Where's the beef?

After the main meat of the Slate podcasts that I listen to, they conclude with a section called "recommendations", or "cocktail chatter", during which they share something that they've been doing, thinking about, eating, etc.  I don't seem able to come up with any meat (still haven't snared a rabbit), so I thought I'd just skip to the recommendations.  Here goes:


1.  Sleeping in.  This is a new discovery for me.  Instead of getting up every day at 4:30, I now sometimes snooze until 6 or 7, and then lay around and read for while.  I'd highly recommend this practice.  Nap consumption is going way down.


2.  This blog, because it's smart and funny and sweet and a lot about food.  I think you will love it.  (Thanks D., for the tip!)


3.  Being FB friends with "Israel Loves Iran."  People from potentially warring countries post messages of peace to one another.  There's really no downside to clicking like, and I will confess (*second confession of the day, but that's another story) that I sometimes get a little weepy when I see the posts.


4.  Cold swiss oatmeal.  You can find a recipe here, that looks really good, but I don't have all of those ingredients.  I don't even know what a sultana is, in fact.  So I mix about a quart of non-fat yogurt with about one or two cups of oats, and maybe some almond milk, other stuff that I do have around, like nuts and fruit and maybe some molasses or honey or vanilla.  It sits in the refrigerator overnight, or in my case, for a week, and absorbs all the liquid and comes out creamy and delicious.  It gets a little gluey towards the end of the week, but I'm okay with that.


5.  This article by Tim Kreider, which includes a line that I've been thinking about a lot:  "More and more people in this country no longer make or do anything tangible; if your job wasn’t performed by a cat or a boa constrictor in a Richard Scarry book I’m not sure I believe it’s necessary."  I've taken to imagining myself as a cat dressed in suit each day as I go about my activities, to see if what I'm doing is really worth the effort of wiggling all four legs into all four sleeves, and then tying the Windsor knot around my neck.  


6.  Speaking of boa constrictors, there was a pretty horrible post in the free section of Craig's List the other day -- someone was giving away an enormous albino boa constrictor that they had found in their apartment a week before.  Sheesh, I am no wuss, but I think I would have to move.  But that's not the recommendation.  The recommendation is actually for the free section of Craig's List, which, I know, you all know this, but there are some pretty compelling posts there that make you curious and glad to be alive.  Like "free umbrella".  And there's a picture of a faded, somewhat bent umbrella lying on the sidewalk.  It harkens the whole "beans at the fair" kind of lump in the throat.


7.  So many podcasts to recommend, but today I'll stick with The Paper Machete, which, as they say, is a salon in a saloon.  It's short, and varied, and I even love the little introduction.  I could just listen to that over and over.  (Oh, wait, did I actually say that?  Yeah, that was a typo.  I would totally never just listen to that intro over and over.  That would be strange.  And completely not worth wrestling the four legs into the suit.)  


8.  The Hardly Boys.  There may only be about two people in the world who think this is as funny as I do, but I cannot stop laughing.  Watch the whole movie, not just the clip.  I don't know where you'd find it, though.  I got it when I met ACJ at a hotel near the airport, she brought it for me, and we are probably the only people in the world who laugh out loud for a week over the dogs fly fishing, saying, "ten o'clock, two o'clock," over and over.  


9.  Jack Hitt's new book, Bunch of Amateurs:  A Search for the American Character.  It's kind of about Ben Franklin, a little bit about the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, and a tiny bit about do-it-yourself gene splicing.  


10.  Swimming in a lake every day.  


That's all I've got.