The Hippie and I were talking about nutrition again so I [finally] bought some olive oil. Now The Hippie is a vegetarian, and so will I be one day if I don’t save up enough for my old age. Seriously, I just don’t see how I could really cut back much and still enjoy food. True, I eat cookies and argue that ground beef is not red meat. You see, it is brown, I’ve seen it. If you leave the wrapper off in the fridge it will even turn a deathly gray color on the outside. (That’s a joke, son.) My point being that I do not do anything to excess, so cutting back is most difficult.
Face it, my diet includes meat, of course, mostly fish, ground beef and chicken (skinless). I only eat white bread and rice occasionally for variety, once every other month. I drink only diet soda and decaf every day. I insist on 3.25% milk, not that mirky near-milk called 2%. I use evaporated milk in my coffee. No raw sugar and only rarely cake or candy, except for my daily chocolate bar. Potatoes are very rare in my life, in any form. So until talking can go aerobic, I don’t think talking about diets is going to result in any weight loss.
[Author’s note: This confusing passage is a referral to my plan to lose weight, since I can gain weight on a diet of 1200 calories per day. The Hippie prefers power-walks, but they don’t work for me. Makes one tired without the results. In the end, I lost nothing through dieting.]
For a break last evening, I read unusual facts about famous people, you know, how Winston Churchill was 1/16th Iroquois and such. There was an article about how the Russians [Soviets] uprooted all these factories and shipped them east on the trains. The tale is that they had these factories put back together and out-producing the originals in a few weeks or months.
Now, I do not in any way discount the super valor of the Red Army in defeating Nazi Germany, but there is just something about the factory episode that does not add up. Individual machines would make sense, but entire factories. I don’t disbelieve that it was done, only the time scale. I think the historians are overlooking or leaving out some prep work. It just seems if it were really done, as claimed, by human labor, there is a point at which adding more people fails because they start getting in each other’s way. I suspect some of the factory sites were prepared as much as eight years earlier, in 1933, including running in the necessary rail lines.
[Author’s note: in later years there is some evidence finally emerging that Soviet historians did fudge the factory thing to build up patriotism and loyalty to the regime.]
Then I get a late start off to school. For the first time this year, there was no real traffic jams at rush hour, and I made it with a few minutes to spare. That includes picking up the Hippie’s amplifier in Delray. That HP computer is pretty much fixed now, and it does not make sense that the person who donated it said it was in good working condition. In fact, it was so bad that we used it in class as a model of what could go wrong. If it had not been for charity, we would conclude the damage was malicious. I loaded all the critical updates and ran the anti-virus twice before class. That leaves just the anti-spyware and it is ready to go. Actually, I need copies of Microsoft Office that will work with Windows 98, and that baby is ready for sale.
[Author’s note: years later, that olive oil is still sitting in my fridge.]
