Our weird, wacky, wonderful world …
China accounts for 73 per cent of the world’s beer consumption, according to the Wall Street Journal. Step aside, Canadians and Australians, it looks like our beer bragging days are over.
A Zen thought from Dogen …
“A flower falls, even though we love it; a weed grows, even though we do not love it.”
Finally a Zen thought I almost get. They remind me of the old dusty basement treadmill for the body, they keep the head active although there’s no promise of getting anywhere.
No Merlot …
Utah state officials apparently ordered motorist G. Eurick to remove the vanity licence plate “Merlot” from his car. Utah’s bureaucrats discovered Merlot is a type of wine, and Utah state law prohibits the names of “intoxicants” on licence plates.
(This Week magazine 30-3-07)
Red tape and red wine don’t mix eh? Oh well, Fran Lebowitz puts it right: “Great people talk about ideas, average people talk about things and small people talk about wine.” Or does she?
I guess it’s still up to us. We have to decide who’s right — bureaucrats, free thinkers or, even more audacious, we should think for ourselves.
For that fashionable hiker-bear occasion!
For the hiker who has everything, who meets the bear who has everything, there’s the crystal-covered canister which “delivers a shot of bling and sting,” from Pepperface.com for only US$105.
World Food Day …
It’s coming. It’s 16th October, so we have a month to decide what our two-bits worth may be. A Spanish poet, Federico Lorca, predicted, “The day that hunger is eradicated from the Earth, there will be the greatest spiritual explosion the world has ever known. Humanity cannot imagine the joy that will burst into the world on the day of that great revolution.”
It’s a sure bet none of the generations on Earth this day will live to see it. We can live in hope it’s soon after.
Sleepwalkers are passé …
Drunks on the road are the Zen weeds; whatever! We can do without them, and the newest aberration of under-the-influence idiots. The American Food and Drug Administration has found strange side effects from users of such prescription sleeps aids as Ambien and Lunesta. They have been reported to cause whirlwind late-night cooking sessions, with the person waking to find their kitchens full of opened boxes, dirty pots and dishes which is a “so-what?” activity for the rest of us, compared to the other one, which is those who don’t cook in their sleep go driving in their sleep.
“Sleepdriving” the FDA calls it. Oh, and when they awake the next morning, if they do, and we do, they do not remember a thing.
Oh well, based upon the speed of our federal health authorities at approving any medication for use in Canada we’re probably OK for a couple of years, unless the border restrictions are softened for “sleepdrivers” because, gun-toting or not, you don’t dare awaken them, eh? Or is that another urban myth?
Good Lord, what’s next? That stupid chicken in that stupid TV ad becoming reality TV and running loose around our streets behind the wheel? Time to start walking, eh?
Just wondering …
Paul Harvey’s words you already know: “In times like these, it always helps to know there have always been times like these.” If he’s right, does that mean either Bertrand Russell or George Carlin are closing in on the mark with the help of sleepdrivers and whatever else is brewing in our worldwide cuckoo department?
Bertrand Russell said, “If there is life on other planets they must be using Earth as their insane asylum.” Carlin, followed with, “If it’s true that our species is alone in the universe, then I’d have to say that the universe aimed rather low and settled for very little.”
A tip of the hat to the sane and the sensible among us. May they multiply and multiply — if there’s enough of them left.
May you and your family enjoy the fall hunt, be it berries, bird counting, fish, photographs, big game, small game, water birds, space, solitude or simply plain walking in the generous abundance we have of all anyone could want, and where we have, hopefully, no sleepdrivers.
