Top ten reasons to replace your old car:
10. The miles per gallon is like a good golf score.
9. Worn upholstery, peeling paint, and other aesthetics.
8. Unidentifiable noise.
7. It won’t pass registration.
6. Electric motors all need to be recoiled/rebuilt.
5. Most of the miles are off-road miles.
4. Dead animal in the engine compartment.
3. It just ain’t cool anymore.
2. Your neighbor’s tree fell on it.
1. The authorities have assured you it can’t be retrieved from the lake.
If you love the green of trees, if you love the smell of rain, if you love being outside, you might be a sandal-wearing hippie. On the other hand, you may have Earth Love.
Love isn’t exclusive to hippies. It isn’t reserved for Christians. Love doesn’t only happen on the day you get married, and it isn’t only felt for other people. Love can be felt, undoubtedly, for pets and other animals, and yes, love can be felt for the planet on which we reside.
The greatest aspect of recognizing when you have a love for Earth is the feeling of responsibility for Earth. We don’t live here for free. Not 100% free. If we enjoy clean water to drink, there are things we absolutely must do to have it. Likewise with good, healthy food. If we wish to survive at all, we have to take action.
Earth Love, of course, goes beyond survival. It helps us care for the animals and plants not directly in our food chain. This kind of love transcends our inner natural-selection self.
When you start feeling a love for the Earth, and the earth which is its constitution, you discover an ability to care even for nearly invisible organisms such as macrobiotic crust. Yes, ALL varieties of macrobiotic crust—the dietary kind, and the living earth kind.
Could you imagine? Caring for lichen? Caring about algae? Caring about the current state of cyanobacteria?
Of course you can, because you have Earth Love.
My friend Rudy Magrudian spun a Q-tip so fast he started a fire in his ear.
He said, “That’s nothing. You should see what I can do with a box of matches.”
He once promised that if we were ever in a robbery, he would shield me from all the bullets. All the bullets in the whole world.
His catchphrase is, “I thought it was a poop but it was only a fart.”
He has a collection of electrical panel knockouts. Enough that he could melt them down and make his own Panzer.
If it wasn’t for Rudy, there would be a lot more work done in the world. He has a tendency to distract. He has what we call a distraction attraction. It’s like a magnet that makes people around him stop working. His own workflow is completely sporadic. He attracts people into his distraction and then falls for it himself.
He claims he once made a perfectly working sailboat out of a bunch of coconuts.
There was some controversy over it, but he did grow some hair for the donate-hair-for-cancer-patients program. It wasn’t ’til later that they found out it was armpit hair.
My chum, my pal, my friend isn’t sure if he likes apple trees or lemon trees better. He’s willing to sit and think it over though.
He’s unapologetically loud, and apologetically crass. So much so he ends up saying he’s sorry at full volume before he even gets the swear words out.
Rudy Magrudian, star of the supermarket, has sung songs over the PA system in every supermarket from Tulsa to Tacoma. They almost always find him before he finishes the song and escort him out of the store. The one time he did finish is because he sang a short one. It was that dirge, “Happy Birthday.”
His shirt size is extra extra medium.
If not for Rudy, a lot of kittens would have drowned. He has saved kittens in a sack multiple times from raging rivers. Just ask him about it. He’ll tell you.
There was once a motorcycle gang terrorizing a small town, but Rudy went in and cleaned it all up, scaring the gang out of there. He set up traps, bombs, and wires until every last one of the gang lost their motorcycle, got clotheslined, or fell in a pit. You know, come to think of it, that sounds a whole lot like an A-team episode. Maybe Rudy isn’t as real as I thought.
But he’s never seen a Hitchcock film, so he can’t be that cool. You know?
Of course, I had to try these. If you’re a long-time fan of something and they make an improvement, you’re going to want to see what that improvement is all about.
I could tease you and say, “Let’s talk about Pop Tarts for about six paragraphs and then I’ll tell you what my critique is.” That’s not my style. I’ll just dish it out right here. Pop Tarts with Protein are as good as Pop Tarts without. I hope the company keeps making them and doesn’t just call it a novelty run.
When I tried it, I was surprised at how flexible these Pop Tarts were. The protein gives the Pop Tarts a different texture so they bend instead of crumble. If you took the original Pop Tarts backpacking, you could expect to have a lot of crumbs in the package. I didn’t take my Pop Tarts with Protein backpacking, but I could see when I opened the package that the two tarts were much more supple than their original counterparts. And for the record, I don’t mind having a bunch of crumbs, but this new style is looking to be backpack friendly.
The flavor was exactly as expected. I tried the brown sugar kind and they tasted just like the old ones, though there was a hint of protein. It reminded me of having a smoothie with whey protein added. The protein has a noticeable, not overwhelming, taste.
Critique summary: I liked ’em.
Now for the Pop Tart facts. Fact number one: they are an alternative option for all the granola bars out there.
Fact number two: I don’t know anyone who toasts them.
Fact number three: Pop Tarts are the fuel of choice for Adam Bahn, pilot and engineer. He invented the Flying Dream, a hovercar that runs off of chemical electricity. He knows how to start his day. With a Pop Tart.
Eating healthy foods is easy, right? There’s so much of it around. And yet, there are so many ways to not eat healthy. Chocolate cake is not all that healthy for me, and it seems we’re having it a lot lately. There’s always someone wanting it, even though it’s not their birthday. Someone among us is always willing to make the cake too. Do you have one of these at your house? The person who is ready, willing, and able to pop a chocolate cake in the oven any time and then serve it, they are contributing to everyone’s enlarged waist. Everyone in my house needs new pants now. We’re getting soft and flabby. Of course, it has nothing to do with the fact that I have to buy every known variety of cookie on the market—and then make some from scratch too—it can’t be that. Purely coincidental.
There is a way. I’m not sure how effective it is though. We need an experiment. Society at-large needs a documentary, sort of like Super Size Me, only in this one the person would only eat foods made the healthy way. They would eat black bean brownies, carrot cookies, and brussel sprout lollipops. When they were a month into it, they would stop and go back to eating whatever they used to eat, and we’d all see the difference. Is it healthier to eat that way, or to just have the salad in front of you undisguised? This experiment would help us all know what the truth is. Should I continue eating the chocolate cake as dessert for my salad, or should I infuse it with whey protein, rutabaga, and kale and rename it “salad”?
Xenosthesia.com 