polyployed

 In the United States the holidays of Halloween and Thanksgiving are bulwarks against the invasion of Christmas. Without them, Christmas would invade October, just like it has in Germany.

Many animal that we thought of as pure vegetarians will eat meat when given the opportunity. When deer find bird's nests they will eat the nestlings, and tortoises will gleefully hunt birds. The birds get their turn though. It turns out that German Peacocks eat sausage, so the next time you're in Germany, and you visit Pfaueninsel (Peacock Island), please guard your sausage. If you don't, then it may not not be there when you turn around.

On a recent trip I visited with some old friends for a few days. Some of her family is a little suspect. At some point she told me story that describes how. Many years before she was visiting with some relatives, I think a pair of aunts. The three of them were sorting out the belongings of another recently deceased relative. At that particular moment they were sorting though old albums and pictures. Some are being tossed, and some are being kept. My friend notices one that's just been tossed onto the discard pile. She picks up the photo, and she can't believe what it is. It's a snapshot of Mahatma Gandhi. Not a clipping, not a repro, but family snapshot of Gandhi. She picks it out of the discard pile. Thinking that that her aunts didn't recognize it, she asks them, "Do you know who this is?" The aunts squint at it for a second, and then one replies, "That's the horrible little man that ruined India for us."

 I think I've finally boiled down the both sides fallacy to its essence. A both sides argument uses a non-representative sample to draw a false equivalence between two groups.

Thought: Ravens are crow magnums.

The refrain, "there's nothing in the house to eat," is something I usually don't think. I find it a bit lazy or unimaginative, but I admit it's appealing in some way. I've found myself falling into this pattern in the last few weeks. I think it's often habit.  I've just been making sandwiches recently. Admittedly good sandwiches are pretty easy to make here in Germany. Good bread, good cheese, and good meat are plentiful and cheap. I think I've become lazy by eating so many sandwiches. Tonight I finally tired of sandwiches. I spent a good fifteen to thirty minutes dancing around the fact that there was nothing to eat. Well, nothing other than the bean soup I made on Thursday. The bean soup that left me with impressively long-lasting gas. I'm meeting people tomorrow, so I'm holding off on eating that. Then I realized that I had a bag of roasted beats. From there the idea of borscht came to mind, and as it turns out, borscht is really easy to...

In the the last three years I've had multiple people tell me that California does not have a drought. I have been told that California's water issues are man-made.  I have been told that this is a media misrepresentation. California has been in drought. You could just look at drought.ca.gov to check, but that doesn't seem to be enough for some people. It's the government, and they feel that the government can't be trusted. So I want to demonstrate the facts as an eye-witness. First a little background on California hydrology. Much of California's water comes from snowpack in the mountains.  One third of LA's water supply comes from snowpack. For the last twenty five years I've been hiking out to small alpine lakes in the Sierra Nevadas. These lakes are fed directly by snowpack, and they drain naturally into streams and creeks.  They are unaffected by civil engineering. Since the drought started, these have been drying up. My most recent trip was in 202...