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Showing posts from July, 2014

Israel-Palestine conflict for dummies (like me)

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Times are tough in the Middle East right now- well, they have been tough for over 2000 years, but you know what I mean. Israel and Palestine are going at it like feral cats fighting in an alley. I never really understood the whole thing until a few years ago- most conflicts based on religion are confusing to most people anyway. To me, it seems like an asinine premise (for any religion) to kill people in the name God, and it seems like every religion has this dark period in its past.   This guy later died from, you guessed it, a snake bite. "But, TK, those snake handlers seem like a level-headed group, and they haven't started a holy war with the Westboro Church people, who also seem like they have a grasp on what God really wants." True, but there are really only a few religions in the world, but many spin offs based on philosophy differences. I am definitely no theologian, but when reading about the major and minor religions it looks like they are all pretty mu

My first (and last) pepper eating contest

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“Let’s bring this hot pepper pack to the cook out,” she said. “It will be fun!” she said. My in-laws had a 4 th of July cook out yesterday so the whole family went up to the mountains to visit, tell stories and eat some of my father-in-law’s grilling. My wife went to the store that morning to get a few things and came back with a pepper tasting kit. There were 6-8 peppers in there, mostly resembling habaneros, but there were a few smaller ones that looked really potent. After we had finished eating the BBQ, my wife brought the package of peppers out, along with some paper plates, and announced that we were going to have a pepper eating contest. Only 4 of us committed to the contest and the rest of the family gathered around with cell phones poised for photos and video. The package had a list of the peppers along with their heat index, not a Scoville rating, but a scale from 1 to 10 with a picture of the peppers and a brief description of each. We were going to start out on