Author: Mark Tokarski

Just a man who likes to read, argue, and occasionally be surprised.

Asch to Quora, experiment to sad reality

When I was a child in Catholic grade school, I was an altar boy. It was a big deal to my deeply indoctrinated mind, wearing girly frocks and lighting candles and ringing bells. Our pastor, Father Neville once took trouble after a morning mass to advise me that I was not my brother Steve, that I was not measuring up. Asshole. That really stung and in no way did it move me forward, especially not beyond Catholicism, as it should have.

One morning during a weekday mass we had to attend, my class sat in the balcony of the church, Little Flower, to this day still on 2nd Avenue South in Billings, Montana. It caters to the Hispanic community, and is quite charming. As an altar boy I knew the drills, when to stand, when to kneel and sit. We came to a part of the mass where we insiders knew it was time to stand, and yet my whole class just sat there, so I mustered all my courage and stood up, all alone, to snickers and oddball looks from our nun/teacher, sister Iforget.

I was demonstrating the courage of nonconformity in the most conformist way possible, by adhering to the altar boy code.

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Eurhythmy

The word above, “eurhythmy” is a solution to a clue in an anacrostic I completed yesterday. It is a new word for me.

In case you’ve not done an anacrostic, sometimes called just acrostic, it is like a crossword puzzle with the following complications:

  • The ultimate solution is a quotation from a published work. All of the letters are numbered one to however many (170 in this case).
  • There are clues to solve, and solution to each clue is spelled out on blanks, under which are numbers that correspond to the quotation, so that those letters are moved above.
  • The first letter to the clues will spell out the author of the quote and name of the work.
  • There is a lot of back and forth between quotation and clues, otherwise I think the puzzle would be insoluble.

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Anyone care to check it out?

I’ve done all I am going to do. It has to do with the fatal shooting of two Democrats in Minnesota, State Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, and the wounding of State Senator John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, on June 14th, four days prior to this writing. The shooter is identified as Vance Luther Boelter, born in 1967.

Police received a call from the daughter of the Hoffman’s at 2:06 AM. They encountered Boelter in a parked car at 2:36 AM. They arrived at the Hoffman house at 3:35 AM.

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Some historic perspective on the carnivore diet

A commenter, Rob, wondered if we are not better off on a no-carbohydrate diet.

Could it be possible that a diet of no carbs is the healthiest for humans? Maybe early humans existed for thousands of years through ice ages eating only meat. Don’t they find fossils of animal bones butchered with stone tools and not much evidence of any other food? Our digestive system is very different from a chimps or gorillas which both are able to digest vegetation much better than us. Maybe rollercoasting insulin and glucose levels are the main cause of health problems?

My own opinion, not without reading over the years, is yes, we could easily survive on a no-carbohydrate diet. Having just indulged in two Lindor chocolate truffles (my ‘reward’ for a long bike ride), I can only suggest that Rob is correct, and that it would be just a tad boring. It so happens that I just read a piece by Gary Taubes, science journalist, who has been writing about this subject for decades. In his latest piece, Tales from the History of Carnivore Diets, he offers the following (rather long but riveting) quotes:

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The light(bulb) goes on! (Extreme censorship at Amazon. com)

We have in our kitchen halogen lights under the cupboards that are burning out, five of eight now gone. I decided to replace them, and went to the local Ace Hardware. There I found a single GY6.35 replacement bulb packaged and priced at $6.99, meaning that we would pay $55.92 to replace all eight. I purchased one at that price, and then came home and checked it out on Amazon. There I was able to buy one dozen for $9.68 total.

Are they of the same quality? I cannot imagine why not, but even if not, say they last only three years instead of five, then I will have to repurchase them and again I will do so at Amazon.

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Pop quiz (courtesy of Good Eats)

I watch a show that has been running since 1998, locally and then nationally, called “Good Eats”, hosted by chef Alton Brown. I just discovered the show this year. It runs in half-hour episodes, and while I don’t look to it for recipes, I do find it useful for cooking and grilling tips, and general information (like the difference between baking powder and baking soda). Brown has a delightful screen presence, so it’s been a pleasure to watch him age over time, to gain weight and then go back to svelte using diet tips I would throw out the window, but by which he lost 50 pounds. (Hint: Smoothies are not my thing.)

I tend to watch every episode, even as artichokes, beets and turnips are not of great interest.  But watching as I do early each evening (there are perhaps two hundred shows available by my count), I notice they occasionally (and subtly) toss in a movie or music reference, leaving it to the viewer to decide where it came from. Below are three I’ve picked up on, and I leave it to you to provide the reference. (It helps to have been born in the 20th Century.)

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On writing about staring into the abyss

I wrote the post below after having mulled on it for some time, and not exactly sure where I would take it. As always, with writing, I am surprised at the outcome.

However, and completely unanticipated, writing that piece generated bouts of depression. I was reminded of my childhood, my dysfunctional family, and living in the shadow of a super achiever.

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On staring into the abyss

I had an older brother, Steve (1943-2011) whom I idolized. I had no choice really, but I really did idolize him. Steve was one of those rare birds who was genuinely nice and smart, and who was a hard worker too. In other words, it would do no good to resent him, even as I, the younger brother (he was seven years older), was known by everyone we knew in common as “Steve’s kid brother”. Either Steve’s virtues fell upon me too, or not, but nowhere in the world I grew up in was there anything but love and admiration for my older brother.

Steve had “the calling”, meaning priesthood in our very Catholic family. When he announced late in his senior year of high school that he would enter the seminary in the fall, my parents’ hearts swelled with pride. Steve was not an ordinary human – once he got a traffic citation for a rolling stop, and Mom said “That will never happen again.” It was as if the parent-child relationship had reversed, as both Mom and Dad would look to Steve for advice as their other three sons struggled in life and passage into maturity.

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Coffee without milk, anyone?

It has come to my attention that some things I think uproariously funny are not at all funny to others. A couple of recent examples:

Sarah Silverman said this as part of her standup act a long while ago. I repeated it once when seated at a table next to a gay relative, openly so and married to another gay man. It was somewhat uncomfortable, not because he as gay, as we’ve all gotten over that. It was because he seemed above it all, the gathering we were at, the drinking and family tensions. So I decided to take a chance, and repeat the Silverman line to him.

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Comparison, Astronaut Resnick and Professor Resnick

I remember a few years back when I was doing this kind of work, I would take two subjects and grab ten photos of each, preferably looking at the camera. I would then go to Photoshop with each of the 20 photos and straighten the heads so that the eyes were level. I would then go to Microsoft Paint and adjust the head size of each photo so that the eyes were set at one-inch apart. Then I would construct two files each containing all ten heads for one of the subjects, and then bring in one-half of the face from the other subject, and compare it two the ten in the file in front of me.

That might come off as humorous, but all I can say today is that it brings back memories of neck pain. I have stenosis, so that doing tedious work like this places a strain on my neck. But I persist, as it was only by this kind of tedium that, for instance, I was able to identify Buddy Holly as a set of twins, and then later ID these twins as having morphed into 1) musician Gram Parsons (Birds, Flying Burrito Brothers), and 2) to identify the separate twins has having become a) film and music mogul David Geffen, and b) movie mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg. (See this post.)

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