Jim Garrett @JimG@toot.cat
Mathematical non-mathematician, Middle Eastern music, amateur musician, anti-imperialist, Software Freedom advocate, environmentalist. White cis male >50. Completely out of step.
Joined Mar 2020
Jim Garrett
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Þe Olde Mastodoun Innstance: Being a Location for the Gathering of Perſonnes of Like Mind and Spirit for the Exchange of Talk and Experience
Jim Garrett
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Jim Garrett
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My #Monday morning face. 😸
(Click image for full view.)
#Qualitätskatzen #CatsOfMastodon #Mastocats #Cats #Greece #Agistri
(photo: @kernpanik | license: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
Jim Garrett
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Jim Garrett
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i've been on and off moving some things around in our house during my jazz listening today (so the currently upbeat good ass Patrice Rushen tracks are helpful) and my brain, when directing my body to do repetitive low attention tasks like "move stuff from a to b", wanders.
today it wandered to family music.
so, while I'm taking a break from wearing a path in some floors, I'm going to ramble, thread-style.
Jim Garrett
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@ajroach42 @djsundog One of my favorite observations about this is a passage from Vonnegut's "Bluebeard":
“...simply moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but world's champions.... A moderately gifted person has to keep his or her gifts all bottled up until, in a manner of speaking, he or she gets drunk at a wedding and tap-dances on the coffee table like Fred Astaire or Ginger Rogers. We have a name for him or her. We call him or her an "exhibitionist." How do we reward such an exhibitionist? We say to him or her the next morning, "Wow! Were you ever drunk last night!”"
Jim Garrett
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Every box in our home is individually and carefully tested for assured emptiness.
Jim Garrett
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I'm learning Scottish #Gaelic and oinline I use
- #duolingo for learning the #language (in addition to the books I bought)
- #LearnGaelic as dictionary, general reference and sometimes for grammar https://www.learngaelic.net
- (slightly coughing 😊 ) Google as translation service https://translate.google.com/?sl=gd&tl=en&op=translate
Question to all the #gàidhlig learners and speakers: which online resources (dictionaries, courses, translation sites, reference, ... ) do you use or would you recommend?
#boost welcome
Jim Garrett
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‘It’s about self-love’: the black women busting beauty myths in west Africa | Global development | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/apr/29/its-about-self-love-the-black-women-busting-beauty-myths-in-west-africa
More great Australian political satire I just came across
Honest Government Ad | The Fires - YouTube
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6BmbvTvFQ3g
Jim Garrett
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as we talk about the morality of vaccine patents
i think it is a nice time to also remember historical precident
jonas salk did not patent the polio vaccine. he went out of his way to make sure it was not patented.
he never got rich. he actively made sure he didn't get rich off of it.
but that history is full of stories about how for the rest of his life, jonas salk did not have to ever pay for a beer in any bar in this country. he would get on airplanes and once somebody recognized his name, the entire damn plane would stand up and clap for him. he constantly had hotel rooms comped, meals for free at restaurants, thus and so.
because he was surrounded by people who knew he had saved their children from having to ever consider the fear of an iron lung, and were overwhelmingly grateful for it.
he was always modest and demure when recognized thusly. but i think that when people start saying "well why else would someone make a vaccine, if not to get paid for it and hold the patent", i think it is good to remember these stories. the world did not punish jonas salk for not patenting the polio vaccine. the world loved him for it. maybe not in the structures that billionaires are most used to. but they did love him for it, in small ways, in humble ways, on the individual level.
Jim Garrett
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Too many people still don't understand that you don't need to be a racist person or acting with malice to perpetuate racism and cause harm.
Jim Garrett
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Jim Garrett
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Yesterday's threads: Laundering torturers' reputations with copyfraud; Foxconn's Wisconsin death-rattle; John Deere's dismal infosec; and more!
https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/106115550006997288
7/
Cool info about some plants.
The strange, amazing stories behind six everyday plants | Plants | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/apr/24/the-strange-amazing-stories-behind-six-everyday-plants
Ramadan mubarak to any Muslims who may read this.
To Muslims and non-Muslims alike, here is some beautiful meditative devotional chanting (Zhikr/Dikr) from the Turkish Sufi tradition that I just came across. Put it on play and bliss out for an hour.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_nQ9K65R8YWCzggl1JXZ8egfX_yNZGRjFI
The leader of the group, Oruç Güvenç, who passed away a few years ago, was apparently a devoted Sufi, a great musician, a PhD clinical psychologist, and a music therapist:
Dog and Snake got together and out came Cat.
Watch your cat(s) for a bit and you'll realize this is true.
I'm a cat lover and this is not intended as a criticism.
Mathematical non-mathematician, Middle Eastern music, amateur musician, anti-imperialist, Software Freedom advocate, environmentalist. White cis male >50. Completely out of step.
Joined Mar 2020
