So

No one's got anything to blog about, huh? Some of us are trying to procrastinate, you know. This blogging famine is making it very difficult.
I mean this blog is certainly in the decomposing stage. Which is a shame, blogs these days just ain't what they used to be. Course I'm just being a snob, I post about "your mom" jokes. But seriously, too much angst these days, it's becoming a cliche to feel desolate and blog about it. And so many blogs are just angsty.
So here's to original, angst-free, blog-thoughts! For my procrastinating, reading pleasure. And yours.
On that note, I'd like to take this moment to convince everyone once more to move to Oregon where it's ok to just lie in the myriad of dandelions of a grassy hilltop. For hours. In the sunshine. With the background yelling of stoner-skateboarders in the nearby skate park. Which in itself acts as a source of entertainment. Hard to say no, right?

The reality and global warning.

This story takes us back many years. 2.4 billion in fact. this is where my awareness first existed. Previously it had been a small crack in a glacier somewhere off the coast of nowhere. The thing was that all the other cracks in glaciers all the world over were losing their identity by the huge pieces of ice closing them off. This was of course a tremendous blow to their ego, and so some of them, by force of instinct and a tremendous will to exist, became what we now take for granted: our own awareness. Of course the fact the that these awareni and the homosapians collision is a total coincidence and you can of course see many people who lack this special quality.
Many years passed before my awareness developed brain cells and what not. Legs seemed like a good idea till i realised i could not fly with them. It took a further billion years to notice that they look better in flat fronts.
One thing it really hated was having to breath that obnoxious oxygen, i mean of course anything in the universe tastes better than vile oxygen, it took several million years to develop a taste for it after it came into style.
So anyway i was just getting wind of some carbon dioxide in the atmosphere when everyone starts going green. I mean please, just when something good starts some people have to ruin it. I would even consider just waiting a couple billion years till the next ice age and i can snuggle back into a comfy glacier if it werent for the 15% i was saving with Geico.

Borsch

New Yorkers think that the disgusting blue stuff they see in bottles in their grocery stores is the real borsch. Maybe in Poland it is. But not in Russia or Ukraine. I am not going to make any disparaging remarks about other people's food. And I actually like beet borsch (when it's cold and has some boiled eggs crumbled into it). But the difference between Russo-Ukrainian borsch and Polish borsch is the difference between Chassidus Chabad and Chassidus Chagas.

Some examples (click on the last image to enlarge and view in full glory):




(garlic is in the picture, because borsch is eaten with garlic dipped in salt and sometimes rubbed onto toasted rye bread)



(presence of meat and sour cream together for demonstration purposes only)

עומד לשרפה 2 aka the onion post

לכבוד ידידי הגר"ח הרה"ג כראלינג עקס שליט"א:

בענין שאילתך לגבי הברכה על בצלים יש כמה צדדים ברכת בצלים חיים דנקרא "רא" בעכו"ם היא שהכל משום דלאו דרך לאכול כמו דאיתא בברכות שילהי דפרק כיצד מברכים ובקצה"ח שם אבל מאידך גיסא יש לטעון דזה הוי מנהג יוצאי רוסיא יוקרע"ן וקצת פולין דרך אכילה דידיה הוה וליברך האדמה אגב אורכא מצד יוחסין יש לי מדור רביעי לומר מנהג דידן אבל אין לדקדק בזה כדידיענא מכ"ק מסאקמער שאין גורסין "שפיץ יחוס" אלא לסוסים וכלבים (ויש מוסיפין שידוכים וד"ל) וא"ת דאין לברך את האדמה משום חוקת הגוי של עובדי כוכבים שעובדים עפר הארץ דמתקרי למיניהם טרי האגערז וכדומה אין לחוש לזה דאין מברכין את האדמה ממש אלא ברכת הנהנין באיאמה"ע בורא פרי האדמה דיש לנו לזה מסורת אבותינו אבל יש לבא לההוא מסקנא דאין מברכין מזונות מטעם אחר דבתר רובא אזלינן ואין לתמוך על מנהג שאין מנהג המקום וכידוע בכל עולם הישיבות דאין שייך מה"מ כלל באמעריקא דכולנו מבולבלים כמו טשלענט ואין שום קהילה חזקה דיש לה מקום ומנהג ולאו גורסין מציאות דמכשיש כלל דפתיחת העניים מביא לידי כפירה דמביא לידי כאלעדז דמביא לידי זנות דמביא לידי ב"צ רחמנא לצלן! ולענ"ד הדבר תלוי בסביבה כדי שרוסי שאוכל בינו ובין עצמו (כמו שרגיל באוכלי בצלים) יברך האדמה ובורא נפשות ומי שרואה אותו יברך משנה הבריות אבל אם הוא אוכל עם חברים שאינם נוהגים כן יברך שהכל ויש כמה ראיות לדבר.

בברכת כל טוב והצלחה רבה

דער הלבע כופר

The above was a cleverly written satire or a load of borderline sacrilegious crap depending how you look at it. The only part that was meant to be taken seriously in any way was the very last sentence after the exclamation point. Even so, I want to do some real research and ask my rabbi. I would say continue making shehakol until then.

About sports

Soccer is the most superior of all sports.

Baseball is about as interesting as a game of paper-rock-and-scissors.

Both facts are objectively true.

Gefilte chicken

Fine, since nobody posts anything, I’ll do another food post.

Everybody knows gefilte fish. But what about gefilte chicken? Click on the images to enlarge (and sorry for the quality).

Austin PSA

As I'm sure y'all have noticed, lately there's been a lot of spam in our little corner of the blogosphere. A lot of spam. Nasty shtuff. Anywho, back in the day, in the land before time, I used to have word verification on comments (On TRS). E convinced me to get rid of that, so I did, and replaced it with comment moderation. E convinced me to get rid of that too, so I did, and all was well for many moons. Now suddenly we are under attack, and it's quite annoying. What to do? Good Q. Obviously we don't want to stifle anyone's creativity, or the fights that happily happen between two bloggers (call them discussions if you will), but at the same time, who wants to provide a platform for spammers? The Japanese shtuff isn't so bad, because it's in a foreign language, but the other spam? Disgusting. I've taken the simple step of enabling comment moderation for all posts older than thirty days, which seems to have stemmed most of the tide. I think that the spambots detect that their spam isn't going through, and stop trying, or something like that. Far be it from me to suggest that anyone should follow my lead, but I thought it appropriate to say something on the matter.

How do thoughts look like?

Not like this:

(pyramidal neurons in cerebral cortex)

More like this:



(synchronized firing of pyramidal cells, in red, due to inhibition from basket interneurons, in black)

First picture mine. Second borrowed from some paper (forgot which one).

Click on the images to enlarge.

Guess who wrote this:

http://www.heightsdeals.com/blog/2009/11/12/24/