Life as an Extreme Sport

Category: …and everything else

Mostly everything else in a brain-academic way.

Your Own Personal (milk chocolate) Jesus

...and everything else

Apparently transubstantiation shouldn’t involve chocolate. But I admit, the first thought I had was “huh – do you eat a chocolate Jesus starting from the feet, or the head? Outstretched hands? What’s the equivalence of the bunny ears? And is he hollow?” Then I wondered at the calorie count. And unfortunately, my brain then decided to say, “hey waitaminute, doesn’t that look a lot like the little mummified baby from the Mütter?”

The fact that the gallery swears the timing of the exhibit of anatomically correct, sans loincloth, chocolate Jesus is not supposed to coincide with Easter strikes me as the disingenuous bit. Why not admit it’s a commentary on Easter and the pagan celebrations mixed with the Christian (or even specifically Catholic, since this is a crucifix)?

Any which way, it seems like a sort of silly thing to get up in arms about. It’s not like it’s a Serrano, Hirst or Ofili.

crunchy lambs, stigmata style

...and everything else

I’ve had this weirdly crunchy, industrial triphop version of “Mary Had a Little Lamb” stuck in my head all day, made all the weirder by the fact that I’m pretty sure it only exists in my head, and is the result of a weird confluence of American Idol, Gwen Stefani, and searching madly for a stuffed lamb this morning. (An hour, people! It took me an hour to find a stuffed lamb. At Easter!)

On top of that, life has been poorly balanced on my part of late. I’m hoping my next hop across the country (tomorrow) will perhaps allow me to achieve a bit of what I’ve lot, namely getting back towards meditating on a daily basis. While I hope, I’m not hopeful – if that makes any sense.

For a large part of this afternoon, I was overcome with the urge to put the iPod on, turn up the volume and roll down the windows, and just drive. The heavy promotions for Fox’s new Nathan Fillion vehicle, “Drive”, hasn’t really helped much, and occasionally breaking through the Mary Had a Little Lamb (Stigmata Remix) is snippets of the Kaiser Chief’s Modern Way, overlaid by TV Voiceover Man encouraging me to drive, just drive.

There’s no point in sitting
Going crazy on my own
It’s the only way of getting out of here
It’s the only way of getting out of here
This is the modern way
Of faking it everyday
And taking it as we come
And we’re not the only ones
Is that what we used to say
This is the modern way
I know where I’m going
And that we are in the knowing
And I will stop at nothing
Just to get what I want
It’s the only way of getting out of here

food ethics

...and everything else, Bioethics

How and why we eat has been an interesting aside for me since reading Michael Pollan’ The Omnivore’s Dilemma last summer. Always something of a binge reader on food history and related books, I really took advantage of living close to Powell’s to go overboard on the subject. But one prolific food writer I have yet to crack a book of is Tony Bourdain. I’m not sure why – I generally agree with his stand on celebrity chefs, I find his travel show No Reservations to be exceedingly funny and fascinating (and in fact have the New Jersey episode saved for a weekend of fun some time), but the actual reading of his works has simply never happened.

I’m making my way through a backlog of episodes of the show – the DVR caught over a dozen episodes in some marathon while I was in Oregon – and opted to do a little reading on Bourdain while watching him eat his way through Ghana. This quote from a Salon article is interesting, and rather nicely articulates a major concern people have when it comes to Peter Singer, animal rights, speciesism, and food ethics:

It would be nice to think that people know the difference between a crap chicken and a good chicken. If you can afford a good-quality free-range chicken, it’s nice that you have options. A lot of people in the world can’t afford that.

I like the idea that we could live in an agrarian wonderland, where there are heritage animals wandering freely and making delicious farm-fresh eggs, but that ain’t gonna happen; there are too many hungry people in the world.

I love Whole Foods talking about lobster and clam cruelty, when people are being fucked to death, kidnapped, starved, bombed. [The grocery chain recently stopped selling some live shellfish on the grounds that the practice is inhumane.] There is so much cruelty to humans — so much cruelty to animals — in this world. And people are worried about a fucking mollusk. Unbelievable.