The Merits of TVlessness.

In addition to despising car use, I avoid TV like a plague as the web makes it even more worthless than it was before.

I'm literally crosseyed from watching it too closely as a toddler in a reversal of the Mimirs well myth regarding Odin. He gave up an eye to drink from the wisdom well. I half wrecked sight to imbibe imbecility.

And it is mildly galling to see how much time my beloved lefty blogosphere devotes to TV drivel from hacks like Billious O'Biley as it is a reactive posture rather than leapfrogging ahead to excite yearning supporters of a progressive future on how to actually build it.

There is so much education to share on sustainability, clearing house options on how to disengage corporate encroachment and how to finish off the flailing, self destructive GOP with real exciting ideas on how to get off the ratrace oil consumer debt treadmill in a way that allows people to thrive and prosper.

If we generate excitement about a better future with resources at hand people will be thrilled with the empowerment. It is what Liddle Hart would call the indirect method.

Knitting the Fabric of Community.

The corporate world needs to see us as little walking profit centers and finds it convenient to herd us into isolating demographic corrals to expedite sales and quarterly earnings.

Naturally this has little to do with our actual world and long standing bent to forming community and some succumb to these pernicious promptings and fall into a stylized cartoonish solipsism.

One direct and essential way to begin a national reclamation is to turn away from these hollow promptings and toward one another.

I got started on this blogging adventure because a wise friend who is also a shrewd investor told me about a visionary market analyst who has proposed the theory of 'Little Brother' as the greatest threat to the lying sloppy content oligopoly such as ABC News.

Google's 'pipeline' business model allows nearly anyone to report news, and so on and based on my preferences, the citizen blogosphere is leaving the Rupert Murdoch model behind.

Why wait for them to figure out charming satirical whimsy wedded to thought provocation when Citizen Boo is already on it?

When I lived in Seattle, I was acquainted with employee number 5 at Amazon. He left and ended up wealthy, but we'd have these conversations about 'Internet ubiquity' based on the number of search engine citations for something.

A slimier version dreamed up by marketing shills is now called 'going viral'. The ubiquity I propose is a more ethical, deliberate and thoughtful thing that intends to unite rather than exploit by 'viral' niche compartmentalization..

I try to be conscientious about serving my constituent readers in several areas of discourse because I see potentially uniting commonalities between progressive political bloggers, anti consumerist initiatives like SF Compact, fans of Avante Garde Jazz and the alt rock night club demi monde.

I readily move in all those spheres and a few more and when I see some mosaic pattern of interrelated community cohere through my modest efforts it lends a sense of purpose to my crackpot life.

Bateson Learning Theory and Metalogs.

Gregory Bateson was one of the 20th centuries' great thinkers and his specialty was learning theory. He was married for a time to another great thinker, Margaret Mead, and they had a daughter who may well still teach at Harvard.

A basic explanation of learning theory turns on levels of learning. The most basic level of learning might be the way a planeria 'learns' to sense levels of heat and light and moves to the zones most useful to survival.

The next level is one we are familiar with whereby one begins to make conclusions about basic information. There are new elements such as play or pretend versions of contingent real circumstances. Squirrels do this as do we.

Level three is where we begin to derive conclusions about level two like those great 'everything I know is wrong' epiphanies that sometimes visit a life in some great break through that leads to a more dynamic participation in ones life, a shedding of baggage.

This, of course, can also be hazardous and lead to madness.

Those of you who wonder about all this are encouraged to find a copy of his "Steps Toward an Ecology of the Mind", a classic.

Now, in the winter of 2002, I ended up having a lively e mail correspondence with a brilliant Englishwoman I met through here semi scabrous naughty erotic literature web site. She is a math teacher somewhere in the midlands, an old radical who loved Gang of Four shows when she went to college in Leeds.

We became great pen pals for a time but never discussed dirty stuff. I'd explain my weird Seattle existence and share ideas so one time I told her about Bateson's meta dialogs and here is here wonderful reply. Best to you"Emily" wherever you are, (spellings are in her Brit English).

"So I was reading the Metadialogue about meta messages, and then I got it, the progression from baby to adult understanding of messaging,(and the annoying way many knuckleheaded blokes are still stuck at a child level of development)."

"1. You start off, as a child, having to be sent explicit messages - metamessages - about what your messages are going to be about:

- this is play; this is serious; this is instruction."

"2.But soon you get so reading the metamessages, that you start to play with them.

- you use teasing, irony, sarcasm, taking things literally, exaggeration, to pretend you mistook one metamessage for another."

"3. Then you get better, and you blend the message and the metamessage together,

-weaving sense and nonsense, blurring reality and fiction - is a documentary recreation documentary, or fiction?"

"4. You end up withdrawing from metamessages altogether,

-leaving just the message and letting you decide what metamessage you'd like to impose on it."

"5. Till one day you realise you don't have to impose,

- you can just let the message be and admire it from all metamessage angles."

"Soooo, what annoys me about the people who email me with that aged question, is this all real, is they haven't moved off the childish level one and I'm at level five."

"Thanks Chris, that helped a lot to answer that bug-bear."

Damn, I miss her.

Elevated Meatloaf.

Meatloaf is a seemingly humble thing, a relic of 50's kitchens.

But if you take it as a food concept departure point for elevation it goes from the droll to the sublime.

All meatloaves need 2 or 3 eggs and some bread crumbish thing from crushed Wheaties to mashed triscuits to ensure binding and if hamburger is used, it should be the 75% grade as the leaner stuff resists binding.

350 degrees F. is a good temperature and an hour or internal temp of 165 degrees is a good cooking guideline.

Those are the essentials. Beyond that any combination of ground beef, pork, turkey or veal for the truly heartless, will work well.

Chicken and lamb are probably out. Ground lamb is its own world, Shawarma, and chicken has a lame texture.

Beyond that, the possibilities are wonderful. Among the additions to make a fun flavor and texture mix would be shallots, leeks, garlic or scallions for the stink lily family.

Walnuts rule and almonds may as well or chopped pecans, maybe even hazelnuts.

Celery is welcome or chopped bell peppers of whatever color, hot peppers maybe if you gotta have a scoville factor and mushrooms are all great plant kingdom things. I've used dried black fungus 'shrooms from Asian markets and fresh baby portobellos.

And then, another oddly fun thing are tinned smoked oysters. Oyster flavor and beefish flavor get along swimmingly. The chinese oyster ketchup is another variant on the oyster flavor element. You can also go wild with worcestershire or A-1 Steak sauce.

For the spice element, the triumvirate of herbs, sage, rosemary and thyme clearly lead, paprika is another option or its sexy Spanish cousin, pimenton la vera, a bit of white ground pepper or coarse crushed black tellicherry peppercorns as your whim suggests, and also some coarse sea or kosher salt.

Meatloaf is a creation that embraces an informed whimsy.

Once you've dumped all this stuff in a big bowl, knead it with your washed hands and blend it all around. Meatloaf is primal. Then fashion it into a long flatish loaf maybe a few inches high and the length of the standard broiler pan, width will depend on batch size but 6 to 8 inches seems to work well.