Spicy peanut noodles with steak

Made from this recipe.

Thought

What some call evil is only disinterest, lack of empathy, and cruelty.

Apricot tree

It thinks it's spring.

The categories don't exist (Baker)

There's no either-or division with poems. What's made up and what's not made up? What's the varnished truth, what's the unvarnished truth? We don't care. With prose you first want to know: Is it fiction, is it nonfiction? Everything follows from that. The books go in different places in the bookstore. But we don't do that with poems, or with song lyrics. Books of poems go straight to the poetry section. There's no nonfictional poetry and fictional poetry. The categories don't exist.

Nicholson Baker, from The Anthologist

Thought

If one is going to defend oneself against the world with any success, one must take up two weapons: curiosity and a sense of humor.

More from Mencken (Mencken)

For it is upon the emotions of the mob, of course, that the whole comedy is played. Theoretically, the mob is the repository of all political wisdom and virtue; actually, it is the ultimate source of all political power. Even the plutocracy cannot make war upon it openly, or forget the least of its weaknesses. The business of keeping it in order must be done discreetly, warily, with delicate technique. In the main that business consists in keeping alive its deep-seated fears—of strange faces, of unfamiliar ideas, of unhackneyed gestures, of untested liberties and responsibilities. The one permanent emotion of the inferior man, as of all the simpler mammals, is fear—fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants beyond everything else is security. His instincts incline him toward a society so organized that it will protect him at all hazards, and not only against perils to his hide but also against assaults upon his mind—against the need to grapple with unaccustomed problems, to weigh ideas, to think things out for himself, to scrutinize the platitudes upon which his everyday thinking is based.

H.L. Mencken, from A Mencken Chrestomathy

Thought

It sometimes seems that the purpose of life is to teach us how not to love.

Mencken on democracy (Mencken)

I have spoken hitherto of the possibility that democracy may be a self-limiting disease, like measles. It is, perhaps, something more: it is self-devouring. One cannot observe it objectively without being impressed by its curious distrust of itself—its apparently ineradicable tendency to abandon its whole philosophy at the first sign of strain. I need not point to what happens invariably in democratic states when the national safety is menaced. All the great tribunes of democracy, on such occasions, convert themselves, by a process as simple as taking a deep breath, into despots of an almost fabulous ferocity. Nor is this process confined to times of alarm and terror: it is going on day in and day out. Democracy always seems bent upon killing the thing it theoretically loves.

H.L. Mencken, from A Mencken Chrestomathy

Mencken on work (Mencken)

Once I ventured the guess that men worked in response to a vague inner urge for self-expression. But that was probably a shaky theory, for some men who work the hardest have nothing to express. A hypothesis with rather more plausibility in it now suggests itself. It is that men work simply in order to escape the depressing agony of contemplating life—that their work, like their play, is a mumbo-jumbo that serves them by permitting them to escape from reality. Both work and play, ordinarily, are illusions. Neither serves any solid and permanent purpose. But life, stripped of such illusions, instantly becomes unbearable. Man cannot sit still, contemplating his destiny in this world, without going frantic. So he invents ways to take his mind off the horror. He works. He plays. He accumulates the preposterous nothing called property. He strives for the coy eyewink called fame. He founds a family, and spreads his curse over others. All the while the thing that moves him is simply the yearning to lose himself, to forget himself, to escape the tragicomedy that is himself.

H.L. Mencken, from A Mencken Chrestomathy

Thought

The most difficult anger to release is a rage at thwarted justice.

Thought

Only one who can perceive justice can render it.

Aspects of the void (P'o)

Jewels of jade and pearl are put in the mouths
Of the illustrious dead
To conserve their bodies.
They do them no good, but after a thousand years,
They feed the robbers of their tombs.
As for literature, it is its own reward.
Fortunately fools pay little attention to it.
...
In all the world, good and evil,
Joy and sorrow, are in fact
Only aspects of the Void.

Su Tung P'o, from "The Weaker The Wine"

Thought

There is no correction without concern.

Thought

It is ridiculous to be concerned exclusively with the means of production when the methods of production are so much more important.

Thought

There is a moral imperative to defy silly prohibitions grounded in fear and the lust for control.

The same intensity (Honnalgere)

She said: 'I love you
And if you love me
With the same intensity
Don't trouble me with love.'

Gopal Honnalgere, from "The City"

Two bits from Kamala Das (Das)

We have spent our youth in gentle sinning
Exchanging some insubstantial love and
Often thought we were hurt, but no pain in
Us could remain, no bruise could scar or
Even slightly mar our cold loveliness.

Kamala Das, from "The Descendants"

Ask me why life is short and love is
Shorter still, ask me what is bliss and what its price.

Kamala Das, from "The Stone Age"

A home (Subramaniam)

A home, like this body,
so alien when I try to belong,
so hospitable
when I decide I'm just visiting.

Arundhathi Subramaniam, from "Home"

Blueberry pound cake

Made from this recipe:

Mudflap upgrade

Makes me wish I had a truck:

http://www.cafepress.com/+smart_mudflap_sticker,301638076

Roast chipotle chicken

Custard bread pudding

Made from this recipe:

Chicken paella with nuts and berries