An Indian couple was awarded $200k in a court case when a college told them to stop using the microwave ovens to heat their curry sauce. Other students/employees complained about the smell and the mess.
I expect that in very short order, large numbers of students and employees will be firing up their George Foreman grills and filling the air with the sweet smells of barbecuing beef.
It is hard to imagine that any judge could rule AGAINST beef-eaters for cooking the traditional foods of their peoples even if it makes other employees retch.
For the record, I once worked in a factory that forbid the cooking or reheating bacon in the break-rooms. I wonder why.
I was not able to complete my maintenance goals of warm-up and then four sets of six reps of dead-lifting my bodyweight.
The warm-ups went OK. My warm-up isn't very scientific. It is six reps of 135lbs (the bar + a 45 pound plate on each end) then six reps of 185 (the bar + a 45 and a 20 pound plate on each end).
I managed one set of six reps of my bodyweight and my glutes and hamstrings said "Enough".
I don't think the flu made me weak. I think the inactivity that went along with the flu did.f
I expect the stamina to come back quickly if I lift once every three days and walk on the other two days.
Eaton Rapids is usually placed in USDA zone 6A (predicted annual low of -10 F)
It was -16 F, actual, when I looked at the thermometer this morning.
We tend to be warmer than some of our neighbors because our house is on a knoll and we have tree cover. Cold air is dense and runs downhill and puddles-up in the hollows.
A dense tree-cover is helpful in terms of softening temperature extremes at ground-level. "Cold" is partially the result of the heat-energy stored in items on the ground radiating through the atmosphere to deep-space. Clouds help retain over-night heat. Branches over-head also help reflect some of that heat back.
A secondary effect of heavy tree cover is that the sap and the buds freezing release heat and cause a very localized rise in temperature. Multiply that slight rise a million times and it makes a difference.
Shallow, snow-covered bowls with no vegetation or strctures emerging above the snow are the worst-case scenario for low temperatures. They are parabolic mirrors aimed at deep-space and have no other thermal mass than the human stupid enough to choose to bivouac or have their snow-machine founder there.
Gordian Knots (not to be confused with Don Knotts)
The Phrygians had no king, but an oracle at Telmissus (the ancient capital of Lycia) decreed that the next man to enter the city driving an ox-cart should become king. A peasant farmer named Gordias drove into town on an ox-cart and was immediately declared king. Out of gratitude, his son Midas dedicated the ox-cart to the Phrygian god Sabazios and tied it to a post with an intricate knot ...comprising "several knots all so tightly entangled that it was impossible to see how they were fastened"
The ox-cart still stood in the palace when Alexander the Great arrived. An oracle had declared that any man who could unravel its elaborate knots was destined to rule over all of Asia. Alexander the Great wanted to untie the knot but struggled to do so before reasoning that it would make no difference how
the knot was loosed. Alexander the Great drew his sword and sliced it in half
with a single stroke. -Adapted from Wikipedia
Rules
I want to blather a bit about "rules".
I believe that reality is filled with chaos and turbulence and unpredictable events. It may be predictable for short intervals but things fall apart as scales increase.
This causes us, as humans, endless intellectual anguish. We spend our childhood forming mental-maps and yarn-balls of if-then-else logic. It is a universal conceit to think that our mental models accurately and comprehensively map the world.
It is pretty easy to demonstrate that it doesn't, though. Maybe there is a rule that says "Don't go into that bar!" or "Don't walk through that neighborhood after dark". The reason for those "Don't go" rules is that the operative rule-sets we are carrying in our heads fails (often catastrophically) in those environments.
Declaring "That is against the rules" is not a viable defense against a mugger or rapist.
Trump
The main reason progressives HATE Trump is because he doesn't honor the rule-sets in their heads. This is an unprecedented (in our lifetime) event.
For example, the head of NATO reportedly told Trump that if the United States is attacked, that no European country will assist us in defending our nation. Four generations ago the US initiated the Lend-Lease program and the support has flowed and the defense umbrella stood without a hiccup since.
Intelligent people are unable to perceive how
distorted and self-serving their mental models became over decades of
self-referential evolution. Julian and Fatou sets are a mathematical example of how simple rules applied over many iterations can produce bizarre and complex outcomes.
The Euros are outraged when Trump demands that the Europeans reciprocate in any way. In the experience of every living European, American generosity has been akin to gravity: Reliable, always there, a force of nature that you don't have to pay for.
Other Gordian Knots
The war-gaming guys have the same blind-spots as everybody else.
Who says China will not use nukes to seize Taiwan? If they did, how certain are we that the US would retaliate with nukes? Isn't that what the Slotkin/Kelly insurrectionists were prepping the troops for? "Disregard your superiors when they tell you to launch nukes?"
Since I have been "house bound" for much of the past week, I have a lot of empathy for the people south of me will be enduring, both during and after the huge ice-and-snow storm that will be hammering them Friday, Saturday and during the clean-up.
One of the distractions that help me retain my sanity was.....Youtube!
Youtube is a tool. Youtube is like a chainsaw. You can be the master of the tool or the tool can be your master. Trust me, it is better to be the master.
Proactively "seeding" your algorithm (or feed) is a smart move.
Here are a few channels that held my interest.
Serenity
Life is good when listening to piano concertos while installing primers into brass cups. I confess to a fondness for compositions by Sergei Rachmaninoff and Camille Saint-Saens. The Youtube video linked above is almost five hours long so you will not have to keep interacting with your device while listening.
Social commentary
Andre Williams
This guy's channel helps certain mysteries snap into focus.
For various personal reasons, I have a vested interest in understanding how I can help individuals of the African-American community be as successful as possible.
His language is edgy.
Relationships
Jimmy on Relationships. Look through his videos and click on something that you are interested in. Or not. I don't get a commission.Conflictish. Look through his videos.... Pretty chill dude. Easy to listen to.
Understanding women
Yeah, right. Impossible, but I never saw that stop any man from trying.
EmilyWKing, Look through her videos...
Jedediah Bila: Look through...
The audio is garbled at the start of this video. "Cinderella took off her shoe and found love. You (modern women) took off all of your clothes and couldn't find love."
For the Francophones
Passe-moi les jumelles
Or, if you cannot understand French, you can turn on auto-subtitles after clicking on the gear icon in the lower, right corner of the screen. Then you can click on the gear icon again and activate auto-translate to English or any other language that they offer.
Not a French channel but Swiss.
Apples
Cummins Nursery
None of their videos go over two minutes, which is not an overwhelming amount of information.
The narrator taste-tests many unusual varieties. I watched their video on Ashmead's Kernal, Black Oxford, Boskoop and Zabergau Reinette.
You have to go to the videos page to see all of their content.
Do any of my readers want to recommend any video channels to those poor folks who might find themselves snowed/iced in?
I found a weak spot in our preps. We ran out of dog-treats.
It is possible that our enforced "in house" conditions may have increased the number of treats Zeus got. He manfully consumed the extra treats without complaint.
Worst Storm Evah!
Inches of freezing rain predicted for the coming storm
It looks particularly bad for the band where freezing rain will exceed 1/2".
Power outages kill. Downed power lines kill. Carbon monoxide from improperly used generators kill. Hypothermia from furnaces that won't run without electricity kills. 1/2" of an inch of freezing rain is considered catastrophic and power outages are a near certainty.
Southern Arkansas is predicted to get over an inch of ice. So is a band from Atlanta, Georgia to Virginia's Dismal Swamp which includes the entire state of North Carolina.
Glare ice is almost impossible to walk on without crampons or without sprinkling some kind of grit on the surface. As a last resort you can vacuum your carpets and sprinkle the dust the vacuum collects on those surfaces you must walk on.
Snow can collapse roofs and is messy. If you have to drive in it then you can get stuck or have an accident. But it is the ice that is the big killer.
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