I Can't Keep This Inside Any More...

My freezer is full.  It is always full.  This is due to the amazing variety and quality of flash-frozen food. And the fact that it occasionally goes on sale. I have flash-frozen vacuum-packed meat and fish fillets that are delicious many months after purchase.  I buy my breakfast sausage frozen in bulk whenever it goes on sale, and enjoy it for the next several months.  A sale on carnitas keeps me happy for a long time. My huge selection of flash-frozen fruits lets me make any smoothie anytime, no matter what is in or out of season. I also stopped discarding over-ripe bananas: Freezing them for smoothies worked wonderfully. Best of all, my enormous stock of flash-frozen dark green vegetables proved to be my dietary and nutritional salvation as a single person who loves to cook but who hates left-overs and hates discarding fresh produce I failed to consume rapidly enough. Earlier this week I encountered an awesome sale on mini-chubs of my favorite breakfast sa...

I have some empathy for Senator Franklin's behavior during his prior career as a comedian.  I actually have some relevant experience! I was in the US Navy from 1975 to 1981.  At the time, the Navy was working very hard to cope with enormous problems like racism and illicit drug use (with gradual but steady success).  This was also during the difficult transition from the draft to the all-volunteer military, which greatly impacted both the number and quality of recruits.  To obtain better personnel, the Navy recruited more women into a service that still had rampant problems with sexism and violence against women (as both service members, spouses and even the general public). In this environment I became know as a good joke teller. I couldn't create or write jokes, but I understood how to deliver them with pinpoint precision, as targeted weapons tailored to whatever audience was present.  I told any joke that would get a laugh, no matter the subject or conten...

As part of my ongoing effort to stay out of the "echo chamber" and learn about my biases, I recently took a look at the science and technology writers I follow, the folks I rely upon as reliable sci/tech news reporters and analysts. What I found is that my list is about 75% female. I know I wasn't merely "chasing skirts", so I decided to dig a bit deeper to see if there were attributes these female writers possessed that were different from, or less prevalent in, male authors. I looked first to see if the women preferentially covered topics that matched my interests, but I found no such general emphasis compared to male writers. This meant I had to look at the writing itself.  This investigation was made more difficult by my lack of an adequate liberal arts education, something not required for engineers when I was in college.  So I was not really prepared to do a serious lit-crit comparative analysis. As best I could, I looked at the flow of many arti...

The recent wave of sexual assault and harassment claims against prominent people and celebrities has made me to think more deeply about my own sex- and gender-related biases. Looking back at high school, being a social recluse I treated everyone pretty much much the same, doing my best to avoid being noticed or giving offense, in particular trying to avoid passing on any of the bullying and teasing behavior I had experienced. That changed when I enlisted in the US Navy, which at the time (mid 1970's) was challenged on a few key fronts: Recovering from the Vietnam War, and combating racism and drugs.  This was also near the start of the new "all-volunteer" US military with the end of the draft in 1973, which resulted in more women being recruited to meet staffing goals. At the time the Navy had a terrible sexism problem, not solely toward it's own female members.  The cultural view of many (most?) male sailors was that females were prey to be pursued and captured...