Testes, "The Other White Meat," and More

Photo by John Hoff,
my door with a Sponge Bob
toy I found at the site of the
planned eco-village.

Things are moving forward in the sale of my house at 3016, so I can buy another house which is (I swear, good friends and neighbors) very nearby. Within SIGHT of 3016 6th.

Word on the street is...

...some of my neighbors REALLY don't want me to move. This is very gratifying. I only seek another house because a BIGGER HOUSE means I can have more guests, such as graduate students and young, idealistic college students (Karl Noyes, Alice Battey, Willie What's His Name, and more) who will be able to use my bigger house as a base of operations to bring their positive energy to the neighborhood.

Bigger house. Bigger yard. More guests. More room for all my books. A garage so my buddy Karl can convert diesel cars to run on vegetable oil. All that great stuff, and right in or at least NEAR the eco-village.

In the meantime, it sounds like I need to go to yet another meeting to move things forward on the possible purchase. Meetings. Arg. I'd rather be pounding nails. But you gotta do what you gotta do. As Kevin Gulden puts it so well, "We move at the speed of government!"

Testes, The Other White Meat

I got bold and asked what were the "organs" in the Thai organ stir fry. Ear and testes, I found out. Yeah, I thought that one organ was too pale for a kidney, even though it tasted rather kidney-like.

The clerk told me some of his friends who swear they like to try new things drew the line at testes. I told him to wait and see--I'd be back for seconds. I was more adventurous than his friends, even when it came to food. ESPECIALLY when it comes to food. My two biggest regrets about living in Texas: I left without trying armadillo or rattlesnake.

Texas, I'm coming back! WITH A FORK, BABY!!!!

So, anyway, the clerk told me testes are considered a very fine cut of meat in Thailand.

"So the King of Thailand eats pig testes?" I asked, pointing to His Majesty's visage above the rows of video cassettes.

Yes, the clerk asserted. The King certainly does.

Well, what more do you need to know? The King of Thailand is infallible and beyond reproach, or so I've read. I would never think to print a criticism of him.

Also, each time I go to Bangkok Market I try to update the owner on the latest going on in the neighborhood, such as the planned evictions at 3119 4th Street. I learned the owner was once very active in the Hawthorne Neighborhood Association, but other work has pulled him away. All the same, he seems glad to hear the latest scoop.

Some call it "gossip." I call it "increasing social capital."

My son Alex and his inventions

Oh, also, the camera crew came by and shot some video of me with my son. They are putting together a long film feature, planning to enter it in some kind of festival. I was very proud of my son as he stood in front of a dry erase board at the Humphrey Institute and explained his inventions, including a "sticky rope" for weak shipwreck victims needing to be rescued at sea, but too exhausted to cling to a rope.

He also had an interesting theoretical invention to protect cities by placing devices at their "perimeter" which would disrupt tornadoes by creating a "counter-tornado."

I asked my son (on camera) where the energy comes from to create the counter-tornado. Is it solar? Is it nuclear? He looked at me as though it was so obvious. How could I not realize?

"From the tornado itself," he explained.

This is the kid who decided--when he was 8 years old--he needed to go to MIT, because it was the best school to study robots. Tonight we watched Iron Man at the Mall of America. The robots which were the minor characters stole the show, as far as my son was concerned.