Double Agent

Our family occasionally eats Boca burgers. For anyone not familiar with them, they are a meatless alternative to hamburgers. They don't really taste like hamburgers and when I've read the ingredients, I've always been a little uneasy. Not surprisingly, there seems to be a lot of processing involved in getting vegetables to look like meat. Still, I do think they taste fine.

Last night we had a new kind of Boca Burger - Grilled Vegetable Boca Burger. The package describes this as "The ultimate veggie patty. Tender chunks of grilled zucchini, bell peppers, and corn with hints of garlic, onion, mozzarella and asiago cheeses."

So let me get this straight - you grind up vegetables and soybeans, add cheese extracts, binders and vegetable oils to make a paste. Then you form this paste into a patty to approximate meat. And then, because presumably, you think that real vegetables taste better? look nicer? are healthier? you add them back into this pretend meat? Is this a product that is vegetables trying to be meat trying to be vegetables? I don't get it. It gets me confused trying to figure out.

Maybe I'll just go have some celery instead.

May December

As I've grown older I've noticed several things about being a man. The older we get, the more delusional we become. This is no more evident than around young women. There can be 20 years difference between a woman and a middle aged man and he'll think he might have a shot at catching her eye. Put 30 years between them, and he'll be convinced.

Where does this hubris come from? Does it come from a society that assigns us more and more responsibility, stoking our egos, until finally we believe the impossible? Don't get me wrong, there is some value here. Without this sort of delusional belief, we wouldn't have conquered small pox, harnessed nuclear power or flown to the moon. And Harrison Ford wouldn't have married Calista Flockhart.

I suppose in the end whether the belief is arrogance or visionary depends upon our ability to achieve it and how it's viewed through the lens of history.

Also, no work has been done on the house for the last three months due to winter and life generally being busy. Blog updates have been and will be spotty for awhile yet.