I'm calling it that because the butcher behind the counter at the local market called out to me, helpfully, asking if I'd found everything all right. Personnel at this market are encouraged to ask that, and if the customer strikes up a conversation, they're allowed to follow it, at least a little ways.
My response was to say I knew the market like the back of my hand (which I've barely explored in any detail, but idiomatically it means "know quite well") but thanks to a gift from my moved-away neighbors, I was now developing more BBQ savvy. "You'd think an old guy like me would know everything there is to know about BBQ" I intoned, using my louder Bartonius voice, "not true, I'm just a beginner." The butcher perceptively remarked that we forget and grow rusty as well.
"Yes, and the technology is always changing" I agreed, "like I've got this chimney thing..., anyway, expect to see more of me." I thanked him for his early morning "meat therapy".
As I wandered away from the meats section, I was thinking about my concerns about meat eating, a behavior I indulge in, which quickly led to thoughts on the role of morality. To make a long story short, some of the best and most interesting work involves a delicate hand and a lot of empathy, and those habituated to bull in a china shop behavior e.g. lacking empathy, just won't have a prayer of landing such assignments.
However I do feel empathy for all of us who are meat, me one of them. Being meat has amazing properties and many novel ways to suffer. I'm watching my dog suffer loss of mobility day by day as I blog about it, as this form of degeneration has no cure but to start again with new meat, if one believes in "reincarnation" where "carne" is literally "meat" in Latin i.e. "to incarnate" is "to become meat".
There's a pun in English a lot of geeks use, rhyming "meet space" (the space of meetups) with "meat space". Per the meaning @ Meetup.com, a meetup is indeed a meat space event, and I would argue even cyber events involve lots of meat, not just silicon and plastic, as the meeters still need to incarnate in order to pilot their avatars. As long as one has a meat avatar, all events involving one have a meaty flavor.
That's just a fancy way of calling attention to some of the substantive consequences of enjoying ones presence as a mammal, in turn a member of the Meat Kingdom (many of the meats for sale and good for BBQ are not mammal meats, the set of animals being a superset of the mammal set).
My response was to say I knew the market like the back of my hand (which I've barely explored in any detail, but idiomatically it means "know quite well") but thanks to a gift from my moved-away neighbors, I was now developing more BBQ savvy. "You'd think an old guy like me would know everything there is to know about BBQ" I intoned, using my louder Bartonius voice, "not true, I'm just a beginner." The butcher perceptively remarked that we forget and grow rusty as well.
"Yes, and the technology is always changing" I agreed, "like I've got this chimney thing..., anyway, expect to see more of me." I thanked him for his early morning "meat therapy".
As I wandered away from the meats section, I was thinking about my concerns about meat eating, a behavior I indulge in, which quickly led to thoughts on the role of morality. To make a long story short, some of the best and most interesting work involves a delicate hand and a lot of empathy, and those habituated to bull in a china shop behavior e.g. lacking empathy, just won't have a prayer of landing such assignments.
However I do feel empathy for all of us who are meat, me one of them. Being meat has amazing properties and many novel ways to suffer. I'm watching my dog suffer loss of mobility day by day as I blog about it, as this form of degeneration has no cure but to start again with new meat, if one believes in "reincarnation" where "carne" is literally "meat" in Latin i.e. "to incarnate" is "to become meat".
There's a pun in English a lot of geeks use, rhyming "meet space" (the space of meetups) with "meat space". Per the meaning @ Meetup.com, a meetup is indeed a meat space event, and I would argue even cyber events involve lots of meat, not just silicon and plastic, as the meeters still need to incarnate in order to pilot their avatars. As long as one has a meat avatar, all events involving one have a meaty flavor.
That's just a fancy way of calling attention to some of the substantive consequences of enjoying ones presence as a mammal, in turn a member of the Meat Kingdom (many of the meats for sale and good for BBQ are not mammal meats, the set of animals being a superset of the mammal set).
