Stories

I value learning from people who think differently. A lot of people seem to value cultural exchange. Probably the most different place from the United States I've visited is North Korea, twice. I grew up equating flying with travel and the only way to explore other cultures. Now that I've stopped flying, I see how I had made myself dependent and ignorant by a practice (flying) that is destroying cultures, homogenizing the world. I still want to learn from people with different backgrounds or who think differently. I've shared at length how much cooking seasonally and locally connects me with people from other places far more than going to restaurants of other cuisines, which are increasingly homogenized and homogenizing the world. Likewise with many other…

On July 21st last year, both the solar panel and power station broke. I don’t know why or how, but cutting-edge technology is prone to fail. As the next day would complete two months, double my goal and twenty times my expectation, I decided I could declare victory, reconnect the circuit, and plug back in the next day. You can hear me say so in my July 22 podcast episode, 609: Finishing My Off-the-Grid-in-Manhattan Experiment in Month 3. I said after recording, I could say I started my third month, plug back in, cook some lunch, and move on. Instead, after recording, I noticed I still had some sauerkraut fermenting and enough other summer vegetables to make salads to last me another day. Instead of…

The backstory: I emailed a reporter doing a story on me to ask when the story would post, sharing that I'm using the story to motivate me keeping the apartment off the grid. She wrote back, "Please please don’t continue on in this dark and freezing weather because of this story!" She then explained what was setting the pace, then continued, "please please don’t risk your health by going on the roof in these freezing temps for the sake of this one story deadline." I wrote back to allay her concerns. Later that day what I considered a funny silly story happened so I shared that story with her. Both help illuminate what I'm doing so here are both. To allay her concerns: To clarify,…

Because on the first day I watched in maybe a year or more, on October 23rd they played a Christmas ad! I'm posting partly because I was reminded that the universe started that day, exactly 6,026 years before (for details, scroll down). Anyway, here's the story: Podcast guest E.J. Perry was quarterback for Brown University when we recorded our episode. Possibly partly from being a guest, he signed with the Jacksonville Jaguars (likewise, after endorsing my book, General Lloyd Austin became U.S. Secretary of Defense and after appearing on my podcast Eric Adams became Mayor of New York City). I decided to watch Jacksonville play the New York Giants, which they did on October 23. It was hard to find a TV to watch since…