!Christina's 5 questions
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agk's diary 
11 July 2023 @ 16:39 UTC
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written on GPD Win 1 via PuTTY
as first daughter mumbles herself to sleep:
"this a-way, this a-way" (from the song 500 Miles)
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I love to answer Christina's questions; read
others' answers. She wrote 5 new ones!

 gopher://sdf.org:70/1/users/christyotwisty

July 2023 Questions:

1. Favourite way to stay active

    Ride a bike, with or without a trailer towing
    first daughter, to places I have to go anyway:
    for bread, to open mic, to visit, to church,
    to Evy's work, to the bank, etc.

2. How to stay focused and productive?

    Tilt at windmills. Maintain friendships and
    windmill-tilting partnerships that are maint-
    ainable. Scheme. Reflect.

    Think about the windmills on little breaks from
    stupid stuff you have to do. Break drudgery
    into chunks. Gamify them:

    "I'll carry 10 more rocks then think about
     windmills; two 25-minute pomodoro tomatoes
     then play cards for 30 mins/carry 10 rocks"

3. If I could have any sport or game instantly
    mastered, unrelated to my current interests or
    abilities, which and why?

    I'd love to be a competent futbol/soccer or
    basketball player without putting the time in,
    to play pick-up games, especially with young
    people.

    But it wouldn't be fair. Sport teaches you to
    work hard for incremental improvement. What
    kind of monster would I be to get skill without
    work?

4. Interesting trivia tidbits about historical
    events.

    Martin Luther King Jr had armed security.
    Universal Basic Income was tried in England as
     the Speenhamland System and degraded life in
     the industrializing nation to horrific lows
     that shocked Marx. Polanyi's book The Great
     Transformation provides the best account.
    During the US Civil War, a Hapsburg became 
     emperor of Mexico.
    The early Spanish/Portuguese slave trade was
     a side-effect of their attempt to bypass 
     trans-Saharan Almoravid control of the trade
     in Mediterranean salt for Ghanaian gold.
    In the first major use of "technicals" in hist-
     ory, Chad defeated Libya's air force with 
     pickup trucks and desert skills in 1987.
    Before coffee-houses or tea-houses, there were
     lemonade-houses in France and Spain.
    Brazilian blacks bought the freedom of enslaved
     blacks with the pooled resources of their 
     redemption societies in the 19th century, and 
     sent them to be educated in Nigeria.
    John Brown expected if he could take the armory
     at Harper's Ferry West Virginia, cut the rail-
     road, and build a maroon guerilla force that 
     raided from the mountains, killed planters,
     liberated slaves to swell ranks, Haitian moun-
     tain fighters'd hear of it, send reinforce-
     ments, liberate all enslaved people of the US.

5. A summer recipe.

    Dice fresh tomatoes hot from the garden and
    mint from outside the kitchen door. Add salt,
    olive oil, and some pepper. Chill for a few
    hours and eat on toast with more olive oil or
    butter. Drink iced mint sun tea with it.