Snow is falling as I type. For myself, I don't care how much it snows, as long as the electricity and Internet stay connected. Concerns about my well-being may be coming from the cosmic principle of Good--it may be trying to prod you to do something about the well-being of someone who does not enjoy walking in snow.
Cooking
Athena Scalzi is very new to housekeeping. She visits Internet recipe sites--most of which are sponsored by people who encourage the site hosts to post recipes that use expensive ingredients--and then says you can't make dinner for less than $50.
Hello? I cook. I certainly encourage people to talk to me over meals at buffet restaurants, but that doesn't happen every month. I encourage people who are going to supermarkets to take me along and pay for odd jobs before we go into the store, which works out in practice to $100 for anywhere from one to four weeks. I don't buy the full package of every ingredient every time I shop, because boxes of seasonings last months or years, but I wouldn't get enough meals to survive if I spent $50 on dinner. I do survive. I actually have, at the time of writing, some surplus pounds to work off--all this Internet time is starting to show. I even share meals from time to time.
Frugal meals do not have to rely on oatmeal or will-even-your-possum-eat-Kraft-macaroni-and-cheese (mine won't); they are good ways to use up dry beans if you have a place to simmer things for hours, but they don't require dry beans. I usually buy canned beans.
Local lurkers, if you want to start a series of ten posts called "Five Frugal Dinner Recipes (#1-10)," please fund them now. Each post costs $5 and may include your business name, a short blurb, a link to your web site if it behaves well for me, and/or a plain JPG photo of your business or logo or anything you fancy (if you're not in business you could ask for a picture of a flower, vintage car, public figure, etc.). No post here will ever contain videos, GIF, or any spyware or "cookies" other than what Google embeds without consulting me.
Athena Scalzi's post, with her $51.24 recipe, is here:
Poetry
We know why traditional songs and poems didn't celebrate rain at the winter solstice: Though the Northern Hemisphere usually sees a thaw just after the solstice, when the December thaw lasts too long our ancestors observed correlations with poor crops and more contagious disease and said that "a green Christmas makes a white graveyard." The thaw was thought to have arrived too soon, and be likely to last too long, if Christmas Day wasn't frosty and cold. Pathogens and their vectors would multiply if they weren't frozen; perennial plants wouldn't be stimulated to produce seeds and fruit. A long December thaw seems less of a problem in a world that ships food around the world and zaps contagious diseases with antibiotics, but farmers still note that some crops, like wheat and apples, thrive in summers that follow cold winters.
But there are lots of good poems and songs about rain...
Politics, Strategic
Florida is crowded, Republicans. Virginia has some towns that are losing population. If you're leaving a solid "blue" state, consider whether Virginia may want you.
Psychology
Jamie Wilson may be reading too much into one simple study that found that, when an experiment was set up so that lying had only a very small emotional payoff and no consequences, an all-male group of research subjects felt bold enough to tell the truth (reporting lower game scores) when they had higher levels of testosterone, nervous enough to lie (reporting higher scores) when they had higher levels of cortisol in their blood.
1. Humankind don't learn much from studies of all-male groups. What we know about testosterone in women's blood, which is what "human blood" should presuppose, is that any significant amount of it produces a state of discomfort. We still don't know how testosterone would affect women's reporting of their scores to people who wouldn't know which ones were telling the truth, but we can guess that it would lower their scores.
2. We don't know how testosterone affects males' ability to report the perhaps-uncomfortable truth about things more consequential than game scores. It would be hard to set up a large-scale study of how well men report the truth about who really did most of the work on a "team" project, or how much they put into and took out of a petty cash box set up for about a dozen employees to use.
3. We don't know how testosterone affects either males' performance on a simple game, or their reporting of their performance on a simple game, when sex is even remotely involved (when the researchers are male or female, or wear A, B, or C cup bras, e.g.). We do know that testosterone tends to blow the male mind; men score lower, on average, on IQ tests supervised by researchers who wear bras, and increasingly lower according to bra size, then they do on IQ tests supervised by other males.
Virginia Legislature
Excellent bill proposed by young Delegate Clark of Isle of Wight. Regrettably it seems to be just sitting on the table in committee. If your Delegate is on the Committee on Agriculture, perhaps you can persuade person that this bill needs to become a law.
World Economic Forum
This web site does not do foreign policy, so we'll not be discussing Trump's remarks at Davos last week. They are recommended reading. Here's the transcript:
If you find that white-on-black format hard to read, you can always copy it into your word processing program. If anyone out there really finds it easier to watch a video than to read the words, Brian Zinchuk posted the live video:
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