5 Things I Thought About While Maple-ing

Is Maple-ing a Word? It is now!

I tapped my maple trees a little early this year because the weather forecast called for a couple of warm days and I wasn’t going to get cheated out of the first flows of sap. But to be honest I could have waited another week. The trees needed to thaw first, and then start the flow, but no harm no foul. The sap is running now and I had a good fire on my outdoor stove yesterday, reducing the first 40 gallons to just 4. There’s a lot of time to sit and think during maple-ing, especially when the sky is blue and the temperature climbs to 59F, and this is just a few of my thoughts from the other day. I’ll take some video and update as this end of winter tradition continues. If you enjoy False Choices please take a moment to

1. They don’t hate you for lying. We are surrounded by lies; it’s like walking next to the water’s edge at Good Harbor beach and you suddenly realize your head is now in the middle of a huge whirling ball of gnats. Hollywood entertainment, like movies and TV dramas, is just a polite term for lies; well made lies hopefully, that actually shine a light on some eternal truth, but recently our entertainments are just terrible lies. But it seems that many people who watch a lot of TV and movies have come to believe the lies are real. We see a morality in the movies that most of us would not think of adopting in real life, and yet some people do. For example, we often see people in movies or TV shows who won’t take the first shot when their life is in danger because in TV fiction taking the first shot means you’re not a ‘perfect’ good person. Apparently you have to wait for your attacker to miss before you can defend yourself. You might laugh at this idea, but California is poised to pass a law that makes it a felony to shoot an invader during a home invasion. I’m not sure what would happen if he shoots first and misses and then you shoot him, but my guess is that you would have to hire a really good lawyer and have some video evidence that the invader shot first. The people who believe that the attacker must fail to kill you before you can defend yourself are morally superior to the rest of us and much beloved.

2. They hate you for telling the truth. Do you think I’m lying? Consider the following examples of people who were, and in some cases, still are, hated:

   • The people who said there was no collusion between Russia and Trump, including Robert Mueller who headed the investigation and came up with zilch, were detested and called Russian assets

   • The pros who said herd immunity was a good idea and the economic and school lockdowns were bad ideas (very much hated)

   • People who wouldn’t take the jab (which almost no one takes anymore)

   • The pros from military and foreign policy who said Ukraine could not win a war against Russia

   This is not an exhaustive list, and I only mention it because I have come to the conclusion that whomever the mainstream narrative hates is probably closer to the truth than the people whom they love.

3. Entropy is an interesting concept, it says that things tend to move to disorder, randomness, uncertainty, unpredictability, and that this tendency increases over time. Ideas, processes, systems, everything we build and even our physical bodies and our individual and collective lives seem to follow the law of entropy. A man walks into a wilderness which looks like a mess. There’s detritus everywhere; dead trees, fallen branches and leaves a foot thick. He starts to clear it out and after years of effort he has a productive little farm that raises enough food for him and his family and the many others who buy his surplus. His son takes it over and continues to build the farm, but the grandson goes away to school to study economics and never returns, disdaining the hard life of the farm for the easier life of the city where, let’s be honest, there are more women and higher pay. The farm falters and is sold. The new owner tries to make a go of it but it’s hard to make a profit on a small farm when large farms are more efficient, more mechanized and you have to compete with farms the world over. The bank takes over the farm. Eventually the farm is abandoned and then one day darkness arrives and one of the outbuildings becomes a meth lab. The meth is sold in the nearby city and untold numbers of lives are ruined through addiction, lost education, car accidents, unwanted pregnancy. But bigger farms are successful and economists are upbeat on the overall numbers! Plus, we can import the same products for less $ than our failed farm once charged! Who dares to complain? The cost of the abandoned farm is not part of the calculations, of course, since it’s no longer working. There is a good deal of flailing about, wringing of hands and crying into the wind about the harshness of city life these days. That’s the story of society’s entropy. The economist’s son totals the family sedan. Full circle, full stop.

4. Men and women are very similar, but are extraordinarily different at the same time. How can this be? Whether it’s personality or preferences we overlap a lot, yet when we make decisions for ourselves we go in opposite directions most, but not all, of the time. It’s amazing to think that puberty starts about 12 or 13 years old, and yet by 18 most boys and girls have somehow figured out themselves, the world, and their place in it and decided in their own choices, their own decisions, to adopt their own preferences. Most boys, but not all, are interested in things, while most girls, but not all, are interested in people. It’s become an article of faith in our society that we are born as ‘blank slates’ and our preferences can be engineered in a way to provide everyone with maximum freedom to determine their own lives, which is of course wonderful; in other words, we try very hard not to pigeon hole people, especially young people, into one set of choices or another, which is of course the best way. Yet at the end of the day, the great majority of boys and girls make their own selections for work and most but not all boys choose to work with things, and most but not all girls choose to work with people. It’s not unusual to see the most ardent believers in humans as ‘blank slates’ nod with approval when their own children make choices along the same lines that thousands of generations before them have done. And a few girls will choose mechanical engineering, and a few boys will choose nursing, and that’s great if that’s their preference.

5. The turducken comes up in the news every so often, like this week for example, with the start of NFL free agency. The history is that the very famous NFL coach and broadcaster John Madden invented the word ‘turducken’ and it has now become part of the lore of the NFL. The turducken is a deboned chicken, inside of a deboned duck inside of a deboned turkey. The whole ‘thing’ is then roasted to a deep golden brown and eaten by NFL types with their bare hands. It’s obviously a primal male ritual performed by men who love the field of battle. Oddly, while Madden invented the word ‘turducken’ he did not invent the concept of the multi stuffed bird. Where does the idea come from you ask, though in the back of your mind you probably already know the answer: France! Yes, the French, like those pictured below, have a long history of bizarre food stuffings: vegetables, seafood, red meat or poultry, the French love to stuff one thing inside of another inside of another: Quails inside of pigeons inside of pheasants served with mushrooms inside of vegetables inside of potatoes. I cannot think of two things more opposite in this world than the French and the NFL. Go figure.

   

   That’s the future Ambassador to The United States of America on the right. Touchdown!