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POPSThe Namahage: Japanese New Year's devils scare the laziness out of children
More: The head of the household will try to appease the devils with a specially prepared meal accompanied with sake. He assures them that no one has been lazy in his household. Then the Namahage, seeing all from their mountaintop, look into their secret book which records the doings of every household and challenge that statement. The head of the household again promises that all have been obedient and hard-working and pleads with the devils not to take his wife and children into the mountains. It takes considerable effort to control these devils with their strong work-ethic. As the negotiations drag on, the head of the household offers more sake… while begging that his wife and child not be taken away. Eventually the Namahage relent placated by the offerings and the sincerity of the head of the household. They bless the next year's harvest and wish good health to all the members of the household. As the Namahage leave, they promise (or rather threaten) to return next year.
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POPSFennel from fronds to bulb Click through for recipes for Orange and Fennel Salad, Gingered Fennel Toss, Stuffed Fennel Bulbs, Fennel and Chicken Flatbread, and Fennel and Shrimp Risotto.
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POPSThe Something Awful/Paypal fiasco More: I'm not going to tell people to close their Paypal accounts. I'm not going to say all their actions were completely unwarranted. I'm just presenting my experience with them and will allow you to draw your own conclusions. However, I harbor a fundamental disagreement with their business practice of assuming all their clients are filthy criminals who must repeatedly prove their innocence to a series of unmanned servers and computer systems. I do not support their ability to freeze entire accounts, take money from whoever they want at whatever time they want, and impose whatever arbitrary rules and regulations they deem necessary without having to answer to any organization. Every single cent in every single Paypal account is earning their company ungodly amounts of interest in their central bank account. They offer users credit cards and the chance to put your money into interest-generating accounts. So exactly why are they not under banking and FDIC rules again?
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POPSThe death of "wit" I have been finding that the more attention I put towards my Zen practice, and the more I focus on compassion for all, the less funny I find a lot of the "wit" that's out there. I think that's why this piece spoke to me.
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POPSA simple way to reduce cancer risk by 77% Boosting your Vitamin D will also improve your energy level and reduce your risk of osteoporosis. Most people living in industrialized societies are badly deficient in Vitamin D (when I got mine tested, it was half of the lowest normal level. Since I've been supplementing, I feel SO much better. Get your D level checked!
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POPSStaying fit while traveling frugally Click through for tips on exercises that can be done while sitting on a crowded plane or bus, exercises that can be done in a tiny hotel room, and even exercises that can be done in a room too small to lie down in.
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POPSHow do we - and to what extent should we - get bicyclists to obey traffic laws? More: Enter the Idaho stop-sign law. The rule, passed by the Idaho state legislature in 1982 and updated in 2005, essentially allows bikers to treat stop signs as yield signs. If a biker slows down and sees no cars coming, he or she can roll through a stop sign—a so-called "rolling stop." The "Idaho stop" has become a rallying point for vehicularists and facilitators alike—a sort of Great Compromise for bicycles.… Skeptics say that the rule would lead to more crashes. But a follow-up study of the Idaho statute found that accidents involving bikes actually decreased the year after the law was passed and haven't varied much since.
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POPSCyclists are not a menace More: You might say that even if we’re not a menace to other vehicles, we’re a menace to pedestrians. But again the figures don’t stand that up. Cyclists make up about 1 per cent of the traffic in London, and they also cause 1 per cent of the traffic injuries to pedestrians – almost exactly in proportion with their numbers. The injuries they cause are also, as you’d expect, disproportionately at the lower end of the scale. The fact is that only a minority of cyclists indulge in the arrogant behaviour towards pedestrians which gets us a bad name. I would have no problem with a motion that says some cyclists are a menace. But tarring us all with the brush of a minority would be like supporting a motion that says Muslims are a menace. It would be outrageous.”
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POPSA Left-Handed Commencement Address: Ursula K. LeGuin at Mills College, 1983 More: I hope you live without the need to dominate, and without the need to be dominated. I hope you are never victims, but I hope you have no power over other people. And when you fail, and are defeated, and in pain, and in the dark, then I hope you will remember that darkness is your country, where you live, where no wars are fought and no wars are won, but where the future is. Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country. Why did we look up for blessing — instead of around, and down? What hope we have lies there. Not in the sky full of orbiting spy-eyes and weaponry, but in the earth we have looked down upon. Not from above, but from below. Not in the light that blinds, but in the dark that nourishes, where human beings grow human souls.
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POPSA cloud still hangs over Bhopal More: What’s missing in the whole sad story is any sense of a human connection between the faceless people who run the corporation and the victims. In 1995, a Bhopali woman named Sajida Bano sent a handwritten letter to Union Carbide. The factory had killed her husband in 1981 in an accident, and then, on the night of the disaster, her 4-year-old son. “You put your hand on your heart and think,” she wrote, “if you are a human being: if this happened to you, how would your wife and children feel?” She never received a response. The survivors of Bhopal want only to be treated as human beings — not victims, not greedy money-grabbers, just human beings who’ve gone through hell and are entitled to a measure of dignity. That includes concrete things like cleaning up the mess and providing health care for the sick, and also something more abstract but equally important — an acknowledgment that a wrong was done to them, and an apology, which Bhopalis have yet to receive.
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POPSThe Waste Land - San Francisco's roving recyclers More: One man, tall and strong with sharp eyes and long dreadlocks…Mute, he pulls a scrap of paper out of his cart and starts writing… “What school?” Berkeley, I say, impressed and somewhat embarrassed that he can tell so quickly my status. “Why here?” he jots. I try to explain. “You’re not too smart,” he concludes, pointing at my thin sweater and shivering hands… Then he offers me the red down coat he is wearing and goes back to work. As I walk around the cardboard boxes that contain the recyclables…I see bits of his scribbled conversations with others. “Temper is going Everyone’s under $ pressure,” reads one…“Me, I don’t sweat the cash too much,” reads another. I return to ask for the paper on which we’d just had our conversation. He looks at me skeptically. “You’re a bad journalist,” he writes. “No tape recorder.” Then he hands over the paper and smiles. I asked for his name, but he holds his forefinger to his sealed lips, then turns and goes back to
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POPSInteresting shift in teen & tween attitudes & beliefs More: The survey also probed changing attitudes about drugs, sex, drinking, abortion and willingness to fight in a war - you can see all of the findings in the link above. For those of us who are working with kids, whether in our careers, volunteer work or as parents, the other thing that comes through the study is that teens want to do the right thing, but, they still struggle with knowing what that is, or how to make it happen. The study emphasizes the important role that parents, friends and an extended constellation of adults play in helping teens discover and act on their values.
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POPSBarbara Ehrenreich: The uproar over the new breast cancer screening guidelines More: So welcome to the Women’s Movement 2.0: Instead of the proud female symbol -- a circle on top of a cross -- we have a droopy ribbon. Instead of embracing the full spectrum of human colors -- black, brown, red, yellow, and white -- we stick to princess pink. While we used to march in protest against sexist laws and practices, now we race or walk “for the cure.” And while we once sought full “consciousness” of all that oppresses us, now we’re content to achieve “awareness,” which has come to mean one thing – dutifully baring our breasts for the annual mammogram. …the numbers are increasingly insistent: Routine mammographic screening of women under 50 does not reduce breast cancer mortality in that group, nor do older women necessarily need an annual mammogram. In fact, the whole dogma about “early detection” is shaky… the idea has been to catch cancers early, when they’re still small, but some tiny cancers are viciously aggressive, and some large ones aren’t going anywhere
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POPS"The world’s greatest deliberative body has been subverted by the threat to filibuster" More: What is clogging up the Senate these days is threatened filibusters that don’t actually happen. This is the imaginary filibuster… In 1975, party leaders in the U.S. Senate adopted a new procedure to deal with filibusters. In order to keep the Senate floor clear for other business, if senators merely threatened to filibuster, the body would automatically impose a 60-vote limit on cutting off debate.… And bills with majority support would die. For the price of a threat, the votes needed to pass a bill could be raised from 50 to 60. It’s not clear why no one foresaw what would eventually happen, but soon the number of alleged “filibusters” was rising. Delighted senators found they had a new tool to stop legislation. With just a threat to filibuster, a senator could stop a bill cold even though the Senate supported it—and without having to actually filibuster. A single senator can unilaterally make it more difficult to enact legislation.
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POPSAnne Mustoe: headmistress and round-the-world cyclist (1933-2009) More: The glimpse of the lone cyclist which inspired her own ambition to cycle round the world came in January 1983. She said it took her four years from that defining moment to screw up her courage, resign her job and cycle into the sunrise, but she calculated that she had no ties, her stepsons were married off, and she could just afford it if she lived modestly until her pension came through.… All her incident-packed journeys were recounted in a warm, accessible, no-nonsense prose in which a wry, understated humour was coupled with indefatigable fortitude, enthusiasm and optimism, making light of robberies, injuries, freak floods, storms, desert heat waves, blizzards in the Rockies and ferocious winds in Jutland and Patagonia — and even of being knocked off her bike by a short-sighted nonagenarian in a Fiat Panda. Mustoe cycled off on her last expedition in May this year, but became ill in Syria. She died in Aleppo (Haleb). RIP, Ms. Mustoe.
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POPSResearch indicates empathy is innate in humans More: If children are naturally helpful and sociable, what system of child-rearing best takes advantage of this surprising propensity? Dr. Tomasello says that the approach known as inductive parenting works best because it reinforces the child’s natural propensity to cooperate with others. Inductive parenting is simply communicating with children about the effect of their actions on others and emphasizing the logic of social cooperation… The roots of human cooperation may lie in human aggression. We are selfish by nature, yet also follow rules requiring us to be nice to others. “That’s why we have moral dilemmas,” Dr. Tomasello said, “because we are both selfish and altruistic at the same time.”
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