SuperForest

Today, 53 years ago, Ms. Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Which eventually lead to a change or two.

Here’s the wiki’s!

Rosa Parks.
The American Civil Rights Movement.

Feel good y’all, on this day in awesome history!

SuperForesters around the world!

Good morning.

This film has been making the rounds. It must be seen to be believed.

You do not have to agree with it, but you must see it.
Zeitgeist: Addendum will be one of the major talking points of the next decade.

Your homework is to watch it, that we may collectively discuss the ideas put forth.

Here’s the link: Zeitgeist: Addendum

Love to All,

Jackson and Team SuperForest

I’ve been mulling over this for a few hours now as I wasn’t sure which way to put it. This weekend just passed, a few things happened that saddened me, angered me and, momentarily, lessened my positivity and hope regarding humanity.

Firstly, while riding on a bus headed into town, someone hurled a rock at a window towards the rear of the bus. It sounded like a bullet, the driver hesitated and, naturally, I felt quite scared and upset that someone would do that. Had we been travelling on an older-style bus (with regular glass windows), the rock no doubt would have launched right through the window and hit the passenger sitting beside it.

Secondly, following the rock incident, the driver stopped the bus and called the police to report the incident. The police told him that the passengers had to disembark and wait for the next bus while the police were on their way to investigate. A group sitting towards the back of the bus whined and harassed the driver as they were going to be late for whatever event they were headed to.

Thirdly, on another occasion, a schoolgirl made a racist slur under her breath that, had they heard it, would have offended just about half, if not all, the people on the bus.

Finally, while standing at the side of a road last night, waiting to cross, I turned to see a car suddenly swerve towards, then away from, me – if for no other reason than to scare the crap out of me. Following this incident, I got home and felt really down. I felt that people have no regard for each other and I started to harbour very negative thoughts. I felt helpless and sad for those who seek ways to torment others.

My boyfriend then said something that helped. “Ok, even if you tracked that kid’s car down and threw a tonne of bricks into his windscreen, his Dad would find the car in the morning and be very upset. He’d probably give someone else a hard time because he’d be so outraged. And the person he takes it out on might go and do the same to someone else. So the end result would be more unhappy people.”

This inspired a brainwave. If I woke up tomorrow morning, and was the nicest I have ever been, smiled at everyone I crossed paths with and just generally became, for lack of a more articulate expression, a beacon of light … that might set off a chain of goodness that stretches further than I could imagine. And then I thought of SuperForest. And how this is exactly what Jackson had in mind when he created it. To turn negatives into positives. Mission accomplished, dear friend.

Hugs to Daniel Gimenez for the pic.

Here in the Netherlands it’s very common to eat bread. It’s so common that most people have it for breakfast and lunch. But why is bread so fascinating? It’s eaten almost everywhere, the ingredients are roughly the same but still every country with a bread-culture prepares the meal differently. But what makes bread so universal? Why does the entire globe eat it? And where does the concept come from, in fact?

Let’s start with the last one, the history.
The first traces of bread have been dated back to the Neolithic era, aka the New Stone Age. This is roughly 10,000 B.C., quite a while ago. Back then it was made from cereal grains and water and these are, remarkably enough, the main ingredients we still use today.
This ancient bread still has got it’s descendents today, it is believed that the Mexican tortilla, the Indian naan, and the Mid-Eastern pita can be seen as “the fathers of all breads”. Take the pita for example, for the people not knowing this kind of bread, it’s a circular flat bun; approximately a fifth of an inch thick and about four inches in diameter.

These are a few excellent pita’s. Before eating they’re often toasted, sliced open and stuffed with an ingredient of choice, could be shwarma meat, could be veggies. But funny enough this type of bread got through to Italy a few centuries ago. There they decided to make it a bit larger and put a variation of toppings on it. Namely: tomatoes, mozzarella cheese and basil. Et voila, the pizza was born. Later it became an international food and migrated to the U.S.A. and other countries.

But pizza is a somewhat mutated form of bread. So the bread-trend started a couple of thousand years ago at various places and managed to spread across the entire world. But why would such a simple-seeming thing spread like a virus?
Back in the Neolithic days people had lots of land that could be used for harvesting crops. And they did, in fact crop farming was first developed in the Neolithic. People had lots of crops but they hadn’t discovered breakfast cereal yet. So there was no point in flattening some of your maize, putting it in a basket and holding the whole under a cow while you’re milking it. No, there was just a lot of grain but no proper way to prepare it. So everyone was very happy to get a ‘DIY-guide’ on processing the grain into an edible product.

Furthermore the edible end-product, bread, contains a lot of energy. Energy that was needed for hard work on the land.
Funny enough this is still the reason why we eat bread in the Netherlands. It contains lots of energy in the form of carbohydrates. This kind of energy can be released easily by your body so when consuming bread in the morning you’re ready to go when you arrive at work or school. (I must admit I rarely have bread for breakfast, personally I prefer a good bowl of breakfast cereal; also containing carbs).
There are a few more reasons to eat bread today then there were back in the Stone-Age days. The fibers are good for your digestion and (added) vitamins contribute to your general health.

This directly could be one of the reasons why it’s eaten at such a vast amount of places. But there’s got to be another reason than: “it’s healthy.”
And there is. For starters grain is available at a lot of places. And where there’s grain, there’s bread; so to speak. But personally I think that the fact that it’s customizable plays a larger role. Translated in 21st century slang: “Bread is hackable”. If you have a bit of dough you can do an infinite number of things with it. You can put nuts, fruits, spices, seeds or even vegetables in it to improve the taste. When done baking there is, again, an infinity of serving possibilities. In Mediterranean countries for example they serve bread right before dinner with olive oil and salt. The purpose is to pour some of the oil over a slice of bread and sprinkle a bit of the salt over it. In France, also a Mediterranean country, but a bit different though, they serve their famous Baguette with their even more famous cheese (or fromage, if you’re a Francophone).
And here in the Netherlands, well, we bake a bread, slice it up and cover it with a variety of things. I often have strawberry jam on my slices at lunch but the Dutch in general massively consume hagelslag. Don’t blame yourself if you’ve never heard of this before, it’s a Dutch bread topping made from chocolate.

They’re a bit like the U.S. Jimmies. Anyway, they’re widely known and used within the borders of the Netherlands. When people go camping in another country they take a few cartons of hagelslag with them because it’s unavailable in other countries. That’s a fun fact about Dutchmen actually.

Since SuperForest is quite international it seems an interesting idea to ask the readers if they eat bread. So, do you eat bread? And, if yes, what kind of bread? When do you eat it and how do you eat it? Drop us a line.

-jdh

Artist Graham Rawle has re-imagined the Wizard of Oz into a new book!

Check out Graham Rawle’s website for a sweet behind-the-scenes video and more “making of” photos.

While many of us grew up being told to eat our veg, it’s very likely we, instead, became skilled at avoiding them (i.e. by feeding them to the dog or slyly popping them into our pockets). Now that we’re older, it’s only natural that some of us followed up such vegetable-dodging creativity with amazing vegie art. Ju Duoqi, a female artist who lives and works in Beijing, has gone about recreating Western art masterpieces using vegetables such as tofu, ginger, lotus roots, coriander and sweet potato.

Of her work, Duoqi says, “In the summer of 2006, I bought a few kilograms of peas, and sat there quietly for two days peeling them, before stringing them on a wire and turning them into a skirt, a top, a headdress and a magic wand. I used a remote control to take a photo of myself in them, and named it Pea Beauty Pageant. That was my first work of vegetable art.”

Read more about Ju Duoqi here.

To SuperForesters around the world!

Thank you for reading this site.

Much love to each and everyone.

Sincerely,

Jackson, Niki, Andrew, Alex, Taylor, Jaell, Julius, April, Jordan, Spoon, Carla, Iman, and Baloo the Tanksgivingzzz hound.

Today in 1922, Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon opened and had a wee peek into King tut’s tomb!

How sweet is that?

Here’s the wiki.

86 years ago on This Day in Awesome History!

Hi Everyone,

Reuters and the NY Times are both announcing that New York is in danger of a Thanksgiving “terror strike” by “al Qaeda.”

Just to put this announcement in perspective: You are six thousand times more likely to die of congestive heart failure than you are of dying in a “terror attack.”

Translation: Nothing to worry about folks! Have a safe and happy Thanksgiving and much love to you all.

Love,

Jackson

p.s. Go easy on the gravy.