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Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").
linksdecay & ruin got that wrong appropriate tech fun social media stuff Like asecular.com (nobody does!) Like my brownhouse: |
vegetarians against the apocalypse Tuesday, March 25 1997 A bit of free wisdom from the Gus: If you feel content, you are ignorant.I had a little email exchange today with some guy named Townsend who maintains the computers in UVA's Cocke Hall (as you recall, I complained about the CD players not working). He claimed someone had checked the CD players and that they worked. He also wanted to know what my affiliation with the University was and I, not answering him, accused him of typical suspicious-bureaucrat "blame the messenger" syndrome. It feels so good to burst bloated egos via email. Meanwhile, someone with a very Italian name (Leandro Asnaghi-Nicastro) critiqued as "looking fake" the obviously faked photograph illustrating my Christin-Gus letter exchange page. But I joked along with him and he eventually requested to use some of my material in some future issue of his ezine. I looked over it and I would suggest you do the same; it's at http://www.capnasty.org/.
I myself eat meat. I've never had a reason to personally stop doing so. Environmental anti-meat arguments never had much effect on me, and neither did Animal Rights or Health aguments. But with Mad Cow Disease possibly capable of spawning a new plague, it suddenly seems irresponsibly complacent to eat beef or to allow others to do so uninformed of their risks. Elizabeth is a vegetarian, so she could be smug while I talked of these things. She's also a non-smoker these days. She's anxious while conversing, since she feels the need to have some sort of prop in her hand. I myself enjoy holding a drink while I socialize. So she suggested we go get some beer. She drove us to the Barracks Road Kroger and we each picked up a six pack. But then she went off to hang out with Liz West. I began my pre-work nap.
I did more research about Mad Cow Disease and found this rather blockheaded book review in the Washington Post. The book reviewed is Deadly Feasts: Tracking the Secrets of a Terrifying New Plague by Richard Rhodes. This book contains a much more fleshed out (pardon the term) analysis of prions and the diseases they cause. It tells the tales of such historical prion researchers as Nobel Prize winning Dr. Carlton Gajdusek, who identified the behaviour of prions in the Spongiform Encephalopathy known as Kuru seen in a tribe of ritualistic cannibals of New Guinea. Dr. Gajdusek has recently made dire predictions about what will happen if current meat practices are continued. But the reviewer, a Mr. John Schwartz, dismisses such predictions summarily simply because Dr. Gajdusek once admitted guilt to molesting children. My response: when the messenger comes shouting that the Hun are at your gates, you don't stop to ask him if he beats his wife. The reviewer reassures us "The U.S. Agriculture Department and Food and Drug Administration took additional steps after the book went to press to reduce TSE risk" without elaboration. What I know is that the government has called for a "voluntary moratorium" on feeding cattle recycle animal proteins, and that, for obvious economic reasons, no one is abiding by this moratorium. I'd like to send Mr. Schwartz some vitriolic email, but his email address is conveniently absent.
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