You are Invited to a Salad Wednesday Experience

This Week's Featured Salad!
It's the Summer Strawberry!

Picture
Click on it to learn its secrets

This Week's Announcement!

Friends, a correction: Though I've always had difficulty explaining what inspired Salad Wednesday, I was under the impression that I started it. Like a human, I thought that the individual amoeba I call the universe was mine and mine alone, that no one's hair flops and snarls just like mine.

In Chiang Mai, Thailand, while on supposed hiatus from Salad Wednesday, we wandered into many Buddhist wats. Buddhism is really into the number 8. 7 is the it-girl of spirituality, but, I mean just look at a Buddha statue and ask yourself if that guy looks into odd primes. Still, 7, alpha dog that it is, got the week, and so instead of a convenient power of two, Buddhism had to squash its eightfold path into an unyielding 7-based paradigm. What to do? Drop a path? Add six more? Create a new calendar around 8s and 4s, with atonal friction against the Standard Week, way way before Steve Reich figured out what to do with those sorts of loops?

Nah. This is Buddha were talking, not some skewed middle manager. Not some mangled roll of tape. Even equanimity's number one proponent knew that streams need a cascade here and there, or else why bother. To represent various aspects of Buddha's life and values, there is one pose for each day of the week. Except there are two for Wednesday, one for the morning and one for the evening.

On Wednesday morning, he's standing, holding a bowl, which, and I'm not just saying this, looks just like a salad bowl.

On Wednesday evening, animals come to Buddha and bring him food. We got one of each. A picture of the four of us is attached.

I'm not saying that I'm the reincarnation of Prince Siddhartha, I'm just saying that history doesn't rhyme, but it covers its own songs. I didn't invent Salad Wednesday any more than Leibniz invented calculus. And besides, the point of this email isn't about where Salad Wednesday came from. The point is that it's back:

Wednesday the 10th! 7:30
Bring: salads, snacks, drinks, friends, incarnations, incantations, carnations, train nations, flourless chocolate cake, Supreme Court reporters, the Supremes, silly monsters, three-liners, anything you've recently indicated with a pronoun.


Image of broccoli romanesco (aka, the psychedelic broccoli) borrowed from "Bert23" on a Creative Commons license. And what to find that elephant? Look here.