Perhaps my favourite video out there at the moment, showcasing what it's like to have fun with your friends.
This is how we live at HPHQ.
Watch it, get inspired, and live for the moment, just as Mnsr. Ilabaca does,
Dope soundtrack too,
Word to mother,
Saturday 23 January 2010
True Self-Expression ; Video; Travel Montage
Wear Sunscreen - man, I can't stand sunscreen.
The video however, showcases a montage of how travel can be done, if you really want it.
Enjoy,
The video however, showcases a montage of how travel can be done, if you really want it.
Enjoy,
True Self-Expression ; Video; Everyday is a journey, Everyday is a dream
Here's a success story from Tim Ferriss' book, The four hour work-week.
Hazardous Pioneers is based on similar principles that this guy in the video is talking about - most importantly, Living. Here he explains how he did it, and he's only 22. Hopefully that should inspire you to get off your arse and start living too.
Enjoy it,
Hazardous Pioneers is based on similar principles that this guy in the video is talking about - most importantly, Living. Here he explains how he did it, and he's only 22. Hopefully that should inspire you to get off your arse and start living too.
Enjoy it,
True Self-Expression ; My second Wwoofing experience
After surviving my first Wwoof encounter, I decided to give myself a go at round 2.
This would take me to 'Aung Mingala Farm', a practicing Buddhist household located just outside the village of Kendall.
Definitely the best cooking I had experienced so far! Tin, is from Burma. She's quite a remarkable woman. Currently, she's paying for 5 kids to go through medical school back home in Burma, and she affords this by cutting and selling flowers from her garden, making various food items and jams and selling them in the village. 5 kids man. Wow.
My stay there was pleasant all in all. The last few days became a little quiet for me, but overall it was good.
Tin taught me a lot about Buddhist meditation and Buddhism in general. I even took part in a meditation class that she ran, which was pretty awesome. Sweaty, but awesome.
Work was pretty rigid. Start at about 7am, a morning tea break at about 10am, and then working through til lunch, at about 12.30pm. The work was varied, but pretty boring - just things that had to be done around the farm, such as;
Mulching, Weeding the pond (from which I got a beast of a rash all over my arse!), weeding around the flowers and potting/unpotting plants.
Still, the mundane attributes to the work that I had to do was soon forgotten with some of Tin's lush cooking. I swear I must have put on a couple more kilos in cake weight.
Activities for me when I wasn't working was pretty much meditation, yoga, and backflip practice -
The farm was tranquil, and I soon realised that upon my arrival, so I adapted my mindset accordingly. I think if you rocked up to this place expecting a good time or a bit of a laugh, you'd be disappointed.
Eating was mostly in silence, and after a while it became painful. Still, the flavours distracted me from that part, especially after Tin told me that 'you are a noisy eater'. Ah, the bluntness of Asian communication.
I'd give it a 4/5 overall. No near death experiences, but plenty was learnt a long the way, and due to a couple of omens popping up here and there, I knew that's where I was supposed to be.
Check it out if you have the time, but don't go looking to lose weight!!
Friday 22 January 2010
True Self Expression ; My First Wwoofing Experience
My time for another BALLS OUT adventure had come again; this time, it would morph itself in the form of Wwoofing - or 'Willing Workers on Organic Farms'.
Oh god my head said, I've never farmed in my life.
In fact, merely bending down just to reach the washing out of the basket had always been a mission in my mental, and yet now for some reason, I was putting myself in the realms of farming. Farming I tell you! Do you have any idea what that means boy! my head would squeal at me, in a panic. That's an up at 4am, back-breaking, all-day slog of an effort. I'm already keeping you alive, and now you're trying to put an end to me.
Shut up head.
Cue heart.
Go for it, it would say to me.
And so I did.
The following is an account of my first effort ever at voluntary organic farming. Ever.
My journeys would take me about an hour and ahalf north of Sydney, to a place called Mangrove Mountain.
My intention was to get some Yoga done, and so my location would be known as 'Satyananda Yoga Retreat', a title which I tried and failed many a time to say in a hurried explanation of my not so certain future.
I would be there for one week. I would be working at least 4 hours a day, and I had no idea what to expect.
But I had nothing to worry about. I was picked up at Gosford train station on time, taken to the retreat about 40 mins away, and shown to my accommodation, all pretty swiftly.
I would be staying in resident accommodation - a bunk bed to myself, with shared shower and toilet blocks. People pay for this, I thought. Bargain.
Work
We would do a voluntary hour of 'Karma Yoga' or 'selfless service' each morning from 8-9, which everyone on the site was encouraged to do, not just wwoofers. Usually it was a mundane task such as cleaning or sweeping.
I had sweeping, toilet cleaning, wheelbarrowing, and more sweeping.
It's an interesting concept is the old 'selfless service'. You find your brain chattering like shit, giving you all sorts of reasons why you shouldn't been doing the task at hand.
Still, with a week's practice, I learnt a lot about what was being said in my upper regions. And with a little concentration, the voice would soon fade away.
The actual wwoofing work was split into 4 one hour sections throughout the day.
That was pretty sweet, as each task went pretty quickly, and it usually meant that you had a wide variety of things to do.
I did everything from clearing land with mattocks and hoes, to relocating boulders, to setting up the Yoga studios, to preparing food in the kitchen.
Every day at lunchtime we were on cleanup duty. And between each hour of work we were invited to take part in a yoga class of some sort or another. Result!
All protective clothing and tools were provided for us. They even had a recycling room, where you could donate or pick up clothes that were available - pretty much like their own on-site, free charity shop. Good form.
The work rate was pretty good - I was never given a task that was thought to be out of my league. But the thing I learnt the most with wwoofing is you don't get, if you don't ask. And that led me to asking for the more physical jobs, and no surprises, that's what was given.
It was only on New Year's Eve that I worked about 6-7 hours, instead of 4, but I didn't really mind, as it was super busy. An extra 300 people had come for the celebrations, so I didn't really notice doing a few more hours here and there.
Food
Possibly the biggest shock to my Korean accomplice and partner in crime, Jay. 'This is not good for dogs' and 'Shit. I cannot stay here for one week' were some of the responses I was met with on the first night at the dinner table. I was creasing up.
All the food is vegetarian. Fair enough, I expected that somewhere in my head. But seeing as I had literally only converted from being a veggie just a few weeks before, my body had to go into survival mode.
That meant destroying their stash of butter, eggs (when present) and nuts + seeds.
The food was pretty dire most of the time, in that I mean flavourless. Thank god for the salt and pepper dispenser.
But it was organic, and not processed shit, so flavourless yet healthy was something I was willing to accept, especially for free Yoga.
The best dish we had there was mushroom soup. Ah, it was a god send. The dahl they had there, with a pinch of salty goodness, went down well too. They did make some good cakes come NYE too, which needless to say, I did fill my face with.
Yoga
Absolutely brilliant I thought. Just right for me, being a beginner. Nothing too strenuous. In one day, you would do a class at 6am, a meditation class before lunch, and another class in the evening before dinner. Perfect. It was really well organised, and I managed to keep up quite well. There was no frustration from not being able to handle the pace at all.
And the guided meditations were fantastic.
I strongly reccommend everyone to check out 'Antar Mouna' meditation techniques if you can find them, and definitely 'Yoga Nidra'. I have some on my mp3 player right now, and using them daily has had quite an effect. Highly recommended.
Activities
When we did get the odd half day off, swimming in the river was the favourite. Most notably, doing shit like this out of the trees; -
And for the beast -
There was also the option of kayaking in the river, which we did and had a great laugh doing so.
Other options were walks up in to the caves. Oh we did that alright. In fact, we smashed the walk. That was the chilled bit, even though the incline was about 90% the whole way.
It was when we reached the caves it got interesting.
There was a tree sticking out off the edge of the cliff at about a 45 degree angle.
Looked climbable to me.
Branches were strong enough.
Sweet.
Up I went.
Got to the top.
The view, well, it was insane. Pure, unadulterated lushness of nature.
I reached for my camera.
Sunddenly, 'CRRRRRRAAAAAAACCCKKKKKKK!'
'FUCKKKKKKKK!' I shouted at the top of my lungs.
The tree had come out of the floor.
Fucking termites!
And that was that.
Off the edge of the cliff with me in the top of the tree.
I worked it out, and the fall was about 7 meters. I fell over 3 ledges consecutively, finally plonking my arse on the fourth.
The fourth being only about 2 and a half feet wide. It was tiny. After that, about another 15m drop.
Somehow I came out alive. Jay thought I was dead, and seemed to come away from it all more traumatised than myself.
Must be the yoga, I thought.
All in all I'd give Satyananda a 4.5/5 rating.
If you get the chance, check it out!
You won't be disappointed.
Just don't climb a termite tree.
Ah sod it, climb it. You won't forget it.
Hari Om Tatsat!
Saturday 16 January 2010
Knowledge - Cavemen in New York City
Caveman stylee - so check it out. Looks like there's a few of us out there that have caught on to our history. Funnily enough, this was just the conversational topic of today's lunch. Omens ey?
Give it a read, then go and hunt a pigeon or something. Karma will excuse you, honest.
More about all this later,
Enjoy
Original article here - http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/fashion/10caveman.html?pagewanted=1
LIKE many New York bachelors, John Durant tries to keep his apartment presentable — just in case he should ever bring home a future Mrs. Durant. He shares the fifth-floor walk-up with three of his buddies, but the place is tidy and he never forgets to water the plants.
The one thing that Mr. Durant worries might spook a female guest is his most recent purchase: a three-foot-tall refrigerated meat locker that sits in a corner of his living room. That is where he keeps his organ meat and deer ribs.
Mr. Durant, 26, who works in online advertising, is part of a small New York subculture whose members seek good health through a selective return to the habits of their Paleolithic ancestors.
Or as he and some of his friends describe themselves, they are cavemen.
The caveman lifestyle, in Mr. Durant’s interpretation, involves eating large quantities of meat and then fasting between meals to approximate the lean times that his distant ancestors faced between hunts. Vegetables and fruit are fine, but he avoids foods like bread that were unavailable before the invention of agriculture. Mr. Durant believes the human body evolved for a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and his goal is to wean himself off what he sees as many millenniums of bad habits.
These urban cavemen also choose exercise routines focused on sprinting and jumping, to replicate how a prehistoric person might have fled from a mastodon.
In a city crowded with vegetarian restaurants and yoga studios, the cavemen defy other people’s ideas of healthy living. There is an indisputable macho component to the lifestyle.
“I didn’t want to do some faddish diet that my sister would do,” Mr. Durant said.
The caveman lifestyle in New York was once a solitary pursuit. But Mr. Durant, who looks like a cheerful Jim Morrison, with shoulder-length curly hair, has emerged over the last year as a chieftain of sorts among 10 or so other cavemen. He has cooked communal dinners in his apartment on East 90th Street and taught others to make jerky from his meat locker.
The tribe is not indigenous to New York. Several followers of the lifestyle took up the practice after researching health concerns online and discovering descriptions of so-called paleolithic diets and exercise programs followed by people around the country and in Europe. The group’s lone woman, Melissa McEwen, 23, was searching for a treatment for stomach troubles. She started reading the blog of a 72-year-old retired economics professor who lives in Utah, Arthur De Vany.
Mr. De Vany’s blog promotes what he calls Evolutionary Fitness. Like his disciples in New York, he believes that ancient humans could perform physical feats that would awe the gym rats of today.
His followers believe that he too is capable of fearsome feats. When Mr. Durant told a gathering of New York cavemen that he had seen Mr. De Vany at a seminar in Las Vegas, Matthew Sanocki, 34, asked if Mr. De Vany looked as muscular in the flesh as in pictures on his blog.
“He looks great,” Mr. Durant said. “You feel like he could, at a moment’s notice, charge at you and trample you.”
Already, the New York cavemen are getting attention from the patriarchs of the paleo movement. One such figure, Erwan Le Corre, a Frenchman whom the magazine Men’s Health said “may rank as one of the most all-around physically fit men on the planet,” stopped by Mr. Durant’s while visiting the city in December. The men sealed their friendship with what both described as a bare-chested — and in Mr. Le Corre’s case, barefoot — run across the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges on a frigid night.
Mr. Le Corre, 38, who once made soap for a living, promotes what he calls “mouvement naturel” at exercise retreats in West Virginia and elsewhere. His workouts include scooting around the underbrush on all fours, leaping between boulders, playing catch with stones, and other activities at which he believes early man excelled. These are the “primal, essential skills that I believe everyone should have,” he said in an interview.
Loren Cordain, a professor at Colorado State University and the author of “The Paleo Diet,” links the movement to a 1985 New England Journal of Medicine article, which proclaimed that the “diet of our remote ancestors may be a reference standard for modern human nutrition.”
Another source of paleo converts is CrossFit, a fitness program known for grueling workouts combining weightlifting and gymnastics. CrossFit trainers, who teach at more than 1,200 gyms and other affiliates across the country, generally encourage clients to follow either a caveman diet or the Zone diet, which requires tracking calories. “Some of the gyms have hardcore paleo folks, and if you’re a member of that gym then you’re paleo, while other gyms are hardcore Zone,” said Anthony Budding, who manages the content on CrossFit.com.
Experts in early humans dispute some of the tenets of latter-day paleos, including the belief that fasting is beneficial and that the body is unequipped to handle an agriculture-based diet.
Still, there is a “sharp contrast” between the strength and fitness of our distant ancestors and us, said Clark Larsen, a physical anthropologist at Ohio State University. “The male or female of 12,000 to 15,000 years ago will be considerably stronger and in better shape,” he said. Unfortunately, life was short: If you made it to age 30 or so, you had done well.
New York might seem a challenging environment for the aspiring caveman. Entire professions, oblivious to the rising and setting of the sun, toil in the glare of computer monitors. More to the point, the city has gone so far as to outlaw both hunting and gathering, at least when committed in a city park. Uprooting a plant, snatching a bird egg or trapping a squirrel in a park are misdemeanors punishable by up to 90 days of jail.
“I like New York, but it’s hard to sit in a Midtown office all day,” said Ms. McEwen, a slim brunette, who prefers the term “hunter-gatherer” to describe her lifestyle.
But the surprising consensus of the paleos is that the city is a paradise.
“New York is the only city in America where you can walk,” said Nassim Taleb, an investor who gained a measure of celebrity for his theories, described in “The Black Swan,” that extreme events can roil financial markets. “People treat walking like exercise,” he said, “but walking is how humans become humans.”
Mr. Taleb, who rejects the label “caveman” in favor of “paleo,” avoids offices (including his own) as much as he can. He prefers to think on the go. Dressed in a tweed coat and Italian loafers, this paleo man is a flâneur, sometimes walking miles a day, ranging from SoHo to 86th Street.
Instead of eating three square meals a day, many of New York’s cavemen fast intermittently, up to 36 hours at a stretch. Fasting is a topic of banter at the Union Square West apartment where Matthew Sanocki and his brother, Andrew, live and run design-related e-commerce Web sites.
“Are you going for a 24?” Matthew might ask Andrew, describing a fast by its duration in hours.
Andrew Sanocki, 38, a former Navy officer, explained that he preferred working out on an empty stomach near the end of a fast, and then following up with a large meal. This is a common caveman schedule, intended to reflect the exertion that ancient humans put into finding food. It is as if, Mr. Sanocki explained, “we’ve gone out and killed something, and now we have to eat it.”
Another caveman trick involves donating blood frequently. The idea is that various hardships might have occasionally left ancient humans a pint short. Asked when he last gave blood, Andrew Sanocki said it had been three months. He and his brother looked at each other. “We’re due,” Andrew said.
Most of the cavemen at Mr. Durant’s gatherings are lean and well-muscled, and have glowing skin. A few wear trim beards. Some claim that they no longer get sick. Several identify themselves as libertarians.
They regularly grumble about vegans, whom they regard as a misguided, rival tribe. But much of the conversation is spent parsing the law of the jungle. The most severe interpretations generally come from Vladimir Averbukh, a jaunty red-headed Web manager for the city who was born in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. Upon visiting Mr. Durant’s apartment for the first time, in August, Mr. Averbukh scowled at a tomato plant on his host’s roof deck.
“Cavemen don’t eat nightshades,” Mr. Averbukh, 29, said. He explained that tomatoes are part of the nightshade family, arguing that they are native to the New World and could not have been part of humanity’s earliest diet. Mr. Durant shrugged. (Mr. Durant said later that there was nothing uncavemannish about eating tomatoes.)
Mr. Averbukh is a pre-Promethean sort of caveman. Much of his nourishment comes from grass-fed ground beef, which he eats raw. In a bow to the times, he sometimes uses a fork.
The other cavemen in New York find Mr. Averbukh’s preference for raw beef a little strange.
“I draw the line at sushi,” Andrew Sanocki said. “Paleo man had fire, didn’t he?”
Beyond Mr. Durant’s tribe, it is likely that other New Yorkers are practicing a milder, diet-focused version of the lifestyle. An Upper East Side physician, Grant Macaulay, said he has recommended the diet to hundreds of his patients, and sends them to Barnes & Noble to buy a copy of Mr. Cordain’s “Paleo Diet.”
But these computer-savvy cavemen are not interested in living off the grid, like others who share their ambivalence toward the indoor life. And their eating and exercise habits aside, the cavemen say they have no nostalgia for the prehistoric world.
Mr. Averbukh, who drives around town in a red Smart Car, said the thought of “throwing yourself in the forest with a stick and seeing how long you survive” held no appeal.
The cavemen are happy in the modern world, they say, but simply want to regain the fortitude that they attribute to their ancient ancestors.
“The problem is that as soon as we get out of our temperature-controlled environments, we’re weak,” Mr. Durant said. “Where’s that wildness that allowed humans to flourish throughout history?”
With this view of humanity’s past, what does Mr. Durant see in his future? One idea is a restaurant called B.C. or Wild. Just in case he develops the right business model, Mr. Durant has bought the domain name hunter-gatherer.com.
Give it a read, then go and hunt a pigeon or something. Karma will excuse you, honest.
More about all this later,
Enjoy
Original article here - http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/fashion/10caveman.html?pagewanted=1
LIKE many New York bachelors, John Durant tries to keep his apartment presentable — just in case he should ever bring home a future Mrs. Durant. He shares the fifth-floor walk-up with three of his buddies, but the place is tidy and he never forgets to water the plants.
The one thing that Mr. Durant worries might spook a female guest is his most recent purchase: a three-foot-tall refrigerated meat locker that sits in a corner of his living room. That is where he keeps his organ meat and deer ribs.
Mr. Durant, 26, who works in online advertising, is part of a small New York subculture whose members seek good health through a selective return to the habits of their Paleolithic ancestors.
Or as he and some of his friends describe themselves, they are cavemen.
The caveman lifestyle, in Mr. Durant’s interpretation, involves eating large quantities of meat and then fasting between meals to approximate the lean times that his distant ancestors faced between hunts. Vegetables and fruit are fine, but he avoids foods like bread that were unavailable before the invention of agriculture. Mr. Durant believes the human body evolved for a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and his goal is to wean himself off what he sees as many millenniums of bad habits.
These urban cavemen also choose exercise routines focused on sprinting and jumping, to replicate how a prehistoric person might have fled from a mastodon.
In a city crowded with vegetarian restaurants and yoga studios, the cavemen defy other people’s ideas of healthy living. There is an indisputable macho component to the lifestyle.
“I didn’t want to do some faddish diet that my sister would do,” Mr. Durant said.
The caveman lifestyle in New York was once a solitary pursuit. But Mr. Durant, who looks like a cheerful Jim Morrison, with shoulder-length curly hair, has emerged over the last year as a chieftain of sorts among 10 or so other cavemen. He has cooked communal dinners in his apartment on East 90th Street and taught others to make jerky from his meat locker.
The tribe is not indigenous to New York. Several followers of the lifestyle took up the practice after researching health concerns online and discovering descriptions of so-called paleolithic diets and exercise programs followed by people around the country and in Europe. The group’s lone woman, Melissa McEwen, 23, was searching for a treatment for stomach troubles. She started reading the blog of a 72-year-old retired economics professor who lives in Utah, Arthur De Vany.
Mr. De Vany’s blog promotes what he calls Evolutionary Fitness. Like his disciples in New York, he believes that ancient humans could perform physical feats that would awe the gym rats of today.
His followers believe that he too is capable of fearsome feats. When Mr. Durant told a gathering of New York cavemen that he had seen Mr. De Vany at a seminar in Las Vegas, Matthew Sanocki, 34, asked if Mr. De Vany looked as muscular in the flesh as in pictures on his blog.
“He looks great,” Mr. Durant said. “You feel like he could, at a moment’s notice, charge at you and trample you.”
Already, the New York cavemen are getting attention from the patriarchs of the paleo movement. One such figure, Erwan Le Corre, a Frenchman whom the magazine Men’s Health said “may rank as one of the most all-around physically fit men on the planet,” stopped by Mr. Durant’s while visiting the city in December. The men sealed their friendship with what both described as a bare-chested — and in Mr. Le Corre’s case, barefoot — run across the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges on a frigid night.
Mr. Le Corre, 38, who once made soap for a living, promotes what he calls “mouvement naturel” at exercise retreats in West Virginia and elsewhere. His workouts include scooting around the underbrush on all fours, leaping between boulders, playing catch with stones, and other activities at which he believes early man excelled. These are the “primal, essential skills that I believe everyone should have,” he said in an interview.
Loren Cordain, a professor at Colorado State University and the author of “The Paleo Diet,” links the movement to a 1985 New England Journal of Medicine article, which proclaimed that the “diet of our remote ancestors may be a reference standard for modern human nutrition.”
Another source of paleo converts is CrossFit, a fitness program known for grueling workouts combining weightlifting and gymnastics. CrossFit trainers, who teach at more than 1,200 gyms and other affiliates across the country, generally encourage clients to follow either a caveman diet or the Zone diet, which requires tracking calories. “Some of the gyms have hardcore paleo folks, and if you’re a member of that gym then you’re paleo, while other gyms are hardcore Zone,” said Anthony Budding, who manages the content on CrossFit.com.
Experts in early humans dispute some of the tenets of latter-day paleos, including the belief that fasting is beneficial and that the body is unequipped to handle an agriculture-based diet.
Still, there is a “sharp contrast” between the strength and fitness of our distant ancestors and us, said Clark Larsen, a physical anthropologist at Ohio State University. “The male or female of 12,000 to 15,000 years ago will be considerably stronger and in better shape,” he said. Unfortunately, life was short: If you made it to age 30 or so, you had done well.
New York might seem a challenging environment for the aspiring caveman. Entire professions, oblivious to the rising and setting of the sun, toil in the glare of computer monitors. More to the point, the city has gone so far as to outlaw both hunting and gathering, at least when committed in a city park. Uprooting a plant, snatching a bird egg or trapping a squirrel in a park are misdemeanors punishable by up to 90 days of jail.
“I like New York, but it’s hard to sit in a Midtown office all day,” said Ms. McEwen, a slim brunette, who prefers the term “hunter-gatherer” to describe her lifestyle.
But the surprising consensus of the paleos is that the city is a paradise.
“New York is the only city in America where you can walk,” said Nassim Taleb, an investor who gained a measure of celebrity for his theories, described in “The Black Swan,” that extreme events can roil financial markets. “People treat walking like exercise,” he said, “but walking is how humans become humans.”
Mr. Taleb, who rejects the label “caveman” in favor of “paleo,” avoids offices (including his own) as much as he can. He prefers to think on the go. Dressed in a tweed coat and Italian loafers, this paleo man is a flâneur, sometimes walking miles a day, ranging from SoHo to 86th Street.
Instead of eating three square meals a day, many of New York’s cavemen fast intermittently, up to 36 hours at a stretch. Fasting is a topic of banter at the Union Square West apartment where Matthew Sanocki and his brother, Andrew, live and run design-related e-commerce Web sites.
“Are you going for a 24?” Matthew might ask Andrew, describing a fast by its duration in hours.
Andrew Sanocki, 38, a former Navy officer, explained that he preferred working out on an empty stomach near the end of a fast, and then following up with a large meal. This is a common caveman schedule, intended to reflect the exertion that ancient humans put into finding food. It is as if, Mr. Sanocki explained, “we’ve gone out and killed something, and now we have to eat it.”
Another caveman trick involves donating blood frequently. The idea is that various hardships might have occasionally left ancient humans a pint short. Asked when he last gave blood, Andrew Sanocki said it had been three months. He and his brother looked at each other. “We’re due,” Andrew said.
Most of the cavemen at Mr. Durant’s gatherings are lean and well-muscled, and have glowing skin. A few wear trim beards. Some claim that they no longer get sick. Several identify themselves as libertarians.
They regularly grumble about vegans, whom they regard as a misguided, rival tribe. But much of the conversation is spent parsing the law of the jungle. The most severe interpretations generally come from Vladimir Averbukh, a jaunty red-headed Web manager for the city who was born in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. Upon visiting Mr. Durant’s apartment for the first time, in August, Mr. Averbukh scowled at a tomato plant on his host’s roof deck.
“Cavemen don’t eat nightshades,” Mr. Averbukh, 29, said. He explained that tomatoes are part of the nightshade family, arguing that they are native to the New World and could not have been part of humanity’s earliest diet. Mr. Durant shrugged. (Mr. Durant said later that there was nothing uncavemannish about eating tomatoes.)
Mr. Averbukh is a pre-Promethean sort of caveman. Much of his nourishment comes from grass-fed ground beef, which he eats raw. In a bow to the times, he sometimes uses a fork.
The other cavemen in New York find Mr. Averbukh’s preference for raw beef a little strange.
“I draw the line at sushi,” Andrew Sanocki said. “Paleo man had fire, didn’t he?”
Beyond Mr. Durant’s tribe, it is likely that other New Yorkers are practicing a milder, diet-focused version of the lifestyle. An Upper East Side physician, Grant Macaulay, said he has recommended the diet to hundreds of his patients, and sends them to Barnes & Noble to buy a copy of Mr. Cordain’s “Paleo Diet.”
But these computer-savvy cavemen are not interested in living off the grid, like others who share their ambivalence toward the indoor life. And their eating and exercise habits aside, the cavemen say they have no nostalgia for the prehistoric world.
Mr. Averbukh, who drives around town in a red Smart Car, said the thought of “throwing yourself in the forest with a stick and seeing how long you survive” held no appeal.
The cavemen are happy in the modern world, they say, but simply want to regain the fortitude that they attribute to their ancient ancestors.
“The problem is that as soon as we get out of our temperature-controlled environments, we’re weak,” Mr. Durant said. “Where’s that wildness that allowed humans to flourish throughout history?”
With this view of humanity’s past, what does Mr. Durant see in his future? One idea is a restaurant called B.C. or Wild. Just in case he develops the right business model, Mr. Durant has bought the domain name hunter-gatherer.com.
Sunday 10 January 2010
Mike Johnston
Mike, you emailed me about minimalist housing,
Please email me your email address so I can chat to you about some of your points a little more!
Peace!
Please email me your email address so I can chat to you about some of your points a little more!
Peace!
Tuesday 5 January 2010
Movnat / Parkour ; Training with Sydney Parkour, Update
Had a dope session yesterday.
Just popped back to Sydney for a couple of days, so it was time to get a session in.
Thanks to everyone who came along, had a sick time!!
Some of the days progressions -
Word!
Just popped back to Sydney for a couple of days, so it was time to get a session in.
Thanks to everyone who came along, had a sick time!!
Some of the days progressions -
Word!
Knowledge; An Afternoon in an Australian Prison Cell
An encounter with Sydney's Police Force - Hazardous Davis
The afternoon was dry, roasted peanut dry, with the sun blaring down onto the arcade of Newtown's 70s concrete formations.
That meant I had sweaty nuts, but the fun didn't stop there.
Upon leaving Newtown's train station, I encountered two of Sydney's Finest Transport Police Officers, perhaps the two most illusive, too.
In fact, the illusion was that they were real Trannie Police, but the truth? Well, they never actually stated that to me; all will become apparent.
My interest with dealing with the Police really was solidified when I became aware of AntiTerrorist's videos on Youtube a few months ago. A victim of Police misconduct in the UK myself meant that it was only natural to want to clue myself up with regards to how to deal with the boys in blue.
'Oi! Oi Buddy! OI!' shouted one of the guards at the top of the stairs, as I walked to their left out of the side exit.
'OI! I SAID STOP! STOP!'
Naturally I intended to keep going.
You don't need a ticket to just wait for someone on the platform, that really would be a milking. Or do you?
The Transport officer's arm was out, and against my chest. Later I would discover that 'his hand was out and it was I that had walked into it' or what could also be interpreted as Bullshit.
I had come off of the platform, as a result of not meeting a friend, to hit up the beach for the afternoon. That was the plan. But when I didn't see him get off the train, I thought he might be out the front of the Station, up at road level.
I got to the stairs and then was encountered.
They said they wanted to see my ticket. Then when I didn't answer (amateur move in hindsight) they snappily moved on to 'What's your name? Give us your name, your address. You MUST give us your details'.
When I asked what LAW they were operating under, they gave me a statute. And when I told them that, that's when it started to get aggro...
What started with two Transport Police progressed in a few minutes to 3 Police officers joining us, to make a party of five.
When I asked them what LAW required me to give them my details, well, again, they gave me statute. And again I corrected them. And again, they got more, and more, livid.
Unfortunately they arrested me because I was silent. When I did give them the AntiTerrorist 'Mantra' for arrest, they didn't take record of it. Ignored me even.
I was searched, and they found my passport in my bag - something I had packed for my visa appointment earlier in the day.
'Bollocks' was the only thing going through my mind when they found it.
They put me in the Police Station, all 3 of them.
I shared a cell with a meth addict and a mentally-ill alcoholic. And the whole time, you could see the sadistic look on "PROCON HARLY'S" face. 'Think you're so tough not talking to us do you spiritual man' his face said. 'Just wait and see what these crackheads are gonna do to you'. His eyes said it all.
Time passed. The whole floor was livid at me for correcting them legally. And the responses we that off 'I don't give a fuck' from ol'Harly, and 'you are the biggest TWAT I have ever seen in my life' one of the female officers on duty squealed at me through the perspex, shit-stained door of my cell.
As I sat between what felt like an air bubble in a skagheads syringe, I tried to block out the smell of stale urine and Bacardi. In fact, recently learning how to meditate, I did that.
'Breath Awareness' I told myself, as I tried to ignore my arse going numb on the planks beneath me.
And it worked. As the whole floor got even more pissed, I seemed to feed off it and give out a soulful bi-product; calm.
I sat it out. All of it. 4 hours in there. And came out with what I wanted.
I gave a hostel address as my location. That's the hostel that I've never checked in to. I refused fingerprints, hardcore. They actually grabbed me and told me they would (quote)'Force' me to do it, because it was their station and my 'rights' didn't apply there. I kept composure, and despite getting a little twitchy at their 'legal threats' (note; not lawful) and some of their massive out-numberings of bacon bap to civilian, I refused to panic, even if I had no fucking idea about going to court.
The charge - Traveling without a ticket.
Refuse to give transport police Name and Address
Both of these are acts; statutes.
The final product - A 'Court Attendance Notice' for about a month's time. Note; Notice. Oh, and nowhere on the document were my passport details.
Other things to note -
I only signed for my belongings.
Their statement was incorrect.
I did not sign at being given a court notice, a statement or any paper work for that matter.
I thought I would lose a tooth when I said I adamantly do not give consent for my fingerprints to be taken. It was the hardest part, as I was uncertain whether I would win this won. But I stuck to my guns and they couldn't force me to do shit, no matter how many threats.
Their language was somewhat primitive to say the least, almost ape-like, but I didn't let myself forget that they too, were just ignorant people. Humans, somewhere inside.
I snoozed and I loozed; a) By carrying ID such as a passport, b) For not telling the Transport Officers straight away that I was waiting for a friend on the platform, c) and for not walking away from them fucking quick enough, as long as I was on their land (about 1 inch from making it to the curb!) they could detain me there.
But, on the plus side, I have come away with only a Notice. For those of you that don't know the relevance of the latter, check out 'John Harris - It's an Illusion' and watch it online.
And no I'm not going to court.
I didn't pay anything either. That's what they want from me if I go to court, money.
See 'The Strawman Illusion' video online for more about that.
I held my ground and stuck up for myself. No one else was there to, and when my friend did eventually arrive, I didn't want to get him involved. Instead, I wanted to use this as an experiment. I knew enough with regards to not paying anything and getting off in the way that would benefit me the most, but not enough to sail out empty handed. Experience truly is the best teacher, and I've now a ton of questions which I will research the answers too as a result.
If you have any info you can pass to with regards towards what I should do next, please email me.
And never forget, they never got their fingerprints.
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I've written up the day's events in a more creative way. There are many important details that have been omitted, but pay relevance to the whole 'freeman' set up.
If you want to know more, I will share in hope that you can further increase your knowledge with regards to walking this land freely.
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