tbentley.com

Boggin had a cleaning woman, who came in twice a week.  The cleaning woman, let’s call her Kathrin (since that was her name), was of German origin; she spoke with a thick German accent.  Not unusual in upstate Illinois, an area that had been settled, despite the French name of Des Plaines, by German farmers, toward the end of the Nineteenth Century.

Boggin was relatively liberal, for her age and time.  Both politically and religiously.  An Eisenhower Republican, I guess she’d have been. She didn’t let her prejudices show, though I’m sure she had some.  But as a Congregationalist who had married a Jew (Oppenheimer changed to Opper some time around the First World War), she really couldn’t afford prejudices.

She loved to talk politics with Kathrin, who was almost a Nazi throwback; Kathrin could rant, and Boggin would goad.  One day, they got into religion; the subject of Jews came up.  You can imagine Kathrin’s stand.  Finally, Boggin said, “Well you know, Jesus was a Jew.”

“Ach ja,” replied Kathrin triumphantly, “until he turned Cat’lic!”

Sour Cereal Recipe

1/2 cup millet
8-9 cups water

Wash the millet, add to a 4-qt pot with the water.  Turn on the heat.

Ginger == about 1-inch piece, chopped finely (cuisinart works).
½ medium-sized onion — chopped fine (cuisineart)

Add ginger and onion to the pot.

3 tsp cumin seeds
1 tsp salt
1 pinch ground fenugreek

Add cumin, salt and fenugreek to the pot.  Stir the pot to prevent its foaming over the side.

2 ½ tsp chopped green chillis, canned

Add chillis and coconut to the pot.  Stir, scrape off the foam.

1 ancho chilli pepper
Break ends off the chilli, dump out the seeds, cut into small pieces with scissors.
6 pitted dates (will be too sweet if you use too many), chopped fine.
½ tsp Vietnamese Chili Garlic Sauce
2 Tbsp medium-heat bottled Salsa
1 Tbsp Butter

Add chilli, dates, sauce,  and salsa to the pot.

1/3 cup unsweetened coconut  — add

The Sour Cereal is cooked when the millet seeds are split open.

1 bunch chopped Cilantro

Turn off the heat, add chopped cilantro.

Serve when hungry.

This may be a long and difficult post, at least for the poster.

Here’s the entry for OK from etymonline:

1839, only survivor of a slang fad in Boston and New York c.1838-9 for abbreviations of common phrases with deliberate, jocular misspellings (cf. K.G. for “no go,” as if spelled “know go”); in this case, “oll korrect.” Further popularized by use as an election slogan by the O.K. Club, New York boosters of Democratic president Martin Van Buren’s 1840 re-election bid, in allusion to his nickname Old Kinderhook, from his birth in the N.Y. village of Kinderhook. Van Buren lost, the word stuck, in part because it filled a need for a quick way to write an approval on a document, bill, etc. The noun is first attested 1841; the verb 1888. Spelled out as okeh, 1919, by Woodrow Wilson, on assumption that it represented Choctaw okeh “it is so” (a theory which lacks historical documentation); this was ousted quickly by okay after the appearance of that form in 1929. Okey-doke is student slang first attested 1932. Greek immigrants to America who returned home early 20c. having picked up U.S. speech mannerisms were known in Greece as okay-boys, among other things.

From Wikipedia about Occitan languages:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occitan_language

The word òc came from Vulgar Latin hoc (“this”), while oïl originated from Latin hoc illud (“this [is] it”). Old Catalan and nowadays the Catalan of Northern Catalonia (France, Catalunya Nord) also have hoc (òc). Other Romance languages derive their word for yes from the Latin sic, “thus [it is], [it was done], etc.”, such as Spanish sí, Eastern Lombard sé, Italian sì, or Portuguese sim. In Modern Catalan, as in modern Spanish, sí is usually used as a response, although the language retains the word oi, akin to òc, which is sometimes used at the end of Yes-no questions and in higher register also as a positive response.^[15]

Coverture (sometimes spelled couverture) was a legal doctrine whereby, upon marriage, a woman’s legal rights and obligations were subsumed by those of her husband, in accordance with the wife’s legal status of feme covert. An unmarried woman, a feme sole, had the right to own property and make contracts in her own name. These terms are English spellings of medieval Anglo-Norman phrases (the modern standard French spellings would be femme seule “single woman” and femme couverte, literally “covered woman”).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coverture

“The first reaction to truth is always hatred”

==Tertullian

“It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.”

–Victorian philosopher and mathematician W. K. Clifford

Getting a constant “site not available” response to  page requests, time and again,  is a great pain in the ass.  It’s caused by a full or corrupt dns cache in your computer.  The way to solve it is to flush your dns cache; to do this:  (1 reboot your computer, or (2 detatch, then re-attatch to your network, or (3 use ipconfig:

The command to flush the dns cache is ipconfig /flushdns

You can type  this in a command window, or in the command line at the bottom of the start menu; but it’s easier to create a batch file to issue the command.  Then you can just click on the batch file to execute it.

Batch (command) file method

Create a new text file on your desktop, rename it “flushme.cmd” (or what you wish, so long as it nds with “.cmd” ), and save it.  Now edit that file, and enter these two line:

ipconfig /flushdns
pause

Save this file.  You should now be able to make it run with a double-click.   Hit return to make the command window go away.

Pin it to your task bar:  Create a shortcut to the batch file (the thing you just created), then make the target read

exe /C “path-to-your-file-flushme.cmd”

You can now pin this shortcut to your taskbar, so it will run with a single click.  The original batch file can go into a subdirectory on your desktop, if you wish to keep things tidier; just make sure the shortcut’s target is changed (unlock from taskbar to edit) to reflect its new location.  The “pause” command in the batch file can be removed, once you know it’s working.

To imagine what it is to shift your perspective from the “I”-centered consciousness to ego-less, think of driving on the opposite side of the road.

When I went to Proviciales, an island in the Turks and Caicos,  I rented a car.  It was a fairly standard Ford automobile, with left-hand drive.  But in this formerly British colony, driving is on the left side.  So, I was driving on the left side, but with the steering wheel on the left side–the wrong side for this situation.

It was the wrong meme.  Driving on the left requires a right-hand-drive car, and vice versa.  The meme was, “driver on the left”.  But the driver did not work out too well on the left.  “Driver on the right” was the right meme for this situation.

There was a lot more to it than that, of course,  It just didn’t “feel right” driving on the left with a left-hand-drive auto, because it wasn’t right (no pun intended).  The whole thing felt out of joint, and really was.

This is the problem in trying to shift from the “I” conscousness, to ego-less.  At first, it just doesn’t “feel right”.

I recently ordered a laptop power adapter from NewEgg.  I got a shipping notice, with a USPS tracking number (much appreciated!), but then this:

Shipped from 34 35th Street

Hello?  35th street where?  Is there a city involved here?  NewEgg lists their office address; in Los Angeles.  Shipped from LA?

No.  After looking up the tracking number, turns out it’s being shipped from Brooklyn, New York–the other side of the country.  Well, I’m on the east coast, so that’s great for me—but why not tell me that in your notice?

It’s even more inconvenient at Amazon, who NEVER give the shipping source–which is really painful when there’s no tracking number, either.

The Question:  What does this series of numbers indicate?

six  two  five   five  four  five  six  three seven

Hint:  It has nothing to do with the 13th Century Italian mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci.

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The Answer:   on a ditigal clock, each numeral is formed from a matrix of seven illuminating bars.  The series of numbers is the number of bars needed for each numberal.

The Moral:  Lying in bed awake at night, can’t you find something better to do with your mind?

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