9 meatballs, on top of spaghetti 🍝

Covered with non-dairy Parmesan 🐮

It's not really spaghetti. It's "small rigatoni".

And the meatballs are meatless:

They're soy balls, apparently.

Sorry if the headline is falling apart and the walls are tumbling.

I picked them up at Trader Joe's.

Alex Jones and some in the Right would discard me as a soy boy here, but that's okay. You can't win all the battles.

First time trying these. To do them justice, I like to toss them in a little bit of oil and brown the outsides (and season to taste).

And then pour your tomato sauce on top. Let simmer.

Very easy.

While everything cooks is a great time to assemble a salad.

I'm a big fan of olives lately. A decent dressing and olives is all you need to elevate lettuce into a totally serviceable salad.

That Deluxe French dressing by Wishbone is surprisingly vegan. I keep re-reading the ingredients, and the story keeps holding up.

Ty Wishbone.

Some of the spaghetti pieces fell off of the plate and onto the floor.

If you look closely you'll see that plenty of things have fallen on the floor.

"pasta expands", they tell you. As tho that settles it.

I know it expands. I'm playing it to expand. That doesn't mean it's simple to know exactly how much.

I can know a putt breaks to the right, but still it's possible to miss it to the right even tho I knew that.

Lately what happens is I originally pour what would probably turn out to be a good amount, and then rationalize that I'm pretty hungry and a little bit of pasta costs only a couple cents so it's better to have too much than too little and it's hard to argue with that and I keep throwing in like 2 or 3 pieces more until I stop myself and then there's too much and I decide I don't want to waste any and get determined to jam it onto the plate.

And then they fell.

Bird's eye:

I rate these meatballs pretty nicely. 7.8/10

The texture was surprising. Loose and borderline crumbly. I can't say I really minded it.

I probably wouldn't recommend them as a first or shining example of what a plant-based protein can be, not when Gardein products are so reliably good.

But for me it's kind of exactly what I want in a meatball. Mild and unchallenging. I really just want it to be there, and then my sauce and seasonings can determine the flavor.

And it's well priced.

Khabib the fighter guy is tweeting about having honor

I know it's not really a Tweet, it's an InstaSnap.

But any time you say some quick little thing to the internet, I feel like you're tweeting. If you're on Twitter you're bound to be tweeting, but you don't have to be on Twitter to tweet.

Khabib, seemingly, has recognized this. But his standards of honor are very unprincipled and weird, if that should surprise us coming from someone who specializes in how to fight against people.

I'm no fan of McGregor-- I adore Mayweather and am kind of forever stuck at McGregor being a heel. But if we play the videotape:

Why didn't you fire anyone when their team attacked the bus and injured a couple of people?

Well, the person who threw the chair at the bus was McGregor. So he's the person who would be in jeopardy. If you don't want double standards, okay, but then you'd likely be on the hook too for attacking the guy.

The UFC doesn't need to have the same standard with everyone. They can work with whoever they want to. And if someone is a star and valuable for them, it might be worth the baggage where someone who is less valuable isn't.

And plus the crime happening during an event and actually in the ring and live on PPV might distinguish it from other crimes and what McGregor did. Especially if he was due to fight soon and they're not sure yet what legal issues he needs to sort thru.

They could have killed someone there, why no one says anything about insulting my homeland, religion, nation, family?

That seems unlikely to me, that someone would be killed. What did happen with the glass injuring his eye may actually be pretty close to the outermost extreme.

But why is this all the same sentence and compared? As tho insulting you is right on par with attacking and injuring and potentially killing people?

He's basically telling on himself here and being a poster child for some things the YouTube Right would talk about, i.e. conflating speech with violence.

#triggered

I don't know what exactly McGregor said, but being bothered by insults from Conor McGregor seems a little like being bothered by insults from Hulk Hogan.

(I know they say Conor and Khabib legitimately do not like each other. But still, you can't be increasingly riled because of his behavior during fight promotion. He's obviously gonna say things that are ridiculous and intended to get people talking about it.)

---

Now, if Khabib actually is on Conor's level and isn't really taking it seriously and this is his own Hulk Hoganing of it, then bravo.

Maybe we're all one strand of atoms inside the feather of a giant flamingo. Maybe everyone is an actor and it's all just you and they swoop in from heaven or hell and the various dimensions to play their role as your story calls for it. It's hard to say.

My response here is to the extent that we can take it on face value and he really means it.

Why do you have to punish my team, when both teams fought. If you say that I started it, then I do not agree, I finished what he had started.

Confirmed, he conflates words with initiating violence.

(And then, it makes sense to be violent as a response to speech you don't like, and how could anyone think there's a problem with that?)

But to the people making these rulings, and to western civilization in general, words don't count. You're allowed to say words. Whoever attacks someone is the one who started the fight.

And one more thing, you can keep my money that you are withholding. You are pretty busy with that, I hope it won’t get stuck in your throat. We have defended our honor and this is the most important thing.

Haha, no. Honor has to do with staying within the codes of the event you're at, within the terms of your contract, recognizing that the fighting ends when the match ends, that you can't attack people because you don't like what they say, etc.

You defended your id, if anything.

Someone sat inappropriately close to me on the bus yesterday.

I'm first person on the bus and I take back row right, and he's second person and goes there.

Why?

The only seat you absolutely can't take is right next to me, but of all the other ones, this is the worst.

That section of seats that he's in (4 on each side facing each other) seem all generally the same to me, distinguished only by where other people are sitting. If you value being near the back of the bus, then you take back row left. There's really no explanation for why you need to be in that section and back is important and it has to be the right side.

One of those things can give before you get so close.

Even if you anticipate the bus will fill a little, you make the decision as tho we're the only two on it. Because you never know what the formation will be and if it will get congested at all. We might end up having plenty of room back here. So you don't lock us in to definitely having a proximity issue.

So wherever people would end up sitting, it can't possibly bail him out for the choice. It's a theoretically awkward move at the point where he does it, no matter how it develops after that.

As it happened, the bus did fill up a little before leaving the station, but not by enough to save him. He still had the 3 seats in his row open beside him, and all of those are better choices.

If he thought I was cute, I get it. But that's the tradeoff. You still get called out for making the inappropriate choice.

I was on my way to Trader Joe's and Chipotle

Chipotle was good.

It was pretty high on the spectrum of how good Chipotle can possibly be.

Like whether your body is in the mood for it or the ingredients are a little better that day or who knows what, sometimes it hits you just right. This was one of those times.

I ate first and shopped for groceries on a full stomach.

Conventional wisdom would tell you that's the way to do it, so that you don't buy too much. But I really strongly disagree. (I ate first only because I was hungry and didn't want to wait.)

It's not hard to just know how much is a reasonable amount to buy and not go over that.

You'll be thinking about eating in a more inspired way and have better visions of what you want when you're hungry.

The goal of grocery shopping should be to get the things that you end up being in the mood for and wanting when it's time to eat. To get as close to that bullseye as you can. And it's really hard to believe that you'd make better guesses when you're full.

Being full would only help if your default is to wildly lack discipline and put things in your cart too loosely. But then you want to work on that and get better and be able to shop hungry and hit closer to your full potential.