‘m not saying mentally disturbed people should go without therapy and medication when necessary, but it’s interesting to look at artists (Van Gogh for instance), writers, and public figures in the past who would today be forced to assimilate from their uniqueness into bland submission to the ordinary. Maybe we should search for a way to keep the extraordinary while seeking to heal.

TweetI’ve started a new collection of cookbooks. The Beautiful Cookbooks truly are beautiful, as well as informative. These are oversized coffeetable books about various regions in the world. So far, I have the American, Texas, Asia, and Provence cookbooks. Each of these cookbooks has historic information about the region, including its people, culture and food. [...]

Food is, of course, the most basic of our needs beyond water and air (and toilet paper!). Isn’t it funny how we take these simple things for granted? You breathe in and out, you pull on the roll, you turn on the tap, you pop a Lean Cuisine into the microwave, or answer, “Yes”, to “Fries with that?” Easy, automatic, instant. But of course, it’s not. All of these things, with the exception of air, require a complicated combination of infrastructure and workforce to get to us. We only think about it when the system breaks down (imagine a toilet paper factory worker’s strike!), or when we pay our bills.

Tweet Unless you work from home, transportation is a necessity. But it need not be expensive. You don’t need three cars. You probably don’t even need two cars. And you could likely get by with no car at all, especially in the city. If you live in a larger city, you probably have a bus [...]

TweetI subscribe to a lot of newsletters, but my favorite is the “Funny Columns” from self-described “writer Melvin Durai, who was born in India, raised in Zambia and brainwashed in America”. He apparently now lives in Canada (go Canada!), and most of his columns have a sarcastic political message, often about the ever-increasing lack of [...]

TweetIf you stretch your meat with pasta, potatoes, veggies, etc. you can buy even expensive cuts of meat and fish with relatively little cost. Most Americans (and people in other developed countries) eat too much meat anyway, and need more fruits and vegetables in their diet to stay healthy. Thanks to kakisky and morguefile for [...]

TweetI was already interested in the book based on a friend’s recommendation, but then I opened it up and found it was written by the same author as The Kite Runner and I was hooked. I loved both of these books. Both novels are about Afghanistan, but tell a different type of story. The Kite [...]

TweetGerman. Beer. These two words just seem to go together. Beer makes us think of bratwurst, Oktoberfest, crazy drunken Germans in leiderhosen, beer steins, and so on. And German beer tastes great! Even many of the popular US beers, Busch for example, are from original recipes brought to America from Germany. According to Wikipedia, only [...]

TweetThis is a thought-provoking book about how our diet affects our daily life from emotional, physical and spiritual perspectives. I found a lot of myself in Annemarie. She was Dutch but lived in South America for most of her childhood and adolescence. Then she moved to America. She was married to a middle eastern man [...]