From Paris to Texas to Timbuktu

Once, in Texas, I met a man from Timbuktu, and mentioned that I had been discussing his native country a few days prior. I explained that at least here in the USA, "Timbuktu" is a sort of a symbol of a place that is very faraway - a place difficult to get to. "The 'ends of the earth'" a mutual friend paraphrased. "And very exotic." Timbuktu guy seemed shocked to find this out.

I had conversed about this very subject with Henry, a Texan, and Frederic, from France, who said that Timbuktu was no big deal; he traveled near there a lot and had once driven through it on a motorcycle. So we had asked him, well, Fred, what do they say in France to generically represent the faraway place? "Texas. We say it is as far away as Texas."

I got the idea he sort of thought we should have known this! After all, this all occurred IN Texas. But just like the African I was to meet, we Americans in Texas had not known this, and were all greatly amused. And so when the subject arose with Timbuktu guy, I added this nugget of recently acquired knowledge: Texas is France's Timbuktu.

In answer to my recent queries about this idea, a friend from Brunei has stated the following: "Some people, especially the literary types, borrow 'Timbuktu.' In the local context, our 'Timbuktu' is a place called 'Temburong' which is a Brunei county. The place is actually not that far away. It feels far because one has to take a long windy road, cross into a neighbouring country, and then ride on a ferry to get there. The ferry ride is very short. It takes maybe 2 minutes to walk across the river if you could walk on water. It takes a couple of hours to get there by land and by boat it's probably 1.5 hrs."

Another friend from Venezuela just shrugged when I asked him, and said Timbuktu as a metaphor was used the same way there. By the way, the man from Timbuktu could think of no comparable expression from his native locale, so we came to a dead end. I guess we were hoping he would say something on the order of, "Siberia is Timbuktu's Timbuktu!"

(A story of Timbuktu)

The Curious Case of the Chronosynclasticly Infundibulized Engine

I am writing to you Gentlemen (and Ladies) regarding your ambitious yet, in my humble view, completely attainable, goal of constructing a sub-surfacial-traveling powered ship, rumours of which have been circulating in the pubs back of J. street since Thursday last.

Mr. Fulton of the Colonies in particular is seen to remain in good spirits and has been noted to enthuse over your plans quite openly, although I have reproached him privately as I have some reason to believe your Party has taken some pains to keep this matter privy. Be that as it may, I found myself unable to stop thinking about your astounding Conceptions, and in a moment of great lucidity last evening a great Idea struck me with great forcefulness, relating both to your works and those to which I have been lately dedicated, since devouring both the writings of Mr. Franklin and certain sensational and lurid chapbooks of unknown author but rumoured to be of Maltese origin, (which I hastily sought out at the home of a certain Gentleman, B. of the Royal Society , and read last week), and experiencing the events I shall recount to you below.

As I am sure you have been involved in the tale of Mr. Fulton's ruination and the splintering of the hull timbers and consequent sinking of his experimental Vessel due to the Unsustainable Weight of the Watt engine, you should know I find it a great Disaster, (although I cannot help but note that I have been recorded as warning him of this very hazard) and that it will ever be an Impossibility for the Watt device ever being of use at Sea, needing a Stone foundation for anchorage on Land.

For I have of late found what I reckon to be, (and I hurry to assure you I have been performing the most controlled experiments in my laboratory, outfitted by B. who wishes to remain uninvolved at this time, for reasons I will make clear forthwith,) a great source of rotary Power.

If you follow the proceedings of the Society I am sure you recall the mention of the Device to Alert the Living of the Revivification of the Thought-to-have Passed. Humility indicates you might not have connected this modest invention with myself, but I am indeed its Inventor. In any case, it is but a simple thing to affix a strike bar in the coffin and a bell and ringer above ground. I was observing the Groundkeepers at Alderney Road Cemetery the Monday evening a fortnight ago, ensuring their proper training, and whilst lecturing the two heard an unusual whirring noise emerging from one of the coffins awaiting burial the following morning. (To my chagrin, the actual bell-alarum was not activated), but in our excitement, we flung open the coffin and stood stupified as we witnessed the recently departed, identified by a small plaque affixed to the coffin, as a Mr. Barry Morris Goldwater, spinning rapidly an inch above the bottom of it!

While I have yet to account for this phenomenon, for he is undeniably dead, I transported the fellow's remains (amidst yet another mystery, for the whereabouts of his family nor even the circumstances of his appearance have been determined) to my laboratory, and with a series of leather belts and sheaves have driven an Archimedes pump uninterrupted for the last 12 days, producing the amount of 17.2 Horse Power. Requiring only the proper amount of formalin to be kept on hand and a small Leyden Jar, and with the weight of both the poor deceased Mr. Goldwater plus the attached apparatus, not exceeding the weight of just over twenty stone, I think I have found The Engine which your Company seeks.

Yr. Humble Servant,
Dr. Prichard Mitford
Jumper ST. LONDON

(Epilog)
Alas, a great calamity has ensued since I penned my missive. Last night I hastily entered my laboratory, hearing a "pocketa-pocketa-queep-pocketa-queep! Pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-queep-pocketa-queep!!" The poor fellow had begun emitting a faint vapor. I began fingering delicately my row of glistening valves. “Give me a dram of whale oil!” I snapped to my assistant, Igor. But it was too late. The leathern belts alike began to ignite, and the Archimedes pump, off centered, began to moan as well in mechanical distress.

Suffice it to say the ensuing fire engulfed my laboratory, I am ruined, Igor has left my employ, and the entire affair has come off disastrously. And worst, not even the smallest remaining shards of burnt ossia from the unfortunate Goldwater have been recovered. Even any impulse towards some remaining curiosity over these matters is tapped out. As is my erstwhile benefactor B.

I have repaired to the Sloth and Pennywhistle to lick my wounds, and have acquired passage to Alyaska (Beringia). My ship is to sail at dawn.
Regretfully,
and respectfully,
Mitford

Lying Eyes

When I decided to adopt my dog, Trouble, I knew there was a big age-difference problem. After all, she was barely past adolescence. She wanted to do young things, and I wanted to mostly sit and read and drink old tawny port, and smoke my pipe, and think about Spinoza. And occasionally go down to the Old Boys' Club and sit in the dark mahogany library, and talk to the other gentlemen about the shipping stocks, and the lost glory of the Empire. And she's usually glad to see me when I arrive home. Most nights she sleeps by my bedside.

Trouble, however, wanted to run free, and go jogging, and had dreams of being an Iditerod sled dog. God knows we live too far from Alaska, but I have never had the heart to destroy the hopes and dreams of such a young and beautiful animal. So even though she's not supposed to, every so often Trouble goes out on me, late at night, and sometimes doesn't come home until dawn. I see the evidence: the KFC wrapping paper in the yard; and sometimes I can even tell another dog has been with her. I just don't let on.

Those nights, this old house sure gets lonely. I guess I'm her rich old Man, and she won't ever have to worry. But she still can't hide her lying eyes.

A Nice Pair

The ocher one took seven years. I sure learned a lot about Jackson Pollock while doing that one. I could have called it "Another Punk Throws Paint" because it's pretty common a thing to do among beginners. (Do you throw paint? I throw paint! Don't tell!) I never could figure out a good name for it. I tried to call it "The Gnostic Revelations of Jack Black" (Old #7, of course) but the actor was just becoming well known about a week after I finished. What the heck. I hereby rename it "Old #7."

The other one, Corridor Head, I started at the same time and finished in about 2 months.

I mixed Varathane Diamond floor finish (extremely tough, completely clear, never yellows) in with my acrylic paints as I painted to give the lustrous translucence of oils. It's similar to generic water-based acrylic gloss medium sold in stores, but cheaper by the gallon. I'm such a chemist. I balled up the photography, too. I ought to re-shoot with my tripod, like I knew I should in the first place.

From the early to mid '90s. Each about 2' x 3½'

Yes, they ARE for sale. Glad you asked!

Bizarre Argots, Ceazarny, and Bithageer

Secret languages, whether spoken by children, gypsies, con men, dissidents, criminals and even solely by one gender (the language of women, known as Nushu in China), have been around for a long time. After all, Pig Latin is known to almost every kid born in the U.S., and if you meet people who aren't native English speakers, and explain the concept, you'll probably get some stories about something similar in another language, from childhood. And likely each will smile as he or she remembers.

Long ago I encountered a variety of secret language known as "Carny talk," the secret language of carnival workers, among some Miami, Florida youths. It's lately mutated into a Rap-related sort of thing known as "izzle." But back then, the rules were simple, if slightly varied: after each initial consonant "ee-ah-z" was inserted. Shoes became "shee-ah-zoes." A fine car was a feeazine ceeazar, and police were either peeazolice or peeazoleeazice, depending, I guess, on whether you were in a hurry.

Into this group had alit one fellow who had learned a variant of this lingo or argot, which he constructed by a similar rule. The add-in was "ih-thug" with a voiced "th" as in "the." Beer became bithageer. Eagerly they all taught each other all their variations.

And began mixing the two variant constructs in their language. "Theazats a fithagine weazomithagon" was not unusual to hear. ("That's a fine woman.") I was usually, but not always, lost. I deciphered some of it.

It took me a long time to reconstruct all that, because when I learned later the "formal" rules of Carny, there was no ih-thug, it was all eaz-uh. This was the form popularized by Murray the K, I later learned.

Once I was in a car with a Frenchman and a Belgian, and with no warning, just for kicks, I began speaking Carny. "Wheahzen weaze geazet teazo theaze beazar, eazi'm dreazinking a beazeer." Silence. They both turned and looked at me with great horror on their faces. I couldn't keep a straight face and started laughing, looking at their expressions. They thought they had lost their command of English!

A few years later I recalled all that, and tried the same thing with my sister-in-law. To my utmost shock, she began rattling off Carny talk so fast I couldn't keep up! I had no idea she would ever have learned this! I guess she then enjoyed the look on my face. As it turned out, she had been in range of Murray the K's radio shows where she grew up; I never had been.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

A few years ago, I did some research on "Carny talk," and at that time came up with a few web pages, which was the best I could find on the internet:
http://www.linguistlist.org/issues/5/5-764.html#1
http://lloyd.emich.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind9710e&L=linguist&P=3270
(those are pretty good, and with bibliography)

So I decided to revisit this fascinating topic, and checked around on the internet using Google and Wikipedia. Google mostly returned the same seven year old links, above. Wikipedia is a mess. The best they have is this article on Argot.
I occasionally contribute to Wikipedia. I spent some time adding judiciously to this one, crosslinking some other articles, and calling attention to the information in the linguistlist.org link mentioned above. In my view, all the various Pig Latins, Carnys, and such should be connected with one article. They properly distinguish between argot and jargon.

In the meantime, I found the original author of one of the 1994 summary pages has gone on to editing The SpecGram.

Nushu - Women's language Language Games - Wikipedia
The end of Nushu

(A tip o' the hat will be given to any who identify the mystery carny in the illustration!)

Turn Backwards, Oh Time

Why does the arrow of time move forwards and not backwards?

For some reason I began rethinking this ever-present conundrum recently and achieved some, for me, new thoughts.

Maybe it doesn't. Maybe we just see it wrong. Backwards. The refusal to see the arrow of time moving backwards is equal to atheism. The failure to accept the mind-boggling notion that time, flowing backwards, violates entropy and displays the universe moving to a more ordered state is a failure to accept Creation right under one's gaze. The bones of the antelope gain flesh, bacteria contribute mass, and the flesh warms, and an arrow is suddenly ripped from the form and flies returning to a bow, and life is created from dust. To reverse the arrow of time is merely to embrace God. All things flow towards God, and will meet in a faraway but explicitly knowable time. The inevitability of our return to the Creator has been made achingly, beautifully, obvious since we began to think. We just see it all backwards. We flee to the unformed Future, and perversely imagine we have the blessing of the Creator, while we flee; while we break the heart, in our backwards flight, of the only organizing Principle of which we have evidence. We invent the future to console ourselves in our sad, dishonest loneliness. We yet imagine in our flight we are not ignoring the wisdom of our parent, and we make promises we know we may not be able to keep. By reversing the arrow, we are runaways, and perhaps pawns, on our wooden ships, prodigal children casting occasional breadcrumbs behind us into the sea, but with no conscious intention, and no other way, to return, and yet reaping from our lonely sea of unformed unknown, and so curiously binding all the things we glean to the far hand of the beginning from which we flee.

Double Double Trouble Trouble

A Year Without Cheese - Redux

It's over. Readers who kept up with my comments at the original post (A Year Without Cheese) know it was over a while ago. But I mostly kept going even in the face of some admitted failures.

And the results are in!

Last year:............................. This year:
Total cholesterol ..230........... 197
Triglycerides ..........95............. 94
HDL (good) .............47............. 40
LDL (bad) ..............164........... 138

Weight loss: 10 lbs.

Scope This

What's with the picture? It's a photo I made from my own custom-mixed alloy, made for the sole purpose of photographing it through a microscope.

Other stuff going on today is links:

Here's one I just found, the Canadian Project Gutenburg

And its Australian cousin

(Which came about because I am reading Wikipedia's article on Project Gutenburg.

A frisson of danger! Some of these available texts are legal, out-of-copyright in some countries, but illegal to possess in the good old U.S. thanks to the lovely copyright legislation passed here in the '90s - the Copyright Term Extension Act, (different from the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.)

I love Project Gutenburg.

Visualize why.

Haircut Day

Help identify this breed!

Separated at Birth?

At least in the movie version (Braveheart) of Robert the Bruce, played by Angus Macfadyen. Both Muqtada al-Sadr and Robert the Bruce: heirs to minor dynasties, political and militia leaders. Can't make up their minds.

At least one proved to drop the ball at a historical juncture, and allowed freedom to die. In the movie.

Graduation

I originally did this as an actual assemblage. The original sculpture is long lost, so after many years I remembered it and re-did it in photoshop. The draw is the multiple meanings.

An Even Strain

I was trying to make a subtle point to my two employees. As too often happens, Hop was angry about a perceived slight, probably imaginary, from one of my customers. Hop is what I consider a high-maintenance employee. So I had to take a minute to talk him down. I assured him that he knew more about his job than the customer; that he, Hop, was my most relied upon man when it came to his specialty, and he calmed down. Charlie just looked out the window, his mind wandering. He was used to it.

"The bits fail in one of two ways. Either the teeth wear out, or the bearings wear so bad the wobble starts making the drill string jump. The driller oughta feel it, and pull it before he loses a cone." Now Hop's looking bored and impatient. "The thing is, most of these guys think you can sell 'em a better bit. If the teeth are gone, they want to go in with a bit with a cheaper bearing and teeth that last longer. If the bearings go and the teeth are still good, they want a bit with a bigger bearing and cheaper teeth. I've seen both you guys give in to this idea, and it's a misconception. You have got to talk to these people about cost-per-foot. Just keep pounding away: 'Cost per foot is the only criterion that counts.' It does not matter if the teeth wear out first, or the bearing wears out first, or if they both wear out at the exact same moment, what matters is how much did it cost me to drill x number of feet with this bit?" Now Charlie is getting sort of wild-eyed like he always does when I forget to use only one- and two-syllable words; and he's afraid I'm going to ask him to do the math again, which I am. "Sometimes the best bit for the customer just wears unevenly, and that's still the best cost-per-foot bit for drilling that particular rock, and for him. You ought to -you got to - show him the numbers."

Charlie is a joke-teller, a card player, and our customers love him. He is not a technical guy by nature, but he's helped me build my business and he's a good man. Hop is different; more than once he's actually thrown a punch at me, and once he cussed out a customer. Who was, granted, acting like a supercilious son-of-a-bitch. I had to warn him, then, and almost fired him. But I didn't. And he is sharp as a razor.

Neither of them is exactly well-rounded. You know what I think? Well-rounded doesn't count for squat.

Uncle Herb's Adventure

You walk through the automatic doors and walk around to the right, looking at the floor, but peripherally, too, hoping vaguely to locate and check out the vegetable section first because probably nice people frequent the vegetable section and their presence might help you to acclimate to the grocery store, but instead, as you walk in you are thrown into a twilight zone that's just awful. Each of the five cashiers is over two hundred pounds and every last one of them is wearing a hairdo that looks like it was fashioned after something on Hee Haw, and you are getting an awful trailer park vibe but just as you try to twist this ominous Boschean vision into something more forgiving, more flexible in aspect, the horrible realization audibly insinuates itself that there is actually a Muzak rendition of the Velvet Underground's Sweet Jane coming over the store audio - it's incredible, no one would ever even believe it - and you wonder for a millisecond if the cashiers are familiar with this song oozing from the speakers, and you know it means nothing to them and everything to you, and you can see that this is not going to be easy.

Skulking alone, shopping through the shelf aisles, I do well. I have an apple, potato, a grapefruit, yogurt, eggs, three pounds of butter, and a bag of chips, some dry roasted peanuts, and bar soap. I start mentally composing audio tracks they should play to shoppers. "Officer Four, Control Violation on Aisle Six," I imagine a sexy-voiced audio girl saying. "Alien control systems," she whispers.

I lean back against a shelf, forgetting that I need to grab a bag of kitty litter right in front of me. "Jesus, did I hear that or just think it?" I ask myself. "Man, I am messed up." I see that the subtle corruscating plaid pattern designed into the ceiling exactly matches the design of all the products placed on the shelf; a brilliant shelf design that makes me think the store manager must be a committed artist, an acidhead genius to design all the shelf product placement to look just so like this, with the flickering randomly associated colors colliding... Oh, god, I realize I'm drifting, it's impossible, it's just me, I need to get the hell of of there; I must check out, pay and leave as soon as possible.

I head for the checkout line.

Fee for Foo

I'll tell you about bad tea. First there's the "tea" you get in Chinese restaurants. It's so weak you can't, of course, taste tea. You can barely see a tint in the water! And it smells sort of like flowers. Jasmine. If I wanted jasmine water, I would ask for jasmine water. But I asked for tea.

And since I live in the South, I can barely find a good glass of iced tea. Well, that's not strictly true. There's good unsweetened tea available. Usually they want to push a sort of syrup at you, that might actually be good on pancakes. But, I was raised in Florida where tea is strong, and sugar is added later. If it won't dissolve, you are simply trying to put more sugar in it than God intended. It's just that more than half the time the server races by and refills my glass with the syrup variety.

And then there's the matter of lemon. Sweet googly moogly! The restaurant business is full of people who just don't get it. People put lemon in their tea because they want the tartness and taste of discernable lemon juice in it. I mean, it is an established custom. It's sort of well known. In theory but not in practice, apparently. Nowadays the practice is to achieve "cost control." This means try to get about 50 slices of lemon out of each one. The result of this insanity is twofold: all the lemon juice ends up on the cutting board and is discarded, and the resulting microtomed slice is impossible to grasp by the diner and extract the few milligrams of lemon juice remaining.

And lately I've been eating at the Indian restaurant. Now I thought surely these folks understand tea: British Empire and all. And in the first year, all was well. I would order "strong, plain tea" and a pot would arrive shortly! This I would drink with a bit of milk. With the strong Indian food, it was perfect. In gratitude, I would tip 30%. But then things changed. Now the tea is getting weaker, and weaker, and tasting less like tea and more like... cardamom. Which I can assure you, does not taste good with milk. And today I was told "plain tea is not available." So I switched back to iced tea, which also is approaching total transparency and also tastes like cardamom. And comes with a piece of lemon exactly one millimeter thick.

Corny Story

Anyone with access to a cornfield this coming Autumn might enjoy repeating my experiment. I finally saw, a few years ago, on Rick Bayless's show, Mexico- One Plate at a Time, the actual method for making tortillas. So I followed it.

A friend and I went out to visit her mother, who still lived on the family farm. They rented their fields to others, and a corn crop had been harvested several days before. Giving my friend some time alone with her mother, I wandered into the field and acquired about five ears of dried yellow corn that had been knocked down and missed by the harvester. Hard as iron, they were, of course.

At home, I removed the kernels from the cobs by a twisting motion. They popped right off. Adding water and hydrated horticultural lime, I brought the kernels to a boil and then simmered them for an hour. I turned off the heat and soaked them overnight in this mixture, and the next day simmered them another hour. I wasn't sure how long it took to make hominy. I let the potful cool, and then poured it all through a strainer and rinsed the now-plumped hominy kernels several times.

Using a food processor, which put quite a strain on the motor, I blended the corn into a perfectly textured dough. Through beginners luck, I had succeeded. It smelled sublime. Here,now, came my biggest error: I was, and remain, an abyssmally poor tortilla maker! I rolled out some awfully poor, raggedy specimens, and fried them in oil for some crunchy tacos. No good. And no way was I going to struggle through making the probably 200 tortillas that the dough promised. Surrendering, I covered the dough and put it in the refrigerator. By the next day inspiration had struck.

I fried some salted hamburger and onions and a little hint of salsa and a fair amount of chili powder and then assembled a mess of hot tamales. This went much faster, did not take much skill, and used the dough quickly. Plus I could freeze the extra tamales. I steamed them in aluminum foil packets. Of course for cultural accuracy, corn husks or banana leaves would be used for wrapping, then steaming tamales. I doused them with tamale sauce bought from a store. Delicious. I used lard for verisimilitude and will never, ever do that again. I felt over the next few days that I could literally feel the stuff clogging my arteries. It is simply not necessary. A tiny bit of canola oil would suffice, and I suspect no oil whatever will do fine.

Later I learned food-grade lime is available for commercial cooking operations. I used about 1/2 cup for five ears of kernals. I took a little risk with the horticultural grade, I suspect. All the final rinsing I did reassured me, however.

Those without any chemistry should know that the product is not "limestone," also known as calcium carbonate. I mean calcium hydroxide with H2O affixed. One assumes that historically a lye prepared from hardwood ash was used. I envision also a primitive method where hardwood and native limestone chunks are made into a fire and after the fire is burned out, the lime and ash used as a single compound. Lye- or calcium-treated corn is known as masa nixtamalera. This process allegedly makes niacin more available nutritionally.

In addition, the laborious grinding of dried corn is circumvented. As a lazy chef searching for shortcuts, and one who formerly studied anthropology and maintains an interest in the field, I thoroughly enjoyed my experiment, and the resulting dinner as well.

Texas

What was it like? I guess it really started to sink in when I heard on my radio that John Lennon had been shot. The radio was tuned to a Houston college radio station, an underground thing of noise and in-your-face programming, speedmetal, oh yeah, that would describe it, punks breathing a rancid but new breath across the humid, yellow-skied 1980 Houston area for forty miles beyond the perimeter of the hard industrial town, into the deserted landscape and right up into the radio in the trailer where I was, next to the big loud drilling rig, and up on the drill floor the roughnecks were a mixture of Louisiana and Texas oil field trash. That's what people called us, and so with disdain and pride we called ourselves that, too.

I remember walking up to the rig floor and experiencing November, the cold dry air blowing in from Colorado or Utah to the northwest, and there had been a squall a day or two before but it was long gone. The yellow skies, the wretched smog of drilling mud steam and smell and rig lights and diesel and grease and engine oil, the fecal leak on the engineer's mobile home set on concrete blocks on the edge of the half-acre pad of limestone fill that defined the drilling site and set it apart from the surrounding cornfield stubble... or was it sorghum? The cool blowing overhead kept the zone of industrial alienness low, as if wind alone could blow away that hovering brown miasma this November night. Everything was drying out and cooling off, fast.
The drilling rig roared ungodly loud as usual, 120 feet tall, all lit up with the lights that illuminated the smog and the red light on top to warn away airplanes, and the diesels snarled at the northwest wind and the girders and guy wires let the wind cut itself on the steel, and made the wind cry.
And when I went up onto the drilling floor acting odd and reticent and said, "Hey, you know that John Lennon? Someone shot him, killed him," the floorhands looked at each other in confusion and one of them said to the other, Oh, yeah, the one in a group called the Beatles, they made music... they wuz famous..."
God I felt alone.

...

I see them from the freeway into Houston that next morning, while heading for the cheap motel my company paid for. Five different patterns, different colors, their envelopes quivering and rippling as they rapidly fill up. I guess they rented the small suburban outskirts field, or had permission to be there. There are five balloons there, in the established little neighborhood, right off the main road two blocks away, all five propane burners roaring full throttle; basso profundo, unsyncopated, like an amplified five-piece sousaphone band tuning up, and I drive my truck up and get out and see the five big promises and on impulse shout to the nearest balloon crew, "Hey! I'll pay for the gas if you'll give me a ride!" One guy, hanging onto the outside of the twisting and rocking well-crafted wicker basket dependent from the balloon, shouts to me, "We're full! Ask the others!"
And I do, but the next guy shouts, "Gas is nothing."
"I've got fifty dollars," I yell, and he says "A hundred! But you're too late!" The wind is tearing at the balloons, and the last crew are struggling the most. "Get out of here!" He tumbles over to the inside of the gondola, the rope handlers angrily urge me to get back, and the balloons lift off in quick sequence from the field, headed quickly south in the wind, and the handlers - the chase crew - race to their trucks, start their engines, and drive frantically away from the field, casting me dirty looks through their windshields, leaving me alone in the empty lot, as the roar of the burners fades away and the balloons disappear low in the crisp Houston morning. They are playing all the John Lennon tunes on the radio, now, and right now they're playing "So This is Christmas".

New Respect With Dog Lady

Once my dog got caught in razor wire and ran home, right at the same time a neighbor, trying to start a problematic car that had sat a few days, caused it to backfire loudly. At that moment my dog appeared at my back door, bleeding profusely and visibly. Well, you can imagine what I thought: that the "boom," and my dog's injury, meant that she had just been shot!

So I called 911, and animal control was dispatched. By the time they arrived, we had figured it all out. The backfire guy was innocent, multiple witnesses knew. A lot of the furor was just based on coincidence. My frisky dog had been granted a hair too much freedom by me, who was technically at fault for her encounter with razor wire at a nearby facility. I had not been a good parent. This has been resolved by the time I write this.

But the animal control lady made superficial judgements of me when she arrived. I think she viewed me as a bad pet owner. She made an ultimatum that veterinary treatment was not optional, it was demanded. By this time, of course, my dog was bandaged, having had her wound shaved and dressed by me, and disinfected by gentle peroxide. I had determined an indeterminate period of observation. This carried no weight with animal control lady. I was to present to her evidence of a complete veterinary examination within 24 hours. So we went. My vet basically repeated what I had done, but vended us some antibiotics, which I thought was a boon. So all was well.

Next day the animal control lady pulls up just as promised, and when I gave her all the certificates on my dog, the complete vaccination and spaying records from the past 15 years of all my beasts as well as this one, plus the record of her most recent injury, the lady was surprised. New respect for me was shown. She hadn't realized I really did care.

Fractured Funnies

They show bigger if you click on them...

Man of the Hour

A friend of mine sees in Obama the potential for a leader of great popularity, whom many will support at the levels Ronald Reagan garnered. This post is for you, Kid! Sqirlz morph

Gold

As you are aware, the Bermuda Triangle is reported to be a repository of lost gold, but is not reported to be a repository of the product of the Golden Triangle, i.e., opium. This is a misconception. The Sea of Sargasso is a floating gentle whirlpool /vortex of fresh and decaying seaweed floating in the mid-Atlantic, whose position varies somewhat depending on (or more precisely, relating to) the position of Sirius, the Dog Star. Spanish pirates, entangled by the gnarly strands, often found themselves in the position whereby the ship's Priest stood on the larboard bow and scattered opium into the Atlantic, the poppy straw scattering to the four winds in the Sargasso Sea. Thus to summon Yeshue, their idol.

In any case, decomposition in the Sargasso Sea is known to occur by whirling away its detritus slowly, and so the opium-laden seaweed slowly found its way to the Viking outposts in Newfoundland. Leif Ericcson had driven out and infected with syphilis the last white people he could rip off, the so-called Albans. They had been run out of Scotland and the Shetland Islands, by Celtic refugees, had dark hair, lived in boats made of walrus skins, and hunted seals; and had fled Viking oppression for centuries. Leif, being a pre-Christian mushroom-head, encouraged savage levels of rapacity in his minions towards the European refugees. Of course, the neoSiberian transplants (the so-called Eskimos and Indians) were messing with Leif and his followers to an extent unrecorded. They didn't like the smell of the Norsemen. But they got on with the Albans just fine.

But enough of that. Some of the sailors from the Shetland Islands had ponies. They also knew hemp. Those ponies need strong reins, and the hemp people knew how to deal with it. Anyway, the people on Newfoundland got the opiumated seaweed, the hemp, and the Norse Berserker amanita mushrooms, all at once. The evil oriental geniuses from the Golden Triangle just sneered. There were no evil geniuses left in the Bermuda Triangle, they had all sunk. The experts about the Golden Ratio, a mathematical concept, were far away in Europe. The experts about the Golden Calf were either living openly in Siberia or VERY clandestinely in the midst of Eurasia after a thousand years of oppression. Except in Spain.

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Fractured Funnies

They show bigger if you click on them...

You Know

what this is. Drawn by Sherry Roe, concept by me.

Non-verbal Again

Waiting for the Gift of Sound and Vision

Well, I haven't felt like writing a thing lately. But I have been busy. I learned a little more about my program called Sqirlz Morph (I got version 1.3 a while back ). I wanted to tackle the "simpler" subroutines of warping, as opposed to "morphing", which is the full Monty of the program. I really got balled up over the subtle details, though. I had to think it all through and perform some experiments with red circles and blue squares before I could get it. Of course I went online but got no help. Still, Sqirlz Morph is a great little program and it's free. I see there is a new version 1.5 release at Download.com

There are some older versions still around on the Web.

The first shot is an older one I re-ran with warp settings as opposed to morph, and the second is a previous failure I tweaked a bit today and then cleaned up with Adobe Photoshop Elements. Whom I am not too happy with today, because of their over-kill organizing window, which I had wisely ignored since I bought the program. If you don't save your projects as JPGs, Windows can't view them, and its organizer is written to satisfy the most obsessive minds in existence. Anyway, one whole sqirlz session got lost today and I suspect Adobe, open in a different window, was such a resource hog it caused the project to bail without warning, and I had not saved... you would think we would learn.

Having said that, I gave up the ghost on my old PhotoDeluxe software last year. I forsaw a 10 hour learning-curve, with no guarantees, to force my new machine using XP to keep using it, and the cost-benefit analysis looked grim. So I forked over about $100 for Adobe's Elements, and actually it's great. Except for the dreaded Organizer...

Sound and Vision?

Here's a Brian Eno video about his visual art, 77 Milion Paintings

Jumper

Well, the cat's out of the bag now. I may as well admit it. They have made a movie out of the 1992 book that inspired my name.

http://www.jumperthemovie.com/ will provide some info on this. The usual search of Google Wikipedia and YouTube will provide more.

Author Steven Gould (middle name Charles) is of course not to be confused with the late Stephen Jay Gould whose books I love and found very valuable as well.

This science fiction writer wowed me. Teleportation is an old science fiction theme, but Gould brought it alive with such a fresh enthusiasm that not only did I simply enjoy the book, he inspired me as a writer. Cast out all old baggage, begin the journey anew!

At first, viewing the movie trailers, with slavering anticipation, I was put off by some elements I detected that were not true to the original book. "Oh, lord, another typical Hollywood mash-up," I thought. But it looks like the talent is there in the movie, (screenwriters include Jim Uhls of Fight Club, and apparently Gould has written a couple of sequels I'm also slavering for. One (the third) was written for the release of the movie, okay. It's obvious he didn't stomp off in a funk about this. We will see.

I also loved Gould's 1996 Wildside

Update: The movie was not well received by critics. And I ordered and read Jumper: Griffin's Story which was pretty good. Being such a fan of the books, I was of course rapt throughout. The special effects were all one could ask for. I thought it was paced a little tiny bit too fast - I suppose that's better than too slow, but I didn't think that was likely. The acting didn't do much for me. And there was a huge plot hole.

But I am still Jumper, and I still Jump.
Further update: I indicated to author Steven Gould my appropriation of this name for online purposes. He gave me an okay up on its continued use by me. I think I first used it on an old Sudoku forum, where I have used it Or was it first used on the New Kind of Science (Wolfram) forum? Not sure. My old posts have vanished.

For its Own Sake

Haiku

Raw nerve, cut myself

I've had this much pain before

So I can take it

Inevitable.

Thousand-foot-tall door closes.

Ka-Whooom! Then, silence.

Offshore drilling rig

Sam the Sham got his own boat,

charges for the ride.

Nun rides bicycle

Storm clouds darken, it grows late

Who will start the fire?

"Holy shit, Batman!"

"Hey! You watch your mouth, Robin!"

The caped crusaders.

Symmetry is fun

Beautiful is different

it's not the same thing

What the hell happened?

God damn it all anyway.

My baby left me

I Was a UFO Hoaxter

I got started when I took up kite-flying as a calming activity. My life had been frenetic, stressful, and I had given up a bad habit recently, so I bought a sturdy delta-winged kite.
Since '86 I've been looking for the pre-packaged box kites I was most impressed with as a kid; surely imported from Taiwan those days, with tremendous lift and stability and unique in that they have no obvious"wings" but the paper panels forming part of the sides of the rectangular box. I haven't seen them in years, and I keep putting off making my own. But a good tested delta kite will be all right.

I experimented with nylon monofilament for fishing, 5- and 10-pound-test line, but settled for the reliable 15 or 20. I bought about 15 rolls of 400-yard line as my hobby progressed.
I remember one sunny, breezy afternoon tying a few successive spools together as I played out my kite to a height of about 1,200 yards or about 2/3 of a mile out. A pair of brown eagles came from over the horizon once I got up to about 600 feet; I guess they were checking out to see if they had some local competition. Cautious that they might actually attack, or at least tumble my kite, I quickly played out about 400 more feet of line and outclimbed them. A small Piper from the local airstrip came by to check things out.

I toyed around with it in those days. I would try to see how high I needed to fly it to make it disappear completely. I got self-conscious, once, because I knew I looked odd, out in a field holding an invisible string attached to nothing that could be seen. And flying an invisible kite loses it's fun, even if I was breaking my own altitude records in the process.

I didn't have any fancy reels, just a homemade large can I wrapped and let out simply. It took forever to reel that kite back down from 2000 feet. I remember the first time getting impatient, and then I realized I was having such a cool time, I didn't care if it took a while to reel in and go home. I learned patience.

One night I drove through some backstreets to a field that abutted a main road, though you couldn't get into the field there. It was dusk; I parked my car behind some weeds, and by the time I got my kite up in the air it was dark out. I don't think the moon was visible.
I played out about 1,000 feet of line, got out a little tiny cheap flashlight I'd bought in the grocery checkout lane, and taped it onto the string with some duct tape. It made the line sag somewhat, but as it rose up the kite caught a higher lift far above, and pulled that little light straight up another 600 feet.

It looked very cool. The kite was completely out of sight in the dark heights, but the light quickly became a point, a pixie of light unlike any usual thing seen in the night sky. It was no bird, plane, swampgas, helicopter, star, or balloon. Just a slightly jittery, shimmering little light in the sky.

I didn't know the building far across the field and across the road was a church until the service ended, and people started coming out of the front door of the church, chatting with each other, heading for their cars in the parking lot beside the building. One person saw it, then a few more started pointing up at it in the sky, and talking. I was too far away, about 250 yards to make out any words, behind some weeds, leaning on my car in the total darkness, and I was being quiet. Their voices sounded really alive, kind of loud, but that wasn't it, it was a tone of curiosity, a murmur of unafraid excitement and interest... mystery.

It's interesting to me how about half the people there took one look at it and didn't linger at all; they walked straight to their cars and drove away, almost nervously it seemed to me. The other half of the people stood out there, pointing up at the little light, talking to each other for over 20 minutes, slowly drifting to their cars before the last two couples stayed a few more minutes, watching and talking quietly. The other couple started to their car, the man calling over his shoulder to his friend, "Well, I hope you figure it out!" and the last holdout looked back up into the sky, but his wife grabbed his arm and I barely heard her say to her husband, "Come on, honey, let's GO."

Squeezed

Careful shoppers often note that spaghetti and elbow macaroni are the least expensive pasta choices at the grocery store. I'm looking for the novel mouth-feel of the oddballs, though: rotini, or shells, or even wagonwheels. Remember them? I want a sauce-grabbing and interesting little pasta morsel in my mouth, and I see I have to pay about twice as much to get it. That's right, almost double the price. Even angel-hair spaghetti is about twice as much as regular spaghetti. If they made little fish-shaped pasta morsels, which I want, I bet they'd charge three times as much.
So let's look at the cost to manufacture this. Commercial (industrial) pasta dies, the pieces made to force the dough through, have evolved. They used to be made of copper, by hand; then bronze. Higher speeds, greater forces. Hundreds of pounds of pressure, forcing that stuff out at greater and greater speeds. The factories got more efficient. Hardened steel dies, finally. There's a whole science of manufacturing the dies for pasta-making plants. So I assumed the weirder pasta pieces had more complex and expensive parts to make them. That might be reasonable.
Except for the weird anomaly of elbow macaroni. This stuff is twice as complicated as spaghetti, at least. It's hollow, for one thing, making the extrusion significantly more complicated. And they have to make sure it has that 90 degree bend in it, the "elbow." Not so simple, really. Surely a simple rotini is less expensive to make.
But note this: elbow macaroni has a lousy "mouth feel" to it. It's not that great. No sauce or cheese really goes far into those thin tubes, it's no better or worse than spaghetti, and like regular spaghetti, inferior even to"thin spaghetti" and noticeably less rewarding to eat than "angel hair,"which although requires smaller dies, is really pretty damned simple even in a cost-conscious factory.
The reason regular spaghetti and elbow macaroni are least expensive is not because they are cheaper to produce, it's because they aren't that great.And I'm pretty sure they COULD sell me rotini at the SAME LOW PRICE, they just WON'T. Those bastards.

A Year Without Cheese

In August of 2007, I decided to go a year without cheese. I had just gotten my cholesterol report back from the doctor; and I'm overweight by some 20 lbs.

In the early '80s or '90s I read about an actress who lost weight by a simple "no cheese" diet. Uncomplicated, and not excessively sacrificial or forbidding. Simple. Merely not eating cheese.

After one year of that, and making no other lifestyle changes, I had dropped 10 pounds. Now I'm doing it again. This time I'm experiencing even greater social pressure to eat cheese. People overreact; waitstaff raise their eyebrows.

Then, I was not a fanatic. I recall two or three pizzas I allowed myself during that year. Maybe one or two other violations such as a broccoli casserole serving at Thanksgiving. But I quit buying the stuff and pretty much quit it for the year.

I drink skim milk, eat yogurt, cook with butter. I don't eat a lot of sour cream, but it's allowed. Just cheese.

I ate less fast food in those days, cheese experiment or not. Nowadays, I eat out a bit more. It has become a challenge to go cheeseless, but I have. It's interesting how much easier it is to judge the quality of the burger, without the cheese. I am becoming a fan of the slaw-and chili burger.

Just like last time, I allow myself a couple of exceptions occasionally. I had tacos with cheese for my birthday, and have had one frozen pizza since August. Next pizza will be pepperoni and mushroom and olive, no cheese. I eat a lot of tacos and other Mexican food, and order them all without cheese. A lunch wagon pulled up where I work recently and I asked the lady what she had without cheese. With a worried look, she rifled through her stash of lunch and said, "They all have cheese!" She talked me into getting a taco and simply removing the cheese, which I did. She gave me a price break!

I've been all over the internet reading various others' tales of no cheese. Almost every one of them expresses big regrets: we love the stuff. Vegans, vegetarians, dieters and cholesterol-lowerers, lactose intolerent, candida and yeast sufferers, and low-thyroid people. They are mostly expressing a melancholy sadness relating to this sacrifice. It seems to be difficult, a "last thing on the list" that they were able to quit; the thing they love the most.

http://www.i-mockery.com/visionary/cheese.php

A humorous take on the "Cheesocracy."

I've lost some weight already, but have not been on scales yet. More on this when I find some and weigh myself.

Stupid is as Stupid Does

I would like to take this opportunity to comment on a common tactic employed by many, such as TV's Columbo, but more often used by a certain sort of unregenerate Son of the South. I'm talking about the tactic of deliberately appearing to be stupider than one is. This is often a reflexive habit, honed into such persistent usage it becomes almost unconscous in its employ. I assume the prime role model in this behavior is Andy Griffith. In this fictional display, Andy appears to be a hick, and beguiles the bad guys into letting slip some critical piece of intelligence, thinking he won't pick up on it. But he does! This is because Andy is sly.
I believe the practitioners of this habit, even though they believe they are emulating a smart fellow, have practiced this routine so much that they are in danger of actually becoming the thing they think they are pretending to be. Like your Mama said, if you keep making that face it'll get stuck that way.
Besides, I asked myself a while back, how smart do you have to be, and how smart is it, to constantly make people think you are an idiot, anyway?

Juicy Job

As lads, my friend instigated, and I assisted with, the manufacture of a sort of rum or perhaps "cachaca" from refined sugar, water, and ordinary bread yeast. When fermentation slowed to a crawl, we made a still from Pyrex glassware, even incorporating a water-cooled Pyrex coil to condense it. His father assisted. He didn't know that our "experiment" was soon ramped up from the mere ounce we obtained, and which he thought was pretty harmless even if we tasted it. As it was only an ounce, and was too strong and alien for teenage boys to develop a taste for. He believed. Years later, my friend told me the rest of the story.Unbeknownst to his father or me, he continued his work and somehow (I must get the details) managed to make about 2 gallons of the stuff and stored it in mason jars. Unsatisfied with the strength, he distilled it twice, and it approached everclear or very strong vodka in potency. He and some other guys mixed it with various fruit juices and got bombed.That summer, he went for a job interview at an industrial chemical plant. The interviewer asked him of his interest in chemistry, and he explained his recent hobby. Intrigued, the interviewer peppered him with questions. "Well, I happen to have a few quarts in my trunk right now," he said, and they repaired to the parking lot where he magnanimously offered a couple of quarts to the interviewer as a gift. He got the job. And a cushy job it was indeed for a high-school boy. Nowadays we live in moonshine country, but I still turn my nose up at the stuff. Copper coils, metal pots, radiators for crying out loud: none of those hillbillies can be trusted to obtain the level of purity my buddy and I obtained using all glass equipment and double distillation.

About the illustration: Note the seams sealed with lead solder and the non-food grade ball valve attached. And the dubious plastic hose, although that might just be for the cooling water. But still! Yuck!

UPDATE: My long-lost friend just showed up and tells me: "Your latest entry barely hints at the truth and is dead wrong on most counts." This cracks me up. I believe him. So much for my memory.

Simpsonized

We all lie about our age. The top example shows me as 64. I lied. I'm not 64.

And the bottom: I just play a guy who wears a suit on TV.

Some blog friends on Achenblog began this enjoyable silliness. The site can be found at http://simpsonizeme.com/#

It will ask you for a photo, but I don't really believe it has to be a photo of oneself. I wonder why they are phishing for photos?

Needless to say, playing with someone else's cartooning software caused me to temporarily neglect my own projects.