{"id":151,"date":"2007-04-25T20:29:08","date_gmt":"2007-04-26T02:29:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.almostcool.org\/blog\/?p=151"},"modified":"2010-12-25T22:29:03","modified_gmt":"2010-12-26T04:29:03","slug":"and-so-it-goes-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.almostcool.org\/blog\/?p=151","title":{"rendered":"And so it goes&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>There are times when I think that it would be best to sometimes cut myself off from the world and go live on a square of land somewhere with my wife and dogs and try to grow and hunt all my own food. For a variety of reasons, this past month has been one of those times, which is pretty much the major reason I haven&#8217;t posted anything here for over thirty days now.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m not the type of person to rant (okay, sometimes I do), but just in case I&#8217;m looking at my site about five years down the road and wonder what my problem was, here are just a few of the things that made me want to get off the grid&#8230;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a title=\"FDA page on pet food recall\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.fda.gov\/oc\/opacom\/hottopics\/petfood.html\">Pet Food Recall<\/a> &#8211; Fortunately we feed both of our dogs <a title=\"Canidae\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.canidae.com\/\">Canidae<\/a> (which I highly recommend), but the fact that such a high-scale food contamination got through the system makes me think that the FDA doesn&#8217;t have very good controls in place. In the past couple days, they&#8217;ve expanded their probe and it seems that contaminated gluten may have made it into human food as well. Whee!<\/li>\n<li><a title=\"Virginia Tech\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.vt.edu\/\">Virginia Tech Shooting<\/a> &#8211; Anytime a shooting takes place, it bums me out, but as someone who works on a University campus, this one hit home a little closer. The news coverage (and how much attention was given to the murderers tapes) made me ill and hate our broadcast media even more. At least I rarely watch television.<\/li>\n<li><a title=\"Omnivore's Dilemma\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/1594200823\/almostcoolmusicr\">The Omnivore&#8217;s Dilemma<\/a> &#8211; I&#8217;ll write more about this when I&#8217;m done reading it (which should be soon), but I will say that it&#8217;s the most enlightening (not always in a good way) book that I&#8217;ve read in some time. It&#8217;s already started to make me think even more about what I eat (when I already thought I ate well to begin with).<\/li>\n<li><a title=\"Kurt Vonnegut Jr.\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Kurt_Vonnegut\">Kurt Vonnegut Jr. RIP<\/a> &#8211; I think I can safely say that Vonnegut was one of my favorite authors. There are others at the top of the list that I love for different reasons, but there was something about how Vonnegut captured the joy and absurdity of the human condition that really made him unique. One of the only writer\/musician\/artist deaths that has truly made me really sad.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>There are plenty of other things that haven&#8217;t exactly added to me wanting to embrace the world, but at the same time I haven&#8217;t exactly coiled up into a ball and been unproductive either. As has been the case for large parts of the past year, I&#8217;ve been working on music when I get the chance, and I&#8217;m closing in on review number 2000 over in my <a title=\"Music reviews!\" href=\"http:\/\/www.almostcool.org\/mr\/\">music review section<\/a>. To celebrate, I&#8217;m doing some things over there that are kind of fun (including giving away music and putting up mixes for download), so please do check that out.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ll end this with one of my favorite Vonnegut quotes, and I will be back in less than a month.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span class=\"postbody\">&#8220;Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve got about a hundred years here. There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s only one rule that I know of, babies \u00e2\u20ac\u201d \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcGod damn it, you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve got to be kind.\u00e2\u20ac\u2122<\/span>&#8221; &#8211; Kurt Vonnegut Jr.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There are times when I think that it would be best to sometimes cut myself off from the world and go live on a square of land somewhere with my wife and dogs and try to grow and hunt all my own food. For a variety of reasons, this past month has been one of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.almostcool.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.almostcool.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.almostcool.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.almostcool.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.almostcool.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=151"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.almostcool.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":241,"href":"https:\/\/www.almostcool.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151\/revisions\/241"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.almostcool.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.almostcool.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.almostcool.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}