Canella: a rather different type of cinammon in the west indies

Returned from trinidad. Leaving Southern California after may.

I've realized the value of who you live with. My mother tried to instill it in me, to my failure. But, I got the lesson now, or eventually, I said.

"Love is by definition an unmerited gift; being loved without meriting it is the very proof of real love. If a woman tells me: I love you because you're intelligent, because you're decent, because you buy me gifts, because you don't chase women, because you do the dishes, then I'm disappointed; such love seems a rather self-interested business. How much finer it is to hear: I'm crazy about you even though you're neither intelligent nor decent, even though you're a liar, an egotist, a bastard."
— Milan Kundera (Slowness: A Novel)

Fluoride is bad for you

“In summary, we hold that fluoridation is an unreasonable risk. That is, the toxicity of fluoride is so great and the purported benefits associated with it are so small – if there are any at all – that requiring every man, woman and child in America to ingest it borders on criminal behavior on the part of governments.”
- Dr. J. William Hirzy, Senior Vice-President, Headquarters Union, US Environmental Protection Agency, March 26, 2001

“I am quite convinced that water fluoridation, in a not-too-distant future, will be consigned to medical history.”
- Dr. Arvid Carlsson, Winner of the 2000 Nobel Prize for Medicine

"If, like me, you had visited the slums of Europe and America and seen how near to brutes the inhabitants of those slums are, and then compared them with our masses in India, your doubts as to the effect of Hindu religious belief on the masses would have vanished."

Vivekananda on effects of religious beliefs on the masses.