Was it the turkey? More specifically, was it the tryptophan in the turkey?
Well, yes and no. Turkey does contain a large amino acid called tryptophan. So eating turkey puts some tryptophan into your bloodstream. But there are lots of other large amino acids riding around in there too. And, of course, turkey isn’t all you gobble up at Thanksgiving. There’s a lot of other stuff on the Thanksgiving plate, and a lot of it is carbohydrates.
When you eat carbohydrates, the pancreas releases insulin, and one effect of that is to lower the levels of all the large amino acids in your blood — except for tryptophan. The upshot? You have relatively high levels of tryptophan in your blood, and in your brain that’s converted into the neurotransmitter serotonin, and that can make you sleepy.
More food art for Thanksgiving. Carl Warner explains this shoot:
Although there is a fair amount of waste, there is a lot of food left over which is always shared out with the team, though most of the food used in the sets have either been superglued or pinned, and neither of these makes for good eating.” This fishscape features rocks made of oyster shells and crab claws, boats made of marrows and asparagus, and a shining, silvery, slippery sea of fish
Of the 770 detainees grabbed here and there and flown to Guantánamo, only 23 have ever been charged with a crime. Of the more than 500 so far released, many traumatized by those “enhanced” techniques, not one has received an apology or compensation for their season in hell.
What they got on release was a single piece of paper from the American government. A U.S. official met one of the dozens of Afghans now released from Guantánamo and was so appalled by this document that he forwarded me a copy.
Dated Oct. 7, 2006, it reads as follows:
“An Administrative Review Board has reviewed the information about you that was talked about at the meeting on 02 December 2005 and the deciding official in the United States has made a decision about what will happen to you. You will be sent to the country of Afghanistan. Your departure will occur as soon as possible.”
That’s it, the one and only record on paper of protracted U.S. incarceration: three sentences for four years of a young Afghan’s life, written in language Orwell would have recognized.
We have “the deciding official,” not an officer, general or judge. We have “the information about you,” not allegations, or accusations, let alone charges. We have “a decision about what will happen to you,” not a judgment, ruling or verdict. This is the lexicon of totalitarianism. It is acutely embarrassing to the United States.
That is why I am thankful above all that the next U.S. commander in chief is a constitutional lawyer. Nothing has been more damaging to the United States than the violation of the legal principles at the heart of the American idea.
I realize that a great deal of the relief I feel at this Thanksgiving is the knowledge that the rule of law has a chance of being restored in America. Thanks for doing your part.
Most people don’t enjoy pricey wine more than the cheap stuff:
Individuals who are unaware of the price do not derive more enjoyment from more expensive wine. In a sample of more than 6,000 blind tastings, we find that the correlation between price and overall rating is small and negative, suggesting that individuals on average enjoy more expensive wines slightly less. For individuals with wine training, however, we find indications of a positive relationship between price and enjoyment. Our results are robust to the inclusion of individual fixed effects, and are not driven by outliers: when omitting the top and bottom deciles of the price distribution, our qualitative results are strengthened, and the statistical significance is improved further. Our results indicate that both the prices of wines and wine recommendations by experts may be poor guides for non-expert wine consumer.
When he hears the jingle of my keys as I come into the house, Isaiah drops whatever he is doing and comes thumping along on his stubby feet, half crying and half laughing his name for me, which is “Daa.” I pick him up, he wraps his short arms around my neck, rests his head on my shoulder, and goes, “Mmmmm.” He makes this noise over and over, like I am a warm bath, or a piece of candy, or maybe just a song with which he is harmonizing. Then the other boys crowd around, stepping on my toes, snuggling up close, grabbing hold like I am the tree of life. They have this completely backwards, because it is they who are life, but when this happens I wonder how heaven can be any better.
I have a very explicit reason for wanting to use the word "God." It’s the most powerful symbol humanity has created. We have been worshiping God or gods at least since the sacred earth mother 10,000 years ago in Europe. In the Abrahamic tradition, our sense of God has evolved. For example, the Israelites, 4,500 years ago, had Yahweh, who was a ferocious warrior, a law-giving God. That’s a very different god than the one that Jesus spoke of, a God of love. So our sense of God just in the Abrahamic tradition has evolved.
The question is whether we choose to take our most powerful, invented symbol and use it in a new way to mean the creativity in nature itself. Is it more astonishing to believe in a God who created everything that has come to exist — planets, galaxies, chemistry, life and consciousness — in six days? Or is it even more astonishing and awesome to believe what is almost certainly the truth: namely, that all of this came to be all on its own? I think the second.
The tidiness of Harvey Milk’s martyrdom gave the Gus van Sant movie a shape and a narrative. And within that tight frame, he let this life breathe a little with its contradictions and complexities. I remembered that Milk understood two things: that organizing a gay community from the ground up was essential if homosexuals were ever to be free of threat, persecution and violence; and that such a ghetto would never be enough – because the most vulnerable gays and lesbians and transgenders are destined to be born every day in the great heartland between the coasts. This is the paradox of gay existence that is often the source of so much misunderstanding. The outside world sometimes puts us in a box of cultural otherness – "San Francisco values" – while we are also, simultaneously, as integrated into normality as any heterosexual. Because we are your kids. We grew up in your homes. We can never be totally other when we are also totally mainstream. And so this movie was really about two gay men and the journey between them. The two gay men are Harvey Milk and Dan White. The two gay men are Barney Frank and Ted Haggard. The two gay men are Tony Kushner and Larry Craig. The two gay men are Frank Kameny and Roy Cohn. And as the years have passed by and HIV churned the gay world as powerfully as plagues and wars often do, these polarities were complemented by any number of variations in between.
What I’ve tried to express in my life is that there is a part of both these traditions within me and within most gay people.
I can no more stop loving my church than I can stop laughing with drag queens. I can no more abandon my political conservatism than I can my cultural liberalism. I can no more disown my own Catholic family than I can my dead gay friends. And the struggle of these years has been the insistence that all of this is true and none of it should be denied. Because we are human before we are gay; and humans are complicated, fascinating, vulnerable creatures. We are all virtually normal. The goal of the movement Milk helped propel is not to allow everyone the freedom to be gay so much as it is to allow everyone the freedom to be themselves.
This is not easy for anyone, let alone for homosexuals. For many across the centuries, it has been too much. Dan White, for one, could not reconcile the tensions. He either had to be totally normal or completely other. And the over-powering self-hatred this tension created drove him to murderous rage at the freedom and integration he couldn’t find for himself. And parts of the gay community couldn’t reconcile these tensions either (though without stooping to White’s violence) and resorted to pure rage and escapist pathologies as a way to cope. Our job now is to see the humanness of both stories and to build and integrate through them to something better and stronger and calmer. It is to leave neither White nor Milk behind.
Milk was a radical; but he was also a businessman. He had one true love; and yet couldn’t integrate it into a successful long-term relationship in his short life-time. He was a man of the streets and yet he also had to become a symbol of establishment power. The scene when he both stokes a rally-cum-riot and then calms it down captured the tension perfectly. He was a man of politics, but he was also only a politician in order to have the chance to be a human.
The movie’s brilliance is not that it begins and ends with his death as a reflection on the first and last things; it is that it begins and ends with Milk’s love for another human being as well. This reach for intimacy – always vulnerable, always intimate, never safe – endures past movements and rallies and elections. These manifestations of the political are the means to that merely human end.
Which is why, in so many ways, the gay movement, at its very best, is something holy.
The Dish 