Drink 28 Kinds Medicine Tea!

Contains:

• water
• Sugar
• Lonicera Japanese Thunb
• Chrysanthemum
• Lysimachia Christinae Hance
• Hyperic um Japonicum Licorice
• etc [sic]

Fresh from our local Korean food store.

Notice that this is "The" 28 Kinds Medicine Tea....

Yow. That tea is sweeter than liquid candy cane. For a moment, I thought Sugar should be listed *before* water in the ingredients list. I couldn't finish it.

To be honest, however, what worried me most was this ingredient: "etc."

Dylan Kinnett, author of To Win, Simply Play, has just been nominated for a Tennessee Blogging award. He writes:

I nearly spilled my drink laughing when I read that :-).

I noticed it immediately.

"Something's wrong with the Rasin Nut Bran cereal," I said to my mother. "Have you noticed anything odd?"

"Oh, I thought it was just me."

We decided to look further into our bowls of breakfast cereal. The flakes had tasted slightly more like sawdust, which I chalked up to cost-cutting, but something else was terribly wrong. I couldn't put my finger on it.

After pouring a bowl from the new box, I probed through the cereal, looking for a golden needle in a haystack of flakes. I didn't see anything and gave up.

Putting the box back, I noticed an older box of cereal on the shelf. Down to the last inch of crushed powder and grainy bits, it had been neglected in favor of this new box. I opened it up and ate a handful. The same old Rasin Nut Bran, for sure.

Then I had an idea. I pulled down both boxes and looked at the ingredient lists. On the left, I could see the ingredients I had always known: flakes, rasin nuts, and almond slivers. On the right, the ingredient list omitted the almond slivers!

I looked at the photographs on the front of the boxes. It was like Stalin's regime all over again. On the left, the photograph featured my beloved cereal, complete with almond slivers. But on the right, the almond slivers, like Trotsky, had been removed from all memory.

Indignant, my mother dialed the customer service number of General Mills.

The person on the other line apologized and suggested that market testing had encouraged them to drop the slivers (i.e. someone looked at how much a billion almond slivers cost and decided to can them).

"Sorry, but our factories have completely retooled to produce Raisin Nut Bran without almonds. In fact, we have been producing this for some months. Your grocery store must have just recently sold all their old stock."

As a consolation gift, General Mills sent us three coupons for The new and unimproved Rasin Nut Bran! Some consolation. It was, I suppose, either an irony too finely distinguished for them to understand or something more sinister. Keep repeating something long enough...

I love General Mills, I love General Mills, I love General Mills.....

My mother was dejected. She started buying other cereal. I started eating fruit, or nothing.

Without the blessed light of a healthy breakfast, our lives started to drift aimlessly, our once-centered selves of cereal harmony drifting to the edge of...??

Then, on Tuesday, we received the following letter from General Mills, dated March 2:

I Love General Mills, I love General Mills, I love General Mills I love General Mills!I love General Mills!

Aren't they nice? Listening and all that, and so politely calling us "consumers", and even going to the trouble of making a new version of Raisin Nut Bran with the slivered almonds (oooh, it makes me want to shiver with silvery delight) we all enjoy.

There are many lessons about capitalism and marketing somewhere here.

The site also includes a brief vignette on an early 19th century blogger: Gaston Tableuoui.

This morning, after brushing my teeth, I asked myself, "Why bother shaving? Where did this whole thing about no facial hair come from?"

Well, it's the Egyptians' fault. Evidently, they were making razors as long as 5,000 years ago. The people of India invented them around the same time.

Then Alexander the Great got involved. He made his men shave their beards, since he knew they would be fighting in close combat. Short hair is hard to grab, and no hair is even harder to grasp.

The first barber showed up in Rome in 300 B.C. .

For a while I thought that it was all the sculptors' fault -- aiming for smoothness and form in their sculptures. After all, so many sculptures show perfectly clean-shaven individuals. Just think. Michelangelo's statue of David never gets a five O'clock shadow.

Even Clement of Alexandria argued for the beard:

Um. Oh. Yeah. Well...but wait...

St. Augustine of Hippo argued that:

After all, even Pericles wore a beard. Hmm. I suppose that destroys my beard and sculpture idea. Michelangelo's Moses clamps down the coffin on that idea.

But now I remember why I don't wear a beard. It gets in the soup. I would hate to comb out all the cracker bits.

Yesterday, I felt the worst I have in years. No, my body is healthy, my mind was clear, and my relationship with God was doing well. But when I sagged into a chair to read Tracy Kidder's book, Mountains beyond Mountains, I could feel the little rounds of fat complaining as they squeezed around my belt. I had slept a great deal, and yet I was exhausted.

I knew what was wrong.

I am relearning a life of discipline. I used to think that discipline involved finding a single thing and pursuing it to the most maximum possibility of attainment.

I now know that this itself is a failure of discipline. It takes great discipline to single-mindedly focus on a single thing. But it forces shoddiness and laziness in other areas. Ultimately, single-mindedness to a breakdown.

I should know. This is what I have done with my studies in the past. It led to illness and burnout.

True discipline involves finding a balance. It takes a greater discipline, a more fine-tuned knowledge of one's self to use every minute wisely, doing the task one is most able to do at the moment while keeping in mind a larger picture. To do this while focusing carefully on the small things that define our lifestyle's texture -- like posture and prayer -- requires a much higher level of discipline thatn abandoning all but one thing.

I'm not going to let it happen again. After a discussion with Dr. Teske and Dr. Long of the psychology and religion departments (and after prayer) I have been reminded of the necessary nature of an early morning routine. I have now implemented one -- it contains physical, spiritual, and mental exercise and does well to make me feel clean, alert, centered, and ready for whatever day I am to have. But my goal of discipline goes beyond that. I am going to try to eliminate a number of small tics and vices I have accumulated over the years. It is foolishly unwise to permit them.

Wish me luck and pray.

It's possible I may be undertaking a rather large physical endeavor this summer. This early preparation may lay a good framework for what looks to become a fun but very challenging experience.

The web is an interesting place. You never know what to expect.

Over the weekend, I noticed that I'm on the blogroll of a Buddhist-informed news analysis, political coverage & social commentary site: Empty is Form. In a list that includes Adbusters, the Center for Voting and Democracy, Common Dreams, Lessig's blog, and Urban Dharma, there it is, the Notebook of Sand. Fascinating.

I am somewhat surprised that I would be listed on the site, unless it relates to my multiple postings on Buddhist economics. If I didn't obtain my clothes second-hand, I would probably consider simple robes to accompany the simple, disciplined life I am trying to expand into. But by wearing second-hand clothes, I can still feel comfortable about combatting the waste and slowly paying my debts to nature.

The phrase "empty is form," gave me something to consider yesterday. I immediately thought of John Cage, but I knew I could go farther, or rather, un-limit my mind in thinking of this. I thought of the sound of one hand clapping and its relation to the sound of two hands clapping. And I remembered the words of Leonard Bernstein:

Yesterday was the day I began to think of the in-betweens, the emptinesses of my music, as music. As I practiced for my upcoming recital with my accompianist, Kimberly Trout, I understood. Small, subtle, but beautiful changes took place in my music. It was an amazing experience.

My brother, a seminary student, writes:

The Etownian, the student newspaper of Elizabethtown College, recently covered my sculpture, Philadelphia Fullerine. The article was written by none other than my friend, Natalie Smeltz.

Just for fun, here's another photo of my sculpture, Philadelphia Fullerine.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about 16th and 17th century women's clothing. The author of textuality.org found such linking to be inspiring and promiscuous.

I must admit, however, that I do somewhat share Mark's mild annoyance that people forget to post their name on their weblog. I suspected that the person, who stated his/her college to be "outside of Philadelphia" had been to Swarthmore, but I had to dig further to find out the identity.

• sigh* I really don't like having to dig like this. On one hand, I feel like I'm invading someone's privacy. On the other, all the information is publicly available and linked from the person's site. And he did call me a promiscuous linker.

But anyway, Scott Price has posted a hypertextual teaching portfolio and a number of other hypertexts online.

(odd note - my college's past president, Gerhard Spiegler, had a campaign to make Elizabethtown College into "The Swarthmore on the Susquehanna.")

Reading Scott's hypertexts reminded me how much the hatred of frames has affected people who do hypertext. When I set out to write a piece of hypertext, I don't even think about multiple windows or frames. This is odd, since they *are* a tool that is available, even if they do present some problems with control.

Tinderbox, by Eastgate, solves this problem by saving the state of the windows -- which are open, where they are on the screen, etc.. Hmm. I wonder if it would be possible to make a "bookmark" feature similar to the "remember" feature on GNU/Linux desktop systems. In GNOME and KDE, one can, as in Tinderbox, ask the system to remember all of your application windows and reopen them when you log in once more. But in Englightenment, one can store several of these sorts of states and return to them at will.

Right now window locations are stored in the Tinderbox XML entries as an attribute of the item represented in the window:

Building an interface that does bookmarks like this could be handled with a Nelson-like zipper list. It could be very handy for people who work using a large number of open notes and need to switch between sets of open notes.

Although, I must admit, the demand for this sort of feature may be small.

I Chronicles 11:15-19

Context: King Saul has died, and David is trying to regain Palestine for the Israelis. He has taken Jerusalem, but a number of battles must yet be won to regain the ancestral lands.

A year ago, I met Jon 'Maddog' Hall at the LinuxWorld convention NYC. At the time...

Well, he *did* come to my Linux Users group at the end of December. Sorry for the delay -- I have had problems with my iBook. But now that it's all OK, I have put the notes from the meeting online. Read them here.

Maddog, the executive director of Linux International, is a great speaker and a nice guy. His parents were a lot of fun as well -- he was spending Christmas with them. It was kind of them to spare him for a few hours. And yes, they do use Linux :-).

I wrote a fridge poem a few months ago.

I wrote another one today. Here it is:

I spent my morning considering some koans. Here is one of my own:

(on parables)

This semester, I have been taking a class on metaphysical poetry. I am enjoying the discipline, spiritual depth, and poetic genius of these poets.

One of the distinguishing characteristics of metaphysical poetry is its wit. As I argue in the opening sentences to the paper I'm currently writing:

Here's an excerpt of one of the Holy Sonnets by John Donne:

One man's trash is another's treasure. Sahd's salvage yard is most definitely Columbia, PA's best kept secret. The images you see here are not a deplorable use of forested area. Rather, they are part of a long tradition throughout history of recycling and repurposing. No. These are not pictures of waste. They are photographs of opportunity.

I haven't taken dad to the yard yet. My mom is afraid he'll begin in earnest to build the abstract, ibeam-based flagpole sculpture he's been planning.

Some things are too good to be true. This is one of them.

Fortunately, it's true.

Dick Strawser is the music director of my local classical music/NPR radio station WITF. I have always found his comments and music selections to be reliably interesting, entertaining, and informative.

And now, Dr. Dick has a blog!

The blog looks like it will be a lot of fun. Dr. Strawser's introductory post was rather on the light side, and further posts have been a mix of informative and nostalgic. Dr. Strawser is a good writer. He manages to include a good mix of anecdote with useful, interesting information about music and the world of music. His post, "Of Beans and Bruckner" is particularly fun.

Unlike most blog posts, Dick's posts are not short. Most of them read like a full article. I think it's great that he has chosen to carefully compose posts that are well written. Daily blog writing has many drawbacks. For this reason, I may be reconsidering my own blogging routine. Strawser's blog posts are hefty enough to surpass the length of most blogs' weekly output, and it takes time to read them. But it's worth it.

I'm still catching up. Next on the list for me is Up Close and Kind of Personal with Gustav Holst's "The Planets."

In the meantime, I think I'll listen to Jupiter and the rest of the gang.