I’m proud to say that I’ve found my new favorite coffee. Several months ago, I purchased my first few packages of Groundshark Coffee. The White Belt Blend was POWERFUL. Those handcrafted whole beans from Brazil made for a bold Medium Roast.
The Brown Belt Blend is a little different. It’s not as strong as the White Belt (now Blue Belt) but it tastes richer, I can drink it all day long (like yerba mate), and it puts me in a really good mood.
Olive oil smoke point makes for a hot topic. The question on everybody’s mind is, “Can I use olive oil for cooking?” Well, it depends on what you mean by olive oil, and sometimes on much how good fat your particular blend contains.
If you are cooking with an olive oil that has a higher ratio of polyunsaturated (high Omega 6 content) to monounsatured fats (low Omega 3 content) then you will miss out on the nutritional and health benefits of a pure, unfiltered extra virgin blend.
We had just finished several waves at our local pool’s sauna. At one point in our conversation I brought up the Lindy Effect and its relation to the storied tradition of ancient Roman bathhouses, and how Romans of all social classes spent their time amidst those hot vapors, discussing philosophy and politics until the sun set. It was a state of semi-permanent retirement. Something about the cleansing energies of hot steam that makes conversation more fluid.
You can’t beat a sociopath when it comes to business.
Sociopathy is an informal term that refers to a pattern of antisocial behavior and attitudes. In the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), sociopathy is most closely represented by Antisocial Personality Disorder.
You can try to purge the sociopaths, but without them you’ll always end up with a morally bankrupt society, a fragile market economy, higher prices and sluggish growth.
I refuse to understand Cultural Blanks who say,
“Your wife should not be like your mother!”
This is similar to the standard American slight: “Hah! You’re 25 and still live at home!?”
I think both lamentations come from unresolved personal insecurities. In all my life I have not heard such things uttered except from the weakest and most impressionable of men.
Most Eastern Europeans and Balkanci I meet are perplexed when I tell them I would trade places with them any day; America (and Canada, to a lesser extent), of course, are the “lands of opportunity and wealth.”
Real extra virgin olive oil is notoriously difficult to get in North America, but not for the reasons one would normally expect:
There are many words that, despite their origin in different language histories, sound very similar to one another. These are called false cognates¹:
For instance, while the Hebrew word חוצפה chutzpah means “impudence,” its Classical Arabic cognate حصافة ḥaṣāfah means “sound judgment.”
But not often (perhaps never) do false cognates, with different etymologies, also possess similar meanings. There is one such instance of a similar-enough word that appears in both Croatian and Portuguese that I believe may actually be more philologically related than anybody so far has determined.
Two good friends are sitting on the bank of the Danube river, where after an evening of fishing they are surprised by a strange creature.
In “A Coward”, Guy de Maupassant¹ reminds us that what people want most in life is to be respected.
If, when face to face with the other man, he did not show a proper gallantry and calm, he would be lost for ever. He would be sullied, branded with a mark of infamy, hounded out of society.
