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Music Memories + Songs

Sunday, February 20, 2011

On plus sized bridesmaid dresses

We're going through a peculiar time in history. I think it's a transition period from being dominated by our environment and our biology to learning how to take control of our destinies. That is, we're learning so much about how we work and how the world around us works, but we have trouble applying that in large numbers. There's a growing demand for plus size bridesmaid dresses. Technology and our tendency to eat too many carbohydrates is making us fatter in large numbers, but it's also true that in laboratories we're learning a lot more about the process. How it works, how damaging it is, and what we can do about it. However, most people don't apply that knowledge. They remain victims happy to eat whatever the large food companies push on them, because it tastes good and they don't have time to eat better.

On melatonin

I recently started reading an interesting book on learning languages, Language is Music, though I didn't remember the author's name. She's a woman from Russia who grew up in the United States, in California. I don't know what age she emigrated. Apparently she was old enough to retain her Russian but young enough to pick up English. And she now speaks six or seven other languages as well, including Spanish and Portuguese. She believes that one reason she finds it easy to hear the sounds of other languages is that she had a peculiar eye condition where she uses only one eye at a time, so always see the work in two dimensions. Both eyes work, but not at the same time - they switch back and forth. She doesn't advocate taking melatonin to learn languages, but to listen to it a lot through songs, radio, TV and movies.

On jack3d side effects

The main character of Mignon is a man who was a soldier who was wounded in an earlier battle and now out of the Army and seeking to make his own fortune. He's an engineer who want to put down piles to build New Orleans up as a port, which of course someone must have done in real life. I don't know enough about the history of the city to know whether he could be a fictional version of someone real, or is still premature. He has already left a beautiful woman who loves him and who has arranged for him to get the money he needs, to pursue Mignon. Love is always damaging to Cain characters. Her father is tied to the business partner who tried to cheat him. No doubt they are all going to cheat the main character somehow. The only suspense is in seeing just how they do it. It's not about jack3d side effects, it's about how the cotton corrupts people with a hoodoo as his friend Dan in the Army tells him.

On creatine powders

I'm reading a book Mignon by James Cain who was an old time crime novelist, who was a pioneer of the noir school of crime writing. However, it takes place in New Orleans in 1864, when the Union Army is occupying that southern city, though elsewhere in the country the war is still raging. And he's attracted to a young widow with a father who is seeking to make a fortune by buying cotton in the South and selling it in the North based on some obscure law of the time. That's the trouble with the book. I'm sure it makes sense, but it's not well explained and the context is too unfamiliar to modern readers, who know more about creatine powders than agricultural commerce during the Civil War. I do know that his sexual obsession for Mignon is self-destructive and he'll be lucky to survive - that's par for Cain books.