What the hey does that mean? What exactly is in that pudding? I imagine some backstory involving a detective solving a murder, and finding the clincher hidden inside a serving of pudding.
Alas, it is not so. The phrase comes from bastardizing the original longer version, hundreds of years old: "The proof of the pudding is in the eating," which makes a lot more sense for a phrase that means things will be judged by the results.
Also worth mentioning: in England, "pudding" means "dessert," any dessert, not just what we call pudding. Cake is pudding, chocolate is pudding, cookies are pudding (though they don't call them "cookies", they call them "biscuits"), it's all pudding.
Amazing statistic: conservatives are more charitable than liberals! Even though liberals are always the ones who talk about caring for the hungry and poor and persecuted, apparently when it comes to putting their money where their mouth is, they fall short by any measure. Conservative households give 30% more, and also do more volunteering, and give more blood. The higher donations are true both in absolute numbers and as a percentage of income. (If you don't include donations to churches, liberals give slightly more in total, but still lower as a percentage of income.) Red states give more than blue states, and in fact Americans (at 2% of income) give more than Europeans (French being the least charitable, at 0.1% of income). [Source: NY Times]
This is embarrassing! Fellow Obama supporters, there are so many needy and suffering individuals you can help, let's at least keep up with the let-'em-eat-cake crowd. The US average is 2% of income, and the conservatives are apparently the ones beating the average, so think about how you stack up. Groups like The Humane Society of the US, Doctors Without Borders, Americares, and so many more depend on people like you to save lives...
Old San Juan is adorable, the most visitable spot in Puerto Rico. It is perhaps the oldest place in the Americas, too, with forts and buildings from the 1500s, back when Ponce de Leon, of "fountain of youth" fame, was the governor of the island. It doesn't have the feel of a third-world Caribbean nation at all, but of an upscale European place. That said, everything else about Puerto Rico, including all the things residing in those cute San Juan buildings, were far more American than I expected. It's all pizza and sandwiches Burger King and Marshalls and Starbucks and Payless, the roads lined with the American wasteland of strip malls, just like everywhere else in our country. Yeah, everything was in Spanish, but that was the only difference. Culturally, the country is practically indistinguishable from anywhere, USA. Well, the buildings were pastel-colorful, like Miami. And there were occasional Hispanic treats -- but it was far less Hispanic than the Puerto Rican sections of New York City. I remember mofongo in particular, an island specialty made from plantains. How could you go wrong with plantains? Well, you use them when they're green and tasteless, and mush them into a dense goo that keeps the shape of the mold it was made it. Nothing more than tasteless starch. There were a few other Hispanic foods -- piña colada, dulce de coco, but these were on the fringes of what was mostly a standard American diet.
People here never said "Perdóneme", but rather "Permiso". They said "carro", not "coche". The said "guagua", not "autobus". And weirdest was their tendency to drop the "s" at the end of words. The would count "uno, do, tre". They would said "gracia" and "bueno día". And you could not count on people to know any English.
The weather was amazing. In addition to strolling the cobblestone streets of Old San Juan, or sitting in the third-floor wrought-iron balcony overlooking the narrow streets while listening to the distant strains of salsa, I went snorkeling in Culebra island, hiking through the El Yunque rainforest, and kayaking at night through the mangroves under a sky with more stars than I've ever seen, each familiar constellation suddenly a city of a hundred specks of light, while under the water fish glowed with bioluminescent plankton as they darted. Indeed, every stroke of the paddle churned up countless plankton which only light up when disturbed, so that the water around my oar was always lit like an underwater spotlight in the otherwise dark water. I dipped my hand in the current, and in response a hundred dots of light turn on, like pixie dust swirling about my fingers. I cup some water and lift it up, to see individual specks blinking on and off like so many fireflies in my palm.
There are many stories to tell. Hiking through the rainforest up a steep mountain by flashlight in the pitch dark to get to my isolated cabin, with no electricity and an outdoor toilet (which made me cringe at first, but it was a fully functional bathroom and the jungle was completely private and the weather was perfect... ultimately it seemed like a much prettier setting than an indoor bathroom!), going to sleep to the sounds of the coquí frogs (oo-EE, oo-EE, oo-EE, like crickets all night long) and waking to the crowing of roosters. There are less happy stories too, like being abandoned by my hiking guide, or getting into a car accident on the way to the airport and (after dealing with slow cops in Spanish) missing my flight, left to slowly work my way over two days to Orlando, then Atlanta, then Newport News, and finally home in a series of gambles.
The rainforest of Puerto Rico is but a shadow of that in Costa Rica. The tree height was low, there weren't many cool or special trees, and the only animals were snails, coquí frogs, little lizards, and rats. Still, the flora sure beats the dull vertical sticks that make up our temperate forests, and creates a pretty backdrop for hiking. I was also thrilled to see chickens left to roam at will -- mothers with beautifully patterned feathers and little chicks in tow, while fancy colored roosters strutted ahead vigilantly. You never see that kind of thing in America, where Perdue and Tyson have turned chickens into white, bedraggled, often crippled creatures kept in utterly barren barns, living in their own filth, never seeing sun or breathing fresh air, much less having a family (or even reaching puberty for that matter). Seeing birds living the way they were meant to live made me so happy. It's almost hard to understand what those factory farmed birds are missing until you see the alternative.
I am back from vacation! (Finally!) More on that later, but I wanted to mention something else.
I have long wondered why Christians believed that homosexuality was a sin. Christians typically quote Leviticus:
18:22 You shall not lie with man as one lies with a women; this is an abomination.
20:13 If a man also lie with mankind as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they should surely be put to death.
However, Christians don't believe in following the Old Testament, which includes mandates on keeping kosher, circumcising babies, and so on. So, what gives? I have asked many religious Christians, and the striking thing is that none of them knew. It's as if Christians are mindless drones, believing things for no reason.
I stumbled upon Acts 15:19:21, and my best guess is this explanation. (Any knowledgeable Christians, feel free to correct me.)
Therefore I [James] have reached the decision that we should not trouble those Gentiles who are turning to God, but we should write to them to abstain only from things polluted by idols and from fornication and from whatever has been strangled and from blood.
Looks to me like Gentiles need only follow these four Old Testament rules: no idols, no strangling, no blood, and no fornication -- here's where the homosexuality comes in, I imagine. Mystery solved?
(Worth noting: the Bible injunction refers only to men, and true to the letter, Judaism only condemns male homosexuality -- though lesbianism is prohibited as general lewdness.)
Next longstanding Christian mystery still not explained to me: why against abortion? By my reading, the issue is never discussed in the Bible.
I now own my first ipod. I think that officially makes me a member of America. Thank you Shirley.
I've said no more chocolate reviews, but maybe I can't help myself. I'd long eyed Vosges exotic candy bar, chocolate bars with flavors like bacon or cardamom/plum. The price is exorbitant -- one square of the chocolate bar is about $1 -- plus I had not confidence that the flavors would be remotely good, but today I could resist and went for their Black Pearl Bar, chocolate with wasabi, ginger, and black sesame seeds. Surprisingly, it works. Flavors like these can easily be overpowering, but they aren't. Unmistakable but subtle enough to blend in. Still, chocolate is so yummy as it is, that these flavors are just unnecessary, and on top of that, while quality chocolate, it's not remotely worth the price.
Canada's Parliament was about to vote Prime Minister Harper out of office, so he suspended Parliament for the first time in Canadian history (without Parliament's consent). Sounds so George Bush, who would get around Congress's unwillingness to confirm his nominees by forcing them in as "emergencies" when Congress was out of session for vacation, forcing Congress to respond by leaving at least one person behind during vacations to keep Congress technically in session the whole time. Ah, how we will miss these stories when he's gone.
Cheer up, Canada. It's time for Taiwan's best Parliament fights:Although in my opinion, this girl fight should have been included.
Palin's campaign spending is in the news again. You may recall the scandal over $150,000 in high-end clothing, now it's tens of thousands on hair stylists. My question is: who cares? Really, please explain to me why anyone cares! Why is this an issue at all. If she wants to spend lots of money on fancy stuff, well, who wouldn't?
Adding to the new vegetarian places that I should get around to trying (including Dirt Candy in the East Village and Lula's in Alphabet City) is now Soy and Sake in Greenwich Village. Know any cool new spots (not necessarily vegetarian) that I should try?
Today's paper has an article about my research issue, meat consumption and global warming.
“I’m not sure that the system we have for livestock can be sustainable,” said Dr. Pachauri of the United Nations. A sober scientist, he suggests that “the most attractive” near-term solution is for everyone simply to“reduce meat consumption,” a change he says would have more effect than switching to a hybrid car.
The Lancet medical journal and groups like the Food Ethics Council in Britain have supported his suggestion to eat less meat to control global emissions, noting that Westerners eat more meat than is healthy anyway.
Producing a pound of beef creates... 100 times more [greenhouse gas emissions] than a pound of carrots, according to Lantmannen, the Swedish group. [Source: NY Times]
Cool to see how mainstream the issue has caught on.
You may have noticed the new title of my blog. It looks sort of like serif printed letters, but for the most part not letters you're familiar with. In fact, that's my name in Cherokee. The written language was created in 1821 by Sequoyah (American name John Grist), an Indian who saw printed English books, but had no idea what the symbols meant. However, seeing the idea of written language, he went about creating a writing system for Cherokee with symbols based on what he saw. He at first tried a different symbol for each word, but seeing as there were too many words, he went with a symbol for each syllable -- which mean it's not really an alphabet, but a syllabary.
This modern example is something strikingly common in the development of written language. Though it seems like common sense to come up with a way to write down spoken language, the idea has been invented extremely rarely in human history. It happened once in ancient Mesopotamia, and independently in Central America, and possibly also independently in China, but that's it. All other languages invented written forms only after they were exposed to written language in other cultures, giving them the idea to do it themselves. Hard to imagine that it was such a hard-to-think-up idea!
The word for "Cherokee" looks like CWY, which in the Anikutani (written DhJWh) dialect is pronounced Tsalagi. As you can see, a lot of the letters do like just like English ones, or nearly so. But many don't. I admit, my spelling of my name wouldn't be a Cherokee's first choice, but I stretched the pronunciation a bit in order to choose more exotic-looking letters. Can you blame me?
As the Obama administration chooses its cabinet, for animals the all-important post of Secretary of Agriculture hasn't been picked yet. This is the person with the power to ensure that billions of animals aren't being skinned alive and boiled alive, that the conditions on factory farms be improved. Please take a moment to write to the transition team and urge them to make animal-friendly choices! Click here do it automatically from the Humane Society web site.
What the hey does that mean? What exactly is in that pudding? I imagine some backstory involving a detective solving a murder, and finding the clincher hidden inside a serving of pudding.
If I finish my work (a big if!) then in a few hours I will be off to the tropical weather of Puerto Rico. Wish me a good trip!
I've said no more chocolate reviews, but maybe I can't help myself. I'd long eyed Vosges exotic candy bar, chocolate bars with flavors like bacon or cardamom/plum. The price is exorbitant -- one square of the chocolate bar is about $1 -- plus I had not confidence that the flavors would be remotely good, but today I could resist and went for their Black Pearl Bar, chocolate with wasabi, ginger, and black sesame seeds. Surprisingly, it works. Flavors like these can easily be overpowering, but they aren't. Unmistakable but subtle enough to blend in. Still, chocolate is so yummy as it is, that these flavors are just unnecessary, and on top of that, while quality chocolate, it's not remotely worth the price.
Today's paper has an article about my research issue, meat consumption and global warming.
You may have noticed the new title of my blog. It looks sort of like serif printed letters, but for the most part not letters you're familiar with. In fact, that's my name in Cherokee. The written language was created in 1821 by Sequoyah (American name John Grist), an Indian who saw printed English books, but had no idea what the symbols meant. However, seeing the idea of written language, he went about creating a writing system for Cherokee with symbols based on what he saw. He at first tried a different symbol for each word, but seeing as there were too many words, he went with a symbol for each syllable -- which mean it's not really an alphabet, but a syllabary. 
