On a whole lot of ((little) things:

On a whole lot of things:

Something I have been pondering for a few brief moments is the nature of humanity and what constitutes humanity as a whole. Is it the individual or the collective? Does the individual hold more inertia than the collective? You may ask why I ask that? Or what a frigin stupid question. It has more to do with some thoughts I have had about the continuity or perpetuity of the human race…
Are we not a large mosaic of dynamics and individual inputs that together make a conglomerate. Supposing that the conglomerate is uniform enough to indicate a commonness that we all hope to see. Or are we more a nougat of life being melted and molded together into one or maybe cassata would be a better analogy .. But I digress .. it could be closer to a load of olive bread, but that is for later .. not now ..
My actual question is more along the lines of how much the individual partakes and is constituent of the whole or the sub whole of humanity on a regional or meme base. The actual question we have to ask is are we a self defeating organism .. something like a yeast? We grow .. we exploded our exploits and living destroy our own existence and break ourselves down, only to pop up from the remnants of our existence.
How important is the individual and how important is the collection of individuals in society and its makeup. One of the things we can observe is that in many cultures or subsets of society are very homogonous and in other cases very heterogeneous. Which of these creates a homeostasis or chaos. Do humans tend towards homeostasis or towards chaos? These may seem like silly questions, but guide us to our eventual destiny?
Something closer to home I was thinking about was the value of politicians as a whole.. What value do they actually have for us in their current manifestation.. and yes that is an open ended question.

How much value does the individual deliver to society..

How much value does society deliver to the individual?

Are they interchangeable, or is the one more important than the other, where do we start to debate this from? Do we look at the anarchists, the nihilists or do we look towards some form of divine intervention or direction. Who knows what is more effective in guiding the Meme’s we call culture. How sustainable are the memes we follow or promulgate. In general how sustainable is the human race as a whole. Apparently humans are fairly sustainable in the short and medium term. How do we measure the cost of being human in the long run? Should we attempt to or be part of the phylogenetic inertia that we are part of? That is not meant to be depressing in any way.

As a totally different subtext myself and a few others, have debated the un-humanness nature of owning a GPS. What does it take away from our ability to find adventure and excitement in our daily lives…. That is not saying that there is no Technical value in GPS’s for specific applications, but the thought of navigating myself to work and back on a daily basis staring at a little screen taking away our natural/unnatural ability to find our way home or get lost in the process thereof.. It has taken away our ability to utilize the internal zen art of navigation which has for many years served us as humans very well in a way to either expand or limit our lives. I think in an urban context there could be some perceivable value in using a GPS, but to be real what benefit does it give to us on the proverbial road trip other than to take the road less traveled. Sometimes I think we should rather focus on the journey, what we see and experience rather than the temporal break between being at point A and then being at point B. Fundamentaly I believe that when we go on an extended journey the benefits of not having a GPS by far outweigh having one, that is unless we are bound by some form of temporal constraint to be at point B by a predefined point in the timespace continuum. Often the route through or eventual ending in point C may actually develop our humanity more than we could ever imagine. That is I must now interject and highlight that I speak from a specific meme within society and not from a “general perspective” whatever that General is;-) I suspect the ability of road tripping in most peoples lives no longer exists and will at some point reach a mythical perspective or manifestation, something like the tales of the Argonaut or the search for the golden fleece. When did the eventual Golden fleece become more important than the journey and the people and places that where interacted with both humanistically and tangentially than finding the Fleece. Lets try and imagine .. Jason picked up his GPS plotted his course on Google earth found the Fleece and sent it to sotherbeys to auction over the internet.. End of the story. Maybe this exact point explains to me why there is this huge (re)surgence of computer games and especially those of the role playing nature. It was always something that perplexed me beyond internal rationalization why people would choose and alternative reality to that which we experience on a daily basis. I suppose how exiting our lives are when we sit behind a desk staring at the electrons darting over our LCD or CRT or PS or whatever.. and rush home switch on another screen. Humans seem to have lost the propensity to be able to interact with their own environments in a healthy and interactive way. We have been bound to the media and their interpretations thereof .. I am not saying that there is no place for fiction and media, what I am saying is that in my belief it has taken away from us the ability to be human. What is it that makes us human, this of course could in turn lend itself to an unending diatribe of disparate philosophical or phenomological debates? But as a small aspect of it, how many people actually ever get to appreciate walking on their lawn, the lawn in front of their flat, the nearby park without their shoes on, let alone walking without shoes when the lawn is wet or heaven forbid muddy or dusty. When last did the general populace consider what it is they are doing when they eat a vegetable, a piece of steak. Whn last did you watch the sun rise or set.. and not accidentally whilst driving to or from work? Dunno somehow us as humans seem to have lost perspective on the zen art of navigation of our own lives. Do we need to have a route planned, is the route that life choses for us not to be appreciated and embraced to try and get as much out it as possible.
Just as a subscript for those negative people out there…
(Not MLC rather an appreciation of life to be experienced by all)
Not to harp on this for another 100 pages or more which I could .. maybe another day, or as I stated to someone today, did I answer you or did I think about it in my head and have a meaningfull one way discussion with myself and come up with fantastic outcomes and conclusions.

And now for something totally different:

Recently I went fishing in the north west somewhere .. I was punished by the development of our infrastructure, or better put infrastructural upgrade.. it turned a medium length journey into a substantial journey, that is not the point.. yet it is.
I had a fantastic time, thought of nothing much other than the fishing and standing hip deep in a river and watching the otters, birds and zillions of other things swimming and floating by. The point being that I did not feel like I should submit myself to the arduous journey through the unending roadworks and enforced stops where the large road was put into a single directional lane being swopped around every now and again… like every 20-30 minutes.. note from my previous paragraph, yes we can choose not to take some journeys and do not have to travel the same road twice .. especially when it is bad .. So I decided that there must be an alternative route back home..
Then specifically chose to only get vague verbal directions as to the 350km detour through towns and roads I have never traveled before let alone even knew of their actual location .. thus with the aid of my Zen internal GPS and without looking at a Map drove through the center of the freestate on my way home on very long very straight roads that very few people have ever been on.. What value u may ask… but what if I got lost, would I not be late.. sure there was a chance.. but in principal most roads eventually lead to gauteng in some or other way.. this was specifically liberating to be able to get in a car and allow my internal compass to guide me along the route home. Now before you even attempt to find some kind of spiritual message in this .. there are none .. this was purely just something that happened.. with little or no real outcome other than exposing myself to the universe and its wims.. I know to specific readers of this blog there will be an inordinate number of explanations and objections against this.. yes some of them may be true, some not, depending on when and how you look at it all these explanations will change and may be true and even in retrospect. The past changes as much as the future with enough shifting in perspective..

Oh well enough for now ..

On something more tactile ..

Notes on baking bread .. that was the original or one of the original purposes of the blob…

I have discovered something of value to me and maybe you when u want to bake an awesome bread ..

I found that the high foam beer yeast works like bomb .. for south Africans the “big yellow sorgum brewing yeast packet “ and then also recently have found that brown bread flower definitely tastes good in this configuration. Another pointer is making the dough about 5% more moist than you would expect, this is logical, but never thought why.. u think about it .. then for baking it I now bake only round breads inside a flat bottomed heavy cast iron pot with a lid .. it just seems to work better .. maybe it contains the moisture better and stops the bread from drying out.. still makes a crust ..

Oh well enough for one day.. more down the temporal line