September 16th 2012, Sunday afternoon

Last night an old friend, Mado, and I spoke on the phone for hours. One of the many topics was how we both disliked the fake, inaccurate pseudo-Buddha quotes that people blindly repost without any research for accuracy on FaceBook. Happy to come across a witty blog dedicated to this.

Fake Buddha Quotes


Just love the slurping, crunching enthusiasm of this watermelon eating cat.


More watermelon savoring


Baby porcupine eats watermelon


Cat opens door for dogs


Different types of cat patience with dogs:

Curie wants to play but Wednesday says no


Dog picks soft spot for pillow


Jorge Luis Borges and his cat

“To a Cat,” a poem by Jorge Luis Borges—

Mirrors are not more silent 
nor the creeping dawn more secretive; 
in the moonlight, you are that panther 
we catch sight of from afar. 
By the inexplicable workings of a divine law, 
we look for you in vain; 
More remote, even, than the Ganges or the setting sun, 
yours is the solitude, yours the secret. 
Your haunch allows the lingering 
caress of my hand. You have accepted, 
since that long forgotten past, 
the love of the distrustful hand. 
You belong to another time. You are lord 
of a place bounded like a dream.

Always interested to learn new, unexpected things about NYC. Today I learned about the Straw Hat Riot of 1922.

Had no idea Mulberry Bend existed in NYC.
Where Mulberry Street crooks like an elbow within hail of the old depravity of the Five Points, is “the Bend,” foul core of New York’s slums. Long years ago the cows coming home from the pasture trod a path over this hill. Echoes of tinkling bells linger there still, but they do not call up memories of green meadows and summer fields; they proclaim the home-coming of the rag-picker’s cart.

In the memory of man the old cow-path has never been other than a vast human pig-sty. There is but one “Bend” in the world, and it is enough. The city authorities, moved by the angry protests of ten years of sanitary reform effort, have decided that it is too much and must come down. Another Paradise Park will take its place and let in sunlight and air to work such transformation as at the Five Points, around the corner of the next block. Never was change more urgently needed.

Around “the Bend” cluster the bulk of the tenements that are stamped as altogether bad, even by the optimists of the Health Department. Incessant raids cannot keep down the crowds that make them their home. In the scores of back alleys, of stable lanes and hidden byways, of which the rent collector alone can keep track, they share such shelter as the ramshackle structures afford with every kind of abomination rifled from the dumps and ash-barrels of the city. Here, too, shunning the light, skulks the unclean beast of dishonest idleness. “The Bend” is the home of the tramp as well as the rag-picker.

Cattails, also known as bulrushes. Latin name, Typha latifolia.
Had no idea before this morning that cattails, bulrushes are edible. Also didn't know that they can explode when rubbed.


The video of the cattail exploding


Few people seem to be aware of it, but the common cattail is actually a highly nutritious and astonishingly versatile source of food. Its stems can be prepared as a vegetable, the pollen can be used in bread recipes, the plant's distinctive flower spikes can be cooked like corn, the bulbous shoots at the base of the stem are delicious when boiled, even the cattail's roots can be processed into a rich (and highly palatable) flour. (Euell Gibbons was probably right when he wrote: "For the number of different kinds of food it produces there is no plant, wild or domesticated, which tops the common cattail.")

Eating the roots | the unripe flower head | The "supermarket of the swamp"

Cool seed dispersal


I like this sub-Reddit: Past and Present Pics


Vladimir Kush

After watching this video I wanted to know more about this hardjump style of dancing.
Here it is. 

Wait for it (it's worth it)
Hardjump style dancing in Russia

So I looked up this hardjump thing. Cool kid in a garage.

And plain jumpstyle


It reminds me a bit of that wonderful Irish Step Dancing


Ooh, just had to watch more of that cool Irish step dancing thing


What's the story with that straight arms and torso thing? "The most believable theory, which is supported by many historians of Irish dance, is that the Dance Masters of the 18^th century were responsible. They liked etiquette, and disapproved of the unruly arm movements of Sean Nos dancing. They therefore made their students dance with their arms in a fixed position, holding a stone on the hand to keep them in a fist. It is thought by some that they may have originally made dancers hold one or both hands on the hip, and the completely straight arms came at a later date. Perhaps it was the church, as stated in the previous theory that was responsible for this?" More about Irish step dancing on Wikipedia. How to do the step dance, beginners vid.

Then I discovered that kids do this hardjump style dancing together and in challenges

Then I discovered there is a relationship between a dance called shuffling and hardjump style

Wow. Serious ankle challenge here. Shuffling in heels.

Shuffling in school on a bored day

Hardstyle Battle: Shuffle vs Jumpstyle


Can I please have these for Christmas/my birthday? And please, tell me what you'd like for Christmas too. :)