Air War

Right now I'm eating strawberries with powdered sugar, and they taste absolutely delicious. I love how the powdered sugar gets sopped up by the strawberry juice so you end up with a sweet, sweet glaze covering your precious berries. My favorite part is cleaning the bowl of the leftover glaze when all the strawberries are gone. Mmmm!

Speaking of strawberries, do you know how few countries actually produce them? A slim few! In the US, they are primarily grown in California (over 80%) with roughly twenty percent coming out of Florida. Aside from that, they are only grown in Canada, Mexico, select Latin American countries, and New Zealand! Apparently, the demand for strawberries in Europe is so great right now that any unused cargo space on England-bound commercial airlines is being occupied entirely by carts and carts of strawberries.

While we're on the topic of commercial airlines, my boss shared a wild story with me at work today that involves a woman being upgraded to First Class on British Airways after dying in Coach! Read about it here.

As for other news, I don't have much. The past few weeks have been filled with applying to a graduate program in Marriage and Family Therapy at Cal State Fullerton, eating, sleeping, working (not too many hours, unfortunately), and socializing a bit. With Angela home for Spring break and Jeff back from Peru for a week's visit, my weekend was pretty eventful. Of note is the show I went to with Matt and Angela on Saturday night at EXPLX, a venue in the basement of the Echo in Echo Park. Matt and I had been anticipating seeing Crystal Castles there for a couple months, and Angela gladly accompanied us. The ticket price was steep, $17, and Crystal Castles only played four or five songs because they were the opening act. Since we only went to the show to see them, it was pretty disappointing that they didn't get a longer set. The main act, the Presets, were pretty terrible, and the people they drew in seemed to be, too. At least everyone became very obnoxious once the Presets took the stage, pushing thier way to the front and dancing and flailing about with no regard for others. The sound was awful, too, and the bar situation was pretty out-of-control. We ended up leaving a couple songs into the Preset's set, but at least I got to see Crystal Castles. They are so likable!

Anyway, I need to get going. I'm working on a "book talk" for my Western Civilization class, which is rather unexciting. I read a book called African Origin of Biological Psychiatry, and it was positively horrible. Not only was the text full of countless grammatical and punctuation errors, but the content was appalling. The message was very clear but totally unsubstantiated. Here it is:

Humanity may differ in outer appearance, with variations of colors, but internally they are all black, all African at the core. The question for all humans is how to relate to this blackness.

The author, Richard King, posits that civilization began in Africa and that the early accomplishments of the Greeks and Romans were actually "stolen legacies" from the Africans that had come centuries before them. It all seems a bit curious to me...