Not so New Ideas.

Their aim is, as far as possible, to use nothing which is the product of the factory system or of modern industry in general; for they think these things so iniquitous that every one is more or less party to a crime in using them. . . .  There is certainly something attractive about the idea of living as far as may be on the produce of the land about you: to see in every walk the pastures where your mutton grazed when it was sheep, the garden where your vegetables grew, the mill where your flour was ground, and the workshop where your chairs were sawn - and to feel that bit of country actually and literally in your veins.
Tolkien once remarked to me that the feeling about home must have been quite different in the days when a family had fed on the produce of the same few miles of country for six generations, and that perhaps this was why they saw nymphs in the fountains and dryads in the wood - they were not mistaken for there was in a sense a real (not metaphorical) connection between them and the countryside.  What had been earth and air & later corn, and later still bread, really was in them.  We of course who live on a standard international diet (you may have had Canadian flour, English meat, Scotch oatmeal, African oranges, & Australian wine to day) are really artificial beings and have no connection (save the sentiment) with any place on earth.  We are synthetic men, uprooted.  The strength of the hills is not ours.

-C.S. Lewis

(found in) Joseph Pearce, C.S. Lewis and the Catholic Church p81-2

(original source) Walter Hooper, ed, C.S. Lewis: Collected Letters I908-9

I finished this book (C.S. Lewis and the Catholic Church by Joseph Pearce) which was the previous month's book club book - I'm a  bit behind - today at work.  I marked the above quote yesterday as I hit a little past the halfway point before having to close up shop: I generally read only at work unless something is so riveting that I cannot put it down, but the thought of having nothing to occupy myself with during the lulls (which are pretty much all the time at my job) the next day usually deters me from doing so.  I had marked it because it struck a chord with me; I agree with Lewis in his calling us "synthetic men."  I think that we've done more harm than we may realize by disconnecting ourselves from the land immediately surrounding us.

This is not to say that I think we should pitch the idea of urban living in favor of the farming life.  That would be impossible.  The amount of land we'd need for such an endeavor would be (in my mind) staggering for the number of people that inhabit the States alone.  Instead, we might try and make a compromise with the limitations of society and farm a decent size patch of back yard. Barring that, purchase as much as you can from local growers.  The farming life may no longer be feasible for the majority of us, but this does not mean we should disregard it as obsolete; without farms, where would we get our food?

What I am saying is that I think it's an enriching choice for body and mind to grow your own produce and/or buy from local farmers.

Also, it was - as stupid as this is going to sound - enlightening, in a sense, to realize that people have been rejecting industrial farming for a very long time.  Most likely from it's conception.

I know that this, being a new idea to me, is not a new idea to others; it was just refreshing to know that it goes farther back than had occurred to me.

As a side note: do read this book if you are at all interested in C.S. Lewis.  It was a fantastic read.

~~~

Good news!

I fixed my desktop computer.  What was wrong was a double whammy: I needed to flash the BIOS (update to the latest version) which turned out to be more complicated than it should have been because for whatever reason my computer refused to detect my flash drive.  I ended up connecting two freshly formatted FAT32 (standard format for flash drives, in case you were wondering) drives to the back two ports of the computer.  When that failed, I loaded the fail-safe BIOS and then the optimized BIOS (one after the other) immediately before entering the Q-flash utility.  Magically this worked (after trying five other times to get the darn things to show up) and my BIOS was successfully flashed...to no avail: I was still getting the "Main BIOS Checksum Error" dialogue instead of the operating system.  So, for giggles, I took a stick of RAM out - I had previously done this in hopes it was an easy fix with no result - and viola!  My computer turned on.

So there you have it, random BIOS failure and random RAM failure rolled into one.

My new 4GB RAM stick is on it's way; it's lame to try and World of Warcraft it up with only 4GB of RAM.  I'll happily take 8GB or more, thankyouverymuch.