Does anyone else like straight-up anchovies? They do go best dressed on a pizza with a light layer of cheese but since I don’t do pizza anymore, I just eat anchovies. They give me a lot of happiness as do a number of other foods like fried plantains (my absolute favorite), coconut milk (makes anything taste better) and chocolate (pure heaven)

I made a really yummy broccoli, spinach, coconut soup this weekend and I recommend it to anyone who needs some color or coconut in their lives. It is easy to make: steam the broccoli and spinach till soft, then blend with coconut milk and then add some curry paste and salt to taste. I am sure most will prefer that to anchovies…

Aside from eating a lot of coconut stuff and I admit some “straight-up anchovies”, I saw many movies this weekend. Two of the three movies were on bowling. OK, not exactly on bowling per se but the act of bowling was in both movies, one movie which was “happy”, the other “not so happy.” Actually both go quite well together as well. The first was one of my all time favorites: The Big Lebowsi featuring the life and especially ethos of “the dude” while the second one was slightly less on the jovial, uplifting side: Bowling for Columbine.

Both are amazing films, obviously pretty different in their message although both really punch you quite hard, one making you laugh, the other leaving you more on the nauseous side. While the Big Lebowsi is about the “dude” and his particularly laid back and open lifestyle, Bowling for Columbine is about the “culture of fear” that is strangling America and helps to explain the general atmosphere of societal mistrust and strong American inclination to resort to violence. Moore did a brilliant job at unearthing the ethos of fear and mistrust that is now becoming the underlying warp and woof of America society, an unspoken cultural grid that is being perpetuated especially by and through the media. The amazing thing is that this culture of fear is not simply the “fear of violence and others” but spans into so many other parts of the American psyche like fear instilled by a legal system where the threat of a lawsuit is at every corner or the fear of that one cannot provide for one’s family as things like healthcare and education are so damn expensive and are really up to the individual to provide for. It runs so much deeper than even depicted in the movie.

Anyway, there is a lot more that can be said about the “fear and loathing” in America but it is best to end with “the dude” as he represents the like the total antithesis to a person imprisoned by the shackles of mistrust. We can all benefit from some chilling out to keep free from those shackles:

“Fortunately, I’m adhering to a pretty strict, uh, drug, uh, regimen to keep my mind, you know, uh, limber.” Wise words, dude.