Tex infected me with this silly blog nonsense. It’s contagious, evidently.

First, the background.

1. Post the rules of the game at the beginning
2. Each player answers the questions about themselves
3. At the end of the post, the player then tags five people and posts their names
4. Let the person who tagged you know when you’ve posted your answer
5. Create an arbitrary rule to keep with the whole fives theme.

What were you doing 5 years ago?

• 5 years ago, I was smoking 2 packs a day, eating meat, and not riding a bicycle. I associated primarily with crass bar-people. I considered myself a libertarian, and earned my keep by working for evil corporate overlords.
• Nowadays I don’t smoke, don’t eat meat, ride a bike sometimes, and associate with crass bike people. I consider myself politically confused, and earn my keep working for generally non-evil, non-corporate overlords

What are five things on your to-do list for today?

1. Finish this blog entry
2. suggest a Guy Fawkes ride on the HBG Critical Mass blog
3. Figure out how to get to Jazz Under the Stars in Lancaster
4. Ride my bike
5. Read Siddhartha

What are five snacks you enjoy?

1. Troegenator
2. Appalachian Jolly Scot
3. Ace hard Cider
4. Hornsby’s Hard Cider
5. Lancaster Milk Stout

What are five things you would do if you were a billionaire?

1. Two chicks at the same time.
2. Buy a shit load of farmland and start my own religious cult. Kind of like the Amish, but replace the Christianity with a Secular Soto Zen Buddhism and get rid of all the farm animals — It’ll be all veganic farming and bicycles instead of horses and buggies.
3. Go to space
4. Donate a little bit to some worthy charities.
5. Sponsor a mission to build 1/6 scale models of Stonehenge and the Pyramids of Giza on the surface of the moon. When space aliens come to Earth in a million years, that’ll give their archaeologists something to talk about.

What are five of your bad habits?

1. Running this blog
2. Eating too much
3. Using enormous amounts of profanity in polite company
4. Spending too much time in the internet
5. fantasizing about doing cool things someday, when I could be dong them now

What are five places where you have lived?

1. I lived 7 different places during the first 20 years of my life, but none was ever more than 6 miles from where I was born
2. 10 years ago, I moved about 70 miles downstream to the Harrisburg area. I moved 5 times since then, but was always within bicycling distance of work.
3. I’ve averaged 2.5 years per residence
4. I’ve never, in my whole life, lived more than 6 miles from the Susquehanna River, and I think that if I ever move away from it, I will lose all of my supernatural powers, and turn into an asshole.

What are five jobs you’ve had?

1. Paperboy - Milton Standard Journal - Got my first drop-bar ten speed to deliver newspapers
2. Bus Boy - Good Wils Restaurant - Cleaning up after miserable Bucknell Students
3. Burger Flipper - Wendy’s - cooking burgers for miserable Bucknell Students
4. Macintosh ‘Computer’ Salesman - Bucknell University Bookstore (at this point I was a miserable Bucknell Student myself)
5. Network Administrator - various evil corporate masters

I tag:

1. Stankertanker
2. Doc
3. The Donut Guy
4. end pavement
5. analstormtrooper1996

Look what I made! I got the recipie from The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Vegan Living.

It’s called “Tofu Scramble - Western Style,” and it’s pretty good!

I’ve never been interested in cooking before, but being vegetarian is kind of forcing me to learn. It’s actually kind of fun.

So, I’ve been doing the lacto-ovo vegetarian thing for one solid month now. The increased fiber in my diet has afforded me ample time to catch up on some reading.

How about some shoddily-written book reviews then?

Ishmael

Ishmael is a weird book. It’s written as a kind of extended Platonic dialog between a man and a gigantic, telepathic gorilla named Ishmael. Ishmael has all sorts of interesting ideas about ecology and the role of agriculture in the Bible and in modern society.

He makes an interesting argument that the story of Cain and Abel is really about the conflict between agriculturalists and nomadic herdsmen in the ancient world.

The gorilla gets a little preachy at times, but it’s an enjoyable book nonetheless.

I give Ishmael 3 Jihadis out of 5

The Omnivore’s Dilemma

I actually started reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma while I was still eating dead animals, and it was the next-to-last straw that pushed me over the edge (Scott’s infamous tirade being the final straw).

The book takes you on a pretty good tour of the modern agricultural-industrial food machine that turns government corn subsidies into animal cruelty and human obesity in as efficient a manner as possible.

It’s a long book, and it gets kind of tedious in the very last chapter. I’d give it 4 Jihadis based on the actual quality of the book, but considering that it catalyzed a pretty serious lifestyle change, I’m inclined to give it the 5th Jihadi anyway.

Buddhism Without Beliefs

This book advocates a version of Buddhism stripped of all supernatural hocus-pocus. No Karma, no Reincarnation. It’s kind of a modern, secular, “95 theses” approach to the Dharma. I’m not a fan of supernatural hocus-pocus generally, and so I’m fully on board with rationalism, wherever it appears.

After it establishing its thesis, though, the book kind of meanders along with goofy meditation exercises and gets kind of boring.

Still, it’s nice to be able to be a Buddhist and a Positivist at the same time, so I give Buddhism Without Beliefs 3 Jihadis out of 5.

For a dissenting view, Dark Zen has an interesting critique.

One of the challenges of bike commuting is trying to figure out what to have for lunch. Since my office is far from any restaurants, I have to pack in my lunch on days when I ride to work.

I think I may have found the ultimate commuter lunch:

Raja Foods makes a product called micro curry. It’s shelf stable (no refrigeration required). You pop it in the microwave at the office for 2 minutes, and shazam! you got vegan Indian food for lunch!

Because it’s shelf stable, it can sit in your panniers in the hot sun on the ride in, and you can keep several of them in a desk drawer at the office.

Add some Uncle Ben’s Ready Rice (also shelf stable) and you’re all set.

I got the curry on sale for $.99 and the rice was $1.50, so lunch is $2.50.

Today: 10 miles
May: 114 miles
2008 Utility Miles: 182
2008 Total Miles: 262 miles

So far, so good. I didn’t manage to stay totally Vegan, mainly due to lack of proper planning, but I’m working up to it.

A few observations:

1. Tofurkey Italian sausages are really freaking disgusting.
2. Soymilk in your morning coffee and on your breakfast cereal is pretty much indistinguishable from the real thing
3. Vanilla Soy Yogurt is about as good as the real thing.
4. The healthy food store is full of hippies and weirdos.
5. I lost 2 pounds last week.