What We Eat & Why

People will eat anything that lives in the water. Like raw oysters. They're good and everything, but they're also pretty disgusting. If oysters lived in trees no one would ever even think to crack one open and slurp it down. Also shrimp. Pretty disgusting. If they lived on land we would call them bugs.

French people eat snails, which is pretty gross, but at least they cook them and don't just suck them raw out of the shell. French people eat frog legs too, and I understand that a lot of Cajuns do as well, but then Cajuns are kind of French rednecks. I don't know who was the first one to think of that, but whoever it was was really really hungry I bet. I just don't get why they don't go on and eat the rest of the frog.

For the most part, people eat mammals, birds and fish but they leave reptiles, amphibians and bugs alone. I know someone is going to argue with that and say that some people eat alligator or rattlesnake or frog legs, but you can't go into the grocery store and pick up a package of Alligator Helper or Shake 'N Bake for frog.

Open Your Mind

One of the worst things you can be is close-minded. People say you should always be open to new things and new ideas and new experiences and if you're not then you're close-minded and this is a very bad thing. But to me, when someone says "I hate it when people are close-minded," what they are really saying is "I hate when people disagree with me."

Let's say some guy believes in UFOs and he encounters some super-smart skeptical scientist guy who doesn't believe in UFOs. One of the first things the UFO guy is going to say to the scientist guy is that he's close-minded. It doesn't matter if the scientist guy has considered the possibility of UFOs or examined the evidence himself and just reached a different conclusion than the UFO guy. All that matters is that the scientist guy is not going to be swayed by whatever the UFO guy has to say, and so the UFO guy says that the scientist guy is close-minded and this is a bad thing.

Say there's a fundamentalist Christian guy who doesn't believe in evolution and there's another scientist guy who does. Or someone is pro-choice and someone else is pro-life. Or one person is a union leader and another person is CEO of a big company. It doesn't really matter what the issues are, but at some point someone is going to say "Why can't you be more open-minded?" which translated means "Why don't you just accept everything I say, and why are you making me work so hard to prove my point?"

OK, let's say this geologist guy drills down into the center of this huge rock and there's something he can't explain. It doesn't matter what it is. Say a bird flies out of it. An actual living bird under like a million tons of solid rock. They don't know how it got there or what it ate down there or whatever. The scientist guy will write it up in a journal and record everything he did and observed, especially if he managed to catch the bird because he would cut it up and do all kinds of tests on it. Religious people would call it a miracle, especially if it happened in like India or Mexico or someplace like that. But the scientist would never in a million years think "Maybe God had something to do with it." Not only that, but a lot of other scientists would start saying he imagined it or the bird was actually somewhere else or whatever, and those guys weren't even there to see it so how would they know? The point is, the scientists, even the ones who were there and saw it, would start calling the religious people close-minded.

Religious people can be just as bad, though, especially when it comes to miracles and things like that. What I mean is, I learned very early in life never to question someone who claims to see the face of the Virgin Mary in a water-stain. And never doubt a Pentecostal who says he had lunch with Jesus. And just smile and nod when a hippy says they knew you in a past life.

Everybody kind of has their minds made up about some things, like science or religion or politics. It doesn't do any good to argue about them, and it certainly doesn't do any good to point fingers and call names. It just seems to me these days that you're not supposed to believe in anything and if you do you're "close-minded". It seems like its wrong to have made any decisions or reached any conclusions.

This is especially true if you believe in anything spiritual, because we're made to believe that anything you can't prove is just made up. Science is real and steady and rock-solid.

Well like a year or so ago I read an article that said now a lot of them scientist guys are thinking that modern man may not be a descendant of Neanderthal man. You'd think something like this would stir up a lot of controversy, but it didn't. About ten years ago I read that life on earth was not six billion years old, as previously thought, but instead it was seven billions years old. In other words, they were off by A BILLION YEARS. And you know how they say that dinosaurs all died off when an asteroid hit the earth? Well, now they say they evolved into birds.

I'm not trying to sell anything here. I'm just saying, what a science guy believed 20 years ago, maybe a science guy today would call him an idiot. But God forbid someone should believe something different than a science guy.

I'm also not saying that it doesn't matter what you believe. I think it totally does matter what you think and what you say and how you live. I think there is a truth that's bigger than anything I could believe. I think that God is God apart from however anyone understands Him. But if what I believe isn't going to change or affect what's real and what's true, then arguing about it isn't going to, either.

See, no one really wants you to be open-minded unless you disagree with them. And then its only supposed to be a one-way thing. If you were truly open-minded all the time, you would never be able to make decisions or reach goals, you would be fidgety all the time and easily distracted. That's why people take Ritalin and stuff like that.

On the other hand, it's considered admirable to be driven and ambitious, to know what you want and not let anything get in your way and overcome incredible odds. People like that get these great rags-to-riches stories and their strength lies in the fact that they're NOT open to all these "possibilities" that get in their way.

I'm sure at some point in his life, John Wilkes Booth wanted nothing more than to be a great actor, until some dumb ass encouraged him to take an interest in politics. I'm sure King George thought that Washington and Jefferson and all those guys were pretty close-minded about letting the British keep a few colonies. What about Galileo? What about Columbus? Maybe Galileo should have been more open to what the Pope was saying about the sun going around the earth.....and maybe Columbus should have been open to that Flat Earth theory and just called up Isabella and cancelled his trip.