on the perfect non indian pita experience

Recently the need for Pita was overwhelming, I was drawn and driven to make for myself family and friends, but as it would be the holidays where neigh and all purveyors of fine Ghee were closed... and not one of the Super or should i say sad markets had anything even vaguely containing a substitute for Ghee. this left me in a quandry, a curry had been made, albeit a soft one that children could imbibe. I had to make it..
not to even get me started on the imperialistic and oppresive nature of bulk super/quick markets that strip our society of its diversity and texture which we require as a means to an end.

the receipe follows:

flour -- enough to fill half way up your mixing bowl -- suppose about 3-4 cups or more
butter -- a lump
a dash of olive oil
a dash of powered cumin
a dash of salt that i forgot :-) added half way through
then BOILING water

mix till a pastely gewy mixture ensus.. MIX with a spoon
then slowly but surely kneeding .. with extra flour till the glue-ey texture disappears..

then break off 1 1/2 egg size lumps cover with flour .. prepare a surface with sprinkled flour and roll into mostly circular flat pankake like things..

then melt some butter add a little olive oil ..

paint the other side of the roti..

prepare the pan.. heavy cast iorn works well .. not to hot else it burns

oil/ butter in pan ..
pop in da roti and turn when small bubbles appear , turn twice again.. if they appear to dry paint with a little more oil ..

then put on plate covered with a lid to keep moist ..

cook for what seems hours to produce about 25 roti .. damn it takes long ..

reheat in micro before serving for about 45 seconds..


then tuck in..


you may ask why the Roti?
the roti is so awesome, perfect and malleable and yet so simple a metaphor for life.
complex chemical reactions out of simple ingredients. somehow the heat the oil/butter, flour and salt in the hot water seem to create fantastic polymers... the texture is so unlike bread, yet so awesome in taste. This would be the whole without the hole.. there are almot no holes in the whole. yet it is so wholesome? It is not even so heavy, unlike its light cousin the bread, which with holes can be heavy? somewhat of a paradox.
intructions to eat? eat it how you want, for some ethnic authenticity try breaking off pieces and scooping up the food with your hands and eating like that, it changes the perception and perspective of the food, completing the experience. often or not for us pigmentaly challenged individuals we are drawn to creating a wrap with salad and crap.. not to detract from the taste this tastes good, bu not the same.. the other paradoxical thing i have experienced with eating roti.. is that it is best eaten with stewy things with gue and gloop.. but dont forget the rice.. this adds te texture akin to life.


more another day.. just a moment of sharing

from your rambler in life..

on ataining success

After giving this a little thought, how do we measure success in life, this may be an old adage, a cliche. But this is a question we are all faced with from the beginning to the end. What defines happiness and success don't always seem to be synch. But i suppose they can be.

but my ramblings are more on the notion of being able to achieve things in timeframes that are realistic and meaningfull. I have begun an internal debate, yes I am a Gemini so I am entitled to have an internal debate ;-) but not to begin to sound like he secret we have to quote to nike -- just do it. but where do we draw the line between what is rationally possible.. and i have something t mention on that concept so park it in the back of your mind, and the that which is classically possible. Not to quote those like Lance or the others who are beyond extreme, what binds us to what we can do and achieve and what we should achieve. Or sould I rather say what is it that holds us back or chains us to the shackles of appathy? what creates that little fear within us? did frank herbet not say in dune that fear is the thing inside us that eats us up. It may not have been him who said it like that, but his rendition of the path that the young duke goes through sticks best in my mind. I suppose this time in all of our lives we are burdened with even more fear, loathing, panic, betrayal and downright insane panic about the state of the world and economics around us. Does this mean because we live in an atrificial construct that we should bow down to a system that has no relevance to our hapiness ( artificially it does) or our ability to achieve things, great and small. I have a belief that we can achieve things, it is only a measurement of the value and success that holds us back from achieving things in our daily life. It is possible as i have seen in some unamed friends and others who live by the lightning and take thought and action to a new level, thought drives action into directions we could never believe we are able to achieve, unless those of us held down by the panic and fear of failure success, rational panic( which I must say is a bad thing int he real of belief in our abilities to achieve that which we dream off...) how many of us live in realms of dark fear and loathing for our lives or the direction we beleave it has gone or the belief that if things had just been different ( plaese understand i do not proclude myself from this toungue lashing). the only thing is that things can be done in a baby steps way.. start small if you cannot go at all ... But there are people who dream big and go large. We all have this ability.

on other things and my dreams...

things that one of my new forced blog spam recipients will have to enlighten us about is contemporary anthropology .. think that si what it is called .. noting that this is only a second hand rendition of what it is about.

on status of our existence, how to emasure that.. wont even go there as this is not for now but later when i get a chance to wollow in self dispare .. not really as this is not something i like participating in.

On my current dreams and aspirations .. nothing new .. but it seems like i am able to now start on the project of a dream. we are now implimenting the initial phases of my hydro aquaponics scheme .. no I wont bore you to tears on this .. but put out a moe technical explanation of what i am going to achieve, but i believe this will hold the potential fo answering my question relating to the possibility of a household to be able to survive the impending world food crisis.

On another note completely i went to a scrap yard yesterday, this is a place of dreams. Do yourself the favour and go, get soemone to take you if you fear the unknown, but GO .. and see what treasures lie between the rubble .. things you will need to find your dream... but leave your wallet behind :-) cos it can be expensive ... or take it with and indulge .. this may or may not relate to all that manyn of you .. but use it dont use it (DJ F)...

but that is eough crap and rambling for the moment .. it ahs come to my notice that my blogging ghas at least been elavated to toilet reading for som people .. hey but that is at least a start .. :-)

a picture of my veggie garden

a picture of our organic veggie garden.. soon to be perma/aquaculture garden
it is a slow process but we will get there

a picture

another subtext

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on the society for the preservation of our minds and happiness

This is something we seldom think about, rather stressing away at the daily grind and the jobs we do, bringing me back to the old adage of work to live and not live to work. That si for those of us unfortunate enough to be able to partake in a form of employment that does not give us self fulfillment. It is an old enough challenge .. that is is in the current milieu or paradigm that we exist in, where life is no longer that which we live. In times gone past life was around different things, living, surviving. Our daily existence had more to do with life than an abstract representaiton of it. For the most of us, please exclude yourself if you do not feel this is aimed at You!! , we worry about the worrying and lessthan abstract nature of life and get caught up in the marketing contruct we call society. How many of you ever wonder .. I am sure you do.. that why am I doing this?
and this is not meant to wallow in dispare (cannot for the life of me spell that word), but to ather recap and rethink what it is that we call life, And No this is not meant as a seed for your midlife crisis, life is real and their are constraints relating tot he way you have lived your life so far and the way that you and circumstance has carved itsway through the watercourse of life. Accept that which is, change that which you can, strive to find happiness and inner peace through everythign you do. Sounds like a ripe lot of crap, but i believe it. It think, at least at this stage in my mind that it is possible to do this.

On a more abstract thought, somthing i will continue shortly , but household chores calll me away is to question what is the interaction and boundry between the conscious and subconsciousmind?

something different

I suppose the time for wallowing in the depth and darkness of the global recession or depression are over now. we now have to find ways to find ourselves post disaster, not that for most of you this was a real disaster. WE should view our lives with a little healthy introspection to view with happiness what we have, a roof over our heads, food on the table. But this does not eman we should give up the fight for life, our lives are even more important now. there is no time for wallowing in self pity, feeling down and sad. this is but a new begining that we should all have to go through. on the lighter side fuel costs are down by more than 30% and they are dropping .. wghat does that mean .. ROADTRIP...

How many of us are couped up in our abodes fearing the unknown. I suspect that now more than ever is a time for us to look introspectivly and not be depressed. It is a time to look inwards and seek meaning in that which is around us. I sat watching a really classical piece of film. a chinese kung foo movie. I had to listen to a piece 3 times. These heavily translated super energetic movies have value beyond the obvious. i watched a scene where two of the kung foo masters where drinking tea. The one was discussing the value of various kinds of tea and professing how certain teas are better than others and a and and. whereas the other mast responded that tea drinking is a mood and that the tea and the experience was more related to the mood of the person appreciating the tea and not the quality of the tea. .. I am masively editing this. go and watch fearless.. it is amazing for the one scene in the movie .. the rest is not as spiritual for me at least.

but to go back at least a week in thoughts......

I was noticing that the bulk of us have been gripped in a global panic and fear we are all suffering from insane fear and loathing for the future to come close to quoting that dude. But what in essence has changed in our lives other the fundimental basis of our economy, which we all knew was rotten to the core.. now it is just happened .... all of us as part time soothsayers all saw it comming.. no one ever foresaw the immensity and implications thereof. for thsoe ofus who have jobs, keep them and carry on for thsoe who have lost there jobs, tiems are hard, but in adversity we find ourselves. Often adversity is not a pleasant thing. But it does give us the space, or lack of space to see ourselves in a new context. It also gives us the opportunity to take life by the horns. yes it is difficult, but through adversity the highest level of innovation and invention comes from within us. Best we not sit on our laurels, because tomorrow could beworse, or better. But let us not wallow in the panic of today. Look forward and find a new tomorrow. Often life does not allow us the path we believed we would follow. Things are never as we wanted them. No matter how much we visualize theperfect secret like future.. this does not mean we must dispell our positive thoughts, but rather that we must aim forwards and find the rainbow.

deep in my bones the need for a serious raod trip to places i have but imagined has welled up again. there are places that we have never been to or seen that often define our personalities. On the whole most of us define ourselves on hopes we never really endevour to chase or even get to, and wallow in midlife crisis and never do anything about them. This does not mean we must depart from the reality of our existence. But if our existence is not what it should be then we must change it. But with the reality of the implications thereof... all garble and rambling i know. take heed dont take heed.. it is your life live it.. or as a firend of ours says .. go nike ... just do it :-)

more seemingly random rambling by me ....

enjoy the festive season.

a real definition for a singularity

seems like i missed some of this :-)


A singularity means a point where some property is infinite. For example, at the center of a black hole, according to classical theory, the density is infinite (because a finite mass is compressed to a zero volume). Hence it is a singularity. Similarly, if you extrapolate the properties of the universe to the instant of the Big Bang, you will find that both the density and the temperature go to infinity, and so that also is a singularity. It must be stated that these come due to the breaking down of the classical theory. As yet, there is no theory of quantum gravity, but it is entirely possible that the singularities may be avoided with a theory of quantum gravity.
February 2002, Jagadheep D. Pandian (more by Jagadheep D. Pandian)

the naked singularity and human race

Not sure if the title makes to much sense to me, but it was a phrase that has been in my head for the last few days. After a lot of thought it continues to be oxymoronic, but yet still makes sense. I mulled over it for a few days and have come to the conclusion that in this context it is valid from my perspective (sic!).
what is a singularity? A black whole something that implodes into itself, pulling everything into it into a void of nothingness, albeit very small :-) It may not really apply to humans in the most literal form, but we as humans do tend to be on a course to implosion. But this may not be as bad a thing as we think, I suspect the human race has gone through this specific chanin of vents more times than can be counted, the only difference being that int eh past that there was almost allways a cultural bias. The romans fell a similar way, soceity being collapsed by the course of its destiny. think the only difference is the scale of current demise of Civilization (sic!). currently the Western de-civilization appears to be at the forefont of the demise, or be it the culture of capitalism.

but on a more cheery note it is rainign outside and from the downfall comes the evidant grapple out of the dark deapths a and the regrowh of a new day.

well that is enough for now :-)

so barack brings a new day to america, can he turn things around?

And back to my veggie garden, it seems like it is growing against all odds and it appears after significant persiverance that all the pests seem to be under some form of bio-logical control, for the moment at least. the ext fronteir is the eventual foray in aqua culture and hydroponics as an intelectual excersize. well that is why the fishing is slow :-) and of course the return of the scurge of the chickens .. now there is a challenge.
i wonder a lot if it would be possible for society to be able to return to some form of self sufficiency or barter trade?

saw two amazing articles on the net over the last few days, the mud house in muzenburg in cape town where the neighbours are compaining ? go figure
and the discovery of the fungus that can create diesel or at elast biodiesel .. emans they will just chop down more trees :-)
insane stuff.

a new day another ramble

so whats new today, I listened to an amazing clip where matt damon is interviewed about sarah palin being the vp.. and followed up with a few clips on you tube .. insane .. the american system this woman is insane :-) go check it out .. it really puts it into perspective

but on a more serious note .. what would it be if it wasn't a slightly bit serious .. love that language .. been here in the moot for far to long...

but it brings me to social consciousness ... no not the Pc version thereof :-)

but how we are aware of the social environment we live in and how we perceive it. We often cast a blind eye around us not really noticing the social emphasis of the society around us .. or at times we really emphasize it :-) How is it is we can revel in the social displacement we exist in.. are we ever in a place where we can be ourselves? what do i mean by this? How many of us actually exist in a space that we can honestly call our own space.. or do we fake it more than we live it? how many of us can truly test to being able to say that we are in place where we can call home or in a social environment without constraints without guard and without any counting of our sentences?or would that be words. Mostly we are bound by societies conventions and norms, even for those who live on the fringe..

brings me back to a friend of ours who has a tattoo on her chin .. how do you explain to his to children when they ask? not us but her .. she had a most apt description of why she tattooed a line down her chin.. explaining that this was drawing a line in her life .. moving forward from where she was before .. that this line.. her father calls her sop streep is something that reminds her of a choice she made to turn things around. how many of us get a chance yet take it to turn a new leaf draw a line int eh sand and make a move make a choice and start a fresh? brings me to other people I know .. yea the innocent shal remain unnamed .. well they may not always be innocent who cannot make that transition into a new life. me included? what is it that binds us to that which we know? after reading the book by the dude who rode around Africa on a bicycle .. damn that was difficult to spell ss.. he gives new meaning to being driven and principled.. he went around Africa on notion that he should to prove a point .. what I am not to sure about.. but he did it and did not pay one bribe through almost 2 years of travel through africa .. the bribe continent .. even turning around and turning back from a border post to not go through cos they wanted a bribe... takes some guts.. or in some others language stupidity.. how do we equate idealism and honesty with reality or pragmatism ? that is a difficult question? can we allways b accountable for the choices we make.. or are we bound by circumstance .. there are many of you who have gone through situations .. i know cos i have.. where our idealism and integrity get challenged.. what is the base of our descision, and can we allways be sue of thr outcomes of what happen due to the decisions that are made in those situations. not that i am casting a stone in anyones direction with a log in my own eye :-) but rather only as a social observance .

enough of this crap arbitrary nothingness being rambled on above.. where do we stand the world is turning once again.. making some form of recovery from the pits of desperation a week ago?

saw an amazing blog/ site yesterday .. not so much for the content.. but rather for the name of the blog .. it is called the velveteen rabbi .. awesome name for a blog ... for real classic blogging go and look at my inspiration ... the flyfishingrabbi.com ..seriously cool dude that .. nice way of weaving reality of daily situations with fishing and life .. and then just for goodness sake he wraps the Torah and Judaism into it .. without pretense or effort .. truly talented dude that...

back to social networking .. I have now noticed a really interesting phenomena on face book recently where the emphasis has moved from the trivial to a fair reflection of humanity .. on more than a number of occasions .. both sincere and sarcastically this tools enables those without social ability and those with to be able to empathise with those around them.. the status of a member seems to hold some significance and seems to be a gateway to discourse .. would never have imagined this electronic media would actually be a form of social interaction and actually become a substitute reality that as meaning and that most of us subscribe to.

In this world of impersonalization of the humanity and lack of human touch this appears to have become a real substitute to human communication... maybe a touch harsh to say that this has replaced communication .. or a tad rediculous .. but it does seem to actually have value .. even for me..

so where to now in the space of nothingness..

not sure we have the answer to that .. but suppose we will get there ..

an explanation

I may have to clear up some conceptions or misconceptions on what this blog is about. I may have created some misconceptions regarding the content and tone of the dark recesses of my mind. In an attempt to remain truthful and honest i may have strayed from the eclectic and delved in the deep recesses of ecocomentary which was never my aim, i dont think it would be prudent to remove thsoe posts but ot rather work around those to set an upper and lower bound the arbitray crap that spues from my keyboard.. And note that often the typos are casued by rapid typing and thinking, which precedes the other in certain cases the one then the other... but i feel that I would rather edit as little as possible and keep it as a stream from my mind rather than a composition of note, something that stems from the fingers not the conscious effort to capture the details of my thoughts ina coherent and structured manner, who of us thinks and lives in acoherent manner, there may be a couple of us who are a little retentive.. but not in the case of the stream of my consciousness which will inevitably ramble along a path of directionalness, yes and i am sure that is not really a word.. but often what i am writing is not about the words, but rather the sense of my expererience, as if i was telling you what i was thinking, not trying to create a conclusive argument for or against something that has crossed my mind .. and take that in both senses of the loose meaning of that word.. and yes the pages will be filled with corn and cheese as the weak and it-lectual I am... Nothing is as weak as an IT geeks jokes .. But we all have our crossses to bear .. and yes there is a comments facility on this blog .. and yes you will not be berated by me at least for slating or beatifying what I have to say and you do not have to log in and can put in anonymous comments and yes you can distibute and send this blogon as whatever you percieve it to be to thsoe you want to get or give comment to. This is a reflection of society , science, nature, people, cultures and everyday life as I perceive it in the rare moments that I can put electronic ink to paper and cement theose fleeting moments in my brain to yet another electical manifestation of the neural pathways rushing through my brain in either a lucid or wine imbibed scenario as the day takes itself and at times i will rant like a slaughted pig and scream to the rooftops and shout in anger and dismay at what i have seen throughout that day or my life and at other times the lightness will float like perfect loaf of bread.. why we should bind our minds to the rigour and preconception of our environments when we have a world within worlds within words within ourselves bursting at the seams. i do digress more often than not .. but that was never my aim, originally i perceived about the twists and turns of kneeding bread, but things change as do our minds, what is a mind if you cannot change it, what is a mind if you cannot think it, what is a mind if you cannot dream it.. and at times i will the pages with hallmarkesk garbage at those moments when words have some kind of emotianal meaning in their form and expression and at other times they will be blunt and filled with simple rage and sadness. but I will hope that you will stand throught this and experience life through my eyes however insanly different it may be to yours or in certain cases you may find some resinence in what i have to say.. most probably more often than not by some accident of my own. my ramblings are not aimed at anyone and yet at everyone... If we can touch those around us with our lvies i think we will have a better moment within a moment within a day within our life within your life, we tend to be judgemental and bound to the constraints of our own existance and that which the media and society prescribes apon us not that in any case these are bad things but is there a measure of guidance through this maize of life wheat just doesn twork in the same way or in other ways it is much better in binding things together. enough said i hope

on a happier note

After some serious beratement from one of my readers I suppose the tone of my blog has somewhat diverged from the obviously eclectic view on life bread making religion and rambling or wandering through the maize of life. I suppose I did get somewhat caught up in the topical, which i suppose has little value other than magnifying what we all feel

<>

to say where to now, we cannot say what si the next loaf, where will it come from. Breading our way through life, we kneed and kneed or should it be need some meaning in life?
or is that we need some remaining in life, I suppose bread or dough is a good place to start but suppose the yeasty kind. The other is only the one that confounds us.
I have been contemplating what next?
and I suppose some grammar ..

yes for the other reader that complained about the grammer .. I will attempt to capitalise and add in a little grammer to make the streaming of babble a little more coherent..

but the cheese and corn will never leave that we can be certain off.

it seems like stream of consciousness is not for everyone, the cyberpunk seems to have left a whole lot of us. but Is suppose many of us never got it in our flight through the generation we all called x even though many of preceded or came after it, the chances being that most of the readers would have preceded it by more than a few hours :-) suppose we mostly fit somwhere inbetween the yuppies and whatever else they call us.

suppose the next plan is another egg and milk loaf, but the search is on for a recipe ..

to the more eclectic notion of existence, I feel a stirring towards that which could best be contrived as some form of spiritual longing, this could be some form of sub conscious effort to find some meaning in the chaos and randomness in our daily life. I doubt there are many of us who do not go through this thought a number of times a day, dont confuse what i am saying with some form of organized or disorganized religion. It is rather the notion that a part of our brain requires an unanswerable enigma to base our daily existence on.

I mostly wonder how bread making came into existence, the gue that binds cultures together through history, appologies if this is a repition of somethign that has past before us. But honestly have you not ever wondered why people discovered how to make certain foods, where the base ites came from, I think there may only be very few of the archeologically or hsitorical relics left in the bread world as we know it. a friend of ours once told me of his visit to ethiopia .. damn that was a difficult word.. about some bread that they bake in the sun.. pretty tough and wild.

In this time of darkness i do suppose there is hope even though we wander through the shadow of the economic valley of desolation...
This brought me to somethings i was questioning a little while ago, mostly pertaining to the quality of life and the measurement thereof? I wonder how we can msot effectivly measure the quality of our lives as we live it, is it the quality of our wealth, the measurement of our frienships or relationships with those around us, is it the interactions we have in the maize of humanity or should I rather say the un known humanity, is it the taste of the first cup off coffee in the morning, is it the smell of freshly baking bread, the taste of the bread, the simple things the taste of bread with balsamic vinager, with olive oil, natural olives bulging with the taste of the sun, dust a taste of history. have you ever wondered how on earth people came to start eating olvies that is something close to the twilight zone for all of those wo have ever tasted a raw olive. a food so filled with history and heritage. Is it the smell of fresh basil, the red of a simple tomatoe paste, the tang of the sauce. Is it in the moment of the wine slowly dying on the vine capturing the sun the dust the salt the sugar into something sublime brining us closer to the earth we are so much part of. somthing as perfect as a grilled chicken, the taste of a simple roti, the exotic taste of sushi. do you ever ask your self the question on the value of your days interactions, I must admit i have learnt more and more to appreciate the moments of interactions with those arround us. Sometime ago i heard something that in some ways resonated very well with me, not that it is something that I could partake in but it still touched me. many or some of the more primitive cultures gave blessing and gratitude for the life thay were consuming, I dont believe that this should be confused with saying grace or blessigns for food, this is a subtely more integral part of their daily existence, something done with the origin and relationship these people shared with the items they took in as food. I think sometimes we forget to appreciate that which is laid down before us,
in this mad rush of an existance we call culture we often look past the simple graces we receive, I think it would be best to leave it there else i may sprout a tirade of intenseness :-) that would not be appreciated by all the readers of this blob ..

But i suppose at best we shold look at things at their face value, attempt to see the best in people to apprecuate the bread laid down our plate, the simple items that make our life enjoyable. Is it the seconds and minutes we should cherrish or not? simple moments are what make up our day.

On a tangential thought when is art art, when is food art?

Is their beauty in food is there art in food, in the same way is there art in the lines painted on the raod, is this all not a question of perspective and perception.
Is wine an art form, for some it amy appear that the appreciation is an art form :-) for others the wine is the art form.

why is it that the perpetual hamsterization of lives drives into a place where we cannot accept the minor highpoints of our day, yes that is an oxymoron I do admit that. But what weight does the taste of the first sip of coffee have in your day, one would hope that you are appreciating the aroma, the taste and the texture of the nectar of the ethiopians ... damn those ethiopians keep popping up .. next it will be the albanians .. now there is a race? but to become more eclectic, can we measure our day based on these micro moments of joy as apposed to the mad rat race we live in. the wonder of the snurise for the few moments we let our eyes slip away from the wheel driving to work at the crack of dawn, the wonders of mist and haze the sunlight breaking through and painting pictures in front of our eyes.

age in chaos and human existance stochasticy

where to start

are we in the end of days? Have we been there before..
a lot of what i purporting to be thing i have thought about are merely thing i have read and combined.

most stanislav velikofsky
excuse my spelling cannot really remember how to spell this ;-)


but quite simply our human race is really stretching at the seams, how much further can we go as we are? Have not been throught his before numerous times.. Apparently us as humans have dwindled to a handful at certain times in our history. not that i am that much of a reductionist but this is what the genetasists tell me? Who knows if this is the truth or not, but there is a lot we do not know about our history, why civilizations (sic!) crumbled and collapsed and gre from nothing like the phoenix after the fire, stop me if I wax to lyrical bout the cataclysmic and the collapse of societies through time past.

But it is rather harrowing to look at biblical tales of the end of days, fire brimstone, earthquake and mayhem ..

but have we not brought all fo this on our selves. This global warming thing we cannot decide about? is it us or is it just a cycle, are we going to warm up or are going to freeze?

mass extinctions are nothing new, us as humans have exterminated more than a number of animals through our history and pre-history. there is apparent evidence of many large slow mammals being wiped out by early man. are we not just follwing the path of our predessors in a very effective and efficietn way..


you may ask more emphatically what the hell this has to do about making bread or fly fishing, well it streams through them, or in fact not really, but totally?

having returned from a drought striken region in one of the arid parts of our country it shows how us as humans have un learnt the ability to be in touch with our plannet, ourselves and the people around us, a sweeping statement i agree ! but is that not the tone of the ramblings on the flavour of life. why is it that Humans have lost the ability to engage with the basal surrounds we exist in, why we have to have dominion over beast of the air, the land and the sea? not sure where i heard that piece (??) who lnows, what is it that is implied by dominion, does it imply destuction taiming beyond the point of submission but rather he ensalving of the environment ithout little concern for the future let alone the past, disregarding that hindsight is something int he lines of 20 20 vision, we as humans seem not to be able to view any thing importnt with any sense of objectivity? rather a cynical subjectivity we call praticality?

we seem to have a lost a lot since the evolutionary split from the monkeys.. not really having learnt any real lessons
. this may be harsh thing to say, but reality bites.. geez this corn is big as a field in kansas or Oz ..
somehow there seems to be more order in their chaos,
I was looking at the stock market trends over the lst while and have noticed somthig really ominous .. this looks insanely like trends i saw while looking at ecological models of disturbed ecosystems. first a small wobble getting bigger with earch cycle, better then worse then submitting eventually into a wild stochastic trend often resulting in soemthing very new and different, note the lack of possitive or negative commentry.. dont think it is warented. stochstic systems tend not to be trendable, especially systems which are sentiment driven, are we driving our selves into the unknown...
more and more this brings us back to feedback loops, especially positive feedback loops with no negative feedback..
look back at the monkey, look at the lowly grasshopper all of them have negative feedback loops,
we jsut seem to just keep patching the holes in the leaking dyke.. not noticing that we should never have built a damn dyke in the first place..
all this is just depressing me.

on a lighter note, a moment of clarity struck me, well dont they to all of us, in our humble and grandious way, after unfortionate news from near and far I realize will a little sadness thaty this life we have is but all we have, and that impact we have is as much as we give take and get. how to magnify, simplify condence and distill is up to all of us.
but i suppose for US as human beings, we seem to have lost some of the more advanced biological trends and seem to have lost all altruisim baring reciprical altruisim and have turned back a notch or three in my esteem of biological beings.
but that does not mean we should not strive to move forward and change what we can accept what we cant dont accept what we should not.. say what we mean, do what is true is our hearts and seek out what is true.
If This seems like a bunch of ol horse crap.. then it most probably is and maybe the Secret is a better option.

I fear I ahve digressed what i intended to say a moment ago,
live your life true, live it straight, live with the all in context
have understanding and hope
have clarity
have retorspect, be swayed not by sentiment, but rather your heart ..

geez this is soundign like something from a hallmark card to me .. cant take any of this rseriously at all/..

heard soemthign really interesting about the pygmies in central africa, there seems to be a race to look up to :-)
no serriously, they seem to be one of the few race left which still has some conneciton this plannet we call home, them and a few others.

so you may ask what point am i trying to make?
I am not really sure yet this is in fact only ramblings on the flavour of life in the end.


dunno but I think an internal rebuttal is definitely in line here .. no one including my self shoudl really accept such unstructured ramblings, with little or no point or context ..

till another day in the captains log

general rant on the state of the planent

It had to come at some time or the other my eternal ranting about the way people live on this planet..

Not that there is all that much that I can msuter to do all that much about it .. or is there? I dont really know .. maybe i think to much about it?

where to start with the injustice of the way humans live..?

Think the current peve i have is that we live in a culture now in thiscentury where we live with a financial system that is sentiment rather than value based? why do i say this? what has significantly changed within the economy that i transact in? Nothing really .. lots has happened in the global economy.. but not to much in the south african economy .. other than the external inputs.. but we dont have a sub prime crisis .. but it is the fundimental basis of the economy that is pulling it down.. i know i am not really making to much sense at the moment... but i will try .. note the lower case I.. it may or may not be significant .. think about it ..

pull yourself passed waht is happening int eh global market .. yes there are major problems. .. massive financial problems.. but what has fundamentally changed in terms ofthe vlaue proposition. nothing really unless there was no real value behind the proposition int eh first place.. have we been living on borrowed money for the last 5 years or more? how can our global economy be based on theoretical manifestations .. buying long buying short.. a market that can be manipulated not by the interal value, but rather by the setiment of the buyers or sellers ..

a couple of months ago or maybe more in the south african economy there was a case where certain peple would buy stocks at normal prices and sell single shares .. at a fraction of the value.. was this the buttefly flapping its wing in a well cosntructed fire sale?
who knows .. but in this modern market where automated selling is not allowed but we all know that buying and selling is all driven by formulae of computer programs and simulations that are designed to increase the manipulation of short term or medium term fluctuations in share prices .. creating trends and directions int he markets .. who ahsever heard of futures .. what the hell is that .. futures on futures on futures .. that unwind and destroy a market within minutes and bounce back and plummet .. what is wrong with us?
how can we bet on the fundamentals of our economy how can we let people manipulate our existance like this?

oh well maybe i just dont understand it ..


but to things i do understand ..

why do we punish nature around us ..

why do people pollute rivers ..
this is somethign i cannot understand ?

i am a fisherman .. must be biased.. but how can we pump sewage into our rivers.. and stand buy .. how can we pump detergent insecticides and other chemicals into our rivers in plain daylight?

and the excuses that our sewage systems are overloaded .. why not do something about it .. it costs money .. but money cannot buy our environment back again ..

we are now at the stage where we do actually know how to do things .. no all things .. but many things in a more sustainable way .. we can make a green sewage plant .. we can make things more substainable .. but it desnt make money .. what is money through all of this? it is not happiness. it is not solace.. it is just the evil gue that drives through our society .. I understand we cannot move back to a barter and trade society .. but we can become more sustainable .. or at least try .. or die trying ..

back to the poluting of our rivers and natural environment .. is any amount of money worth destroying lives and futures ..?

the way the first world has rpaed and plundered the third world? all for a couple f dollars .. look at the whole of africa .. it is just ebing destoryed by foreign powers with money targeting despots and despirate people whoa re willing to sell today for no tomorrow.. who is to blame ..

I suppose we all are .. for stnding by and allowing it..
what we can do ? I dont know .. i am only viewing this horror i am no sage .. i cannot point you to a new hope and direction .. and runnign away and living somewhere int eh first world .. may make some sense .. but it wont stop the sytematical destruciton of the third world by the first world powers ?


who knows .. enough ranting on that ..

I think i have time for onw more rant all to be continued a little later ..

why do we sacrifice our cultures for the american or western bemoth of cultural desert that the americans sell to us .. no not that I am syaing those in america are without cuslture .. there are those who are alos being destroyed by the same homogonization .. nice word.. of all of the worlds cultures..

go and have a look at the slow food society .. google it .. and see what they have to say about this ..

goto run .. but will continue my rant tomorrow :-)

the hole is more than the whole or is it

Damn,

have not really had much chance to bake bread for the last week or so.. have been rather slack, but something that has been brewing over the last few days, amongst a hellava lot of things.., was the concept of the hole being more than the whole.. you may ask? What the hell am i rambling on about? But it is simple, when looking at a bread, how important are the holes as a proportion of the whole? I dont know, is it the taste imparted by the glutin polymerizing with the water sugar and yeast and becoming all rubbery or is it the holes in the bread which make it? Think about the holes in ciabatta? they are more important or not? than the taste? not sure, cos if i look at mu most favourite bread it has little or no holes, i know that.. Rotti .. is that a bread, or not, where do we define a bread where does it start or stop is a cake a bread or is it a bread is it an ism or is it an art? we will have to ask Riaan about that? where do we draw the line with weat or flour based products? But i suppose as normal we can preport this argument into another realm .. damn it would be better if we did not? But at an elementary physics level, we are what we are not. The holes inside our molecules are not what we arenot, we are what the holes make us. Not to different from bread, only difference being that bread can still taste allright without being fully three dimensional? well it can ... think of pita, rotti, pizza, naan and all the others you can think of.

on a totally different track.. cannot really see where i was going with this hole whole thing really .. at the time it seemed important, but things change with time.. and this was in draft for a week or so?

so where to now, this is what we think about all the time, wondering what is important, what isnt important. This seems to take hold of us for the bulk of our day or days i suppose. des it help to be decisive or not, do we get more done by taking gratuitous leaps into the chasim of life <>, or do we get there by the road more travelled?

little to say on this really cos I cannot say.

but it does turn me towards another question regarding the basis of our lives in the way we experience life. this may seem like a terribly counfounding and convoluted statement or rhetoric to make. Over the last while, to be honest most of my life, I have been wondering more than owndering about the basis of our interactions in society? what is it that guarantees us a good life. Is it the places we go to te people we meet the friends our lives cross paths with, is it the sunrises, the perpetual traffic, the solitude next to the river. Is it the moments of absolute awe and wonder that we are filled with at moments in our days?

after reading the good Rabbi's comments on the wondering of jews through the desert to the promise of a new land, a new begining, is the wondering more preparatory or is the fnal crossing over into the new land? for those of us who have gypsy blood in our vens, both litteraly and figurativily where is it that we go? Is it the roaming in our heads, the roming in our hearts the experiences from day to day, the headlong onslaught into a new life, being dragged kisking and screaming under our breaths. how do we evaluate what is a good life, is it our living, our sleeping our interactions with family friends and siblings. the good, the bad, the happy the sad, for those of a faith is it the belief that the journey is paramount in the final outcome, or is it the outcome that drives the journey? I suppose I cannot say, I am not the rabbi ;-) I am not the sage I am just the person who lives in the hosue round the corner, with the wife the children, the garden the stationwagon and endless journeyman through the hours of traffic considerng the outcome of my life and others. I doubt there is a guarantee to finding an answer to any of these questions.

I allways wonder what it is to be somewhere else, how much of my happiness is generated from within, from without, do we generate our own happiness or is it a product of our living. this brings me to the parradox of life, wich can be likened to the hours i spend sitting on the spinning bycicle in the gym, session after session going nowhere fast and slow, but i suppose I am getting somehwere .. getting fitterto be able to partake in the challenges that life throws towards us. Is it not the reactions we show to adversity, the reactions we show to happiness, mirth and sadness. who is stronger who is weaker, where do we go?

somehow the keyboard is weaker than the heart, weaker than the wondering in my soul.. no not the wandering in my soul. That is something toally different, having an internal drive to go to places i know exist, yet have never seen, yet remain drawn to these places given to me by thoughts and soemtimes by words or phrases in a book, places that i have visualized and have been drawn to by feeligns akin to my bonds with the soil I tread, yet is this soil i tread ever mine, am i like the wind blowing through the rustlingleaves the dust being drawn accross empty plains? It may be that there are palces that draw us closer, often by word or concept or hope and the search for meaning, churches, shrines, places of energy, temples in mist, dunes in the desert the sun beating down we trod through life searching for an oasis of truth chasing down myriads of mirrages in the desert of life, stumbling accross mystical points of clarity.

i beg your frgivness for this rambling and slef indulgence, i do advise the topic of the bread of life will continue in lighter vain soon ;-)

on the Llama the loaf of bread and lack of any fish

It is strange how we deem to prioritize our lives in a specific direction. No this is not a parrady ,no idea how u spell that word> on the favour the watch and the very big fish ;-) this is rather just some more random ramblings relating the flavour of life, bread and general insanity at the ground level. Where to start, the bread I suppose as it is paramount in my life the Current central theme pervading my daily thoughts. I eventually seem to have managed to emulate a sour dough loaf, running out of flour and having to fill in with brown flour it still turned out all right. more on the recipe's later though, more onto the LLama, well it wasn't really a llama it was the other thing with the Spanish name, the alpacha or something like that.. and yes they do spit .. or so i have heard .. and told by the handler and owner. the dude had amazing things .. dwarf donkeys from some other small place in spain or something .. these are real small donkeys .. chinchilla's .. some funny jumping mice and even a small Shetland pony. You may actually ask me, what the hell am i telling you about this.. the significance of the llama event is the where or why rather than the.. whatever.. The garage at a friends house was having its birthday, the wondrous inanimate can even celebrate its birthday, not sure if it has a gender in English.. in my mind it is a male, but i might be wrong, it may be gender non specific. To get back to the event, i took my daughter to go and view the spectacle.. like most children she was enamored. But the amazing thing was that there was also a big Fat dude singing really poor music on a PA and there was a lucky draw for all the visitors to the shop. this fascinated my daughter as we landed up wining a prize !! a bag of cheap sweets.. and to our friends dismay as she had been their earlier and the lucky draw only applied to those who spent largely at the store ...
all in all a totally pointless exercise from my perspective, But i suppose only from my perspective. sometimes I think we focus to little on that which goes on around us, kids love these inane things, pseudo excitement which could not have been paid for. somehow I think we miss these small things in our day.. WE tend to miss these monumental events cos we are focussed on the bigger things.. the exiting and things we are looking forward to. which brings me back to the no fish .. well that is just generally sad .. but i suppose you have to fish to catch a fish .. that seems to be the premise ... or at least they say so.
well suppose it is enough rambling along onto the path to nowhere ..
we never seem to know where life is going to take us do we..
the other day i applied for a job as a CIO of a company, I thought we are so often bound by the limitations we see in our selves and never really step forward and take the leap of faith. It is not even that I perceive being a CIO of a company. But I do think we need to jump past the edge of our own expectation. But i do have to re-iterate the universe does in some way decide where our lives are going .. be it through karmic interactions or just simply by the sub conscious inertia we impart on our own lives.. who knows? But All we know is that things happen when they happen and in their own time. I dont think that this is a justification for a wait and see attitude to life, but often we will be driven with such furvour into a specific direction and things don't all ways seem to travel at the speed nor the direction we are aiming for. I suppose our mind is telling us one thing or even our hearts, but somehow our general life and living tends to be driving us in a direction we are not all ways aware of? I don't know I may have to go and re-read some of the older articles on the good Rabbi's web site ;) he at least seems to have some direction and drive :-) not that I am in any way a follower of his comments nor religeon .. just seems like a good idea at the time.

well suppose i have to get back to work now and continue on developing my life inertia and drive things in a direction that make sense .. even if it is at microcosmic level and only relates to the next 10 minutes of my day. Damn I am hungry.

the tao of bread making

I suppose you are wondering what the tao is .. one would imagine it must be the Tao.. well it might just be. the tao of physics may well have been inspirational in this arb picking.
What it speaks of is the duality of life existence, science religion, evolution the universe and damn near everything.
I doubt bread making is nearly that complicated, but it is still party to the duality of the universe and life.
Bread making or in my case the religion of bread making not that it is a religion or that it isnt, but that i have subsequently devoted myself to the teachings of the great dough master or bread prophets of old. But what facinates me is the complexity and completeness of something so simple. Such simple ingredeants give rise to such an array of of different products. The simple flour water salt and yeast combine to give rise to such a complex, beautifull, rough, simple and unendingly complex array of of products.
I suppose it is simple enough to say add water and yeast a little sugar and activate, or in the case of the more traditional, take flour water and let it stand. Then the yeast of the Gods, or is the bread making the product of the religeon or is the bread making the religeon or is the product the product of its existance, this is difficult to say?
To diverge ever so slightly we then wait, and tme it takes, how long we cannot say, and without to much ado I sound like somthing out of the Cat and the Hat b y doctor Zeuss. That i must say is not what I wish to say yeat am saying, this duallity thing in life really gives me the creeps, or is the .. whatever ...
We take the yeastly activate then add the flour and kneed, there is a need to kneed, we need to kneed. The bread it must be ned, or is that kned or is it kneeded, I cannot say, but all i can say is that this is what we must do, with the aid of the hands i kneed the dough till it feels right, what is right what is wrong? Dont let it stick to your finger i plead when you kneed.. OMG i am so corny at this stage andsounding more and more like my man the Zeuss. But there are cases where corn works well, but not in my case I must admit, I have failed to tempt the corn to bind and grow with the yeast and flour I must say i have failed. The bread i then kneed and kneed and yet it is not actually bread it is just an amourphous blob of dough. That it is, i place some oil i let it sit , i place my needy dough, or isthat kneedy or kneeded dough, the chees it rolls from my toungue i miust say. I then go on and place the resting dough in a plce of quiet, i let it rise .. not from the dead I say? But to life it grows, yt inside it is life and death, the death of the wheat the growth of the yeast the sun and the rain within the flour fromout the wheat it came. I wonder here on a very different tangent how we as humans began or learnt or discovered bread? how did we find this out? There must be more than the history of the church behind the history of bread, the bread it weaves its web through out the ages.
It then rises life the phoenix out of te fire, it rizes and rizes and we beat it down 3 times? i wonder of this significance, i cannot say why but I do.
We then wrestle it into the form we want it, it this not in the same way we create images of gods and beings and begin to praise them. Only to wait again for it to rize and then to send it into the fires of hell to swell and develop a hard skin outside, structure within and tase throughout. the wheat the sun the rain the yeast the salt all combine to create a structure that from within its humble combines and resonates throughout society in more ways than one, from mere food to religeon of another kind, to the happiness and joy of comunion with friends at a meal to the comunion of man and another God the cementing of he two halves of a day together by the samwich of lunch the toast of breakfast the bread and the wine during theday, the night the sabbath and all. this I must admit is my ode to the Toa of Bread, admit I must it can be asumed to be filled with cheeze, both my words and the bread, but this it is the start the end the continium of life, the continium of life the sun the rain the chlorophyl, the leaves the drought the sand the wind the sun the starts the growth of the sead, the hapopiness of the germination, the harvest of life from soil and sun and plant, the grind of life the wheat it turns , the flour it binds ourlives from begin to end. But alas I msut end only to return and torment again this absurd and silly Blob I must depart my firends and contiue my day.

On Religion

Yes religion drew me to blogging..

I have to admit to it .. it was my religion of flyfishing that drove me to or should I have rather said drawn or lead me o blogging..

I ramble to much, to get back to the point of my comments or ramblings on life.. I was perusing my facebook the other day and noticed a firend .. or aquaintance.. whichever way you see it.. and he had as religeon jedi .. i was waondering if he was not rather a better candidate for klingonism .. But he replied a little later on and indicated that he was considering ku fu panda as this was more in tune with his current state.

But Is uppose to return full circle to Blogging I suppose it was religion that drove the nail further home, I must admit that i find blogging a rather insane and inane thing.. I doubt I would actually read any one elses blog, baring the one that drove me to blogging.. You may ask who or what, but I ramble to much I suppose.

To get back to Fly fishing, that which I do to little yet love so much, the line that drives straight through my life. Yes teh flyfishing rabbi drove me to the blogging, doubt any one atually reads my ramblings, yet many read his ramblings and cameo's on life.

I suppose if I could choose, at the moment my religeon of choice would be the baker.. no not the baker of life, the baker of bread, I am currently on search for the ultimate bread recipe or process.. It may seem like a strange obsession? Not really it is the base and simple product of nature combined with water, yeast, sugar, salt and time, something so simple yet so fantastic. I marvel each loaf i make, each time it is different, each time a new experiment, each time absoloute facination. from normal breads to french style loafs to my current natural or sour dough breads.. something so simple yet so amazing.. Damn I ramble on..


O h well another day another ramble.

But more importantly as our family prepares to embark an adventure more insane than ever imaginable, I sit here wondering about bread, the wonders of flyfishing and where things will go. will the bread taste the same, will the fishing be good. where will our life lead us.

oh to the following of kung fu pandasim

a little further on in life

some times i get caught up wondering about the past.. what if it was what would have been .. what could i have..

and the last couple of weeks have been no exception. I met up with some friends of old from my previous life.. sounds like i was some kind of drug lord or soemthing :-)
No something mroe mundane .. i was an entomologist .. yeah like those geeky dudes in silence of the lambs .. the dudes in the basement of the building. Not quite but it was a lot different from my current incarnation as an IT geek .. well something like that ..

Sometimes I wonder if I could have would have should have continued along on this path of life .. possibly impossible .. like i said inconsiquential babelings along the path of nothingness.. that is life isnt it .

Well more on the note of the weekend we had fun we had fun we had seasons in the sun. We had a whole lot of folk over for the day to celebrate a birthday .. fun was had by all.. but ona differnt topic I was considering our interpid adventure to the land of clouds.. Well somehow there seems to be some form of karmic or god like plan at play.. our journey seems to continiously be moved out.. something or whatever is keeping us from that journey, it appears that there are still stones unturned on this side of the curtain. The purple haze still remains over our current existance. What to do I am sure will permiate our existance, soon enough. It just seems as if our current path is predecided into another route ... soemtimes it would be nice to know where and how our lives will progress. That would be better for me .. but suppose that would be against the nature of the universe as i know it .. It just does not answer to my thoughts.. it appears that i must answer to its calls .. it amy be the slippery hills or the giant stone gongs or the huge red stone monlyth? But somethign will not give .. not without some force or fight .. things just dont seem to be within my most simplest understandings..

something that pulls and drives at the strings of my hearts my lonliest plannet and more close to me my continent of birth. I get pushed and pulled along the sands of time without conviction or hate not knowing where to goto. from the dry sands of our home to the lands of unending clouds. The mountains enshrowded in mist or should i rather say myst?

Suppose there is little in fighting the movement of my fight against my Karma, where the flows of my enternal river take me only time will kow. soon enough the reality of life will be bourne upon me with fury of the son crossing the Verge of the Horizon. Its deepr red and amber its glowing mass breaking through the horizon of time and the day.. but more tomorrow

the begining

I am not sure where this begins or ends..

suppose it is difficult to ever go back and think when things began. Suppose it is important to start somewhere? Who am i, isn't this the question that we all ask? something that we have been caught up with through the ages. mine is a lot simpler :-) I am an Entomologist (yes go and search the word on dictionary.com), but I it no longer. I have become something else, moving from the ecology of life to the ecology of data. I was fascinated by the ecology and interactions of living things only to realize that I had become redundant, not neccesarily redundant in the classical sense. But I had become redundant, my life had almost started moving into a redundant niche. My life had some other inherent phylogenetic sic! inertia. I landed up in the ecology of data. Soemthing I had never ever considered at an early age. I had always perceived my life to be going in a specific direction, only to be driven nearly into extinction by the forcesof society and lifes general ramblings.

Do I miss my old life, I am not sure we can ever say we had different lives, our life is a continium of events and journeys, I suppose this is all part of the secret :-), you will figure this one out later. How much of lives is practical and how much is esoteric is difficult to seperate. what si the value we get out of our living in teh way we know it.

but enough of that inane rambling on my life, i never though i would be trying to put my self at the centre of your universes. No this is only my view on what i perceive on what si going on around us. I allways perceived my self sitting on the rainbow warrior or spiking rainforrest trees in the forests of Norht america or south America or even central africa, only to realize that what drives the forces of our society cannot be simplified into retaliatory actions such as these. Our Societies or cultures have to be chanegd from somewhere else. Why we destroy everythign around us as humans? can we simply change the world as we know it singly as individuals or not. I have my doubts if we can, but I suppose it is a very good strating point.

I do suppose that we do have to start somewhere and the individual within a society does have the power to change things, how and to what effect I am not sure. I feel the hidiously fast anture of life currently does not allow us to actually make an impact, news is fed to us a second by second basis, we get so much information, my or some other folks attempt to change society from the ground up gets swamped in the general milleu of media within the flash of an eye, and there is nothing sensational about what I want to say. Yes you may argue that i am rambling, yes I am. the nature of my ramblings do tend to be extremely stream of conscious type of crap.. ya suppose so. But I hope that this may spark some thought on your lives.