Hornswaggler | The culture, the humor, a bit of the sports, not so much the politics, and the workplace distraction
Hornswaggle is an alternate spelling of
hornswoggle, an archaic word that means to bamboozle or hoodwink. I take my
pronunciation from the late Harvey Korman in "Blazing Saddles" --
"I want rustlers, cutthroats, murderers,
bounty hunters, desperados, mugs, pugs, thugs, nitwits, halfwits, dimwits,
vipers, snipers, conmen, Indian agents, Mexican bandits, muggers,
buggerers, bushwhackers, hornswagglers, horse thieves, bull dykes, train
robbers, bank robbers, ass kickers, shit kickers and Methodists!"
After blogging about "16 and Pregant," I feel I need to get some higher-brow material on here pronto to balance it out. To that end, I just finished "The Omnivore's Dilemma." Let me tell you what I learned:
-- Just because it's an organic chicken doesn't mean it ever went outside. It probably didn't.
-- Buy organic eggs. The lives of regular laying hens apparently are worse than those of "broilers" (eatin' chickens), as each hen gets less than a shoebox's worth of room.
-- Turns out that it may not be Americans' massive intake of beef that's the problem, as far as cardiovascular disease etc., but rather what the cows themselves eat. Cows were not meant to eat massive amounts of corn, and cows raised on grass, though they may not taste like the beef we're now accustomed to, have lower levels of bad fats and higher levels of good fats, which helps explain why primitive groups that ate meat constantly didn't have heart problems. Interestingly, even salmon that's been farm-raised and fed corn or who knows what else starts to develop a beefier nutritional profile, with higher levels of bad fats.
-- Corn has cunningly cultivated humans, not the other way around, and now it rules us like the aliens in "V." The amount of processed corn products we eat is stunning and not good.
-- Even though you should probably buy organic if you can afford it, organic agriculture is no longer that different in some important respects from regular, pesticide-heavy agriculture. From an environmental standpoint, is it worth buying organic lettuce that's trucked up from Mexico? Probably not. Try to buy local -- visit your farmers market.