Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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Like my brownhouse:
   fake fish like candy
Friday, January 15 2016
Ray and Nancy came over this morning to walk their dog Jack with Gretchen. While they were off somewhere else in the forest, I returned to the windfall mentioned yesterday. It was warm enough (with temperatures in the 40s) that I didn't need a jacket or gloves. With three cuts, I bucked two fat chunks out of the middle of the windfall's trunk. Combined with a small piece from near the top, the three-piece load came to 102.1 pounds, to which I added 15 pounds of cardboard (the ample packaging for the new ceramic kitchen sink that was recently delivered).

This evening, Gretchen and I drove out to the Little Bear in the tasteful complex of restaurants and venues in Bearsville. There we met up with David (of Susan & David), who was there with his brother Josh (a paramedic living in Denver, Colorado). We were soon joined by Juliana & Lee. Most of us ordered Tsingtau beer and the table ordered a mix of plates, the worst of which being the crispy fried faux fish (my idea). The "fish" itself wasn't so bad, but it was served beneath a sticky sauce that was so sweet it tasted like candy. I know American Chinese food is different from real Chinese food and that it caters to caricatures of what Americans supposedly like (lots of sugar and fat), but normally I can take it. This stuff was barely edible.
Over dinner, David's brother Josh told us about life as a paramedic, though he mostly didn't get into specific stories. Instead, he mostly talked about the technical reasons for various emergency health phenomena. Take, for example, the case of someone whose lower body is crushed between a train and a platform. We've all heard that this person can survive this way for a long time, but the moment the crushing objects are removed, the person dies. I'd assumed this was because of a sudden drop in blood pressure as the tourniquet-like-effect of the crushing objects are removed. But it turns out that the reason a person dies in this case is instead from the sudden release of potassium ions from all the crushed cells. The potassium reaches the heart, messes up its electrical system, and the patient dies of a heart attack. The one specific story Josh told concerned a man who was ran into a pole on his motorcycle. This had split him in half all the way up to his diaphram, and though he eventually died, he arrived at the hospital still alive.
David and Josh left early, and the subject matter bounced around among a few interesting topics for awhile but then lodged for far too long in vegan talk, that is, the things all vegans know but they discuss anyway as a way to confirm their membership in a community. (Other groups do this too; I'm not Christian, but I imagine that when they get together, Christians talk about how totally awesome it was that God gave His only begotten son so that we might be saved.) What was odd about this was that Juliana and Lee aren't even vegans.
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http://asecular.com/blog.php?160115

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