Vegans, Leather and FLO$ Spoiler
 

Great, now I gotta go and look up "sentient." I simply have never had seafood I think this is because I don't like the smell -- now don't go telling me that "really good seafood doesn't smell" because it all does to me, from the can of tuna to lobster and all points in between it smells. The other thing is that seafood tends to look like what it is on the plate and that just "bothers" me.

I don't like milk and never have. As I grew older I got into the "we are the only species that drinks the milk of another" thing. Now, I just don't drink it. Cowsmilk should be drunk by baby cows.

Eggs. There is a stringy umbilical cord in there --- ewwww. I know people who have cracked open eggs to find little embryos or blood. Nope, just never interested in eggs. As a child I apparently would eat the white part but only if it was not cooked with the yolk, and it had to be burned with lots of pepper. Yes chickens will lay eggs anyway, but not in the quantity that they are forced to do so for commerical purposes. A normal laying hen lives at most one year. Free range is fine, I just to don't eat eggs.

To each his own. For the record, my husband is a strict carnivore -- potatoes and corn are the only vegetables I can get him to eat.

Vegans, Leather and FLO$ Spoiler
 

This may piss off Thurgreed, but I have to say I totally agree about the smell and taste of seafood, and am equally irritated by people who claim certain things don't have a fishy taste/smell. They all do. Maybe not a strong, rotting, gross fishy taste/smell, but it is recognizably fish, and that smell/taste is nasty ick ick ick.

furs
 

Yes. Much better to use an insulating petroleum derivative that'll pollute a landfill for the next 10 milennia and whose byproducts poison water, harm human health, and damage the earth. Where the hell is your moral sense?

furs
 

That fits. I was getting sick of saying, "Bark like a dog," anyway.

TM

Vegans, Leather and FLO$ Spoiler
 

Same here. The taste makes me gag. But I love cheese. In fact, it is my favorite food. I don't eat that much of it because it's addictive, like a sugar addiction. I want it more and more. Weird.

Vegans, Leather and FLO$ Spoiler
 

Umm, I think cats are perfectly happy to drink up bowls of cow's milk. Granted, they can't go out to the Piggly Wiggly and pick up a quart themselves (well, most of them can't), but I'd wager they sure as shit would if they could!

furs
 

See, I am very fortunate that I happen to look SUPER dressed up like an old lady. I can't wait for fall, because one of my favorite get-ups is a fitted tweed skirt suit, silk blouse, 2 1/2 inch heeled laced-up walking shoes, gloves, pearls and a nice brooch. I LOOVE the Miss Marple look.

Only catch is that I still am often too chicken to wear everyday hats, though my wedding/church hats have gotten extremely elaborate. Besides, hats are a total bitch to store in NYC, they take up some serious space if you keep them well. How, I ask you, are you to store a bonnet with 14 inch trailing pheasant feathers when you don't have enough space to cram in more socks? (No, seriously, how, I just ordered one.) Hint on hat buying wherever you are: go to the nearest African-American neighborhood and ask where to find "church hats" (you can even go on Sunday and ask a church lady wearing a hat you admire).

BR(Alternatively, I can e-mail you some good websites with hats of varying levels of outrageousness)C

furs
 

Another "talking [lecture] point" of my former friend the vegan -- no petroleum products. So, basically, all she would wear was cotton (no doubt, her clothing was manufactured in faraway places by children in forced-labor sweatshops, making $.07 a day). I forget what she did about shoes -- really, what could she do? Wear Keds? Espadrilles?

I don't think I'll call and ask her though. It will have to remain one of the countless gaps in my internal general-knowledge anthology.

Edited to correct ambiguity.

Vegans, Leather and FLO$ Spoiler
 

Mmmmmm....... cheeeeeese.


And that's all I have to say.

Vegans, Leather and FLO$ Spoiler
 

The Displaced Dog is a big fan of pretty much any dairy product. He does not seem to discriminate between cheeses made with cow, goat, sheep, and on one occassion, horse milk. Actually, his affinity for dairy was helpful when the horse milk cheese was served because I didn't care for it, and I could discretely hand it off to him.

Vegans, Leather and FLO$ Spoiler
 

Pets
Are
Wonderful!!!!!!!

Bilmore's ahead of the curve -- was it a precog?
 

Bilmore, when you picked your avatar, did you know that Opus was coming back to the funny papers? Or is this just another case of art imitating the FB?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...-2003Sep8.html

(After eight years away from newspapers, Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Berkeley Breathed is creating a new comic strip called "Opus," starring his beloved penguin of the same name. )

furs
 

On the wall on a thick (padded, if you can get it) hook, if you don't have room for stands and it won't fit a hatbox. A collection of good ones looks almost sculptural that way if done correctly. You can swath it lightly with tulle or cheesecloth to keep off the dust if you won't wear it often though may not look as nice.

Stacked hatboxes make charming sidetables and solve the storage problem by usefully doubling as furniture.

furs
 

I hate to ask, but where did she live? Cotton has no insulating properties whatsoever, it's worse than linen (which she can probably wear, actually). There's a reason search & rescue guys refer to it as "killer cotton" every time they drag another dead hiker or hunter in jeans and a J Crew barn jacket out of the forest.

furs
 

Once people get heavily into "I won't wear/eat this because...." it's pretty impossible to find a rationale for the lines that they draw -- except, perhaps, that they are ignorant or in denial about the real effects of the supposedly good products they choose. Cotton, for example -- if you wear cotton, you are supporting the pesticide industry (and many pesticides are petrochemicals). Cotton, rice, and tobacco use more pesticides than any crops (I forget which is first, second, and third). Rice, of course, is grown in vastly greater quantities than any crop, since it's a daily staple for half the world, so it's obvious why rice makes the list. Cotton makes the list because it's pest-prone, grown on massive plantations that can be wiped out by a single incursion ("monocropping"), not a food crop so not subject to the same regulations as food crops, and often grown in parts of the world that don't regulate chemical use much.

It makes sense to me when people say "I'm going to choose x rather than y whenever possible" -- say free-range vs. factory raised. But not the absolute bright line "I will not use x because doing so means using petroleum" view.