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



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   vegan ghetto
Saturday, September 4 2010
Penny, David, and their baby son Milo showed up this morning and I joined them for another Saturday of yardsaling in the West Hurley-Woodstock-West Saugerties-Bearsville area. I'm still seeking an old stereo tuner-amp I might be able to convert into a robust MP3 player, but whenever you're actually looking for things at a yard sale, you never seem to be able to find them. Instead you find $3 junk boxes full of well over $3 worth of things you might want some day along with -$20 worth of crap you'll have to go through the trouble of throwing away. I bought a super-narrow beverage cooler that seemed like it might have some potential for something some day, an album for storing DVDs, some issues of MAKE Magazine I don't happen to have (they were with CRAFT Magazines, which Penny took), and the aforementioned junk box (including pencils, screw eyes, and an expensive gold-plated USB cable). On yard sale excursions an unusual item will often turn up twice or more times at different yard sales, and today that item was parabolic makeup mirrors. It was a sunny day, so I took the opportunity to demonstrate the power of focused sunbeams at two different locations. People are always amazed by this relatively simple trick that elementary school science classes should have imparted as basic ho-hum common sense.
As always when we yardsale with Milo, there was plenty of gushing over the baby. When he responded well to someone's purebred little poodle, the owner asked if Milo liked dogs. Not really thinking of the implications of her answer (when said in the context of a Korean baby), Penny said, "It depends on how tender they are." The dog's owner was horrified at what she took to be vicious Asian stereotyping by someone who had actually adopted an Asian child, but it was cause for much laughter later on as we reminisced about what had already become a classic interaction.

Originally we'd planned to maybe meet Penny, David, and their friend Ava at KMOCA, but that didn't work out. Gretchen's lower back has been bothering her for days and she's only really been comfortably lying down. So she stayed home and watched teevee while I went over to Penny and David's for dinner. The word was that it would be a vegan-friendly ratatouille (their friend Ava is a vegetarian). But what this meant in practice was that all but a narrow strip of the ratatouille would be covered beneath a repulsive molten later of cheese (applied by Ava the vegetarian). The strip left for me, the vegan ghetto, was only enough for one serving. I was offered more later, of course, but by then there was no vegan ratatouille left. Would it have killed Ava to only cover, say, half the ratatouille with cheese? Especially considering the non-vegetarians were also having barbecued chicken? The tiny size of the portion left vegan not only seemed passive aggressive, it reminded me of a human trait I don't like: the desire to occupy and spread over all the territory allowed. "Why not cut down absolutely all the trees outside the national park? We've already protected the trees we need to!"
Another couple also showed up for the dinner, and because their aging purebred Jack Russell doesn't play well with others, she stayed out in the car for the whole meal while Sally and Eleanor ran around eating crumbs (and also big hunks of leftover chicken).
Little Milo seemed to enjoy offering food to the dogs, demonstrating an commendable amount of inborn selflessness. But David, as expected, seemed to worry that dog saliva might introduce his baby to dangerous bacteria. Raised in the sanitized bubble that David seems intent on constructing, poor Milo would inevitably suffer through a lifetime of crippling allergies, his immune system never sufficiently challenged or tuned to the dangerous realities of the world. Interestingly, David had shown an aspect of this overly-protective parenting in a different domain when we'd been out yardsaling. He'd nixed the idea of buying a copy of Grimm's Fairy Tales, saying they're "too traumatic." To this I'd responded that young children aren't traumatized enough in childhood and enter adulthood unprepared for the traumas that await them.


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