Heroic Tales ebook bundle

My latest effort, a bundle of ebooks in one inexpensive package is now available for pre-order!

Heroic Tales

Readable on Amazon, iBooks, Kobo, and Barnes and Noble, this is a collection of LOTS of books, all in one place.

It is available on pre-order now, and will be published on July 17!

19 heroic tales in all, from novels to short stories...

Get this package, and you could be set for reading for the rest of the summer!  You might have as much fun reading it as I did "curating" it, as I put it all together!

PJSC podcast #134- Heroic Fiction is Paleo Too!

I fear I have dwelt too much on the small stuff of Paleo- what we eat, and how we exercise, and how we sleep a bit too much.  In fact, I think that is what has happened to virtually ALL Paleo podcasts over time- now, don’t get me wrong- all of that is crucial, and definitely the first step in gaining health along with a wonderful, fulfilling life.
But that is key: we also want an overall wonderful, fulfilling life!  We could sit in a laboratory run by Loren Cordain, never leaving, and have all of our life functions monitored, day and night, for nutritional excellence.  We could be trained by Frank and Christine Zane, and have perfect physiques.  Our sleep could be monitored by Chris Kresser, and Robb Wolfe could lecture us about Paleo each and every day, and yet…  Would THAT be a good life??
Obviously not.  And so, on my PaleoJay’s Smoothie Cafe podcast, I am going to start to explore the items that are listed on my blog page around the big blender:

Featuring: Recipes, Health, Music and Philosophy!
Side Dishes: Fun, Energy, Renewal, Life!

All of these are just as important, at least, as nutrient composition and the raw ingredients of health.  And so, from now on, on PaleoJay’s Smoothie Cafe I will be stressing the really important parts of life- the music, the fun; all those things that bring us every, renewal, and life!  Don’t worry, Paleo Quick Tip of the Day still be there, coming out weekly, with more down-to-earth recommendations, shortly and succinctly!  (I am increasingly bothered by how paleo, and other podcasts are getting more and more long-winded- who has the time for all of that? Podcasts of an hour and more?  Sheesh, you can usually say it in 10 minutes or less- remember that brevity is the soul of wit.

But today, we will start with a short story, read by your own PaleoJay!  It a new Conan short story, written by newcomer Jess Thornton, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.  If you only know Conan the Barbarian character from comic books and the movies, you will come to see that the original version, as created by Robert E. Howard back in the 1930’s, is a very different animal indeed.

 And so, get a large jar of your green paleo smoothie out, for here is the audio version of Conan Returns!

Is Paleo "Barbarian"?

Are we, as followers of the paleo diet,  more like this dying Gaul below than the civilized Romans?

Let me throw some ideas your way:

From what I've been able to glean, the Gauls were primarily meat and dairy eaters.  They also raised grain, and used a good bit of it to make beer- a beverage that the wine drinking Greeks and Romans found disgusting.  They did also have bread, and porridge made from grains and lentils, but from all indications this was kind of "back burner" food- the preference of these tribal barbarians was for meat, cheese, and butter, of which they had quantities available; both from the widely available hunting, and the herds they kept. They also had vegetable gardens, but of course the white potato was unknown.  The northlands they dwelt in had not been overgrazed, which was the case around the Mediterranean, the erstwhile "Fertile Crescent", which had been overgrazed for centuries since the dawn of civilization there, and was beginning to gradually turn to desert.

The Romans were a largely predatory civilization, and had become rather puny physically over time compared to the barbarian Gauls... they were victorious over the Gauls and others not from physical superiority, but through a specialization of warfare technique that made each soldier function as a cog in a giant machine of disciplined warfare, rather than using individual initiative. 

 Here is a good description of the diet of the Romans around the time, 2nd Century BC, that our gladiator friend above lived (and died) in:

"The lower class Romans (plebeians) might have a dinner of porridge made of vegetables, or, when they could afford it, fish, bread, olives, and wine, and meat on occasion.

Since many of the lower class were citizens, the ancient Romans had a program to help them, somewhat like a welfare program. The welfare program was called the annona.

There was also a separate WIC-type or school-lunch program (the alimenta), just for kids, which was instituted, or at least greatly developed in early 2c CE.

In the regular food welfare system, people were issued welfare stamps, which were little tokens, called tesserae. How these were issued (remember there was no open public postal system), and how Romans identified themselves to the authorities in the first place, we (the authors of this article) do not know. You showed up with your tokens (tesserae) and containers, at large government warehouses. You got wheat flour -- or bread already baked from government bakeries, and other foodstuffs. Meat was distributed on special occasions with special tokens."

This is interesting, not only in the rather Paleo type diet of the Gauls, and the modern, civilized, grain based diet of the Romans, but in the social governmental control being used by the Roman government in its "dole", or Welfare system.

Perhaps it is an inevitable development of civilization to use low quality food as a means to control their populations?

Here is a quote from the seminal science fiction author Philip K. Dick:

"We live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups. I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudorealities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives. I distrust their power. It is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing."

To me, this sounds like a description of the current state of affairs between Big Government, Big Pharma, and the Big Processed Food manufacturers- manipulating us with sophisticated marketing, selling us fake, non- nutritional foods that

1. Keep us misinformed 
2. Keep us sick
3. keep us addicted to the foods they sell that make us sick
4. Keep us reliant on expensive drugs that they sell

I've always revered and loved the glory that was Greece and Rome.  But now, I'm starting to think rather often of a quote from the author Robert E. Howard, from his most popular hero Conan the Barbarian-

"Barbarism is the natural state of mankind. Civilization is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must always ultimately triumph."

What do you think?  Am I a little paranoid here, or not?

Jay