For the first time ever, I almost didn’t manage to park in front of the supermarket. I don’t know what it is everybody else is getting but I set out for some flour and finally managed to buy some. For two weeks, I’ve been trying to buy the blasted flour, but whenever I get to the store, somebody calls or emails or something happens to distract me and I end up buying sugar instead. I have so much sugar at home right now that it’s starting to look like a confectioner’s. And we don’t even have anybody here who eats white sugar.
Flour, Finally
Clarissa's Blog 
May I recommend converting sugar to alcohol? 🙂
Merry Christmas!
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You can always use all that sugar to make samogon.
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I’m so virtuous that it never even occurred to me.
I saw samogon once, and it looked unappetizing.
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Even the hooligans in my high school knew how to make it better – at some point they tried to commission me to build a distiller with a carbon purification stage… 🙂 🙂 Offered me ten rubles. 🙂
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And thus began a scientist’s career. . . 🙂
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This particular offer I declined. I did, however, attempt worse things. Bombs being the safest among them. 🙂
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God, I surely had a useless childhood, as I know realize. 😦
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But there must have been some defining childhood interest that turned you into a linguist?
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Given that my father was teaching me morphology and syntax at the age of 4, I don’t think I had much of a choice. 🙂 Not that I’m complaining.
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More than a few years ago when I was livin gin a teachers dorm I saw a friend (Bulgarian) coming out of the small food store in the ground floor looking kind of disappointed. She explained that she had to buy raisins because they were out of fish.
I spent some time trying to figure that one out and failed (like most things she said, she definitely marched to the beat of her own drummer).
Compared to that, sugar instead of flour almost kind of makes sense.
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It does make sense. Sugar and flour are located next to each other at the store and come in identically shaped packages.
Raisins and fish I can’t figure out, though.
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You have tea, you have sugar, so put them together …
http://www.southernliving.com/food/entertaining/iced-tea-recipes/iced-tea-recipes-southern-sweet-tea
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It could have been worse than confusing flour and sugar.
Years ago when I was a psychiatrist at a state free clinic in California, I had a patient who was extremely upset because he’d spent his last $50 bucks on what he thought was marijuana — and as soon as she got back to his apartment, his cat took one sniff of the bag and went wild.
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In 1961, not even Kurt Vonnegut could foresee the “IT-revolution” of today – nobody could imagine the Internet, the World Wide Web, Facebook – or iPhones and other iStuff. In the short story below, Vonnegut just uses distracting noise to interrupt peoples’ thinking – it is “radioed” into their heads. But now – close enough – almost everybody is chained with the slave manacles of social media, email, texting, Instagram and so on and on.
Maybe this is too lengthy to posts here, but I don’t mind if you remove it.
https://archive.org/stream/HarrisonBergeron/Harrison%20Bergeron_djvu.txt
“A buzzer sounded in George’s head. His thoughts fled in panic, like bandits
from a burglar alarm.”
“George was toying with the vague notion that maybe dancers shouldn’t be handicapped. But he didn’t get very far with it before another noise in his ear radio scattered his thoughts . George winced. So did two out of the eight ballerinas. Hazel saw him wince. Having no mental handicap herself, she had to ask George
what the latest sound had been.
“Sounded like somebody hitting a milk bottle with a ball peen hammer, ” said
George .
“I’d think it would be real interesting, hearing all the different sounds,”
said Hazel a little envious. “All the things they think up.”
“Urn, ” said George.
“Only, if I was Handicapper General, you know what I would do?” said Hazel.
Hazel, as a matter of fact, bore a strong resemblance to the Handicapper
General, a woman named Diana Moon Glampers. “If I was Diana Moon Glampers,”
said Hazel, “I’d have chimes on Sunday- just chimes. Kind of in honor of
religion . ”
“I could think, if it was just chimes,” said George.
“Well-maybe make ’em real loud,” said Hazel. “I think I’d make a good
Handicapper General.”
“Good as anybody else,” said George.
“Who knows better then I do what normal is?” said Hazel.
“Right,” said George. He began to think glimmeringly about his abnormal son
who was now in jail, about Harrison, but a twenty-one-gun salute in his head
stopped that.
“Boy!” said Hazel, “that was a doozy, wasn’t it?” ”
https://archive.org/stream/HarrisonBergeron/Harrison%20Bergeron_djvu.txt
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron
“”Harrison Bergeron” is a satirical and dystopian science-fiction short story written by Kurt Vonnegut and first published in October 1961. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, the story was republished in the author’s Welcome to the Monkey House collection in 1968.
The story was written as a satire to offer a critique on people’s claims that we should all be equal.[1] It has been embraced by those critical of egalitarianism as an allegory of caution against socially enforced equality, more specifically the dangers of enforcing equality by virtue of leveling.[2]”
“In the year 2081, amendments to the Constitution dictate that all Americans are fully equal and not allowed to be smarter, better-looking, or more physically able than anyone else. The Handicapper General’s agents enforce the equality laws, forcing citizens to wear “handicaps”: masks for those who are too beautiful, radios inside the ears of intelligent people, and heavy weights for the strong or athletic.”
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William Blake’s “mind-forged manacles” covers all those frames of thoughts that are stronger than chains of steel. The IT craze, drugs, gambling, sex – he seems to not dare include religion, just vaguely hint it. As that of authority.
London – BY WILLIAM BLAKE (1794)
I wander thro’ each charter’d street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow.
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every Man,
In every Infants cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear
How the Chimney-sweepers cry
Every blackning Church appalls,
And the hapless Soldiers sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls
But most thro’ midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlots curse
Blasts the new-born Infants tear
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/172929
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“[William Blake] seems to not dare include religion, just vaguely hint it.”
I don;t know, are we talking about the same dude who claimed that “Prisons are built with stones of law, brothels with bricks of religion” or not 😛
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