Freedom is the cure
We saw this on a billboard driving back from Idaho Falls. There were a lot of these signs in the impoverished desert communities between our destination but this was the most confusing. We fell silent as we drove by, both trying to understand the point they were trying to make. I still don't know.
The woman is throwing away that mask like it's a dirty diaper.
It's depressing they're so opposed to helping others they feel compelled to advertise it on a billboard.
Toshiro Mifune
Mifune had a kind of talent I had never encountered before in the Japanese film world. It was, above all, the speed with which he expressed himself that was astounding. The ordinary Japanese actor might need ten feet of film to get across an impression; Mifune needed only three feet. The speed of his movements was such that he said in a single action what took ordinary actors three separate movements to express. He put forth everything directly and boldly, and his sense of timing was the keenest I had ever seen in a Japanese actor. And yet with all his quickness he also had surprisingly fine sensibilities. I know it sounds as if I am overpraising Mifune, but everything I am saying is true. […] Anyway, I’m a person who is rarely impressed by actors, but in the case of Mifune, I was completely overwhelmed.—Akira Kurosawa on Toshirō Mifune, Something Like an Autobiography (trans. Audie E. Bock).
Fishing is barbaric
(or an unpopular opinion)
Fish have as complex an emotional life as mammals and the practice of sport fishing where you drag them out of their element by a steel hook caught in their digestive tract is unbelievably cruel. We would be horrified by catching a squirrel or a kitten in the same way but we think nothing of lifting a fish out of their element, tearing the steel hook from their throat with a pair of pliers, and throwing it back into the water.
We don't want none of your immoral taters
A quote from The Scots Kitchen
The potato, like the Gael, travelled to Scotland via Ireland, and crossed by the self-same route. ‘That man has not been dead many years who first introduced from Ireland the culture of the potato into the peninsula of Cantyre; he lived near Campbeltown. From him the city of Glasgow obtained a regular supply for many years; and from him also the natives of the West Highlands and Isles obtained the first plants, from which have been derived those abundant supplies on which the people there now primarily subsist.’2 Its first recorded appearance in Scotland is in 1701, when the Duchess of Buccleugh’s Household Book mentions a peck of potatoes as brought from Edinburgh, and costing half a crown.
‘About (1733),’ Chambers tells us, ‘it was beginning to be cultivated in gardens, but still with a hesitation about its moral character, for no reader of Shakespere requires to be told that some of the more uncontrollable passions of human nature were supposed to be favoured by its use . . . (In 1739) a gentleman styled Robert Graham of Tamrawer, factor on the forfeited estate of Kilsyth, ventured to the heretofore unknown step of planting a field of potatoes.3 His experiment was conducted on a half-acre of ground on the croft of Neil stone, to the north of the town of Kilsyth. It appears that the root was now, and for a good while after, cultivated on lazy-beds. Many persons—amongst whom was the Earl of Perth, who joined in the insurrection of 1745—came from great distances to witness so extraordinary a novelty and inquire into the mode of culture.’
...
During the early Celtic period, when adoration was paid to the waters, fish as food was taboo, and even after the introduction of Christianity it continued for a time to be considered dangerous to the purity of the soul.4
I guess we still have a few of these taboos about food. We don't eat horse, dog, or insects because it's considered immoral or dirty.
The infrequently updated blog.