Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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   Yom Kippur anti-fly jihad
Sunday, October 5 2003

The trail that forks off the Stick Trail to the southeast could be called the Canary Hill Trail, since it enters a region whose nearest civilization lies along Canary Hill Road. Canary Hill Road forms a loop off of Hurley Mountain road, and I took it yesterday on the way to Rosendale to see what it was like. It's extremely steep on either end but flat through the middle, and along this flat stretch there is an almost villagelike concentration of houses.
My Canary Hill Trail lies about a kilometer northeast of Canary Hill Road and about 250 feet higher in elevation. Today I took two different hikes from either side of the end of Canary Hill trail to explore a band of 12 to 15 foot high cliffs that run along the 600 foot contour. They were just high enough that I was a little concerned about Eleanor getting too close to them - she tends to get in the sorts of accidents that produce massive fluid-filled contusions. In the part of the cliffs to the southwest of the trail, the rocks tended to be eroded into interesting shapes, including one that resembled a massive alien head balanced on a narrow pedestal.


The Chamomile River is in blue.
The Canary Hill Trail is in orange.
The band of cliffs is indicated by a thick white line.
Home is a red X.
Contour elevations in feet above sea level,
The grid is in kilometers.
Dotted black lines indicate State Park ownership lines.
$: bluestone mines, X: hunting structures.

The flies were so annoying in my laboratory this evening that I took matters into my own hands, literally, and constructed a makeshift flyswatter from a length of perforated shelf-support rail and piece of plastic from some electronics packaging. I drilled little holes in the plastic so it wouldn't suffer from excessive air resistance. It proved a lethal fly killer, and in the course of an hour I eliminated nearly all the flies in the house. When Gretchen came home today, she caught me in mid-jihad on this, the Night of Atonement. I was standing there with my makeshift flyswatter in my hand.

Gretchen had returned from New York City after having skipped the Yom Kippur services she'd intended to attend at the Woodstock synagogue. She said it was the first time she'd ever missed Yom Kippur services, but the prospect of sitting through it by herself, an island in a sea of strangers, had been too depressing.
Gretchen wasn't pursuing an aggressive Yom Kippur fast. Instead of allowing her blood sugar to fall below a certain cantankerous threshold, she picked at various ready-made foods, especially a variety of pickled items, most of which (the mushrooms and the asparagus) were so rich that they tasted like boot leather.


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http://asecular.com/blog.php?031005

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