Waiter, There's a Hair in my Satire
"Fashionable" hairstyles for women began their vertical climb in the late 1760s, and with them rose the ire of social critics. Editorials appearing in London periodicals immediately decried the large headdresses that English ladies were all too eager to copy from their French counterparts.
Chronicling the rise and fall of the fashion takes us from the courts of France to the printshops of London and finally to the streets of Philadelphia in 1778, where all that the high roll represented in a new nation at war with an old empire was brought quite literally to a head."
Did Cooking Give Humans An Evolutionary Edge?
I suppose those people who only eat raw food won't agree with this....
But here's the thing. Nowadays, we look at people, and we find that if people go onto a diet of raw food, then something peculiar happens -which is that unlike every other animal, they do not thrive in terms of getting really adequate energy. And there is a pretty clear reason for this, which is that our species has a very odd type of digestive system.
It's less than two-thirds of the size of the digestive system if we were a great ape - like a chimpanzee or a gorilla - in relationship to our body size. And so we have somehow, and for some reason, adapted to having a small gut - and we also have small teeth and small mouths - all of which indicates that we, as a species, have adapted to a diet which is very high quality, and we don't have to put large amounts through our gut and retain them and ferment them for many, many hours.
Well, what kind of diet is that? It seems very clear that cooking is responsible for increasing the quality of our diet in this way. So then one can say, well, okay, when did we get these adaptations, the small gut, the small teeth, the small mouth? And the answer is 1.8, 1.9 million years ago with the evolution of Homo erectus.
So if cooking is what restricts us as a result of our small diet - our small guts, excuse me - to a high-quality diet, then surely that's when cooking must have begun.
And something that was just recently discovered:
There is a study by some Belgian gastrointestinal physiologists on eggs. And what they discovered was that when you cook your eggs, then almost all of the protein is digested. So it's digested to the point of about 94 percent, whereas if it is eaten raw, then only 55 to 64 percent of it is digested and the rest is lost.
The guy gets a question on the raw food people:
Dr. WRANGHAM: I mean, that's a great question. And I think that it - the funny thing about the raw food diet is that many of the proponents argue that it is the natural thing to do. And I'm quite sure that it's not the natural thing to do in the sense that we're not biologically adapted for it, because if you look at raw foodists nowadays, they lose weight on a raw food diet, even to the point where women, in the only large survey that is being done of this, turn out to stop menstruating in half the cases when they are on a 100 percent raw food diet, an indication of how little energy they have. The scientists conclude that raw food diets lead to chronic energy shortage.
So if you want to gain energy, if you're living in the Third World, like a third of the people in the world, very hungry, then you - the last thing you want is a raw diet. But in our society, a raw diet can have all sorts of advantages. It can help you control your weight, and it has other advantages, too, for some people. I mean, there's lots of benefits that people report.
Some people find that they get reductions in rheumatoid arthritis, for instance, some very specific things like that. But many people feel a greater sense of well being, more vitality - quite often, less pain. And I think partly, this is going to be due to just eating less, and partly it probably is due to the fact that some people may be allergic or have some kind of response to the chemicals that are produced in cooked food. So, it's a very personal thing. You know, for some people, raw diets can be terrific. It's just that, you know, don't think they're natural, they're not.
2 hours before Yom Kippur, I wanted to drop by and wish Jewishstas to be signed and sealed in the book of life, however morbid that sounds.
Easy and fast fast.
Timelies all!
Another lazy Sunday morning, with Nova in my lap kneading away...
So, if I were going to bake something with peaches and/or nectarines, what should it be? Other than a pie.
Poking head (there's no internet yet in my - um, I mean, our - new place! There won't be any internet until October! The world is so strange when internet-less. Um, I mean, married)---
So, again in a skipping-lots-ignoring-ongoing-conversations-and-poking-my-head-for-a-short-time manner, and very last-minute, but still, it's that time of year again, and, yeah, still in a risk of sounding a bit strange:
On Sunday evening (as most of you clever people probably already know) starts the Jewish holiday of 'Yom Kippur', which means 'Day of Atonement'.
This is a day of soul searching, of trying to better define to ourselves our faults, and try to accept it upon ourselves to become, at least a little, better people. A day of repenting past wrongs we did, looking and finding it in our hearts to forgive wrongs done to us, and trying to remember to learn from this process in the rest of the days of the year. The holiest day of the year for practicing Jews.
On a rough division, there are two kinds of wrongs people can do: against G-d, and hurting their fellow human beings. In Jewish tradition, if the person committing a sin against G-d is truly sorry for what they did, repenting and taking it upon themselves to try and avoid repeating it, G-d forgives those sins.
The deeds which hurt other people, though, are not so 'easily' and personally forgiven. If somebody did anything to harm another person, they would not be able to cleanse themselves from that deed, no matter how much they'd pray and be sorry and repent and try to do good in the future, unless they make amends with the person who was hurt by that deed. As long as peace between people is not achieved, the 'sin', so to speak, is not 'erased from the books'.
Regardless of the date in the year, I'd hate to think I'd offended somebody here (or everywhere else, for that matter). I don't think that the attempts of becoming a better person than one already is, is something that needs a date or a certain holiday for it, of course. It's just that, for me, having a certain day in the year to stop my daily runnings around, and think of nothing else but the really important things, is a good reminder of the order of priorities I'd like to have in my life.
So, since Monday will be, for me, this day of soul-searching, of trying to create a new start in my on-going effort of 'becoming a good human being, or at least a slightly better one', I would like to ask all of you here, if I offended anybody, or hurt any of you lovely people, to tell me about it, and give me the opportunity to apologize, fix it if possible, and also learn from my mistakes, and try to not repeat them (there are so many new ones to practice, why repeat old ones, you know?).
In case I offended anybody, and can't communicate directly with them about it (for whatever reason), I can already say that I'm truly sorry. I can honestly say that I didn't mean to - you're all so considerate and thoughtful and generally all-around lovely, that there's absolutely no room for such a thing here. However, I might have had a slip of a keyboard, or mistaken somebody's intentions, or many other possible so forths. Y'all are so understanding, you probably didn't take offense anyway, but I want to make sure, all the same.
Please don't get me wrong - I'm definitely not trying to go around in a 'holier-than-thou' show off, or force my personal beliefs on others, or make statements which may be understood as criticizing anybody else's beliefs and way of living. If anything, being around here, among such a rich versatile group of kind and clever people, exposed me to a lot more ways of choosing to lead one's life than I've ever had a chance to see before, and showed me much more of the beauty and richness that is the world we live in.
[Edit: this is especially true this year, with all the things that happened to me during it, and how wonderful y'all were all throughout, even when I couldn't properly post at all, or hardly, or only when *I* needed it. Thank you.]
