Beautiful Acronym Quotes

There will be others, many others. You’ll try desperately to digest a single word through the acronym-laden gibberish, while beginning to wonder what the point of all this is, and also why you didn’t feel that staple you just sent into your thigh. You usually do. You’ll wonder what your company even does. After six years, you have no idea what an information system is, do you? Maybe you should ask. Maybe that’s how this ends. You’ll imagine how poetic it would be to simply unmute yourself and say, “Sorry to interrupt, guys, but what’s an information system?” Still, your mind will drift further, envisioning how much more tolerable this call would be if you could just slowly masturbate during it. So you do. You masturbate during it. And it’s beautiful. Masturbating, invisible within your three-walled fortress. Invisible… invisible… practically invisible.

All our time spent making lists would be better spent painting, or writing, Or singing, or learning to speak stories. Sometimes I feel as though the Church has a kind of pity for Scripture, Always having to come behind it and explain everything, put everything into actionable steps, acronyms and hidden secrets, as though the original writers, and for that matter the Holy Spirit Who worked in the lives of the original writers, were a bunch of you literate hillbillies. I think the methodology God used to explain His Truth is quite superior. My life is a story, more than a list. I don't feel that a list could ever explain the complexity of all this beauty.

WUI” (rhymes with phooey), an acronym for “wildland-urban interface” (though some call it “wildland-urban in your face”). On a map, the WUI represents the fault line between the forest and the built environment, but over the past thirty years it has also come to represent the sweet spot in North American real estate development: hiking trails out the back door and a scooter-friendly cul-de-sac in front. Today, more than a third of American homes and more than half of Canadian homes are located in the WUI. It is a beautiful place to live, until it goes feral.

The benefits of a diet anchored in an abundance of plants is clear to see. The healthiest and longest-lived societies are scattered across the globe, whether it be the mountain villages of Sardinia, the forests of Costa Rica or the Japanese island of Okinawa, but they have one thing in common: a diversity of plants in their diet. The Hadza people of Tanzania are among the last hunter-gatherers on Earth, and they probably consume a diet closest to that which humans have adapted to eat. They forage wild berries, honey and fibre-rich tubers, and eat lean, wild meat. This consumption of between 100g and 150g of varied fibre a day results in a beautifully diverse and robust gut microbiome.4 This could not be more different from the industrialized West. Americans, on average, eat around 15g of fibre a day – half of the recommended amount and ten times less than the Hadza – resulting in poor microbial diversity.5 The so-called Standard American Diet (with the apt acronym SAD) has replaced fibre-filled plants with refined grains (plants stripped of their fibre), processed meats, sugar-sweetened drinks and deep-fried food. We all know that the modern Western diet is not good for physical and mental health, but the reason is that it’s essentially an anti-biotic diet. Without providing the food for healthy microbes, we end up overfed yet undernourished. Add to this mix an overuse of pharmaceutical antibiotics and a lack of exposure to a variety of environmental microbes due to home-cleaning products and urban living, and no wonder the industrialized world is a desert for microbes. A diet low in plant-based fibre results in a vulnerable microbiome.6 This increases the likelihood that the defence system loses balance, resulting in chronic inflammation and, eventually, a host of physical and mental health conditions.7 If it’s clear that a variety of plant fibre is the key to a microbiome-friendly diet, how do we practically implement this? The American Gut Project is a large citizen science project in which individuals across the world volunteer to send stool samples for analysis by a team at University of California San Diego School of Medicine. In 2018, they published the results of over 10,000 participants, finding that eating thirty different plants a week was associated with increased microbiome diversity.8 This was regardless of whether you were vegetarian or vegan. Most of us in the West manage only around ten plants a week. While not a necessary requirement for good health, thirty a week is a sensible, evidence-based target. It’s important to remember that plant foods aren’t restricted to fruit and vegetables; nuts, seeds, herbs, spices, grains and legumes also count. While you can add as many layers of complexity as you wish, getting a diverse, healthy microbiome is really as simple as aiming for thirty types of plant a week.