My mom had a friend over the other day who discovered a praying mantis in our living room. She calmly asked my mom for a paper towel, and used it to pick up the critter. Mom thought her friend was going to release it outside, but instead the woman crushed it in her paper towel and threw it in the trash.
If I had been there I would have screamed.
Mom, possessing better manners than I, and still a bit stunned, said nothing. We don’t kill praying mantises here. We treasure them. If we find them around the yard, we pick them up and take them to the garden. They have a voracious appetite for the bugs that do the most garden damage. Just last week I found this gal chomping on juicy tomato worm. A worm that had already stripped 3 or 4 leaves from my one tomato plant.
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Tina Seelig, Executive Directory for the Stanford Technology Ventures Program
Tina Seelig is the Executive Director for the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, and one of the most truly brilliant and creative people I have ever met. In addition to a PHD from Stanford Medical School in Neurology, she’s written many books, educational cards for kids, and is a serial entrepreneur. I recently listened to this talk she gave at Stanford, and then played it again just to take notes. She has great advice for those legions of young women and men starting out their careers, including (my notes in italics):
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Who would have thought that something as unassuming as salt could provide the basis for such a fascinating tour through time? In Salt: A World History author Mark Kurlansky gives us a history of the world, from the perspective of the salt trade. Although we take our table salt completely for granted these days, in the not so distant past the ability to access salt was critical for a society’s survival. The main use was for preserving food – cod, herring, cabbage, meat. Those countries who had an ample supply of salt could equip armies, live through winters, and engage in the profitable trade of food that would otherwise spoil without salt. Empires have been built, massive fortunes have been made and lost, all to do with controlling the salt trade. Even in nature, where there are salt licks, there are animals, taking in this simple compound so necessary for physical survival.
Kurlansky starts us off in China four thousand years ago where the act of drilling was first invented to access brine from salt wells, and takes us up all the way to the present with the Morton and Cargill companies dominating salt production worldwide. The book is extremely well researched and filled with interesting detail. A must read for any lover of history or of food.
Here’s to the crazy ones.
The misfits. The rebels.
The troublemakers. The round
pegs in the square holes – the
ones who see things differently.
They’re not fond of rules and
they have no respect for
the status quo. You can praise
them, disagree with them,
quote them, disbelieve them,
glorify or vilify them.
About the only thing that you
can’t do is ignore them.
Because they change things.
– an Apple Computer Ad, 1997
One of the great tragedies of our time is that in our desperate incapacity to cope with the complexities of our world, we oversimplify every issue and reduce it to a neat ideological formula. Doubtless we have to do something in order to grasp things quickly and effectively. But unfortunately this “quick and effective grasp” too often turns out to be no grasp at all, or only a grasp on a shadow. The ideological formulas for which we are willing to tolerate and even provoke the destruction of entire nations may one day reveal themselves to have been the most complete deceptions….The American conscience is troubled by a sense of tragic ambiguity in our professed motives for massive intervention. Yet in the name of such tenuous and questionable motives we continue to bomb, to burn, and to kill because we think we have no alternative, and because we are reduced to a despairing trust in the assurance of “experts” in whom we have no real confidence.
Thomas Merton
You may be capable of great things,
But life consists of small things.
-Den Ming~Dao