large, but in the beginning it came down to one main difference and that is it.  When Mohammad died/ascended to Heaven, there was a successor to his power.  The Shi'a say that the leader was a relation of Mohammad and his power was hereditary through history unbroken to today and the Sunni say that it was four elected or popular leaders including the one that the Shi'a consider the leader.  That is it, the only difference that seems to really matter.  

I know it seems really stupid, but then we should look at the differences between Christian religions.  Catholic and Anglican differ, initially,  only with the allowance of divorce and the head of the Church resting in London as opposed to Rome.  All the other splits from Roman Catholic are initially minor and each subsequent split is only slightly different from the ideas that they split from.  Now there are Christian religions that are radically different from others, but that is after many many splits and divergences.  

Shia and Sunni are comparatively to that, identical.  But just because they are comparatively identical does not mean that they get along well together.  The funny thing is that they did get along well together for centuries, just not anymore.  The current center of Shia dominance is the  Tigris and Euphrates rivers through Iran with pockets along the Mediterranean (in Syria and Lebanon) and in Yemen.  

This was all light research.  But in the course of things I happened upon other research angles.  Wahhabism.  This tiny tiny religion has practitioners numbering about five million world wide and it has a history that is more than two hundred fifty years in the making.  It is by far one of the scariest things that I have read on Wikipedia.  They are fundamentalist Sunnis and they believe that everyone who does not believe what they believe should die.  They are very strict monotheists and that means there is only one being at you can name in a prayer, God and Mohammad is his prophet— but not prayed to.  The other Muslim 'Saints' are not to be named in prayers.  The dead can not be named in prayers to help gain the ear of God and that doing any of the above implies polytheism and therefore is a Capitol crime.  And right from nearly the new branch of Islam has been associated strongly with the Saud family.  Indeed, there very first joint conquest in the Arabian peninsula was a city where they killed almost everyone and the second they merely beheaded every man and enslaved every woman and child.  Sound familiar?

Who do they, the Wahhabi, consider beneath their contempt?  They hate the polytheistic, they hate the Shi'a and they hate any Sunni who does not follow their strict version of islam, but these last people are given a chance to repent to avoid execution (again, sound familiar?). 

In addition to their reckless slaughtering, they also destroyed religious monuments and places of worship, sound familiar?— the Taliban in Afghanistan swept through that country demolishing anything that was not Islamic, religious sites that predated the founding of Islam, everything.  Daesh also demolishes temples and holy sites, but they sell the artifacts on the black market.  The Taliban leaders were mostly from Saudi Arabia, there is no clear proof that they were Wahhabi, but it fits the pattern.  Daesh does follow the tenants of Wahhabism, they destroy other religious sites, force the conversion of other Islamic sects and behead all others.  They even admit Wahhabi ties.  

It is all complicated and not clear cut.  Islam is diverse a religion as Christianity was a few hundred years ago.  Each branch of the religion has additional branches and those branches have more branches.  I heard once that there were over two thousand different takes on Christianity, a religion that had a four hundred year jump on islam age wise.  In another four hundred years I suspect there will be that many flavours of Islam.

Freight Trains in Bedrooms: Why this is a Bad Thing

I am tall, not as tall as some but taller than most.  I am broad too, not as broad as some, but broader than most.  I am taller than most broad people and broader than most tall people.  The combination makes me a very big person, luckily I lost some weight this last year, but still I am quite heavy, because in addition to all that size, I am moderately muscular— not a sculptured muscular body, but a naturally muscular build.  

One of the results of this body is that my organs are bigger than the average.  For example being tall and broad I have a bigger pelt than most people, more skin.  I have bigger parts too.  They say your heart is the size of your fist, so my heart is bigger too.  And my other parts like my nose, and my head and my ears.  And my tonsils.  Tonsils?  And bigger Uvula.  Uvula?  I know you thought I was going to talk about another organ, but that is private and you have to be on a need to know basis to find out about that, but tonsils and uvula are important.  

I just looked both of them up to be sure what they do.  The uvula dumps saliva into your mouth so that you can talk for a very long time, or sing, or do what you need to do like eat crackers.  Tonsils are the first part in the defense of infections entering though the mouth., the skin is of course the first line of defense for infections normally.  So big tonsils means better health and big uvula allows me to eat drier foods and talk longer than nonhuman animals.

Those two organs have been bigger in me for a long time and they have served me well as I don't get sick very often and that might be a factor.  One other impact has been sleep apnea.  My father has it and we used to watch him while he slept on the couch.  He would snore and snore and snore and stop… and when I say stop I mean stop breathing.  And then he would snort and start breathing again and snore and snore and snore and snore and snore and stop.

My first girlfriend could not sleep with me.  I did not understand why and it was truthfully a lot of the reason why we broke up.  She said that I breathed too loud.  I did not understand, but she meant I snored.  My second girlfriend confirmed this, but I thought that this was normal, because my dad snored and I thought that was normal.  

A few years later when I had a third girlfriend and an Autism diagnosis and actually trying to combat it.  With the result that I wanted to get rid of the snoring; I wanted to be healthy.  According to MPTR it was like sleeping beside a freight train and then I would stop breathing.  Then I would start again.  I was in love and I wanted to change so I went to my doctor and entered a sleep study.

It is an appointment that you go to at night.  You get their when it is dark and you arrive and they spent a lot of time hooking you up with sensors on wires.  All over your head, your face, your chest, your arms and your legs.  There is a strap over your stomach.  And they measure you brain waves and your movements at night and how you breathe.  They also have a microphone pickup.  And then they tell me to go to sleep.

When I woke up I told the technician that I was done, I normally slept for five hours in a night but there I slept for seven hours so I asked as I was unhooked what they thought of the sleep.  They said they have heard worse, but I had sleep apnea for sure.  When I got the report, it said that I had stopped breathing an average of nineteen times an hour and I did not have proper sleep, that my REM was interrupted and very short.  They said that I also fell asleep within two minutes of turning the lights out, way faster than I thought.  

It took me a little while to get the Sleep Apnea breathing machine.  Getting used to wearing a sleeping mask was difficult, but I knew that if I did not get this fixed, I would not get another girlfriend, so I had reason to persist.  It took me about three months get used to wearing it and I did not notice any affect on me except that my perpetually stuffed nose was finally clear and I could breath through it.

Such is the way of gradual things that you do not notice great changes, but you do notice when the change is more pronounced.  Like when I forgot my machine at a place I was staying and I did not have it for a week.  I woke up groggy and I had to take a nap in the afternoon to make it to my regular bed time.  And then all week I was in a haze.  Another affect of getting my sleep in order was that caffeine started to have an effect on me; I thought I was immune or that it put me to sleep.  But it turns out that when you are over tired it can't stimulate you and it relaxes you.

How much noise does a sleep apnea machine make?  Not much.  It pumps air into a mask and when I breathe it all goes into me and when I exhale to stops blowing and in the pauses it blows out vents.  It is about as noisy as a regular breathing sleeping person and a lot quieter than a snoring buffalo.  You can't nuzzle my face when I am sleeping but then I am sleeping.  When I am awake I will be more alert and attentive.  It is the better way.  No freight train in the bedroom, no worried person wondering if I have breathed my last breath.