3 unforgivable character flaws

Poverty of imagination.
Meanness of spirit.
Insincerity.

Another food blog find

Sicilian Rice Ball Casserole:

On acceptance

It is necessary and humane to accept people's shortcomings—or, at least, some of them, those which are inevitable and forgivable—but too often people make the mistake of going further, of celebrating them, as though they had somehow been transformed into virtues.

Red beans & rice

And now, the reason I made the ham...red beans and rice!

From this recipe.

Dinner pics

Baked glazed ham

and dinner rolls from scratch

from the recipes below:

http://www.southernplate.com/2011/03/baked-ham-with-easy-glaze-share-your-sunday-dinner-memories.html

http://www.southernplate.com/2010/01/jordan-rolls-and-why-interruptions-are-the-key-to-success.html

The antidote

Math is the antidote to the superstition of those hoodwinked by coincidence.

Broccoli sunflower seed soup

From this recipe.

Waste

Thought spent on what is false is the greatest possible human waste.

The company of ideologues

An ideologue is always a tiring and disappointing figure, but a liberal ideologue shall ever prove far better company than a conservative one.

Two approaches

Some make themselves ridiculous acting on instinct,
others study for half a century to accomplish it.

Choosing against

We are capable of choosing against our inclinations, but we should do so in awareness that we are likely moving away from contentedness, if not happiness.

Sanity

Sanity is a balance of clarity and calm, a compromise that diminishes the closer we examine the cognitive process.

Tonight's supper

Thai peanut baked chicken, cheese-and-spinach biscuits, and fresh-from-the-garden steamed broccoli. I also tried a new brownie recipe (not shown).

Dumping the myths

Dumping the myths and regressive ethics of Christianity and similar authoritarian monotheisms frees us from a lot more than the mind-numbing shade of God.

The prospect of profit

The prospect of profit is a heavy thumb on the scales of justice.

Motive

The politician's pride was once to create;
Now tearing down is enough to feel great.

On evil

There is always a perspective from which evil is drained from its contours. The horror is being unable to perform the movement necessary to reconfigure to that point of view.

The common wisdom

The common wisdom is so often wrong, or inadequate, or confused, or misleading, that one is forced to conclude it to be an intentional misdirection. But at whose behest? To whose benefit?

New poems

I have posted the last 6 poems from February.

Life will break you (Erdrich)

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.

Louise Erdrich

Misfortuned

Yesterday for the first time ever, I got a fortune cookie with no fortune in it.

Trojan video?

I think that movies and tv have trained us en masse in a kind of meditation, have made us proficient at letting go of ourselves for extended periods, at putting ourselves into an open and receptive state. Unlike the expansive void produced by traditional forms of meditation, though, this altered state induced by subsuming our ego to the simulacra of life on screens not only opens a gate into our psyches but then uses that channel to program, and often to pollute, our very being. How vulnerable might we be with our defenses thus bypassed by the broadcast?

February poems

I have posted 8 new poems.