The Pryor Week #6: Opium beer, Kidnappings, and Calories

Hey! I hope you’ve been having a sparkariffic week.

Here’s what I did:

• Finally started the wordlings for the next parody book. The topic is billionaires. In case you’ve been paying attention, I’m not a fanboy, fanadult, or fanotherwise.

• Did a shootout in ball hockey as the goalie. Picture a frumpy 37-year-old doing out-of-breath burpees for 15 minutes straight while stopping 90% of the goals ‘cuz he’s somehow ‘good’ at this sport in his middle-old age.

• Did a thorough cleaning of my apartment. This wouldn’t be a big deal for normies, but in my case, it’s a biannual occurrence. Sorry, mom, no pics for you.

• Wrote some amusing satire about “legitimate political discourse” throughout history (in case you missed it)

Pic Descrip:

I love Taiwan’s diversity of products. And by diversity, I don’t mean a city occupied by divers. I mean…just...plain...weird. I really need to start collecting more of these pics to share.

Opium cake-flavored beer. Like, what was going through that brewmaster’s head? Apparently one of them was “I’m going to make a damn tasty beer” because he totally nailed it.

I cannot publicly confirm whether or not it did, in fact, taste like opium cake, though.

---

This Week’s Pryor Learnings

#1. I did not see that coming

According to a poll of 11,000 respondents across every state in the US in 2020:

“Nationally, 48 percent of U.S. Millennial and Gen Z could not name a single one of the more than 40,000 concentration camps or ghettos established during World War II. This number is reflected in individual state outcomes, with an astounding 60 percent of respondents in Texas”

There’s some more scary figures in the article. I searched for this information after seeing far too many Nazi references in recent “convoys” across my beautiful home country of Canada.

While education is a touchy subject, I can’t help but feel this is a direct causal effect with a lack of proper history being taught in school, at least in certain areas. Some day I’ll do a deep dive into education in Canada and America, but I’m procrastinating as I know it’ll be a massive canyon of time consumption.

#2. The incredibly long but narrow green refuge

“The European Green Belt as an area follows the route of the former Iron Curtain and connects National Parks, Nature Parks, Biosphere Reserves and transboundary protected areas as well as non-protected valuable habitats along or across the (former) borders.”

Borders lead to non-human zones. In-country human expansion drove wildlife to the non-human zones. Post-war peace and closure of the border bases lead to a ‘natural’ wildlife refuge that flows throughout Europe.

What an interesting concept, and really goes to support the whole misanthropy movement. Lol.

#3. Walking underwater

Okay, this is just plain cool. This boat thingy sends a big machine-room thingy to the bottom of the Rhine riverbed. It then uses air pressure to drive out all water so people can actually walk on the riverbed within the machine thingy. Crazy!

Here’s a 6 min video showcasing it.

It’s called a “diving bell” and it’s super neat.

#4. Is it time to rethink exercise vs calories?

This scientist thinks so. In this somewhat long-winded but very interesting article, the work of anthropologist Herman Pontzer looked at the crazy effect of calorie burning in other primates and found something a bit shocking. They burn far fewer calories than us—and also store roughly half the fat.

The article then goes on to talk about how our brains consume 20% of our daily calories, and that perhaps is why we need the ability to create emergency stores of extra calories (AKA the big mudflaps surrounding J.J.’s belly).

Even crazier, he then went and studied groups of people in Africa who are known to have incredibly high amounts of exercise every day—7x the amount of walking as the average American—and found they burn a very similar amount of calories as J.J. when he sits on a couch hungover eating Taiwanese shrimp flavored Doritos all day long.

I’m not doing the data justice here, so go have a read if exercise/fat loss is your thing. But basically, it posits that diet—instead of exercise— might be far more important than we previously thought—at least for losing excess fat.

#5. The death of our childhoods

Is this a direct result of some of the new book/subject banning legislation around America? Poor Thomas went down the wrong side of the tracks.

Dark times, indeed.

---

This message has been brought to you by J.J. Pryor’s Brain.

• 😁 Liking this newsletter?

• 👉Forward this email to a friend

• 👋Share Pryor Thoughts on Twitter, Facebook, or another evil social media

• 🤞Click the heart thingy to titillate the algorithm

• 👇Or become a subscriber