I’m hungry. Quite hungry, really. I was just thinking, yesterday, that I am due a don’t-eat-much phase, but it seems I’m going the other way. This is a deep, can’t-ignore-it hunger. Lunch didn’t touch it. All the snacks stored away in my office? Not a dent. It is a considered-second-lunch-at-4 p.m. hunger. (Pizza sounded sooooo good.) I dared not to stand too close to anyone wearing a microphone in the studio this evening, lest my tummy start chiming in. After dinner, still hungry. I didn’t even have a big workout today. Makes me wonder how I’ll feel after a bike ride tomorrow morning.
I met a guy from Hearst Television today. The broadcasting giant sent two recruiters to campus to meet students. They did one-on-ones with interested students, I told him I could tell him to hire some of the young men and women he met, right away. They also did an under-attended info session, too.
Turns out the guy was from Savannah. I told him my wife and I got engaged there, and that we got married there. He knows the place. Everyone there knows the place. He lives just up the road, he said. He told me about the owner of the place where we got married. I told him we were just there in December, did the bridge run. Told him we go every year, that we don’t even do the tourist stuff anymore, but just walk around and enjoy the pace of things. I asked him if he had a job for me there. He asked me if I wanted to be a news director. The guy that was the news director in their Savannah shop just moved. I say, who doesn’t want to be a news director?
I wonder how many people he meets every year. How relentlessly positive he is, because he was profoundly optimistic, and energetic. Good traits, I’m sure, for this type of recruiting.
He left with my card. But, most importantly, he left having met a lot of talented students. A few of them might wind up within their company. They’ve got almost three dozen stations to fill, after all.
Let’s dive into the Tuesday feature, the Tuesday Close Your Tabs feature. I have so many open tabs this has become a regular thing. I’m not sure if we’re calling it that, or if we should. But it’s my site, so I can decide I guess … Anyway, here we are, the Tuesday Close Your Tabs feature. Yeah, we’re not going to call it that. Anyway, I have a lot of open tabs, and not everything should be closed, lost and forgotten forever. Better to memorialize a few of those pages here.
Anyway, I got sucked in, last month, by the title of this post. There’s always something Buddhism can show you, seems like. How to bear your loneliness: Grounding wisdom from the great Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön:
Cool loneliness allows us to look honestly and without aggression at our own minds. We can gradually drop our ideals of who we think we ought to be, or who we think we want to be, or who we think other people think we want to be or ought to be. We give it up and just look directly with compassion and humor at who we are. Then loneliness is no threat and heartache, no punishment. Cool loneliness doesn’t provide any resolution or give us ground under our feet. It challenges us to step into a world of no reference point without polarizing or solidifying. This is called the middle way, or the sacred path of the warrior.
Same website, same general concept for me: of someone is writing about them, lichens and moss deserve at least a skim.Lichens and the meaning of life:
Lichens come alive as an enchanting miniature of the miraculous interconnectedness of nature in biologist David George Haskell’s altogether fascinating book The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature (public library).
Having previously written beautifully about the interleaving of life, Haskell details the ecological and evolutionary splendor of lichens as living symbiotes:
The quietude and outer simplicity of the lichens hides the complexity of their inner lives. Lichens are amalgams of two creatures: a fungus and either an alga or a bacterium. The fungus spreads the strands of its body over the ground and provides a welcoming bed. The alga or bacterium nestles inside these strands and uses the sun’s energy to assemble sugar and other nutritious molecules. As in any marriage, both partners are changed by their union. The fungus body spreads out, turning itself into a structure similar to a tree leaf: a protective upper crust, a layer for the light-capturing algae, and tiny pores for breathing. The algal partner loses its cell wall, surrenders protection to the fungus, and gives up sexual activities in favor of faster but less genetically exciting self-cloning. Lichenous fungi can be grown in the lab without their partners, but these widows are malformed and sickly. Similarly, algae and bacteria from lichens can generally survive without their fungal partners, but only in a restricted range of habitats. By stripping off the bonds of individuality the lichens have produced a world-conquering union. They cover nearly ten percent of the land’s surface, especially in the treeless far north, where winter reigns for most of the year.
Having so mastered the art of unselfing, lichens emerge as living testaments to the visionary evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis’s insistence that “we abide in a symbiotic world.”
Now that we’ve thunk deep thoughts, let us enjoy the idea of a delicious pie.No-bake Lemon Icebox Pie:
My Southern sweet tooth can never resist an icebox pie — a class of pie that earns its namesake from simply chilling the pie layers, so there’s no baking involved. They’re wildly simple to assemble, and lightly sweet with a crisp graham cracker crust and the most stately pile of whipped cream on top. With fillings, the flavors are endless, from strawberry to coconut to chocolate. Lemon ranks at the very top for me — fresh lemon zest and juice in this pie contribute to its natural lemony flavor, with no artificial colors or extracts required.
And now I’m hungry again. I’ve been hungry all day.
Maybe I should distract myself with a hyperbolic headline. A leak at the bottom of the sea may be a harbinger of doom/a>:
The team discovered the leak after spotting plumes of methane bubbles nearly a mile below the surface of the ocean. After sending an underwater drone to investigate, they discovered that water with a different chemical composition from the surrounding seawater was seeping into the ocean from a hole in the ground “like a firehose,” Evan Soloman, a fellow UW oceanographer and a co-author of the paper, said in a statement. “That’s something that I’ve never seen and to my knowledge has not been observed before.”
Further analysis found that the water was 16 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the seawater around it. The authors suspect that the fluid’s source is roughly 2 miles below the ocean floor at the CSZ fault line where temperatures sit around 300 to 500 degrees Fahrenheit.
Why is that a big deal? The researchers say that the fluid might be acting as a kind of pressure regulator between the continental plate and the ocean plate. The more fluid that is in the cracks of the faults, the less pressure there is between the two plates as they smash into each other.
So less fluid means there’s more pressure building between the two plates. This can create a lot of stress on the region and a whole lot more potential energy that could unleash itself as a devastating earthquake.
I wonder if this is happening, in actuality, in other places and we just don’t know it yet.
Something we do know: how many tabs, 28, I still have open on my phone’s browser. That’s pretty decent progress. Still hungry, though.
With a quick dash of a video or two here, we’ll be caught up on the Re-Listening project. For just a moment. That’s the way it works. I’m listening to all of my old CDs, in the order that I got them, in the car and writing something about them here. I live just 4.5 miles from work, but it is a 20-some-minute commute, somehow. These CDs, then, come and go pretty quickly.
We’re in late 1998 here, with a by-design one-hit wonder. New Radicals released this one record, fronted by the high-toned Gregg Alexander, but Alexander and his writing partner, Danielle Brisebois, ended the project before the second single was released. The album ” Maybe You’ve Been Brainwashed Too” was topical, critical, and pulled from all sorts of influences to make a modern pop record. The record made it to 41 in the US, and landed in the top 20 on charts in Austria, Canada, and the UK. You might remember the top 40 hit single.
That’s an artist’s song.
In the liner notes to her 2004 compilation Artist’s Choice, the Canadian songwriter Joni Mitchell praised “You Get What You Give” for “rising from the swamp of ‘McMusic’ like a flower of hope”. In 2006, Ice-T was asked on Late Night with Conan O’Brien about what he has heard, besides rap music, in the last few years that really grabbed him and his only reply was “You Get What You Give”. In a Time interview, U2 lead guitarist the Edge is quoted saying “You Get What You Give” is the song he is “most jealous of. I really would love to have written that.”
I always liked the album, but it’s starting to show it’s age.
The first track has, has always had, a terrific energy. And when it came on — even though I am playing all of these discs in order I’m not always sure which one is going to appear next — I was quite excited for the rest.
A bit later, this one isn’t bad. The bit about obscure bands is hale, hilarious, hipster:
The rest … today it just feels like it’s trying to find it’s voice, while trying to be a meta-album, while trying to channel Prince and, among others, Hall & Oates. The 1970s came back in 1997, basically.
New Radicals signed in 1997 and called it in the spring of 1999. Alexander went back to producing. Seems the touring was part of the problem. They went platinum along the way, though.
You must have inherited the Open Tab gene. I currently have 35 open on the main phone, no idea how many on second phone, and several on the iPad. I, too, remain hungry. Let’s go eat and discuss all our open tabs.