I have been thinking lately about what it means to be an omnivore, the greatest of all omnivores. Greater than rats, cockroaches and even ravens. I don’t think the current food industrial complex is the best (by best I mean most ethical or true or beautiful) way of getting the food we need.

Little thinks, in the field, yon red-cloaked clown,
Of thee, from the hill-top looking down;
And the heifer, that lows in the upland farm,
Far-heard, lows not thine ear to charm;
The sexton tolling the bell at noon,
Dreams not that great Napoleon
Stops his horse, and lists with delight,
Whilst his files sweep round yon Alpine height;
Nor knowest thou what argument
Thy life to thy neighbor’s creed has lent:
All are needed by each one,
Nothing is fair or good alone.

I thought the sparrow’s note from heaven,
Singing at dawn on the alder bough;
I brought him home in his nest at even;—
He sings the song, but it pleases not now;
For I did not bring home the river and sky;
He sang to my ear; they sang to my eye.

The delicate shells lay on the shore;
The bubbles of the latest wave
Fresh pearls to their enamel gave;
And the bellowing of the savage sea
Greeted their safe escape to me;
I wiped away the weeds and foam,
And fetched my sea-born treasures home;
But the poor, unsightly, noisome things
Had left their beauty on the shore
With the sun, and the sand, and the wild uproar.

The lover watched his graceful maid
As ‘mid the virgin train she strayed,
Nor knew her beauty’s best attire
Was woven still by the snow-white quire;
At last she came to his hermitage,
Like the bird from the woodlands to the cage,—
The gay enchantment was undone,
A gentle wife, but fairy none.

Then I said, “I covet Truth;
Beauty is unripe childhood’s cheat,—
I leave it behind with the games of youth.”
As I spoke, beneath my feet
The ground-pine curled its pretty wreath,
Running over the club-moss burrs;
I inhaled the violet’s breath;
Around me stood the oaks and firs;
Pine cones and acorns lay on the ground;
Above me soared the eternal sky,
Full of light and deity;
Again I saw, again I heard,
The rolling river, the morning bird;—
Beauty through my senses stole,
I yielded myself to the perfect whole.

-Ralph Waldo Emmerson

I hate Wikipedia for the same reason I love it; because it is a despotic time waster.

I somehow navigated myself to this: Free to Choose, from this blog. I had to go back through my history to figure out how I arrived there. Once there, I spent several hours watching the Free Market PBS programs produced by the economist Milton Friedman.

Spore–> Spore Video Game–> Panspermia–> Circumstantial Evidence–> Mens Rea–> Tort–> Lawrence Lessig–> The Future of Ideas–> Legal Affairs.com–> Lessig.org–> Just because I’m not working doesn’t mean you can’t–> Lessig Wiki–> and finally Free to Choose

I read the first half of the book “The Future of Ideas” a few years back when working at eBay. I remember it painting a bleak and frightening future. I think the second half of the book probably included Lessig’s optimistic views of how to curb the tide of corporate power. I am usually reading so many books at a time that with my short attention span I only finish about half the books I start.

This comes from the work of genius known as “A Confederacy of Dunces”

Your total ignorance of what you profess to teach merits the death penalty. I doubt whether you know that St. Casian of Imola was stabbed to death by his students with their styli. His death, a martyr’s honorable one made him patron saint of teachers.

Pray to him, you deluded fool, you “anyone for tennis?” golf-playing, cocktail-quaffing psuedo-pedant, for you do indeed need a heavenly patron.

Although your days are numbered, you will not die a martyr-for you further no holy cause-but as the total ass which you really are.

Don’t over use alliteration. In fact if you don’t have it built into your name like James Joyce, don’t use it at all.

…Or was it that he drew less pleasure from the reflection of the glowing sensible world through the prism of language many colored and richly storied than from the contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic prose?

the troubling odors of long corridors…

…a din of meaningless words drove his reasoned thoughts hither and thither confusedly.

James Joyce

Poetry is no less mysterious than the other elements of the earth. A lucky line here and there should not make us think any higher of ourselves, for such lines are the gift of Chance or of the Spirit; only the mistakes are our own. I hope the reader may find in my pages something that merits being remembered; in this world, beauty is so common.

Jorge Luis Borges