tbentley.com

Growing old and sex

I think that it was Euripides, the Greek playright.  He was asked how he felt upon reaching such an advanced age.  He replied, ” I am only grateful to be released from the grasp of the great beast of sexual desire.”

I’ve read that it you get almost the same amount of rest when you just lie in bed, as when  you are actually asleep.  More,  while it may seem as though you are awake all night, the truth is usually that you are going in and out of sleep; you don’t notice the times when you are sleeping, because…well, you’re asleep, uncoscious; what seems like a continuous wakefulness is really interrupted sleep. You don’t remember the times you were not aware of.

Looking back at your life is a lot like that.  You only remember the times you were especially aware:  special occasions, sad moments, trauma, joy.  The rest is unconscious, a sort of misty awareness that time must have passed, but not something noticed enough to stay with you.

Like if life were a long subway trip, where you pop up from underground, have a look around, maybe take in a show or dinner, then back down you go, till the next stop comes along.

tbentley general rant, Personal History, Uncategorized

Commy Pinko Fag

This is how describe my political leanings on facebook:  “commypinkofag”.  Accurate, and I am not going to change it for the sake of not hurting anyone’s feelings.

Commy  (commie):

I left Wabash College after my sophomore year in a state of total confusion.  Didn’t know who I was ( hadn’t yet realised my own homosexuality), was totally unsure of my future (I had entered college as pre-theo, that is, pre-theological seminary), and under attack (there were rumors about me being a ‘faggot’ flying about the campus, most of which I was unaware of until the Dean took me aside and asked  me, “is it true”? )

I took a year off from college (I planned it to be only a year), and started working in a nearby publishing company’s art department.  But I knew I didn’t want to do that for the rest of my life:  I wanted to finish college.

Then I heard about a program of the US Navy appealed to me:  NAVCAD, or Naval Cadet, which took guys with two years of college, trained them to be Navy pilots (as officers), and would also pay for them to complete college.  Sounded like a good deal to me.  Note:  this is 20 years before “The Right Stuff” came out.

I applied; passed all the test with flying colors; then waited to hear of my acceptance into the program.

I waited and waited and waited.  Several months later, I got a visit from the FBI.

FBI wanted to know:  Why did you subscribe to “The Weekly People”?  Why did you have a subscription to “The Nation”?

Hey, when I was a senior in high school, I wanted to learn about a lot of thing, among them politics and society.  So I found ads in the back of Saturday Review of Literature, to which my parents subscribed, that i thought would be interesting.

We’re talking about a 16-year-old boy, here.

The two FBI agents wanted to know how long I had been suscribed to these publications, what my political affiliations were (I was still 19, at that time unable to vote), who recommended these publications to me, and did I have anyfurther connection t them?

What they did not ask me about was my subscription to the newsletter of the John Birch Society.  And to the National Review.

tbentley Uncategorized

“‘I like being able to fire people who provide services to me,’ Romney told a breakfast forum of the Nashua Chamber of Commerce. ‘You know, if someone doesn’t give me the good service I need, I want to say, ‘You know, I’m going to get someone else to provide this service to me.’’

Hey, come on, Mitt!  Even Clinton didn’t fire Monica.

tbentley Uncategorized

What pisses me off?

When you are asked to enter your credit card number (or any other long series of digits), and the instructions are:  Without Spaces.

Those long numbers are separated by spaces for a reason: to make them easier to read, and easier to remember.  It’s a psychological thing called “chunking”.  Easier to member several chunks than a long, long string of numbers, or letters, or what-have you.

And it would be so easy for the programer to remove the spaces.  One simple php or c++ function would do it!

Can you tell me why they make life so difficult for us?

tbentley general rant, Uncategorized

I’m making black-bean soup with rice.  Taught to me by a Mexican immigrant in Denver, Colorado. Like his mother used to make.

I started at 11:00 in the morning; we usually eat around 2:00 in the afternoon. It’ll be very ready by then.

I chopped up into small pieces:

• 1 medium sweet onion
• 2-inch piece of sweet potato.  Should really be a piece of pumpkin, but any kind of squash will do.
• 1/4 of a green pepper
• 3 cloves of garlic

In a deep-sided skillet, I made a sofrito (sautee) of the garlic and onions, then added the pepper and squash.  To this I stirred in a good portion of dried oregano (mine is Mexican from Penzy’s), a large pinch of red chili flakes, a pinch of salt and of pepper.  Get these things working all together, so the onions are soft, and then dump in two cans of black beans.  You could cook your own black beans from dried, but that would take another day.

Add some water–about 1/2 cup or so.  Then add about the same amount of red wine.  Don’t worry about the alcohol, it will all be cooked away.  But worry if you must…just use a good red wine, not one of those horrid “non-alcoholic” types.)

Let it all come to a boil, then turn the heat down to real low, so that the stuff is just barely bubbling. Don’t let it boil over the sides.

Stir it often. When it sits their simmering for a while, you’ll get a skin on top; just stir it back into the mix.

Taste: if too mild, add some (1/4 tsp) of Sriracha.  Stir it in.  Add some sugar to bring out the vegetables’ flavors (1/2 tsp).

When the beans are done, the squash or sweet potato will have bocome really soft or even unidetifiable, same with the green pepper, or at least able to be severed with the edge of a wooden spoon. The soup will be thick and dark with the black beans, not watery.

I just checked mine–it’s 12:30, and doing great.  When we eat, in an hour and a half, we’ll each get some  in a bowl, and sprinkle a generous portion of rice on top, and also a lot of raw, finely-chopped sweet onion.

tbentley food, Uncategorized

In 1797, work was completed on a road through Saluda gap between  Greenville and  North Carolina (I believe this is the present Rt. 276) .  According to Greenville, A History by A.V. Huff, Jr.:

An annual event was the passage of thousands of turkeys, driven in flocks of four hundred to six hundred.  The birds were kept together by drovers carrying long whips with pieces of red flannel attached.  By night the turkeys roosted in nearby trees, and by day they could travel about 8 miles.  Both flocks and herds required large amounts of feed on the journey.  The drives occurred every fall and continued until about 1885 when the railroads made them obsolete.

The goal of the drive was Travelers’ Rest, so named because it was a day’s journey from Greenville. ” Horses, mules, cattle, sheep and hogs from Kentucky and Tennessee came over the same road in large herds.”  So there must have been quite a market going on in TR.

Happy Thanksgiving!

tbentley Ancient life, Uncategorized

Man, sometimes I just can’t do it.

Something goes wrong, and I search the forums, and get hints like: “look at the sticky in this forum”.  Big help.  Or else, “What’s your configuration?  Are you running linux?”.  Always good to answer a question with another question.

Usuallly the problems are pretty arcane.  I had an issue with vsftpd, and the only help I could find on that issue was, “Be sure your’re running version 2007, not 2.06.”  I’m running version 2.02, which is the latest version available for my operating system (CentOS 6).

tbentley Uncategorized

Tags on pillows, on mattresses, on anything withf a fabric or stuffing that needs to be identified.  You need to know what’s in the thing you bought, because there may be llergies involved.  Okay, I get that.  But that tag, that’s so ugly–why is it sewn into the seam?  Sure, you don’t want it easily removed–but sewn into the seam?

I suggest all pillows, etc, be made with a matching-fabric appedndage, onto which the contents-tag can be sewn.  Then you could remove the ugly white tag by snipping off the little appendage, and the remaining bit of fabric, which is sewn into the seam, is invisible.

tbentley Uncategorized

Why do we need ear plugs?

To give ourselves a few moments of rest.  To retreat from the hurley-burly of the day.  To go to sleep.  To meditate.  To drown the roar of an airplane’s engines. To escape that most annoying noise from the TV down the hall.  In short, for what we think of a privacy–to be alone with our own thoughts.

What kind of ear plugs?

The soft foam-rubber kind.  E.A.R. is a favorite brand.  Flents now makes an equivalant type.  They must be a cylindrical.  You roll them between your thumb and forefinger, then insert them into your ear beyond the outer lobe so that when they expand, the completely fill that passageway leading to the eardrum.

What’s a bad ear plug?

Any that is made of a solid material, such as wax, or rubber; the idea is to block the sound waves–a solid will conduct the sound waves.

Bad  Idea:  a cone-shaped foam plug.  You might look at these and say, Yes, my ear passage narrows as it goes inside, so I should get an earplug to fit.  But you don’t want an exact fit: you want to fill up the passageway.  The foam is foam so that it can expand to fill up that space.

Doesn’t this get rather expensive?

Not at all, as the foam rubber cylinder can be laundered and re-used.  Save the pairs of earplugs after you use them; when you have collected enough, put them into a bag made for delicate fabrics, and run them through the washing machine and drier.  They’ll come out fresh and ready to be re-used.

My used earplugs get rather un-soft.

Soften the earplugs by hydrateing them.  You can hold them in your hand for a while; you can breath on them, for a quick hydration; put them in a shirt pocket, near your skin–you are perspiring and exhaling all the time through your skin, which will soften up the foam shortly.  Probably not something you want to share.

tbentley Uncategorized

Avis and I went to see the HD showing of the Met’s production of Sigfried yesterday at a movie theater here in South Carolina.  It was a small theater, with a posted capacity of 159.  We arrived 10 minutes early, and were alone in the room, so we got to choose good seats, row high enough and in the center.  A total of 9 people, including us, eventually attended.  But what gets me is that four of those other seven decided to sit directly in front of us!  Choosing from 157 other seats, they needed to clump up right by us.

This was not the first time–at the previous showing of Don Giovanni, we were also alone until five people arrived, who decided to sit right next to us, and then decided they didn’t like those seats, so they got up and moved–directly behind us!  All this in an otherwise empty theater.

tbentley Uncategorized