!Christina's 5 questions
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agk's diary
11 July 2023 @ 16:39 UTC
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written on GPD Win 1 via PuTTY
as first daughter mumbles herself to sleep:
"this a-way, this a-way" (from the song 500 Miles)
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I love to answer Christina's questions; read
others' answers. She wrote 5 new ones!
gopher://sdf.org:70/1/users/christyotwisty
July 2023 Questions:
1. Favourite way to stay active
Ride a bike, with or without a trailer towing
first daughter, to places I have to go anyway:
for bread, to open mic, to visit, to church,
to Evy's work, to the bank, etc.
2. How to stay focused and productive?
Tilt at windmills. Maintain friendships and
windmill-tilting partnerships that are maint-
ainable. Scheme. Reflect.
Think about the windmills on little breaks from
stupid stuff you have to do. Break drudgery
into chunks. Gamify them:
"I'll carry 10 more rocks then think about
windmills; two 25-minute pomodoro tomatoes
then play cards for 30 mins/carry 10 rocks"
3. If I could have any sport or game instantly
mastered, unrelated to my current interests or
abilities, which and why?
I'd love to be a competent futbol/soccer or
basketball player without putting the time in,
to play pick-up games, especially with young
people.
But it wouldn't be fair. Sport teaches you to
work hard for incremental improvement. What
kind of monster would I be to get skill without
work?
4. Interesting trivia tidbits about historical
events.
Martin Luther King Jr had armed security.
Universal Basic Income was tried in England as
the Speenhamland System and degraded life in
the industrializing nation to horrific lows
that shocked Marx. Polanyi's book The Great
Transformation provides the best account.
During the US Civil War, a Hapsburg became
emperor of Mexico.
The early Spanish/Portuguese slave trade was
a side-effect of their attempt to bypass
trans-Saharan Almoravid control of the trade
in Mediterranean salt for Ghanaian gold.
In the first major use of "technicals" in hist-
ory, Chad defeated Libya's air force with
pickup trucks and desert skills in 1987.
Before coffee-houses or tea-houses, there were
lemonade-houses in France and Spain.
Brazilian blacks bought the freedom of enslaved
blacks with the pooled resources of their
redemption societies in the 19th century, and
sent them to be educated in Nigeria.
John Brown expected if he could take the armory
at Harper's Ferry West Virginia, cut the rail-
road, and build a maroon guerilla force that
raided from the mountains, killed planters,
liberated slaves to swell ranks, Haitian moun-
tain fighters'd hear of it, send reinforce-
ments, liberate all enslaved people of the US.
5. A summer recipe.
Dice fresh tomatoes hot from the garden and
mint from outside the kitchen door. Add salt,
olive oil, and some pepper. Chill for a few
hours and eat on toast with more olive oil or
butter. Drink iced mint sun tea with it.
