Extra Virgin Olive Oil and you, and me.
Do you know where your food comes from?
Did you know that you may well have in your house, something which comes from where I live?
No kidding, and I am talking to all of you.
Yes you laddy.
Yes you lady
All over the world.
Now, maybe the odds are only about 35% that this is true, but them's still pretty fine odds.
Because I am sure most of you are thinking that what I am saying is ridiculous, and I admit, it's not going to be true for a certain number of you.
But if you have a bottle of (hopefully extra virgin) Olive Oil in your house, there's a close to one in three chance it comes form within 100 kms of where I live.
One of the things I would like to see more of on Steemit would be some more blogging about how people actually live in different parts of the world.
And how where they live fits into the overall world scheme of things.
And how they fit into where they live too
I live where the olive oil comes from.
"which olive oil do you mean?" I hear you ask, and I reply most of it. Probably the olive oil you have in you house comes from here.
I recently saw somebody on Facebook make the claim that almost all the olive oil in the world comes from Australia! And they just label it according to marketing.
haha, sure mate.
I mean just look at this place
Show me where similar sized chink of the correct territory in Australia looks like this from the air.
I still shake my head at such bloody ignorance, although I have been using the internet since 2005 almost continuously, and I have the terrible habit of reading whole comment streams.
So I have seen a lot of ignorance.
So who the fuck am I to be calling people ignorant?
Because indeed I am also a fine example of ignorance.
The more I learn the less I know.
This is a very good realisation for most people to have.
I don't see too many others conscious of that fact though.
This world is a complex place, and it pays to realise that what you believe to be the truth, is most probably not that at all.
But some things are less contentious.
We know a lot, and everyday more.
And statistics and data is at everyone's fingertips these days.
From such numbers we can know certain types of things.
Of course, let us not forget the fine words of (it's a contenscious matter in Wikpedia, nobody seems to know who to attribute this too )
"Lies, damn lies, and statistics!"
Statistics can be used badly of course, and they can be intentionally false, or just plain wrong too.
Even when they are right, there is no guarantee that the person using those statistics isn't using them to manipulate.
I am pretty sure that's the intention most of the time, either consciously or unconsciously.
I stuck my nose in another's blog only yesterday to protest this very thing, and later, after I have posted this, I'll have to cruise on over to see if I have started a flame war, or hopefully something much better, further discussion.
But I have to call things as I see them!
I do also just walk away, more times than not.
I am not stupid, although as noted earlier I remain ignorant of the majority of everything, as befits my merest of mere mortal status.
And as a person who auto-diagnoses on the autism scale or maybe the psychopathy scale, I have never been sure which, I know I have almost zero emotional intelligence.
A special photo for @sammosk
I have to fill in this shortcoming with intellectual intelligence.
I don't seem to feel people as others do, but I can see how others do it, and I can try to imagine, pretend if you like.
I said psychopathy before, although mine is perhaps the diametrical opposite, as I am hyper-sensitive to my effect on the world, and how I affect the people around me.
Of which there are always few.
And always changing.
In the words of Trent Reznor, made much more famous by Johnny Cash's cover
You are someone else
I am still right here
And maybe I am just fooling myself here anyway, and my problem is less romantic, and I am a straight out egotistical maniac.
I certainly get accused of just that.
There is a fantastic quote that goes something like
"You would be less concerned about what people think of you, if you realised how seldom they do it."
Always been my terror, the thought that people wouldn't talk about me when I wasn't there.
I think I have mercury poisoning myself, from an immoral state dentist forty years ago too.
I have never had a filling before or since, but for some reason the travelling school dentist decided I need about six or seven fillings, which he proceeded to put in straight away, not even asking me or talking about it.
Now, I was only ten years old, so don't think I had a fucking clue.
Source school fotographer, used with permission assumed, claim fair use.
I still remember how angry my mum was although she says now she can't remember anything about it, and when I wanted to push her on it she accused me of calling her a bad mother and hung up on me.
So I haven't tried going there again since.
I did start off mentioning vaccines so that set the scene for everything to go haywire fast.
She is Australian after all.
Gets her view of the world directly from the Fairfax group, or Richard Murdoch.
I'm not sure who owns her newspaper and tv channels nowadays, but does it really matter?
Did you know that some of the symptoms of mercury poisoning are
- Aggressiveness
- Anger (fits of)
- Anxiety
- Confusion
- Depression
- Fear and nervousness
- Hallucination
- Lethargy
- Manic depression
- Mood swings
- Shyness
and a host of other things, including anaemia, that I have had for ten years or more.
From another page about the same thing
The effects of mercury on brain function include:
- Poor memory
- Difficulty multitasking
- Difficulty finding words
- A lack of initiative
- An inability to concentrate
- Brain fog
- An inability to make decisions and
- Lack of motivation
- Changes in mood
Mercury is also known to have profound effects upon mood including:
- Fears
- Anxieties
- Irritability
- Fits of anger
- Panic attacks
- Mood swings
- Loss of self-confidence
- Withdrawal
- Being easily embarrassed
- Feeling overwhelmed
- Feeling easily discouraged
- A loss of sense of humour
- Life seems an endless, joyless struggle
'Psychiatric' symptoms
The ability of mercury to induce 'mercury madness' is well recognised and symptoms include:
- Hallucinations
- Depression
- A persistent death wish
- Suicide attempts
- Obsessive-Compulsive Disorders
- Manic-Depressive Disorder
- Panic disorders an
- Schizophrenia spectrum disorders
- Peripheral nervous system symptoms
The profound disruption of nerve structure and function leads to difficulty with motor nerve function including:
- Difficulty articulating words
- Numbness and tingling
- Clumsiness
- Difficulty doing fine tasks such as typing or adding numbers on a calculator
- Tremors
- Ticks and twitches (especially of the face and eyes)
- A loss of coordination and
- Restless legs
Now, I have also had a thirty year drug habit, which has probably changed every dynamic of my life, I'd be the first to admit.
I've never (apart from one three year period, and another few times for much shorter periods) been straight, since I discovered Marijuana halfway through first year med school.
Well, I wasn't everyday stoned straight away, of course.
I had already discovered alcohol and despite my intellectual and emotional reasons for being wary of the evil brew, the devil himself came down to Georgia when I first tasted that frothy bubbly liquid.
My first taste of alcohol was as a seventeen year old on the morning of the last day of school.
Chicken and champagne, breakfast on the beach, and after taking a glass without thinking about it too much, thought that was fucking fantastic and grabbed a bottle and chugged it.
It really was that fast.
One minute I was still the straightest bent person in the universe, absolutely convinced I would never touch a drop of the thing that destroyed my family, and the next minute I was going back for another bottle of that intoxicating mix.
Two magnums of champagne disappeared mysteriously in my vicinity on the beach that morning, and then we all drove to school.
Probably there were two or three cars full of people.
I only had one person with me in mine for sure, as I only had one seat apart from the drivers seat.
That person is a mystery person, I have no idea who it must have been.
And the fun waned a little during the day as the effects of the thing peaked and went, but I was (unfortunately for me) a natural.
I particularly remember having to approach the podium on a couple of occasions to accept the prize for physics, and that for chemistry.
I mean there were some smart people there with me, so in my final year I only topped two classes.
In previous years I had also gotten Maths 1 and Maths 2 and G,D & P, Geometrical Drawing and Perspective.
But I forgot to draw a border on one my exam drawings and lost 1 mark, and Rhonda bloody Short got 100% again.
The only mark I ever lost in G,D & P, I think.
Maybe one of my school friends could tell me if I am mistaken.
(I think I might even have scanned my school reports when I visited Australia in 2010. I'll have a look through those DVDs later, but for now, I want to keep on writing.)
Alcohol and me were a thing!
Though the next month or so was relatively uneventful, as far as drunken stupidity goes, as I was working in Jack the Slasher's in Sugar Road in Maroochydore and thinking about a share house in the city to go off to university.
I got notice that I was accepted into U of Q Med School, and somehow thought I could make that work, although I had never wanted to be a doctor, and had only put it down as it was the hardest to get into.
I didn't actually think I would get in, and not dentistry either, which was my second choice. (I had never thought of the relation between what I had said earlier and this till right now)
any of the rest of my choices may well have worked out, although what I really should have done is accept the offer of an apprenticeship that I had at the end of year ten.
My life would have been pretty different if I had gone that way that's for sure.
Or maybe I should have grown up Spanish and then I know I would have been a professional cyclist. Probably not a super-star, mind you, just a domestique working all the the time for somebody else.
And maybe winning the Paris Roubaix one year after a particularly daring and lucky attack, or something.
But my life drifted where it did, and I was bound for Med School.
And that's where alcohol really took me.
First day of Med School in fact.
Morning of that day, very disturbing (to me) lecture in Maine Hall, where we were told that we were the creme of society and other such nonsense.
I started looking around the room at the other 220 faces, and almost to a person they were positively beaming, soaking in the reflected glory of the Dean's dick sucking.
However, I noticed also seven or eight people doing what I was doing, and almost down to the very last one of them they were my group there in the time I lasted.
Gilda, the gorgeous little straight girl from a fine family of two doctor parents, but humble and real so unlike the other clones of the type.
Elizabeth, oh my fiery girl, also from a family of doctors.
These two are the only ones of us that went straight through med school and became doctors.
Grant only lasted first year I think (maybe first and second like myself) and transferred to nursing.
He then became a nurse and then re-entered med school and became a doctor.
Mandy, who figures prominently in my marijuana story, also only lasted first and second years according to how I remember it, and transferred to micro-biology, only to work for a while as same, and then re-enter med school and is also a doctor now.
And then there was Pete, perhaps the most powerful brain I have ever met, but Pete was not very introspective and was like a brute force of nature.
How I can imagine Ai usually, and that's more than a bit frightening.
I spoke to him on over the internet a few years ago, and he told me how he had taken a thousand trips over the course of one year and then proceeded to argue vehemently how Lance Armstrong was a cheat and deserved to have his Tours stripped off him.
This is not a nuanced view of the world, and I haven't reconnected with Pete since.
He sounded drunk and I can't do drunk people any more.
I liked them back then when I was one, but I avoid them most completely since I went dry.
Either drunk or wilfully pig ignorant, although I don't know why I use that phrase, as the piggies are my friends.
Pete and I had a long and stormy relationship anyway, where I was briefly his employee, and that worked out real bad too.
Getting back to the list, then there was me!! The were other figures in and around us, but this is the core group, unless my memories are editing someone out, and that someone is probably quite relieved.
Those are false names by the way, just in case.
Anyhow, later that same day (we were in Maine Lecture Hall remember, with the dean stroking our dicks, I mean egos) we visited the other campus of the University of Queensland Medical School over in Herston attached to the Royal Brisbane Hospital.
And there was free piss.
All afternoon and into the evening.
And the very next day there was a piss up starting from lunch time.
And so on and so forth.
I can't understand it, although perhaps it's a subtle filter designed to weed out the weak ones.
My name is Scott and I am an Alcoholic.
I haven't touched a drop since 2001 I think was the last time, maybe even 2000.
Funny how I can't put my finger on it.
I had already been dry for six years, until I visited the Walkabout Creek Hotel with the spanish twins.
I am sure you have heard about the Walkabout Creek Hotel, made famous by Crocodile Dundee in the very first scenes of the movie.
Anyhow, that is a different story.
I was talking about my entry into that world, not my exit.
Well actually I was talking about Marijuana, I think.
Actually now I think about it I was talking about Olive Oil and it became all about me.
Haha.
Exactly the sort of blog post I want to read from other people!!
Don't you just love how I can start off talking about olive oil (which I'll come back to) and end up on Marijuana?
They both grow in the ground I suppose, (sometimes anyway) and they both grow exceptionally well where I live, although they have vastly different requirements for water.
And in the end I combine them to make my most staple food.
Medicinal (sic) Extra Virgin Olive Oil
But now I am really getting off track.
I have used up enough of your time I suppose, but I won't leave you with nothing in the end.
If you have read this far at least you'll come away with some statistics about olive oil production that'll leave you amazed (if you like being amazed) or it'll leave you cold if you are the blase type
Did you know that Spain Italy and Greece together produce about 70% percent of the world's production of Olive Oil?
In any given year the numbers do vary.
Wikipedia has a great breakdown that wasn't exactly the same link as I was looking at before.
Did you know that Spain produces about 70 % of that
And of this very large production, did you know that 70 % is produced in the province of Jaén, in the southern state (comunidad autónimo) of Andalusia (Andalucía)
That's where I live. I went to take @menoslobos to the train station in the capital city of the province, which is called Jaen. 70 kilometres the way I go, 50 kms through the mountains (takes twice as long) and about 35 kms as the crow flies.
She was going home to Madrid where she lives, after a short stay in the mountains here with me.
So a drive through Jaén to the train station in Jaen takes one through some significant percentage of the worlds olive trees.
I find it amazing still, after five years living here!
As soon as one crosses into Andalusia my going through the tunnels of despeñaperros on the A4 the horizon to horizon olive trees start, and they don't ever stop, not until you are well past where I live.
If you are coming to my place from Madrid turn off onto the A44 soon enough and then turn off onto successively smaller highways...
...until if you have chosen well, you can turn off the smallest highway yet and come into my village Castillo de Locubín.
Insert village shot
I'll come out to meet you at the edge of town. You'll never find my place otherwise.
lol
Hope to see you soon.
If anyone would like to see a more extensive, although unfortunately by no means complete, collection of my artworks, they can visit me at my main domain.
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and I am on Spoonflower too, https://www.spoonflower.com/profiles/scotty_es although I am afraid I haven't got that one together really, and many of my designs are still not available for sale.
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Well, as usual thank you for coming by anyone who is reading these words, and don't be afraid to show your appreciation, or criticise the hell out of me.
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