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Thar She Blows...

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     Have you seen the price of gold, or silver (or groceries)?  Metals are considered a "safe" haven for investors, those people with loads of money who want two things...more of it and to keep what they have.  And while I've written about this before, that of digging through childhood collections of whatever --coins, stamps, comic books, Pokeman cards-- it is worth repeating that now might be a good time to reevaluate your life and possessions ...and life's meanings.  You may discover that much of what you held onto in the hopes that "this will be valuable one day" probably isn't, or won't be.  I found this out when I would buy an art print in my working years, a realistic painting of a wild animal, usually a tiger or a mountain lion or a pod of killer whales.  Artists whom I "collected" (in the sense of buying limited editions which were signed and numbered) decorated our walls, the framing often costing more than the art.  But m...
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Nothing Artificial...

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    This starts out with a pie, a delicious looking one based on the cover, one whose filling is basicially a shortbread cookie: sugar, eggs, and butter (okay, shortbread has flour instead of eggs, but you get the idea).  My friends wanted a chocolate cake so this seemed rather easy: thaw for a bit then serve.  It was a rather small "pie," typical of what you'd see in a store or in one of those pre-made pie forms.  But then, I cut the thing into six pieces --pieces which turn out to be nowhere near the size of the picture on the box-- and saw what my stomach might be in for: 510 calories and a whopping 14 teaspoons of sugar!  And check out what's in that pastry: margarine, palm oil, "natural" flavors, and need I add, 30 grams of fat...no wonder it was so delicious.  I make gist of this because so much of what triggers our dopamine pleasure centers are things we maybe should check out a bit more carefully.  Not always is this a negativ...
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Cough, cough. Hack, hack.

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     Fair warning before reading: this post will be all over the map, a zig-zag mystery worthy of Tod Goldberg (who?), so mentioned because I've somehow found myself temporarily captured by the world of short mysteries.  The world of today is vastly long, too much and too long at times...the news, the amount of infomation, the drawn-out TV series, the terribly long lines everywhere.  And so I happened to pick up a batch of Best American Mystery & Suspense .  As one editor wrote of the series: Short stories can act like little tuning forks, helping us to clarify our own values.  In a time when our values are being tested daily, it’s hard to think of anything more important.   But alas, just as with those stories, this post has little to do with any of those writings* but more about a few real-life mysteries: remote work, penetrating identity and financial accounts (yours), and the new world of professional hacking (North Korea alone has ne...
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All Fall Down...

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     The chill has come with the announcement of fall, and with it the changing colors of the trees.  Friends tend to ask me what the best time of year is to "catch" the colors and it is truly a crapshoot.  This was again a year of drought in my area, so the trees, which somehow tend to know far more than our weather folk, appear to have begun the change early.  Why hang around looking for that extra bit of moisture when you can simply retire for the winter and hope that next year will be better (sort of like so many voters around the country).  And at this point, I must inject this side note that what used to be a 26-year cycle of drought is now projected by some to be a longer 50-year cycle; indeed the forecast is for a warmer and drier winter as well.  If things don't improve, archeologists may have their answers as to why once-thriving cultures such as the Pueblo of  Chaco Canyon , Mesa Verde, Canyon de Chelly and others simp...
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