happytom’s blog

I've just devised a system of alarms that I think is foolproof for myself:

1. I set three alarms on my phone x:55, y:00, y:05, where y is the hour I need to be up. My phone is loud, but the alarms only go off for one minute and don't repeat, so it has failed me more than once. The first two are songs, and the last one is the same as my phone ringing. My phone is on the other side of the room.

2. I set a dresser alarm clock to y:00. It's not that loud, but it will go off until I turn it off. The clock is also on the other side of the room.

3. My phone goes off at x:55. This at least wakes me for a moment, even if I do not get up and turn it off. I have a tendency, in my supremely groggy waking time, to turn off future alarms, but 3 of them is too much trouble.

4. At y:00, both my phone and the clock go off. This is too annoying, I must get up and turn them off. I have to turn on the light to find my phone (that's important).

5. This is the important part. It is still y:00. I don't want my phone to start ringing in 5 minutes like someone is calling me, because that is supremely annoying, but it's the last alarm, and I know if I turn it off and go back to bed I know I won't get up. So I turn it off and actually start doing things! It works!

Recycling is pointless, except for aluminum, and maybe plastic. It costs more to recycle plastic than it's worth, but do we really need more plastic? Or maybe we can learn how to live without plastic again (but probably not).
Anyway, paper, and glass, especially, should not be recycled.

sex in christ
now, this website really takes a lot of stuff out of context, but there are some good facts buried within:
1. the bible says nothing about sex between women
2. the bible says not a thing about masturbation
3. anal sex is okay for virgins
i'm pretty sure that this is all true. i'm actually surprised to find that i don't have a bible handy, but as far as i can remember, this all checks out.
i think my favorite section is the one on christian pornography. a must-read
my thanks to zen bullet on myspace for his post

What personality trait has gotten you in the most trouble? 

My stupidity. I'm retarded. I guess that's more of a disorder than a trait.

I still exist. I guess I was a little sad that nobody commented on my Bragg's post (except Ruth, no surprise there).
I feel like a dark brown dot, lost in the cosmos. I just started my second quarter at CPP. I've got to go to class. I'll post my schedule when I have one.
Thank you Ruth, for being a good friend.
Laura's b-day tomorrow! 21! Woo!

I'm sort of a health nut. I've read a lot of stuff on healthy diets and herbs and organic vegetables and recently I turned vegan. Well, something's been bugging me for a while and I've got to write a post about it. It's the health food company, Bragg's.

I have much love for Paul C Bragg, one of the founders of the health nut movement in America. He was one hip dude, seriously. But these two products, Bragg's liquid aminos and apple cider vinegar, are kind of wacky. Both are excellent products, they taste good and are well-made, but there are some dubious details with them that I just can't get over. I'll start with the liquid aminos.
The liquid aminos are touted as a natural healthy seasoning that can be used on most all food. If you have ever tried the stuff, you've probably noted it tastes a lot like soy sauce. It is, in fact, made from soy beans, although it says prominently on the bottle that it is not fermented and contains no added salt. It implies that this seasoning is a good way to get all of the amino acids one needs in order to be healthy, that it contains 16 free-form amino acids that everyone needs. All of this is basically true, too.The thing about it that bugs me, though, is that it is made by hydrolyzing soy protein.
Hydrolyzing might sound like a weird chemical thing that shouldn't be done to food. In fact, it's pretty mundane. What they do is treat soy protein with a strong acid, like hydrochloric or sulphuric acid (it matters little which they actually use), and this (basically) breaks all of the bonds between the various amino acids in the protein, and oxidizes a little of it into more flavorful compounds. This process is the essence of the umami taste, the savoriness in foods, and it is very similar to what the cultures that make soy sauce do only a lot quicker and without salt. It's not really bad or too weird. So what's the big deal?
Well, this is the same method by which all cheap fake soy sauce is made. Bragg's is only unique because they don't put salt and corn syrup into their fake soy sauce. Also, I'd estimate it costs about four times more than fake soy sauce. It costs as much as decent organic real tamari (Liquid Aminos is not organic, btw), and I don't think it tastes as good. I just think that they kind of misrepresent this product.
On a side note, a couple of the free aminos listed in the brochure information are glutamic and aspartic acid. These two are the most common amino acids in all life ( I think), and are probably present in every protein in our bodies. In the free form, glutamic acid is a glutamate ion, and mixed with table salt (sodium chloride) it becomes the notorious MSG (monosodium glutamate). The sodium and glutamate ions break apart when you dissolve this stuff in water, so it's irrelevant that Liquid Aminos has no added sodium, it just means that the naturally occuring sodium, potassium, magnesium, and other positive ions in the solution would make crystals with the glutamate if you dried out liquid aminos. Aspartic acid is practically the same, I think it could be used as a direct substitute, MSA I suppose. About a hundred years ago in Japan researchers discovered that glutamate, isolated and crystallized, was savoriness itself. It is present in fairly high concentrations in soy sauce and fake soy sauce, which makes them delicious with many things, of course. It's also present in a lot of meats, cheeses, and other foods, and it is totally harmless unless all you eat is junk food, in which case you are probably getting way too much glutamic acid in proportion to all the other amino acids you need. This isn't a problem with soy sauce or fake soy sauce, as they have balanced protein profiles. If you really think that you will go crazy or get cancer from MSG, then you need to eschew soy sauce and chicken from your diet too. (I'm only talking about free-form glutamate; glutamate in proteins is is practically everything that is edible).
So, that's all about Liquid Aminos for now, I have more to say about it, but I think I wrote too much already.
Onto the apple cider vinegar.
First of all, I have to say that this is awesomely good vinegar. Like the Liquid Aminos, I have put it in a lot of delicious food. But it is pricey, and more importantly, they say some things about it that are a tad off, for me. Bragg's sells a book about how this stuff is super good for you and you should drink it every day. A lot of people buy a lot of this stuff and drink it, believe me, it used to sell in considerable quantities at a health food store that I worked at. People mostly want to use it to lose weight, which might actually work , from what I've read. But drinking any vinegar would do this, it's just the things that acetic acid does to your body. Actually, acetic acid, the vinegar in vinegar, can affect the metabolism of sugar in your body, no matter what vinegar it comes from. I would say, though, that this is one of the less healthy ways to lose weight. Acetic acid is one of the stronger organic acids, and consistently consuming moderate quantities of it is hard on your teeth and your digestive tract. While in general it is good to have a diet that's a little on the acid side, consuming only one kind of organic acid is probably harder on your system than getting a full range of different ones, like ascorbic acid (vitamin C), citric acid, malic acid, etc.
Also, something that I find a little weird is that Bragg's brags about the Liquid Aminos not being fermented (they use hydrolysis as I've already explained), but then they tout the natural fermentation process used to make their apple cider vinegar, and how it's not pasteurized, it has the vinegar mother floating in it, etc. Maybe they have evidence that red rice bacteria culture in soy sauce produces toxins or other bad things and that acebacteria and yeast in vinegar produce only good things, but I think that they just cater to whatever people want to believe is good for them. After all, it has been demonstrated the placebo effect might work, and also that people who believe that they are consuming more expensive wine, or glacier water, or whatever, like it better.
And another annoying thing about Bragg's is that all of these little details that add up to a line of products that really annoys me are hard to explain, and surrounded by pitfalls (like some people who proclaim the evilness of hydrolysis). So you have to write about a hundred pages of garbage in order to give a fair and balanced picture of this stuff. I feel that Bragg's uses this to their advantage, as most people probably don't care enough to read all this. Myself, I care about what I eat and what I spend money on. If you've actually read all of this crazy stuff about condiments, I commend you.

If you search for Laura's name on yahoo, this is what you get, a photograph that she took. It is on the front page of you are beautiful, a website that showcases photographs of (mostly) public art with the words you are beautiful.

If you search for my full name on yahoo, this is one thing you get.

I have no idea why commenting has been disabled on several of my recent posts. I just went back through and re-enabled it for the last 4 posts. Please leave me comments!

Show us a photo of a place you love.

Looking back through my old pictures, I found there were a lot of things I didn't have pictures of. I recently lost soe in a hard drive crash :(   However, Houdyshel took some pictures of Jeff and my place in Lancaster, and I have those:

The old yard with giant sunflowers

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Our Faithful Friend

Colin, on our porch

  Also, because I took thousands of pictures in 2004, I do have really old pictures of one place I loved:

Tommi and Sara's Old Apartment

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Sancho the Great

Decorations

Fat Cameron plays the blue, may 04

I miss Tommi and Sara's old apartment.