Category Archives: Animals

The abomination of cross-species sex

Posted on August 22, 2013 by | 1 comment

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

The cats were a mite disturbed when they heard me talking on the phone to someone describing mule jacks and how human beings go about arranging mules.   A jackass has feelings

Hydrox:  That’s disgusting!  Don’t they have laws to keep people from doing those kinds of things?

Me:  Um.  No.

Niaid:  Yuk!  Tricking some poor donkey into screwing a horse?  And that isn’t against the law?

Me:  I don’t think you’re seeing the big picture here.  They want mules.  Not much use for a donkey, but mules can be handy.  They’re not doing it for fun, nor just as some kind of perverted turn-on.

Tabby:  Yeah, you SAY that.  But I’ll bet there are guys up in the hayloft watching and kicking off their jollies.  It doesn’t make sense any other way.

Me:  No no no.  You aren’t getting what I’m saying.  Those people aren’t interested in the erotic side of donkey/horse intercourse.  They’re after persuading the male donkey, the jackass, to get the lady horse pregnant.  Nobody’s filming it to put on a website for the gratification of deranged people.

Hydrox:  Do they do that with CATs?  Are people out there making cats think they’re dogs and making them YUK do THAT? [Shudder]

Me:  Hmmm. Well, probably if they are it’s only in the sanctity of a science lab somewhere.  No harm intended.  Just science guys scrambling things, throwing things into test tubes to see what happens.

Niaid:  That is absolutely incredible.  What is wrong with you humans?  Do you suppose the humane society people know that’s going on?

Me:  Maybe.  Some of them.  As a rule humane society people are fairly single minded, though.  Don’t pay a lot of attention to what’s going on around them if it doesn’t involve arguing over which way of killing things is best.

Hydrox:  I swear, every day I live I get a new surprise about human beings.  You creatures are so wrapped up in yourselves you can’t see your own noses.

Me:  Yeah, that’s mostly true I guess.  But at least it’s only human beings on the porn websites I’d imagine.  At least people aren’t getting their jollies off about the donkeys and mares.  And there IS a field called animal husbandry, so I suppose some decent people at least force the jackass to marry the mare to make it less objectionable.  Animal preachers to do weddings, perform marriages and whatnot.  Keep it from being so perverted.

Old Jules

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Japanese whale hunting, seaweed, salmon and next year’s Toyotas

Posted on August 21, 2013 by | 6 comments

Hi readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read.  Toward the bottom of this post you’ll find my favorite quote for 2013:  Salmon News:  “We think something happened in the ocean.”

The good news is the Japanese are still eating whales, even though you could light up Tokyo with the radiation in a whale liver.  Seaweed, too, they’re still eating. 

[This sushi thing’s something I’m going to miss.  Used to always look forward to going to Tao Lyn Oriental Market in Albuquerque and buying packets of seaweed and sushi ingredients.  That’s probably something I won’t be doing again.]

The bad news is that the Japanese will likely pass up the rest of the human species in the race to the next evolutionary step.  Possible good news is they’ll devote that extra intelligence in the second head to actually improving Toyotas into the next evolutionary level.

http://factsanddetails.com/japan.php?itemid=879

[Nice pic of a half-butchered red whale]

http://factsanddetails.com/media/2/20090819-Ray%20Kinnane%2030257371_redwhale.jpg

 

Love of Whale Meat in Japan

Home > Japan > 05Animals…

WHALES, WHALE MEAT, SCIENTIFIC WHALING, WHALE HUNTS AND JAPAN

Many Japanese, especially older and middle-ages ones enjoy eating whale meat. It is sauteed, roasted and eaten raw. Japanese say it tastes more like beef than fish. Whale bacon sells for as much as $180 a pound at gourmet food shops and dishes made with whale go for as much as $100 a plate at restaurants.

[Nice pic of a Japanese Whale Hamburger – tastes just like pork or chicken]

http://factsanddetails.com/media/2/20090819-minke%20whale%20bruger%20at%20hakodate%20restuarants%20BBC%20_40657000_ap_burger203.jpg
 Whale meat is dark red and doesn’t look at like fish meat. Japanese consider blue, fin and sei whales to be the most delicious. Sperm whales aren’t regarded as very tasty. Humpback meat isn’t considered that good but the organs are palatable. Japanese generally like minke whales less than other species because they are small and don’t contain much fat, which is what the Japanese love. Meat from minke whales is the easiest to get today. Before the 1987 ban on whaling the Japanese didn’t even hunt them.
 Whale meat in Japan has traditionally made into stews with soy sauce and spinach. These stews are now made with beef or pork. In the whaling town of Wadamachi in Chiba you can get whale steaks, whale jerky, carved whale-tooth jewelry and even a one-meter-long decorated whale penis. Some towns sell whale nose cartilage pickled in sake in cans with a spouting whale. Those who have tried it said the cartilage has a crispy texture and a pungent taste.
 Taruichi, a Tokyo restaurant that specializes in whale meat, offers 36 choices: fried whale, whale bacon, whale heart, whale testicles, whale kidney and even ice cream made with whale fat. Boiled tongue is said to be particularly delicious. At whale restaurants in Shimonoseki you can get fried whale tail, grilled whale tongue wafers, boiled blubber and whale sashimi. In some places you can get sliced whale skin and whale burgers made with fried minke whale.
 Whale meat distributors claim that whale meat is high in protein and low in calories and have alleviated the problem of toughness associated with whale meat through improved freezing techniques. The tail meat sells for as much $70 a pound and is prized for whale sashimi. which is eaten with grated garlic or ginger to mask the odor. The health benefits of whale meat is a matter of some debate. On study found that Japanese in Wakayama Prefecture that eat pilot whale have high levels of mercury in their hair.

Meanwhile, this for you sushi lovers:

Southern California seaweed tests over 500 percent higher for radioactive iodine-131 than anywhere else in US
Thursday, July 12, 2012 by: Jonathan Benson, staff writer
Tags: seaweed, California, radiation

http://www.naturalnews.com/036449_seaweed_California_radiation.html
 

And this for you salmon lovers:

Salmon News:  “We think something happened in the ocean.”
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2013/08/424670.shtml

Sockeye salmon at dire historic low on Canada’s Pacific coast — “We think something happened in the ocean” — “The elders have never seen anything like this at all” — Alaska and Russia also affected

Aboriginal people in British Columbia who rely on Skeena River sockeye are facing some extremely difficult decisions as sockeye salmon returns plunge to historic lows. Lake Babine Chief Wilf Adam was on his way to Smithers, B.C., on Monday for a discussion about whether to entirely shut down the food fishery on Lake Babine, something he said would be drastic and unprecedented.

Mel Kotyk, North Coast area director for the Department of Fisheries and Oceans said department scientists don’t know why the return numbers are so low. “[…] we think something happened in the ocean.”

“We’ve never seen anything like this in all these years I’ve done this. I’ve asked the elders and they have never seen anything like this at all.” said Chief Wilf Adam
These stories were posted up on enenews. This suggests a possible explanation is radiation from Fukushima. That is speculation at this point. It could also be climate change related.

In 2011, Arnie Gundersen, nuclear expert from Fairewinds said this: “So eventually though we are going to see top of the food chain animals like tuna and salmon and things like that that have this process bio accumulates. The bigger fish gradually get higher and higher concentrations. And I am concerned that the FDA is not monitoring fish entering the United States because sooner or later a tuna is going to set off a radiation alarm at some part and people are going to think it’s a dirty bomb or something like that. So that’s not here yet because the tuna haven’t migrated across the Pacific. But I am thinking by 2013 we might see contamination of the water and of the top of the food chain fishes on the West Coast.”

!n July 2012 Gundersen said this: “The federal and even state agencies are not measuring this… I’ve been working on the West Coast and I’ve been trying to get the people of Oregon to demand of their state, the people of Alaska to demand of their state: Check the salmon, it is not difficult, it’s on the order of $500 a fish. Of course you don’t have to test every fish, but let’s test a couple and see. Either alleviate the fear or announce that yes indeed they are radioactive.”

For now I’m thinking the seafood flavored cat food’s still safe provided it comes in half-inch thick lead cans.

Old Jules

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Posted in 2013, Animals, Education, Outdoors, Uncategorized

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Chicken Poems

Posted on August 20, 2013 by | Leave a comment

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read.

The C*ckfight post got me thinking it’s time for putting up a few chicken poems.  These are from the Y2k flock, so enough time’s passed to allow me to post them without violating any confidences.  They’re almost surely all dead and gone from the stewpots of history.

El Palenque
El Palenque doesn’t think;
Knows and loves
His only job
And does it;
Perfection without compromise.
Reality
Where owls, hawks
And sly coyotes salivate
Reduced
To lowest common denominator
When the cackling hen
Rises from a fresh-laid egg.

Gallo del Cielo
Gallo del Cielo
Looks at God
Before he dies
Weeps
For eggs
Unlaid
From Araucana
Hens.

Red Tail Hawk

Raptor eye
Picks the kindred soul
Of silky bantam
From the flock

Rosencrantz
(A buff-crested Polish)

False dawn
Full moon
Morning.
Treetop cries
Of Rosencrantz
And Guildenstern
Deceived by
Counterfeit
Light
And sound
Misty memories
Of owl dreams

Old Jules

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Posted in 2000's, Animals, Chickens, Poetry

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Tooth Fairies, Trouble-Makers and Japanese Nukes

Posted on August 19, 2013 by | Leave a comment
2013 Tooth Fairy with Radioactivity Sniffer Dog

2013 Tooth Fairy with Radioactivity Sniffer Dog

Hi readers.

If you’re like me you probably wonder why the Tooth Fairy changed so much since we were kids.  It was the Baby Tooth Survey did it.  Here’s what happened:

When the Commandant of the National Tooth Fairy Regiment died of cancer in 1963 a lot of traitorous whining wimps in Missouri started crying about the fact the US Government was dropping hydrogen bombs on itself to pre-emptively protect itself in case someone else should drop nukes on Nevada and New Mexico. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_Tooth_Survey

Baby Tooth Survey

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 
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The Baby Tooth Survey was initiated by the Greater St. Louis Citizens’ Committee for Nuclear Information in conjunction with Saint Louis University and the Washington University School of Dental Medicine as a means of determining the effects of nuclear fallout in the human anatomy by examining the levels of radioactive material absorbed into the deciduous teeth of children.

Founded by the husband and wife team of physicians Eric and Louise Reiss, along with other scientists such as Barry Commoner, the research focused on detecting the presence of strontium-90, a cancer-causing radioactive isotope created by the more than 400 atomic tests conducted above ground that is absorbed from water and dairy products into the bones and teeth given its chemical similarity to calcium. The team sent collection forms to schools in the St. Louis, Missouri area, hoping to gather 50,000 teeth each year.[1] Ultimately, the project collected over 300,000 teeth from children of various ages before the project was ended in 1970.

Preliminary results published by the team in the November 24, 1961, edition of the journal Science showed that levels of strontium 90 in children had risen steadily in children born in the 1950s, with those born later showing the most increased levels.[2] The results of a more comprehensive study of the elements found in the teeth collected showed that children born after 1963 had levels of strontium 90 in their baby teeth that was 50 times higher than that found in children born before the advent of large-scale atomic testing. The findings helped convince U.S. President John F. Kennedy to sign the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with the United Kingdom and Soviet Union, which ended the above-ground nuclear weapons testing that placed the greatest amounts of nuclear fallout into the atmosphere.[3]

Follow-up analysis
A set of 85,000 teeth that had been uncovered in storage in 2001 by Washington University were given to the Radiation and Public Health Project. By tracking 3,000 individuals who had participated in the tooth-collection project, the RHPR published results in a 2010 issue of the International Journal of Health Service that showed that the 12 children who later died of cancer before the age of 50 had levels of strontium 90 in their stored baby teeth that was twice the level of those who were still alive at 50.[3][4]

After that things seemed to settle down okay for a while.  Then came Three-Mile Island and Chernobyl.  Tooth Fairies were dying off like flies.  Gums rotting away, skin peeling off them like overcoats.

Fact is, we almost lost the whole kaboodle of Tooth Fairies when the Japanese started dumping all the radioactivity they could scrape together and sending it into the atmosphere headed for Alaska, California, Washington and Oregon.  Pumping water hotter than a two-dollar pistol into the Pacific Ocean.

Tooth Fairy recruitment programs went to zilch.  Finding new Tooth Fairies to replace the ones getting the blind staggers was tougher than the Mother Church trying to find women willing to be nuns.

Luckily, the US Military and the National Academy of Multi-Layered Police Forces, comprising about half the US population, came to the rescue.  Provided pistols to be held to the temples of potential Tooth Fairies who were trying to take French leave from the job.  But to compensate, providing body armor and radioactivity sniffing dogs to help the ones still able bodied enough to slip into a bedroom at night and reach under a pillow for a tooth stay alive longer.

Saved again by the police and the US military and mercenary forces.

Old Jules

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Posted in 2013, America, Animals, Current Issues, Education, Government, History, Human Behavior, Police, Science, US Army

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The Great Tick Migration – Occupy Texas

Posted on August 18, 2013 by | 4 comments

Hi readers. I’m reblogging this because the original writing of it was a direct consequence of the events described in the previous post. J

So Far From Heaven

I wrote this when I lived in Socorro, New Mexico, but I’d guess it’s as timely and germane today as it was then.

http://insects.tamu.edu/images/insects/common/images/cd-43-c-txt/cimg370.html

It’s sad, but they have to migrate: there’s no good water in the Rio Grande anymore.  It’s all sewage passed downstream from Albuquerque and other towns. 
 
This was almost home to them. Their ancestors arrived with the first cattle drives from Texas in the 1880s. But finally they’ve had enough. Lemming-like they’ve decided as one to return home, Lone Star Ticks to the Lone Star State, same as those invading Confederate Texas humans had to finally stagger and stumble home when things took a turn for the worst..
 
This far south they’ve just begun to gather; just started to come out from under the grassleaves, the treebark, stragglers still coming out of the brush. The main migration gathering is further north in the Isleta lands…

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Posted in 1990's, Adventure, America, Animals, Gambling, Government, Human Behavior, Nature, Police, Texas

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Running from the law: The Great Cockfight Bust, or The Great C*ckfight Bust

Posted on August 17, 2013 by | 10 comments

El Palenque2

Hi readers.   Thanks for coming by for a read.  Those of you who have any morals and are offended by the alternative name for the male chicken will be soothed to see I’ve name this twice to avoid criticism.

Must have been 1996, 1997, I was living in Socorro, NM, and I got wind there was a major cock [c*ck] fight going to happen Saturday night.  They happened a few times a month in that area, and though official NM law allowed it as a local option at the time, murmurings in the State House rumored it was going to be prohibited soon.  They’d raided a couple of them in counties where the local option had people thinking it was legal.

Anyway, Saturday night I was at loose ends so I headed out to put hero roosters into my body of life experience.  The place was a mile beyond a gate and down a dirt road into the Rio Grande bosque.  The salt cedars opened up to a large cleared area of several acres with a large metal building toward the back.  Room to park 200 vehicles or more.

I got there early to look things over, still some daylight.  Maybe 20-30 cars and pickups in the lot, guys hanging around talking and smoking outside.  Moseyed into the barn, looked over the seating arrangements, looked a lot like an auction barn for livestock.  But with a cage blocked off in the center for the fighters and their handlers.

Nobody was in a hurry to go inside because it was hot in that barn.  I decided it would be hotter when the place filled up, so I staked a standing-up claim against the support for a tall sliding metal door at the back. 

When the place filled it was noisy, it was hot, and things were happening fast.  Bets, chickens, arms waving and yelling, every reason to be enamored of my place at the door.

But toward the shank of the evening a horn honked out in the parking lot and someone yelled, “Raid!  Cops!”  Sirens blaring, suddenly everyone inside stampeding for the doors.  I ran to the corner of the building and saw the parking lot was filled with flashing lightbars, half-dozen, maybe a dozen police cars.  Sheeze.  This is bullshit!  Guys running out toward their cars getting snagged by the cops.

So I ran like hell out into the bosque dodging salt cedars, rattlers, just put as much distance between myself and that barn as I could manage.  When I went knee deep in mud I knew I wasn’t going any further.  The Rio Grande was right in here somewhere close.

I tucked myself in next to a dead tree in a thicket of salt cedar and watched the lights through the trees, listened to the angry yells of men being arrested, watched the lights threading through the cedars chasing people trying to get away too late.  Waited, waited, felt ticks crawling all over me, found myself wondering about the rattlers, waited, more ticks, waited.

Gradually things calmed down, engines started, gradually the sirens stopped.  Things got really quiet.  But no way I was about to be fooled by that crap.  Full dark, I waited, listened.  Ticks by the hundreds crawling around on me.  Waited, caught myself dozing, jerked myself awake and waited some more.

Finally Old Sol began crawling in, me praying him up.  Still quiet except for the sounds of the morning birds and water rustling down the channel.  I carefully, carefully began working my way through the salt cedars toward the parking area.

I squatted and watched peeking out there as light filled the parking area.  There it was.  My old Mitzubishi Montero and a scattering of other vehicles.  Sitting there trying to lure me to jail.  I scratched and watched.

Finally a guy came creeping out of the bosque maybe 50 yards away, creeping toward a pickup the other side of the Montero.   Heeheehee.  Bait.  Now we’ll see where the law’s hiding.  Glad it ain’t me!

He seemed surprised.  Got into his truck, started it, no sign of the fuzz.  Spun around and vanished in a trail of dust back toward the pavement.

Hmmmm.  Hokay.  I stood up straight, Tried to act like I was just a normal guy coming out of those salt cedars.  Wandered over to the Montero and watched a dozen other guys coming out of the trees.  Cranked up the Mitzubishi and tooled home free as a bird.

The paper was full of it, the Socorro Chieftain, the Albuquerque Journal.  Printed the names of all those guys who got busted.

Served them right, too, going out there watching c*ckfights.

If people don’t have ethics and morals enough to stay away from places like that they need to be in jail.

Old Jules

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Posted in 1990's, Adventure, America, Animals, Chickens, Country Life, Free, Free-ranging-chickens, Human Behavior, Nature, New Mexico, NM, Outdoors, Police, Politics, Survival, Trucks

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What’s so great about being sane and smart?

Posted on August 14, 2013 by | 2 comments

Hi readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read.

The cats have been expressing some doubts lately about my sanity and insensitively observing I also ain’t all that smart.  As happens from time to time.  Seems to run in cycles when they’ve been a long while away from towns and cities where they can observe sanity and average intelligence.

When they’ve lived in, or visited towns and cities where they’ve been able to observe the ‘average’ mental conditions representing sanity and the average US human IQs of 100 at work, they lighten up on me.  For them the illusion of a better life and lifestyle associated with human sanity and average IQ loses a lot of glamor when they’re surrounded by it.  While the gulf between me and sane, and smart, take on something of an ideal.  A condition more to be aspired to than what goes on where sanity and average intelligence prevail.

The problem is those cats are brainwashed by sanist and IQist elitist propaganda, even out here.  They pick it up by words, phrases, value judgements when Gale or the neighbor up-the-hill come to call, and it gradually seeps in, trumping their own experiences and observations.  Same as happens, only more so, to the people in town who are submerged in it.

The only way to put a sea anchor on the illusion that sane and smart are somehow to be preferred to the life they live is to lock them up in the RV and take them to town for a looksee, I figures.  Give them a taste of the cat of averagism.

And if they keep hectoring me I’m sure-as-hell going to do it.

Old Jules

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Posted in 2013, Animals, Communication, Education, Solitude

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Niaid: “So why aren’t we being more vocal about all this?”

Posted on August 12, 2013 by | 8 comments

Naiad dawn2

Niaid:  Why aren’t we trying to get some help on it?  Sometimes we might want to sleep late or we might be busy at sunset.

Me:  Proselytising and zeal are consequences of an erosion of faith.  Nobody needs to shout from the rooftops, “Hey everyone!  The sun’s going down this evening.  The sun’s about to come up!”  Nobody on earth does that because they have faith it’s going to happen.

Niaid:  So why do we do it then?

Me:  Of respect.  A demonstration of our faith, tipping the figurative hat to Truth.    We don’t need to recruit anyone to the cause because we know it’s already taken care of.

Niaid:  Then why do they do it on other matters they have faith in?

Me:  I said it before.  Erosion of faith.  Think about it.  The ancient Jews were never evangelical.  They didn’t need to be.  They had complete confidence in their God.  But when Christianity came along, the situation for Christians became an entirely different problem with a different solution.  They were the new kids on the block.  They were mostly Jews.  They’d spent their entire lives being indoctrinated to the Jewish faith.  They needed numbers.  Groups of other people believing the same as they did to help boost their own confidence what they believed was actually true.

Niaid:  All zealotry is from an erosion of faith?

Me:  Every time.

Niaid:  Patriotic zeal?

Me:  Think about it.  Before the Civil War they weren’t posturing and flag waving.  They knew what they were and mistrusted the people running things, but they never doubted what they believed themselves to be.  But after the Civil War the whole question about what this nation is took on new meaning.  It needed bolstering.  Parades.  Shouting from rooftops.  Fireworks. 

Niaid:  Needed it why?

Me:  They needed it to take the minds of the defeated half of the country that they’d been forced at gunpoint to be a part of something they fought hard to separate themselves from.  After the Civil War the country never again had faith in itself because everyone in it knew the premise the nation was founded on was violated.  Dead.

Niaid:  So the reason we pray Old Sol up and down is our way of saying we know it’s going to come up and go down?

Me:  Yep.  And we know damned well it doesn’t need any extra votes to force it to do it.  We know it will come up the same,  whatever Christians, Jews, Muslems, and anyone else might do in their praying trying to stop it.  We’ve got right on our side.

Old Jules

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Posted in 2013, America, Animals, Communication, Government, History, Human Behavior, Spirituality

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Hydrox: “So why can’t I hear Old Sol talking?”

Posted on August 12, 2013 by | 4 comments

hydroxwindow2

Hydrox: We pray him up every morning, pray him down evenings.  I hear one end of all these conversations you have with him, but I never hear Old Sol saying anything.

Me:  Once again, it’s your romantic mode of viewing reality.  You’re only sensing what’s immediately apparent, not seeing the underlying form.

Hydrox:  I have to see the underlying form to hear what Old Sol says?

Me:  Think of it this way.  You look across the meadow and see trees with birds in them.  And an inch in front of your eyes you see a grasshopper.  You have an a priori knowledge the movement of those birds and that grasshopper jumping are happening at the same time.  But they aren’t.  What your eyes tell you is now is a microsecond earlier for the birds than the grasshopper because of the speed of light reflecting off both, arriving at your eye simultaneously.

Hydrox:  You’ve lost me.

Me:  Your mind filters what it sees with a priori knowledge.  You can’t hear Old Sol talking because you have romantic, a priori knowledge Old Sol doesn’t speak.  You’re not able to sense the underlying form.  It’s the same reason the people who read this blog wouldn’t be able to hear you talk, can’t hear cats talk.

Hydrox:  Well I’ll be damned.

Me:  Think of it.  People in the Bible used to hear God talk.  Adam and Eve, Abraham, Job, Moses, they were hearing in the Classical mode of reality.  Underlying form.   They can’t hear God speak anymore because they’ve gone by necessity into the Romantic mode.  Their minds filter out what God says, because in the modern world if they allowed themselves to hear the kinds of things God said they’d get themselves into a pile of trouble.

Hydrox:  How do you mean that?  People hear God talking all the time.

Me:  Only when God says things they won’t get in trouble hearing and obeying.  God might be telling people all over the place they have to sacrifice their kids, the same way he told that to Abraham.  But you can’t go around hearing God telling you to kill your kids, nor anyone else the way God used to do.  Telling people to smite other people hip and thigh.  Stone them to death if they screw around, masturbate, don’t follow the rules.  People today who hear God telling them to do things of that nature are generally believed to be insane.  Especially if they go ahead and do it.

Hydrox:  So if I can rid myself of this stupid, romantic way of looking at reality I’ll be able to hear what Old Sol’s saying?”

Me:  Yeah, but you’ll need to keep it to yourself or people will think you’re crazy.

Old Jules

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Posted in 2013, Animals, Nature, Science, Spirituality

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Zen etc, Persig – The Phaedrus Chatauqua – Classical and Romantic Reality

Posted on August 7, 2013 by | 8 comments

Persig’s decided to do his Chatauqua on Phaedrus.  Begins by explaining how Phaedrus saw the world in a classical reality form, explains the difference between those two ways of approaching reality.

Hydrox:  So what’s the Classical reality way of viewing cat food?  Are we cats viewing the Romantic way, or the Classical way?

Me:  Romantic.  No question about it, no compromise, even.  The Classical’s the underlying form.  The components that make up the food, the nutritional value.  The process that went into canning it.  You cats couldn’t care less about that.  Taste and odor are the immediately apparent form, the Romantic.  They’re all you care about.

Hydrox:   I like to eat the insides out of things I catch.  Leave the head and sometimes tail and legs.  I like the underlying form best.

Me:  Actually not.  If you were opening that mouse and looking at the way the digestive tract works, the circulatory system, the nerves, lungs, then you’d be getting into Classical form.  You aren’t looking at underlying function even though it’s inside.  You’re after taste, odor and texture.  There are no goods, no bads in the Classical form. No feelings.  Those are all Romantic form.

Hydrox:  Okay.  But you’re saying this Phaedrus guy was only interested in underlying form?  Classical form?  Is that why he was crazy?

Me:  Not really, but we’ll get into that.  Crazy doesn’t seem to confine itself to one form or another.    And the reasons Phaedrus had his insanity are a lot deeper than that.   More in the manner of the way he broke the world down to analyse it than in the form itself.

Niaid:  Off the subject, but wasn’t the kid here in the story killed in a driveby shooting a few years ago?  A long time after this story.

Me:  Yeah, he was.  Before you cats were even born.  Before Persig wrote Lila, too.

Tabby:  So are we supposed to keep that in mind while we’re doing this?  That this kid’s going to end up dead in a driveby shooting?

Me:  Not if you can keep from it, though it’s not easy to keep it separate.  What happened to that kid later on didn’t have anything to do with Phaedrus, and the way you’ll be thinking about him is Romantic.  Feelings.

Old Jules

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Posted in 2013, America, Animals, Book Reviews, Books

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