figs

If he is, I feel sorry for the men that slept with him. Whether he is or isn't, I still think he is a despicable person. If you haven't seen Jesus Camp, by all means, treat yourself to a movie this weekend. Ted makes an extra cocky special appearance in between his weekly meetings with our President to tell us how he is administering to our nation's youth. He left out the part about the glory hole, though.

Hey... "glory hole" does sound kind of soul savin', as in: "Lord have mercy...I'm goin' to be sucked I mean saved at the glory hole!" It would be nice if everyone bought chicken, biscuits, greens, and various Jell-O marshmellow delights to share after they had "repented". It's hard work!

The story is just breaking, so you still have time to put on your Sunday best for the Republican Sermon on the Who Mounted Who.

Giving someone the fig: the Renaissance equivalent of giving someone the finger.

“Don’t eat the figs.” Livia to soon-to-be Emperor Tiberius in the Masterpiece Theater adaptation of Robert Graves’ I, Claudius.

The development of agriculture was quite possibly the most significant event in human history. Prior to the domestication and cultivation of plants, humans across the globe were engaged in hunting and (predominantly) gathering. This is the way we evolved to eat—subsisting mainly on gathered plants with occasional meat hunted or scavenged. Once thought to be a primitive method of obtaining sustenance, hunting-and-gathering is now recognized as in many ways healthier and less time consuming than agriculture. The problem is that hunting-and-gathering cannot sustain a large population except under very unusual conditions. Northwest Coast Indians in America and the Jomon culture in ancient Japan are exceptions. Northwest Coast Indians had huge amounts of salmon, and Jomon huge amounts of shell fish to sustain them in large and happy numbers. But in general, hunting-and-gathering requires small family groups to have access to large areas of land.

The success of agriculture was not that it was easier or more nutritious. It never has been. The effort spent feeding oneself through agriculture is backbreaking and almost devoid of leisure, while hunting-and-gathering takes far less time and effort per calorie consumed. Furthermore, archaeology shows that human health declined sharply when humans switched to agriculture, probably because a rich and varied diet was usually replaced with a monotonous, grain-based diet.