Anthony Bourdain has died

It seems like Trump is incapable of saying anything with heartfelt sincerity.

"'Fuck you,' he says. 'You don't even cook. You're not one of us anymore.' Far from being offended (although I am hurt), I want to give him a big hug. Another drink or two and I just might.

I don't cook. I'm not a chef. The chefs and cooks who are better than I used to be - better than I ever was - know this and don't need to say it. They certainly don't need to say it to my face, like this kid, pressing me up against the bar now with the force of his rage and hurt. He will channel those feelings, appropriately, into a demand that I do a shot of tequila with him. Or two.

Which is a relatively friendly and diplomatic solution to an awkward situation."

- Anthony Bourdain, "Medium Raw" (I opened to a random page)

Another great artist lost to suicide. Anthony Bourdain reinvented food writing with his book "Kitchen Confidential", injecting a brutal honesty and punk rock ethos into the stuffy world of restaurant reviews and travelogues. He continued writing with more terrific work like "Medium Raw" and "Nasty Bits". It's not just that his writing was full of practical advice for diners (never eat fish on mondays, never eat mussels, bread is recycled, etc)... it's that he was brutally honest about himself, about his struggles with depression and drug addiction. If you read his books, his suicide should come as no surprise.

He went on to reinvent food television with "No Reservations", a travelogue show that celebrated highbrow and lowbrow in equal measure, that put third world street food vendors in the same breath with Michelin-starred chefs, that ate the weird stuff not because it was weird, but because it was a new experience. From there, he went to "Parts Unknown" on CNN, elevating his work's already broad international beat to a more explicitly political level, visiting little-known and often dangerous places such as Libya and Myanmar, celebrating the joy and creativity people took in their food, even in the poorest, most oppressed places on Earth. He was a cultural ambassador for all of humanity, the likes of which had never been seen before.

And then there was that time that !Kung bushmen in Namibia punked him into eating a warthog's asshole by convincing him that it was their finest and most exclusive culinary delicacy. And then laughed their asses off at him. And he ran that on tv.

I'm going to miss him so much.

Says who? Maybe if we put everything on that paper the scale would visibly tip but it may be the case that if we could perceive those things as they are such that they could be written down it would exclude the problem's sticking power.

By the way we should also confirm it was really depression.

Happy to explore this with you further. What exactly is the mental illness? How is it being identified, how is it being measured?

I'm against vaccines, as you presumed, as I've personally seen resulting correlations to increased occurrence of Autism, and [lesser] conditions of peanut allergies and gluten intolerance. There may be elements in vaccines become unintentional casualty to the body being trained to reject what we are intending for it so classify as foreign, to fight. There's observable overall increases in these conditions from those who've been vaccinated. We haven't been able to isolate for these yet. I believe we haven't investigated enough. Or perhaps they're not related... but it's my hypothesis.

We don't have ENOUGH information to draw conclusions for MANY things, these observations are merely mine and are thus my opinions.

I recommend everyone does their own research and make their own decisions.