The Toad Abode

A Good Long Run Finally Ended

2009-10-27T14:22:00.003+08:00

Papillon

October 1996 - October 2009

Best of Dogs

OK Class. Attacker Holds the Knife in the Reverse Grip

2009-06-18T08:11:00.005+08:00

Proof that anyone can learn Silat!

New Rifle accessories

2009-01-21T06:12:00.003+08:00

You find iPods in all sorts of places these days. But if you had to pick the top ten items with iPod mounts I'm guessing that the M110 6.25mm sniper rifle would not be one of them. According to a currently slashdotted article in the Firearms Blog that's exactly what the Knights Armament company has done. Other reviews can be found at engadget and productreviews.net .

Speculations about the playlist aside, there's a good reason for this. Some bright boys and girls have come up with a ballistics calculator application for the popular music player.

God be praised

2009-01-21T05:31:00.003+08:00

But still, I didn't think we'd live to see this day. We've watched the evil prosper while good men compromised themselves away. I've wondered what I even keep this flag for. But still, I didn't think we'd live to see this day.

Turduck

2008-12-25T10:04:00.003+08:00

I've been fascinated by the Turducken ever since I saw an ad for one a few years back. There's a sort of culinary machismo to making one of these. First you partially bone a turkey. Then you stuff it with layers - a layer of cornbread or highly seasoned bread stuffing, a boned duck, a layer of sausage stuffing, a boned Cornish game hen and a dollop of oyster stuffing.

The last few years have been The Years of Buying Groceries Wholesale which means getting frozen chickens by the dozen. A person can get tired of roast half bird. I've relieved the monotony with things like curry and tikka. Some time back I decided to learn how to do the kitchen equivalent of the Neutron Bomb. Destroy the bones, but leave the meat in one piece. After one or two inadvertent dinners of chicken hash later the technique was pretty much dialed in. If you haven't tried it you really should. The extra prep time more than pays for itself on the other end. The bird cooks faster and more evenly.

There were no game hens in the freezer, so this year it was just a Turduck. Last night I took the turkey and a duck out of the freezer and thawed them overnight under cold water. By morning the duck was just thawed. The turkey still had a little ice in the body cavity. Perfect for food safety and thawed enough for deboning.

Extracting the skeleton was routine. The turkey is bigger than a broiler chicken, and the keel presents some challenges, but the bones are all in the same place.

The traditional stuffing is a little over-seasoned for Tiel's tastes. I cooked up five or six handsful of couscous, mixed it with 3/4 cup of slivered almonds, a few serving spoonfulls of apricot preserves, cinnamon and three tablespoons of butter. The duck was stuffed with wild rice and shiitake.

Deboning the birds reduced the cooking time from six hours to four and a half, not bad for less than an extra hour of prep time.

Was it worth it? Yes, I think so. The variety of textures and flavors is very nice. The turkey soaks up some of the oil from the duck leaving both birds about as oily as they should be.

Next year I'll make sure we have a game hen. If I'm feeling adventurous maybe we'll have emturduckenrow.

A Couple Gun/Science Links

2008-12-09T06:14:00.004+08:00

There's a certain sort of martial artist who appreciates the philosophical purity of Ed Parker's Creed:

I come to you with only empty hands, I have no weapons, but should I be forced to defend myself, my principles or my honor, should it be a matter of life or death, of right or wrong; then here are my weapons, my empty hands.

There's another sort who reads nothing but Tom Clancy novels and touches him (usually "him") self reading comparison reports between the latest Kimber and Taurus 1911s.

Most of us are somewhere between the two extremes. Self defense is part of why we do this, and self defense is about maximizing your chances of spending the night at home instead not in an ER or the County Jail. From there it's a hop and a skip to looking at other animals with their fangs and claws and stingers and realizing that we're pretty pathetic when it comes to natural armament. The only things we have going for us are an overdeveloped brain and opposable thumbs. So it's time to take The Once and Future King down off the shelf and read the bit about the creation of the animals. Or go to Amazon and search inside the book. Start with the part on pages 194-196 with the words "badger" and "God". And a lot of us start thinking hard about legal weapons.

Some time I'll dust off an old rant about why weapons in general and guns in particular are a bad place to start your self defense strategy. When you need one, nothing else will do the job quite as well. If you decide to keep them around you need good information. It's easy to spend far too many hours and dollars getting equipped. Consumer Reports doesn't do reviews of weapons. They also don't do reviews of religions. There may be a connection. Other than Gun Tests most of the magazines are nothing but thinly disguised advertising copy.

I've always liked The Box O' Truth where the motto is "Shooting stuff is fun". Old_Painless uses a lot of different guns and sees what happens when you put myths in The Box of Truth. How far do shotgun pellets really spread? Will birdshot penetrate walls? Can a Buick stop a bullet? Is hand-loaded ammunition really more accurate than cheap commercial stuff? In its specialized way the information is very useful. And watching him shoot stuff really is fun.

Today's find was Ballistics by the Inch. A physicist, a book conservator and a gun geek don't walk into a bar. But they do test out a variety of ammunition in over a dozen calibers and barrel lengths from two to eighteen inches answering the question "How much does barrel length matter?" They document their experiments. They describe their protocols. They make their datasets available. They use ammunition that a real person might put in a self defense pistol. And they compare their idealized test gun (Thompson Contender with interchangeable barrels) to regular carry pieces. It isn't world-shaking. But it does answer a couple important questions with good science.

Heard Outside a Barbershop Last Week

2008-11-14T01:22:00.002+08:00

Rosa sat so that Martin could march and Barrack could run.

Yes, Sam. It came.

2008-11-05T12:56:00.000+08:00

"We're not racists" for Obama

2008-10-30T06:50:00.004+08:00

Before the first Spring buds opened the campaign signs and bumper stickers started blooming all over Portland. I thought they were related to Snowdrop or Winter Aconite, but they last well into November and sprout like crazy. The Obama-Biden variety propagates best in the mild, wet climate of Oregon West of the Cascades. There's just a few lonely McCain-Palin blossoms.

Our nearest Post Office is on Northeast Killingsworth Street, just above Martin Luther King Boulevard. It isn't as bad as the Chris Rock routine about Martin Luther King Street, but it's in the heart of the historic Red Line district. Ever since the first blooms there's been a table selling the the political version of cut flowers - Obama posters, t-shirts and bumper stickers.

The guy running the stall told me about what sells and what doesn't. In areas where Black people live anything with Senator Obama's picture sells. Downtown, at Saturday Market and out West he moves a lot of merchandise. But the (White) people there won't buy anything with the candidate's face on it. Not one single "Hope" t-shirt. They're happy to have bumper stickers and "Change We Can Believe In" memorabilia or Obama-Biden. But not the image.

He's a businessman talking about his business. He knows what sells and what doesn't. We've made a lot of progress in the last few decades. Forty years ago nobody would have believed a hapa kid who grew up in Honolulu would be the Presidential frontrunner. I suppose we'll have come further when people who will vote for a Black guy won't be afraid to have a picture of him.

Update: Thanks to Keef of the K Chronicles for letting me use the whole picture, not just the offensive parts

Hail Kitty! You Have the Sieg!

2008-10-19T11:46:00.005+08:00

Lions count not sheep when the go into the fold.

I don't usually blog about other bloggers' blogs. But some stories just beg to be told. Salon Blogger Gwen Cooper tells about her tiny completely blind cat. Her tiny completely blind cat who defeated a home invasion burglar.

Right there is every single important lesson in martial arts. The rest is just technique.

It's All About the Sign

2008-10-17T16:00:00.005+08:00

I like my city. I really do. One of the things nicest things is how bike-friendly it is. The people who study these things say that only Davis, CA does better.

Sure, there are stupid motorists. And when you're driving a couple tons of Detroit or Osaka iron stupidity can be fatal. About half a dozen bicylcists die every year in traffic accidents, especially when they are in the bike lane while a clueless motorist decides to turn right.

Some are due to the price of fuel. Every hike in the price of gas puts scores of newbies on the road.

But a lot are just plain irritiating. There's a special breed of Portland cyclist who feels smug in his (usually his) moral superiority and decides that the rules of the road don't apply to him. Or maybe the combination of testosterone and True Goo affects brain chemistry in mysterious non-linear ways. Every day I see people on two-wheelers going the wrong way down one-way streets, riding fast on sidewalks, running stop signs or red lights, turning left across four lanes of traffic in busy intersections or otherwise getting membership points in Future Hood Ornaments of America. They seem to have a special aversion to reflective tape, bright colored clothing and lights and save their most erratic riding for nights.

I used to get mad. But then I remembered the traffic sign. I come from Eastern Washington where they grow a lot of wheat and a lot of beef. The government puts up road signs. You can't predict where the cow is going to be or what it's about to do. The cow doesn't know any more than you do.

Life gets less stressful once you realize that a lot of bicyclists are pretty much the same.

Cards and Dice

2008-10-17T14:50:00.002+08:00

If a stopped clock is right twice a day news magazines can tell you something useful once in a while. And if you catch it at just the right time a human interest story can be interesting.

Earlier this Summer Time Magazine published Candidates' Vices: Craps and Poker. It seems that both Senators are gamblers. John McCain enjoys shooting craps. The thrill of rolling the dice and taking whatever Lady Luck hands out has worked its magic on him since his Navy days. Barrack Obama is a cuthroat poker player and made a lot of his early contacts in games with politicians on both sides of the aisle. Every pot was important even in $1 ante/$3 limit games.

It's things like this that give real insight into a person's character, and I thought it would play out in the campaign.

Well, it certainly has.

Senator McCain's campaign has been marked by unexpected gestures that have come out of nowhere. He's comfortable with risk and uncertainty. If something works or his gut tells him it will he'll keep trying to make the point. If it doesn't he's not afraid to go with something completely random or ride a hunch.

I think that's why he's been willing to change positions to fit his base or run the same sort of campaign in 2008 that was run against him in 2000. It certainly explains the choice of Sarah Palin. Another candidate would have gone with a safe choice. John McCain was risk-tolerant enough to make a quick decision with unpredictable consequences and bet almost everything on the outcome. If the gamble pays off, it's all good. If it doesn't you don't curse the laws of chance. You make another bet and win, crap out or get another point to make.

It also shows up in Senator McCain's personal style in the general election. His strategy is sound, or it will need to be changed. He's passionate about the campaign and has a lot riding on the outcome. The emotional ups and downs are part of the process. He goes with them. When things are going well, he's happy and shows it. When they're not he doesn't bother to hide his frustration or try to lie with his body language. The dice have already been thrown, so the real John Sidney McCain is on display until he passes them to the next shooter.

Senator Obama's style, well, let's say I wouldn't want to be sitting across the card table from him. The campaign has been very carefully run. Caucuses favored the outsider with a strong grass-roots organization, so he folded in some of the primaries. He guessed that the Clinton campaign wouldn't be flexible enough to get past early disappointments, so he raised the stakes in the early contests. A number of his strategic moves like rejecting the 527s or going for points instead of a knockout in the debates aren't emotionally satisfying. But they bespeak a man who wants to win the pot more than he wants to beat the other guys at the table.

Most of all he's kept everything cool. He hardly ever raises his voice. His body language is very self-contained, and he gives nothing away. That's a poker player at work. If you lose your temper or other players can see your "tells" they'll eat you alive. Lady Luck is a bitch, and over a long game you can't trust her. It all comes down to skill and knowing more about the other players than they know about you. Or more than they know about themselves if you're a real pro.

Which approach is better? That really depends on the deep structures of your character. Do you prefer certainty or clarity? Trust to luck or play the odds? Wear your heart on your sleeve or play them close to the vest? Which vices and basic values make a better President?

Risk and the chaos of the universe are always with us. Only a blind fool would deny it. But me? I think lottery tickets are a tax on people who can't do arithmetic. So let's give W. C. Fields the last word.

Is this a game of chance?

Not the way I play it.

I Love My Town - Public Service Edition

2008-08-23T04:17:00.006+08:00

A few minutes ago something smelled wrong. A moment later I realized that it was smoke stepped outside to hear a man saying to my neighbor "That was a fire." Somehow her recycling bin had caught fire and melted. The cover to the barbecue started burning.

Gannon Bond and Gary Lumpkins were driving by and saw smoke. They put out the little fire before it could turn into a big fire. When we thanked them they said "We work for the County. That's what we do."

Well, yes and no. What they're hired to do is mosquito and rodent control for the Multnomah County Department of Environmental Health. What they do is public service. A lot of other people would have just said "It's someone else's problem" and driven on. Many in the private sector would have been afraid of losing their jobs for fighting private fires on Company time. These guys didn't say "It's not our job. Let someone else do it." They said "Someone has to do it, and we are the ones here and now who can do it."

My hat's off to Messrs. Lumpkins and Bond and all the rest who remind us what Public Service really means.

Better Bread in a Gas Oven

2008-07-26T21:48:00.003+08:00

There's a reason they say "Now we're cooking with gas!" I'd never go back to an electric cook top. But they don't say "Now we're baking with gas!" There's just too much air circulation to get real consistency. I should find the repair manual and fiddle with the burner, but I'm a little leery of messing with anything that has the words "natural gas" and "burn" in the same sentence.

There was a young woman from Wales
Said an odor of coal-gas prevails
She then lit a light
And later that night
Was collected in seventeen pails

A search through the cookbook shelf and th' Intrawebs gave some helpful advice.

Home ovens lose a lot of heat when you open the door. By the time the temperature creeps back up it's too late for the bread. The best bread ovens are have huge concrete slabs and thick masonry walls to create thermal mass. Dinky 10x14 Pizza Oven Stones make the home baker feel "artisanal" and cost fifty bucks but don't add that much. My professional baking stone was a broken chunk of granite countertop dumpster-dived from a marble and tile store. Approximate cost zero. Thermal mass? Very very high. To cut down on the heat loss I pre-heated to 500ᴼ, shoved the loaves in as quickly as possible and reset the temperature to 450ᴼ.

Commercial bakeries have special attachments to introduce steam in the first ten minutes of baking. Steam condenses on the relatively cool dough and delays crust formation. The loaves can expand longer, and the crust doesn't tear. Modifying the oven wasn't in the cards that night or any night until there's a spare to play with. I put a roasting pan on the bottom rack and dumped in a cup of water when the bread went in.

The results were very good. The bread rose better and more consistently. The crust wasn't burned, and it didn't tear on cutting.

No explosions. No gun fu. No chainsaw fu. No aardvarking.

Joe Bob Briggs says "Check it out."

Vampyroteuthis Infernalis

2008-07-26T21:32:00.002+08:00

That really is its scientific name Vampire Squid From Hell. The blinking tail lights are especially cool.

And before I forget...

Bobbe, if Caren ever finds out about that thing with the dwarves, the ostrich feathers and the chandelier I think I've found your perfect dating site.

Sufis. Frogs. Cartoons. Tha Intrawebs Just Don't Get Any Better

2008-07-26T12:19:00.002+08:00

This came to me in a roundabout way. Someone read Tiel's blog and mentioned a loose group called Sufis Without Borders. The website led her to this. And when she saw it she figured Someone meant her to show it to me. If there were some Silat it would be perfect.

Leopard meets Crocodile: Or How I Became Really Humble About My Prowess as a Fighting Mammal

2008-07-22T05:31:00.008+08:00

Wildlife photographer Hall Brindley captured a really unusual event at a South African game park in his shoot The Best Day Ever. A leopard dragged a crocodile out of the water, wrestled with it for a while and finally killed the croc with a bite to the back of the head. What amazes me is how good Mr. Brindley is with the airbrush. You don't see a sign of the cat's forty pound solid brass testicles.

I guess the lesson here is that speed, strength and a good favorite technique count for a lot.

The entire sequence can be found here or as a video clip:

Sometimes it's just a matter of who brings more weight to the party
(A herd of buffalo, a pride of lions and a bunch of crocodiles)

Not everything that happens between species is that serious. Sometimes it's just in fun. (And what a very wicked ape it was, to be sure)

Five Minute Chocolate Cake

2008-07-21T10:41:00.003+08:00

I just saw a Five Minute Chocolate Cake recipe on the Dizzy-Dee blog. Mix ingredients in a mug. Microwave on high for three minutes, plop out of the mug. It's perfect dorm food or midnight munchies fodder. Don't even think about the calories or fat. The taste is fine. The texture is a little rubbery. But hey, it's a chocolate cake serving in under ten minutes.

The only real downside is the appearance. Think "Two Girls, One Cupcake" :(

I Feel Safer Already

2008-07-08T10:54:00.003+08:00

I. For Your Health and Comfort You Will Be Collared

One is never sure how seriously to take The Washington Times. Any publication which is owned by Sun Myung Moon is at least suspect in my book. But taking this blog entry at face value we may soon be flying the friendly skies secure in the knowledge that we are safe. Or at least that we will be unsafe in new and exciting ways with security failure modes we had never dreamed of before.

Lamperd Less Lethal has kindly provided a video of their latest product the Air Traffic Security Method, System and Device. Briefly stated travelers would no longer have boarding passes. Instead, each would be fitted with a bracelet before departure which would be removed upon arrival. The bracelet would serve as a boarding pass, contain unspecified personal and confidential information and function as remotely-activated stun gun.

The video begins with obligatory 9-11 footage, just in case people had forgotten about it. Security methods like biometric recognition, bomb detection, are pooh-poohed. "Technology," they correctly say, "is only as good as the people using it, and employees working at minimum wage seldom have the necessary police training and certification to be 100% effective." Pilots and crew, opines Lamprey Limberlost's earnest voiceover, are the last line of defense against Islamic militants. "Terrorists are well-trained, religiously motivated and committed to suicide." Armed Air Marshals (they don't even consider the possibility of armed pilots) are "extremely" likely to puncture the aircraft of shoot innocents. Reinforced cockpit doors, so they say, are vulnerable to plastic explosives.

The solution, of course, is to buy Lackwit Lugnuts' patented slave collar, err, pardon me, "ID Bracelet". It will contain "all pertinent information" and include GPS capability to track passengers and ensure that there are no checked luggage "tampering or diversions". The piece de resistance is "Electro-Muscular Disruption Technology". In other words, every bracelet is also a remotely activated stun gun.

About this time the video started waxing enthusiastic about how the tracking device would be a "small inconvenience to ensure their safe arrival". "We feel that given a choice...most passengers would happily opt for the safety and security of the EMD safety bracelets."

Well, that's the rosy picture they paint. According to this and this at least one high official in the Department of Homeland Security was taking the proposal seriously at least as recently as the middle of 2006.

Let's take a closer look, shall we?

II. So What's Wrong With What We've Already Got?

"Religious motivation" doesn't mean the thin end of diddly squat whittled down to a point. That and the pictures are simply designed to make the sheep frightened of the Sinister Swarthy Oriental(tm) and more likely to run to Limprod Losers so that they can Feel Safe.

Adding lots of stupid people to a security system will not stop smart, motivated people. That's absolutely true. The correct thing is to add smaller numbers of smart well trained people. Even the TSA is starting to do this. The same techniques are available to the rest of us in books like the Terrorist Recognition Handbook. But even with "police certification" no method of prevention is 100% effective. We can do an excellent job of sniffing out explosives in carry on luggage. It won't catch all, but it will catch most.

The defensive capabilities of law enforcement and crew can not be overestimated. Airplanes are not 100% airtight and develop small leaks all the time. A decently trained Air Marshal with MagSafe, Glaser or some other brand of low-penetration ammunition doesn't represent much of a threat to innocents. The same goes for those few pilots who have run the gauntlet and can carry pistols in the cockpit. Failing that, the reinforced door and a co-pilot playing Horatio at the Bulkhead with the rescue axe presents a serious obstacle to someone with a box cutter or improvised knife.

That doesn't even begin to embrace the capacity for terrified violence of a plane full of passengers. Since September 2001 there has been a sea change in air travelers' sensibilities. Where the conventional wisdom used to be "Shut up. Sit tight. Do whatever the hijackers say" it is now "Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit we're gonna die!" Standard Operating Procedure is now to swarm the bad people and beat them into submission or red goo.

III. And What About the Bright Shiny New Toy They Want to Sell Us?

Let's consider the ATSMSD.

Most people now approach air travel with barely concealed hostility. We may not be disgruntled, but we're certainly not as gruntled as we used to be. The TSA line doesn't help matters. We're starting to take buses and trains. AMTRAK can not keep up with ridership these days. All the airlines need is one more thing to make the passengers feel like cattle. If this scheme is ever adopted it will be the last day I fly. If I want to visit the Holy Land I'll book passage on a freighter. It takes longer, but it's cheap, and I can catch up on some reading and wood carving.

What sort of information will be on these bracelets. "All pertinent information" covers a huge variety of sins considering what's in store for driver's licenses under the RealID Act one can only speculate. The information doesn't do law enforcement any good. They already have the information and would detain anyone among the hundreds of thousands on the no fly lists including Air Marshals , three year olds and US Senators.

I'll tell you who will benefit. Phreakers, crackers, identity thieves and pranksters will go into orgasmic trance at the prospect. If the information is remotely accessible it's only a matter or weeks if not hours before someone makes a device that extracts it remotely. Depending on the hardware it may be possible to alter the information with all sorts of amusing results.

That's assuming that the bracelets stay on. It is easy to buy devices that remove security tokens from clothes at the boutique and CPU boxes at the electronics store. No doubt similar keys will become available for the bracelets.

The shock box capabilities are equally impressive. If they are triggered by a remote signal that signal can be jammed or counteracted. And the transmitter can be copied and used to tickle everyone except the bad guys. Or it could be a hilarious trick to while away those long flight hours. A few random shocks around the cabin could provide all sorts of amusement. I'd be sure to slip a really dense rubber or plastic insulating pad between my arm and the bracelet. No $10/hour stewardess gets to apply electric shocks to me unless she's wearing high heels and a spandex frog suit. I haven't been Tasered, but I have been on the receiving end of extra-special high voltage stun guns amped up beyond manufacturers' specifications. In one exercise getting zapped was the signal to empty my magazine at the range. I got all but one in the ten ring. In others it was the signal to drop and roll into a fighting posture. That one worked, too.

How will the remote control operate? It can't be something keyed to the passenger manifest. Imagine searching a 747's worth of names even with the possible new racial profiling guidelines. Nope. It's going to be point-and-shoot. That means innocents will get zapped. It also means it will be easier to come up with an unauthorized remote control.

Those are just my first impressions. I leave it to the real security geeks in the audience (Toby, are you listening?) to come up with other holes in the scheme. I expect the more imaginative could get ten or twenty in the first three minutes. The only things we can be sure of is that this won't be the last stupid plan that comes down the pike. And it will spill all sorts of taxpayer-subsidized black ink on certain balance sheets. Meanwhile, look forward to the Middle Passage Airline where we will be stripped naked, cavity searched, sedated and stacked like cordwood at the beginning of every flight.

Spelling Reform on the Fly and the Misuse of Text Filters

2008-07-01T03:17:00.004+08:00

At least once a week Tiel tells me that English is wonderful for poets. But it's a hellish language for spellers. We may speak the only major language in the world where it makes sense for college-educated people to buy computer programs to correct their spelling. Mark Twain had a thought or two about spelling reform, but nobody least of all Mr. Clemens took him seriously.

Now we're seeing spelling and grammar reform on the fly. Let me tell you it's an ugly sight. We aren't quite the UK where you get points for correctly spelling "Fuck off" on a national examination. But if various online forums and the reports of high school and university teachers are any indication we are seeing the changes from the bottom up. A generation is doing much of its communication by SMS text message. I'm sure PhD theses will be written about the historical influence of l33t speak on text speak and how this decentralized democratic movement revolutionized the written (or typed) language. I'll nod sagely, comment insightfully and hang discreet black crêpe.

When you need to use Standard English it's easier to use spelling and grammar filters. But they have their dangers too. And here's where we get to the punchline of today's joke.

The American Family Association sends me email every once in a while. Who can say why? I'm not going to send them money. They think gay marriage is the downfall of America. I think of it as an effective if somewhat roundabout way of stopping gay sex. Their mailings are a little odd. Words are modified. "Gay" is always "Homosexual" or rather "H*m*se*ual". "Pornography" becomes "P*rnography". It seemed a little strange. So I asked. It turns out they automatically filter these words.

Sometimes the filtering goes a little too far. The AFA secretly owns the very Christian OneNewsNow. It seems they've applied their filtering technology to news stories. When Tyson Gay wins a race:

"Tyson Homosexual easily won his semifinal for the 100 meters at the U.S. Olympic track and field trials," the article read, "and seemed to save something for the final later Sunday." The headline read "Homosexual eases into 100 final at Olympic events."

"On Saturday," it went on, "Homosexual misjudged the finish in his opening heat and had to scramble to finish fourth, then in his quarterfinal a couple of hours later, ran 9.77 to break the American record that had stood since 1999."

"Asked how he felt, Homosexual said: 'A little fatigued.'"

Be careful about that automatic editing, folks.

Dog Food

2008-06-29T09:14:00.002+08:00

Dog food isn't the most interesting subject in the world. It comes in bags. It crunches. Dogs eat it. That's about all there is to it. If you don't have a dog skip this post. There isn't anything here for you.

We had always fed our dogs kibble with the occasional table scrap. First it was the Alpo/Purina level. At our vet's advice we switched to the Iams/Eukanuba/Solid Gold tier. We had heard all the advertising copy about how dog food was "nutritionally balanced" and better for canines than human consumable food. But we were always a little skeptical. Dogs have spent the last fifty thousand years hanging around us because we provide garbage. In the wild their cousins mostly eat small rodents, carrion, some wild fruits and vegetables and the occasional larger game. Rice, corn and wheat are not exactly high on the list. And in the entire history of domestication no farmer has rushed out to shoot dogs that were eating his grain field.

Some time back our dogs were having training and discipline issues. So we called up Auntie Tracy and Aunti Sally to come and educate us. Part of the program was nutrition. They asked what we fed the dogs. We showed them the kibble and sheepishly allowed as how the pooches got our leftovers and table scraps. Nope, no chocolate, grapes or macadamia nuts. We already know those were toxic.

The table scraps were the only thing they were happy about. We got a lecture they could probably give in their sleep about the history of commercial dog food, what goes into it and what dogs should eat. The Aunties recommended Flint River. We tried it. The dogs ate it. But they'll also eat rotten mice, things they drag out of the garbage can and Kitty Roca fresh from the litter box. And it was very expensive. The trainer suggested a more natural diet. The vet wasn't thrilled. She said that she "wasn't sure" about feeding dogs anything but "scientifically designed" food.

We tried giving them ground turkey backs and necks from the yuppie grocery store down the way. At "Suffering Jesus, that's more expensive than what we eat!" a pound it wasn't going to last long.

The real revolution happened when Fubon Market opened up. Pork spleen and chicken feet aren't our cuppa. But they are cheap, and the dogs loved them. We started buying most of our own food in bulk from United Grocers/Cash & Carry and found boxes of turkey tails for about thirty cents a pound. Just thaw and toss. The dogs crunched them right up. Supplement once a week or so with vegetables that are past their peak ground up with organ meat.

Our experience has been wonderful. The dogs' coats got shinier. They had more energy. Their teeth haven't needed to be cleaned since. Sev stopped having accidents in the house and wasn't greasy anymore. The only downside is that they'll sometimes revert to subordinate dog behavior and take the meat out of sight to eat. When we took them out we discovered that they were using a lot more of the food. A lot less was left on the lawn, and most of that was bone meal. And all of this for less than a third of the price of the factory food.

I'm Voting Republican

2008-06-17T06:10:00.003+08:00

And here's why....

Random Pieces of News

2008-06-04T14:40:00.016+08:00

I. Support the Troops

In yet another example of how rhetoric clashes with actions, some in the VA have decided to discourage its caregivers from diagnosing PTSD. CREW and VoteVets.org obtained an email from Norma Perez, PTSD Program coordinator at the Olin Teage Veteran's Center suggesting:

The military has always had trouble believing in PTSD. It's expensive. It doesn't quite fit the image of the heroic soldier. It's difficult to deal with. It's not something you can see. But since the Rand Corporation estimates that about 300,000 could be diagnosed with the condition, along with 320,000 with Traumatic Brain Injury, it's a serious problem for the military and the Veterans Administration. What takes this week into the Idiot Zone is the Army's decision on where to house Fort Benning's PTSD patients. They are right next to the firing range. There might be a better way of ensuring flashbacks. I can't think of one.

The Secretary of Defense is doing the right thing in his attempts to destigmatize PTSD and encourage members of the Armed Forces to seek treatment. He has criticized the Army for being slow to recognize the health threat it poses. That excellent message is being undercut within the government. VA Secretary Peake and Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK) who describe it and traumatic brain injury as "akin to what anyone who played football in their youth might have suffered, Peake told Guinn."

II Food For Your Inner Frog

Insects are easy to grow. Fed properly they are clean, easy to digest and excellent sources of cheap protein. Humans in 113 countries eat a recorded 1700 six legged species from wikkity grubs in Australia to Mormon crickets in Utah, cane grubs in West Africa and giant butterfly larvae in Taiwan. The Torah forbids insects other than the locust, the grasshopper, the cricket and the "black headed beetle", but considering how many forbidden things people of various religions eat voluntarily and how many unconsciously that's hardly a concern. It's really more a problem of marketing and image than anything else.

This article in the Daily Mail provides some mainstream support for serving them in the West. Works for this Amphibian-American. Compared to the way hogs and chickens are raised and processed grasshopper looks pretty good. I suppose it would be easier if people could invert their stomachs to clean out the chitin. If there's commercial potential some bright engineer somewhere will come up with a solution.

III Next Up: People Eating in Restaurants and Drinking in Bars

A three year investigation has revealed "rampant" prostitution in Seattle-area strip clubs. Next up: Fish swim. Birds fly. Rain is wet.

IV Warrior Posture for Warriors

Researchers working for the Indian Army have concluded that yoga is good for soldiers.

after three months new soldiers of the Bengal Engineering Group, who did 50 minutes of yoga a day combined with 40 minutes of traditional exercise, had steadier hands, stronger grips and leaner muscles than peers who underwent a gruelling 90-minute military work-out instead, according to a study.
...
"The yoga group showed an improvement in skilled activities requiring co-ordination and concentration, as well as muscular strength and endurance."

That shouldn't surprise anyone. Yoga has a long and well-documented connection with fighting arts. There were different yogas for different jobs including priests and scholars, peasants and soldiers. Each was designed to meet the physical and mental needs of that way of life. For a very good modern example consider Scott Sonnon's Prasara Flow Book and Video material.

V Poetic Justice, Or Maybe Tiel Can Get a Homeland Security Grant

A group of about fifty vandals broke into Robert Frost's House for a keg party. They ended up doing about $10,000 in damage - that's almost $100 Canadian these days. The two dozen who were caught have to do the usual community service and restitution. The one who bought the beer is spending a few days in jail. The judge added another piece to the sentence. They have started mandatory classes on the Frost and his work.

I don't know how much they'll get out of it. But it seems like a good idea. A few of them might learn something.

VI Raising the Titanic: The Secret History

The Intelligence community gets involved in a lot of research from social science and art to physics and cartography. Sometimes it's the results that are interesting. Better specialized semiconductor technology will come back to them like bread on the waters. Sometimes just having a hand in cutting edge developments in culture and politics keeps them up to date on the people who will shape opinion in years to come.

Sometimes the cover story is almost as interesting as the real project. According to articles in National Geographic and ABC News the 1985 discovery of the RMS Titanic was a byproduct and a blind. Robert Ballard developed the submersible technology for the exploration that led to the location of the wreckage. But he was under contract to the Navy which had funded development for a completely different purpose. They needed to find out what had happened to two lost nuclear submarines, the USS Thresher and USS Scorpion. Ballard was permitted to look for the Titanic only after he had completed his primary mission.

Update: Now that's the story of how the Titanic was found. If you want the real story you gotta go here to read and hear Jamie Brockett give you the real dope in The Legend or the USS Titanic. Yes sir, 497 and a half feet of Mexican rope

Paul Stamets - Fungus Evangelist

2008-05-22T02:00:00.003+08:00

Paul Stamets is a very focused man. He's made a career out of fungi from books like Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World and Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms to editing scientific journals and advising medical schools. His website Fungi Perfecti is full of resources and information. Spend a little while there and you'll get the idea that there's a lot more to the kingdom than stuff growing in the back of your fridge.

This video will give you a little peek into his world. It ranges from basic biology to the really amazing. Who knew that the world's largest organism is a gigantic fungus in Eastern Oregon or that they use ionizing radiation the way that plants use light? Then he gets into half a dozen ways that fungi can be used to address very real problems. They include his revolutionary patents for carpenter ant and termite abatement to breaking down the hydrocarbons in diesel-soaked ground and DoD research on agarikon mushrooms that produce the most specific and effective agents for each individual strain of bird flu as well as cellulose-based ethanol and carbon sequestration.

Infrastructure: Disturbing article Scholars and Rogues

2008-05-14T01:41:00.001+08:00

One of my favorite sites is Scholars and Rogues. It's incisive, cynical, well-informed and goes after the truth like a starving dog after a pork chop. Today it discusses the United States' decrepit infrastructure.

Infrastructure is one of those boring things that people don't like to talk about. Photos of Brittney Spears' naughty bits? Oh yeah! Who Wants to Survive America's Top Apprentice Idol? Bring it on! Ferreting out the phantom terrorists in our hair gel and insoles? USA! 9-11! But roads and bridges and sewers and dams and airports and railways? That's boring. There aren't any boobies or big explosions. You can't wave a flag and send in the Marines or gossip about who gets voted off the island.

When a bridge in Minnesota collapses or the century old New York sewers spring leaks in several places at once there's a three day story. Politicians bang their hands on the podium in carefully measured cadences. Blue ribbon commissions are seated. The Secretary of some cabinet department makes a speech. Bechtel, Halliburton and Fluor's accountants wake up with enormous erections at the thought of the contracts. Afterwards people go back to sleep. The problem is shelved, and everyone figures that it couldn't have been that bad. Look! The gays want to get married! Everyone panic! (You're not thinking, guys. If you want to stop gay sex, then allowing gay marriage is a good first step...)

Well it is a problem. And like brushing your teeth ignoring it won't make it go away. The problem that is. The teeth will go away if you don't brush them just like the roads, dams, bridges, sewers, electric power grid, railways, runways, aqueducts and ports. The ACSE believes it's a more than $1.5 trillion (with a "t") problem over the next five years. That's just to get things back to decent repair.

The Parties and their candidates just don't seem to understand how big this is. Obama proposes $60 billion over five years against needs of at least $400 billion for transportation. Clinton boldly proposes $10 billion in funding. McCain doesn't even mention infrastructure as an issue. I suppose The Market will automagically solve the problem with unicorn farts and pixie dust. I suppose we need magic. We've already mortgaged our grandchildrens' future to the tune of half a trillion to three trillion dollars to take the oil in Iraq. Unfortunately, the spoils of war failed to materialize.

Multiply that by clean water's shrinking funding, crumbling sewers, aging water treatment plants, and declining quality. Or consider the degradation of levees all over the country and note that the Administration is right at the forefront, repairing the levees in Louisiana with the finest materials and workmanship. They're actually stuffing them with newspaper instead of using earth or concrete, but we're still doing a heck of a job. Our bridges and roads are in bad shape and not keeping up with maintenance. Many aren't safe at anything like their rated capacity. The US railway system isn't up to Bulgarian standards let alone Western European or Japanese which is a real shame. It's more efficient per passenger mile than cars or planes. But that gets into a whole different set of issues ably handled by my friend and unindicted co-conspirator, publisher Rustin Wright.

If Teddy Roosevelt were President he'd have turned the government upside down and shaken out all the incompetents and crooks. If it were Dwight Eisenhower we'd have started rebuilding the whole thing under an audacious master plan. FDR or LBJ would have the programs in place and an army of recently unemployed workers holding shovels and pay stubs while they dug in. But we have George W. Bush whose governmental philosophy is that government can't do anything, so it's time to take a vacation and pat himself on the back for a non-job that lived up to expectations.

For the most part the press isn't there absent the squawking when something falls down. John McQuaid calls us the Can't Do Nation. Bob Herbert, one of the New York Times' few columnists with his head screwed on straight talks about our loss of will and clearly identifies the problem and some solutions. But they're pretty much alone. The Press, the boardroom and the politicians are are engaging in their usual short-term thinking. Nobody is taking care of business.

The Importance of Choosing the Right Words

2008-04-29T10:24:00.006+08:00

This was going to be a post about Hans Reiser, the Linux geek who was just convicted of murdering his wife. He insisted on taking the stand for eleven days against the advice of his attorney. The court watchers say that's what sunk him. He come across poorly under cross-examination. His rambling, often-contradictory explanations didn't tell a coherent believable story and didn't poke a single hole in the prosecution's evidence.

An chestnut in Law school goes "A lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client."

But that's a really Grim Fairy Tale, so I'll go with a different example. This is an actual true story that really happened. We were there, and there are witnesses.

Some years back my wife and I took Taiji from a famous Chinese coach who had just moved to Oregon. We were hoping for internal body mechanics and all the rest of that good stuff. What we got was what sells: molasses-slow forms, no application or cultivation of internal strength, white uniforms, black belt clubs and promotions every X-weeks. We were interested in Chi, not Chi-whiz so we left.

Part of the problem is that we were looking for martial arts. The students tended to be upscale versions of the crystal-gazing hairy-legged bark eaters. Getting them to do push hands was hard enough, let alone thinking about developing strength or fighting.

After a few months we started doing the Short Yang Straight Sword Form. In retrospect, I really liked the form. There is a lot in there. But it was tough going for the fluffy bunny crowd. So the advanced student who was teaching the class gathered us all together to talk about swords. I can remember what he said darned near word for word.

He said "Don't think of this as a sword. Think of it as your chi wand. We're not going to sword fight. We're going to learn to play with our chi wands. Your chi wand is a very personal thing. If you handle it enough it will start to collect and store your chi, and you can use it to emit chi. You should never handle anyone else's chi wand without permission. And you shouldn't let just anyone handle yours. Be very careful where you put it. You never want to step on your chi wand."

Tiel and I carefully didn't look at each other and silently asked "Did he say that? Did he really say that?" The guy standing to my right looked like he was having some sort of seizure.

"After a while you will get used to handling your wand. When you are feeling down or depressed pick up your chi wand and play with it for a while. You'll start feeling better and more energetic." Somehow the poker faces stayed on.

Then he showed us some basics - grip, stance and how to make horizontal cuts.

"Now hold on tight to your wand, and keep it level. You don't want your chi to drip off the end while you're waving it."

We managed not to say anything or crack a smile. But then he said

"You're doing really well. Now I want you to get a partner and stand like this. Now very carefully, touch your chi wands together," at which point a female voice murmured "What am I supposed to do? All I have is a chi button."

I had to pretend I had a coughing fit and sit down for a while.

Hanging's Too Good For Him - British Writer Translates Shakespeare to Chav "Yoofspeak"

2008-04-27T03:11:00.003+08:00

Shakespeare has been re-interpreted and re-written from Bowdler's attempts at removing everything unsuitable for women and children to West Side Story. Today's homage to the immortal reputation of the Bard comes from British writer Martin Baums courtesy of the Daily Mail. He has translated fifteen of the plays into the dialect of lower-class London.

Romeo and his Fit Bitch Jools

Verona was de turf of de feuding Montagues and de Capulet families. And coz they was always brawling and stuff, de Prince of Verona told them to cool it or else they was gonna get well mashed if they carried on larging it with each other. Meanwhile, whilst all dis was going on, Romeo, from de Montague posse, had become all jiggy jiggy with de Rosaline bitch who was de niece of de Capulet massive. But never ready to settle with just de one bitch, Romeo and his boyz disguised demselves and crashed de Capulet turf where dere was de masked ball going down, and that was when he saw de well fit Capulet’s daughta, Jools.
Amlet, Prince of Denmark

Dere was somefing minging in de State of Denmark which was making Amlet all uncool. First, his Uncle Claudius had married his muvva, de main bitch Queen Gertrude. Then de Norwegian Fortinbras massive was freatening to invade de Danish turf and finally, and quite unexpectedly, de rank ghost of his nutty farva was spooking de crap out of him. De minging ghost told Amlet he was poisoned by Claudius and wanted him to do somefing about it. Amlet said “Aiii,” and reckoned de best way was to pretend to go all loony toons to make everyone fink he was barking, including Ophelia, de fit bitch he wanted to be all jiggy jiggy with.

That high-pitched whirring sound you hear is coming from the crypts in Trinity Church, Stratford-on-Avon.

I Love My Town! - Police relations edition

2008-04-26T05:52:00.007+08:00

There's a new lawyer in Portland, Eric Bryant. I don't know much about the man, but there's no doubt he's got a serious pair, and they're at least 60% brass by volume. Back in March he was in Northwest 21st Avenue in Portland. It's a street full of upscale stores, trendy people and narrow streets that don't quite accommodate the traffic.

A police officer park his squad car illegally in front of a restaurant and went in. He ordered his meal, sat around and watched the game on TV. He wasn't arresting anyone. He wasn't investigating a crime. He just wanted lunch at that particular diner and parked in a forbidden space.

Most people would have looked, curled a lip and thought "He's a cop. Whatcha gonna do, call a cop to give him a ticket?" Mr. Bryant showed more courage than good sense. He talked to the officer and said he was parked illegally. According to the first news story on the incident the cop replied that he wasn't doing anything wrong and asked "If someone broke into your house, would you rather have the police be able to park in front of your house or have to park three blocks away and walk there?"

Nobody's suggesting that the officer was investigating a crime or making an arrest. Nobody is suggesting that Mr. Bryant didn't talk to him and ask him to move the car. He then ticketed the cop for parking illegally and cited the statute under which he did so and the authority he had as a citizen to issue the citation (ORS 153.058 for those who are interested). All that study to pass the Bar Exam has paid off.

After the Mercury reported on the events KATU covered the story. The AP has picked up the story. Now it's making the rounds of that series of tubes we call the Intrawebs.

I talked to Eric Bryant today. He says that the city has lawyered up. A local attorney has offered to help him defend his interests in whatever falls out. The State is showing an interest. And there's various litigation that he can't really talk about in the near future. He's confident that the ticket will stand. The official PD denials and excuses are pretty lame. "Officers need to stay near their cars so they can respond to emergencies" doesn't hold water in the face of questions like "Weren't there any other restaurants he could have parked near legally?"

Fighting City Hall by yourself is tough at the best of times. If you knock a cop out of his comfortable immunity to the rules that govern the herd it's even worse. If you make them look foolish and ride the pipe the same as mere "civilians" you're opening yourself up for a world of hurt. I expect every aspect of Mr. Bryant's life will be a matter of intense interest to the Portland Police Bureau for a few years to come. Best of British luck to him. He'll need it.

Me? I'll buy the man a drink.

4000

2008-03-25T12:10:00.010+08:00

This week US fatalities in Iraq passed 4000. That doesn't include the large (classified) number evacuated to facilities outside Iraq to keep the body count down. It doesn't include Illegal Combatants from Blackwater or Dyncorp. It's just American servicemen and -women who died in the Sandbox.

Vice President "Swinging" Dick Cheney's only comment was:

The president carries the biggest burden, obviously. He's the one who has to make the decision to commit young Americans, but we are fortunate to have a group of men and women, the all-volunteer force, who voluntarily put on the uniform and go in harm's way for the rest of us.

In other words, "Screw 'em. Nobody forced them to go. Just think of how hard the Smirking Chimp has to work ordering them to die."

The Huffington Post has a more fitting memorial - a photomosaic of Bush and McCain made of the faces of the first 4000 who died for that mistake. Every soldier knows he's expendable. None should have to die knowing he was considered disposable.

If any ask us why we died

Say "Because our fathers lied"

--Rudyard Kipling on the death of his son in the Great War

If you're feeling in a musical mood take a listen at Irma Thomas' version of Another Man Done Gone.

Volture

2008-03-22T05:09:00.004+08:00

Someone in a forum post misspelled "vulture"

Rest In Peace Severian

2008-03-17T09:04:00.003+08:00

Severian - A Good Dog

1998-2008

God Made the earth, the sky and the water, the moon and the sun. He made man and bird and beast. But He didn't make the dog. He already had one.

Clearing Out Bookmarks and Fueling Fear

2008-03-12T04:54:00.004+08:00

Privacy no longer can mean anonymity Instead, it should mean that government and businesses properly safeguard people’s private communications and financial information. --Donald Kerr Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence November 11 2007

You're paranoid, but are you paranoid enough? --InfoSec aphorism

It's time to get rid of a bunch of tabs on my browser and turn them into some sort of post. So today, for your consideration, here's the first in a series of stuff that should turn your hair white.

The two pictures above are of real toys, Playmobil's Police Checkpoint and Security Checkpoint. read the consumer reviews, but have plenty of baking soda to neutralize them. They're acid enough to etch steel. We've gotten to the point where ubiquitous surveillance is an important part of life that children need to learn about in their vanishing playtime. It's not just the ravings of the tinfoil hat brigade. Besides, as research from MIT definitively shows, tinfoil hats actually make it easier for the government to use its restricted radio frequencies on you.

Update: Some killjoy putz at Amazon removed all the customer reviews.

Very Cool Visuals - Agatized Dinosaur Bone

2008-03-12T04:35:00.004+08:00

Some things are worth holding up and saying "Look! See! Isn't this neat?"

These micrographs of dinosaur bones are that cool. (Link goes to the whole set)

Just About the Most Disgraceful Martial Arts Footage Ever

2008-03-08T04:09:00.005+08:00

"Respected Karate master" Isao Nakamura Fushiki is refereeing a match in which one of his students is losing. What he does speaks for itself.

According to related articles as translated by Babelfish he works or recently worked for a local University. I'm betting that won't last long.

If the S.O.B.'s organization doesn't and strip him of rank and toss him so hard he bounces twice it's lost all claim to legitimacy.

In any case he needs to be on trial for something on the close order of attempted murder with a deadly weapon.

Tiel's First Book is Out

2008-03-05T03:57:00.003+08:00

Tiel's first poetry collection - Knocking From Inside - has just been published by Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore's The Ecstatic Exchange. It is available for sale on Lulu Press' website. Do yourself a favor and pick up a copy. It's not the usual unedited self-indulgent confession. Her poems are wonderfully crafted and come straight from the heart. They illuminate the search for the Divine in everything from urban crows and silence to Treblinka and the Dead Letter Office of insincere prayers.

Yes, a Spoonful of Vampires Makes the Liver Flukes Go Down

2008-03-01T03:40:00.006+08:00

At least that's what I think Mary Poppins would have said about Peeps. On its own it's a good, fun short YA novel. There's a little sexual tension, some violence, engaging characters, decent pacing and dialog and above all it doesn't talk down to its audience. Scott Westerfeld hammers out the same workmanlike prose that characterizes his other novels.

Where it really shines is the science. Science education in America is notoriously bad for the most part, and its treatment in popular culture usually isn't even that good. If it isn't cybermagic it's Cargo Cult Science or soft-pedaled because the witch burners are afraid that asking tough questions will make their Invisible Friend angry. You have to pan a lot of gravel to find the rare Bill Nye or Jared Diamond let alone Steven J. Gould (ztl) - (Unofficial SJG archive) We haven't yet gotten back to the bad old days of the Snopes trial. But we're pretty darned close when legislatures pass laws stating that students can not get marked down for any statement on an exam that stems from religious beliefs. Much as I want the whole world to be touched by His Noodly Appendage, Pastafarianism belongs in the kitchen and pirate ships, not the classroom.

That's why I'm so fond of Scott Westerfeld's YA novel Peeps and its sequel The Last Days.

Peeps starts off with a stock premise. There are vampires. Not many people know about them. Our hero is part of an old, secret government organization that captures and studies them. Then it takes a sharp turn to the educational. Vampirism is caused by a parasite which has profound effects on its host's behavior and biology. The even numbered chapters are entirely factual accounts of the strange and wonderful if disquieting world of parasite biology. The odd (sometimes exceedingly odd) chapters tell the story and use it to illustrate complex principles like optimum virulence, commensal ecological relationships, the profound effects of simple changes, parasite-host and predator-prey coevolution, and multiple-host lifecycles. It's entertaining. There's a lot of good information. It gets past cataloging facts and into the guiding principles. Great stuff even if you're old enough to have Young Adult Readers of your own.

The Last Days isn't quite as good, but it brings the more conceptual material in the first volume into focus. The mechanics of societal breakdown and of host-parasite coevolution get a more dramatic, personal treatment. It's definitely worth a read if you liked Peeps.

I don't think it will get the kids to switch from Nintendo to, well, this. But it's worth a try.

The book owes a lot to Parasite Rex, a debt which Westerfeld proudly acknowledges. If you can make it through Peeps without getting the creeping horrors you should check out Parasite Rex and some of Carl Zimmer's other excellent books on natural history. Just keep in mind that he's on the parasites' side, not ours. Waxing lyrical about the life of the bilharzia worm as a romantic love story and praising the ichneumonids speaks for itself. He claimed in an interview that he'd traveled all over doing the research and had never gotten the tiniest parasitic infestation even though other members in his party did. It's not an accident. The parasites know their own and extend their protection to fellow-travelers and quislings.

Every Once in a While He Gets Something Right

2008-02-27T08:12:00.003+08:00

Maybe Caren's spiking Bobbe's Chimay with smart drugs. Or maybe he's just gotten old and slowed down enough so that the (very) odd thought can catch up to him. His most recent post on FMA Talk nails a number of important issues dead on and presents the Unvarnished Word clearly and concisely.

Paranoia? Or Are We Playing in the Big Leagues Now?

2008-02-27T05:39:00.006+08:00

The Republican Noise Machine is revving up to trash Barrack Obama, but it will have to wait in line for a while yet. A former head of the Wellesley Young Republicans, Goldwater Campaign worker, previously Wal-Mart Board Member and Coca Cola corporate lawyer, currently Senator from New York and Democratic Presidential candidate is borrowing heavily from the Nixon playbook.

Politics is a dirty game. Nobody gets into high office completely clean. If they do, well, there's a two headed monster squatting on Pennsylvania Avenue and K Street that will dirty or devour them. The last real outsider to gain the White House was Jimmy Carter who was very effectively shut down. The last reformer to come from the Republicans was Teddy Roosevelt. When he turned his formidable will to the job and the good of the Nation it horrified the Party bosses. They gave the Presidency to the more biddable Taft who furthered their Gilded Age policies.

Barrack Obama is a Senator, a politician and an Illinois politician no less. Jokes about letting him near ballot boxes notwithstanding he's had to make his peace with the Machine. But he's the best candidate out there and has excited the electorate in some very important ways which we haven't seen in decades. Lord knows he's smart and charismatic enough for three or four. It doesn't hurt that he's the first member of the African Diaspora to get within spitting distance of the White House other than by pushing a broom. And anyone who can inspire this sort of vitriol from the economic Establishment deserves at least a second look.

The ability to inspire and desire to shake things up that are beginning to worry me. Forget the "Obama supporters are a cult" crap that the Clinton campaign and various Republicans are spreading. They wouldn't know what to do with an unscripted moment if it bit them on the ass. Come to think of it, that's exactly what it's doing.

No, it's the memory of John and Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. America is very very hard on its charismatic popular reformers. If they don't get bought they have a habit of suffering mysterious assassinations that are never really explained. Dr. King says "Black men will not kill Yellow men to keep White men in power" and dies days later after his police protection is mysteriously withdrawn. Ray never goes to trial. The JFK and RFK assassinations have provided forty years of entertainment to thousands of obsessives, paranoids and people with little reason to trust the government. Nobody believes the official accounts of Malcolm X's murder. And so on.

From all reports the racist bulletin boards and websites are full of real hatred for the Senator from Illinois. The more public ones are circumspect. It's difficult not to be when you know that you're being watched by every law enforcement and three letter government agency out there. The more private ones, so I am told, look forward to the prospect of a Black President with open horror and are talking about assassination and race wars. Colin Powell's refusal to run makes a whole lot of personal sense.

That's why this story from the Dallas Star-Telegraph and the follow up are so disturbing. In case they've disappeared by the time you read this post, here are the high points (emphasis mine)

DALLAS -- Security details at Barack Obama's rally Wednesday stopped screening people for weapons at the front gates more than an hour before the Democratic presidential candidate took the stage at Reunion Arena.
The order to put down the metal detectors and stop checking purses and laptop bags came as a surprise to several Dallas police officers who said they believed it was a lapse in security.
Dallas Deputy Police Chief T.W. Lawrence, head of the Police Department's homeland security and special operations divisions, said the order -- apparently made by the U.S. Secret Service -- was meant to speed up the long lines outside and fill the arena's vacant seats before Obama came on.
"Sure," said Lawrence, when asked if he was concerned by the great number of people who had gotten into the building without being checked. But, he added, the turnout of more than 17,000 people seemed to be a "friendly crowd."
The Secret Service did not return a call from the Star-Telegram seeking comment.
Doors opened to the public at 10 a.m., and for the first hour security officers scanned each person who came in and checked their belongings in a process that kept movement of the long lines at a crawl. Then, about 11 a.m., an order came down to allow the people in without being checked.
Several Dallas police officers said it worried them that the arena was packed with people who got in without even a cursory inspection.
They spoke on condition of anonymity because, they said, the order was made by federal officials who were in charge of security at the event.
"How can you not be concerned in this day and age," said one policeman.
JACK DOUGLAS Jr., 817-390-7700
jld@star-telegram.com

and

FORT WORTH -- The U.S. Secret Service on Friday defended its handling of security during a massive rally in downtown Dallas for Barack Obama, saying there was no "lapse" in its "comprehensive and layered security plan," which called for some people to be checked for weapons, while others were not.
A report in the Star-Telegram that said some security measures were lifted during Wednesday's rally sparked a public outrage across the country, with most people saying they were shocked that a routine weapons search was lifted at the front gates of Reunion Arena an hour before the Democratic presidential candidate took the stage.
"This relaxed security was unbelievably stupid, especially in Dallas," Jeff Adams of Berkeley, Calif., said in an e-mail to the Star-Telegram, noting the assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas more than four decades ago.
Others said they had recently attended large political events, many for Obama, where security screening was halted. Jeremy Dibbell of Boston said in an e-mail that he attended an Obama event in Boston at which "the same thing happened there. We waited for hours in line as people were screened, and then suddenly everyone was just allowed in without going through any inspection at all."

I'm sure there was a "comprehensive and layered security plan". But a charismatic and controversial Democratic candidate speaks in freaking Dallas, and they suddenly stop checking people for weapons? What are they going to do next? Invite him back to Dallas to ride down Main Street in a motorcade with the Governor and detour along Elm past the textbook repository? If they don't have his best interests at heart you'd think they'd at least get lab tests for the irony deficiency they're exhibiting. The Dallas police seem to have a handle on just how touchy this is. They may be haunted by the ghost of Jack Kennedy in ways that the Boston PD just can't understand.

What should the Obama campaign do? That's in the realm of high-level security, far beyond my training and experience. It wouldn't be a bad idea to get a few of the eggs out of the Secret Service's basket and have some very skilled people loyal to the Senator or at least their contract with the Senator reviewing plans and operations. Blackwater and Dyncorp have experience in that sort of thing. So do the Fruits of Islam. The awful possibilities just multiply, don't they?

There's a lot of people who don't want him to be President. Most of them don't want it enough to hurt him. Most of the ones who do wouldn't or couldn't. All it would take would be one with the determination and a lapse like the ones in Massachusetts or Texas. One or two disgruntled nuts or losers. The right opportunity. A word at an opportune moment. His really powerful enemies wouldn't have to get their hands dirty. Someone else would pull the trigger and take the fall. And we're left wondering what sort of mark he might have made.

I'm not terribly good at the whole prayer thing. But mine now include requests that Senator Obama be spared the assassin's bullet. Otherwise we might just have to revise that melancholy Sixties song to "Abraham, Martin, Barrack and John"

It's the Currythief's 39th Birthday

2008-02-26T11:47:00.003+08:00

Note: The birds at the bottom are a pair of (female) Chinese Great Tits

Now THAT'S a campaign ad

2008-02-06T06:32:00.000+08:00

Mushtaq has posted one of Barrack Obama's video ads. It's OK. Black, White, Female, Male, Old, Young, Poor and Rich all together expressing their hope for the future. Good stuff. But the best one of the primaries? No, not anymore. Not when we have this:

There are flashlights, and there are flashlights...

2008-01-29T13:56:00.000+08:00

Todd Erven and Steve Perry have been talking flashlights lately, wimpy little things that just give enough light to see by. Wicked Lasers has created the baddest, if not the biggest, of them all - The Torch. At 4100 lumens it can fry your eyes, melt plastic or start a fire. Literally. Sure, it goes through batteries in about fifteen minutes. If you can afford the $300 price tag you can afford a few "C" cells.

Mixed Feelings

2008-01-13T12:11:00.000+08:00

I've been using my wife's PT Cruiser as a small pickup truck for the ongoing basement remodel. It's just big enough, and you can take the back seats completely out. On Thursday my Silat buddy Toby and I had to put the seats back in. Drawer slides had been selling for five cents apiece at the ReBuilding Center, so my car was full of drawer slides, plywood and electrical parts. Class started in about half an hour. We were going to drive up in the Gray Lady. The only thing left in the back was a wooden tamper handle that I use in a different martial arts group. Japanese white oak bokken $70. Hickory stick $7. What it lacks in tradition it more than makes up in price.

We headed back to the house and just about ran into a pre-teen girl. She stopped. She looked at us. She let out a scream, turned around and ran up the sidewalk, across the street and kept on going still screaming.

I don't know why she was so scared. Was it the two guys walking on the sidewalk? Was there some kind of traumatic incident with an pick handle or baseball bat in her past? I'm sorry she was frightened. If it's something we did it would be nice to know so that we don't do it again. But as someone who cares about self defense I have to say she did exactly what she was supposed to. She reacted quickly and effectively. She put as much distance between herself and the large scary strangers as she could and did everything she could to startle us and attract attention.

Someone who cares about her taught her what to do in situations like this. Whoever you are, you should be proud. She took your lessons to heart and used them without hesitating. She didn't need to this time, but someday it might be for real. It's good to know that there is one little girl who will be ready.

Old School. Hardcore. Mad Skillz

2008-01-09T01:53:00.000+08:00

Video of a man who makes his own triode vacuum tubes from scratch.

We are not worthy!
We are not worthy!

Fabrication d'une lampe triode
Uploaded by F2FO

Unleash the Beast

2007-12-27T02:10:00.000+08:00

For the past couple years the Buffalo Beast has raised cynical curmudgeonhood and hypertensive outrage to new heights with its "Fifty Most Loathsome People in America" list. This year's offering is as good as ever.

48. Carson Daly

Charges: Otherwise too banal for derision, Daly, who cut his shmuck-teeth warming musical Similac for tweens on MTV, acted as Writer's Guild strike breaker by returning to air without them.

Exhibit A: We didn't know his show employed writers.

Sentence: Forced to appear nightly on The Carson Daly Show.
...

30. Duane "Dog the Bounty Hunter" Chapman

Charges: Shocked a handful of innocents and turned into self-recriminating chum for Sean Hannity with the revelation that a redneck bounty hunter is-gasp!-a racist. Looks like an extra from Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. Married to a silicon-based life form. When a guy's own son intentionally destroys his career, you know he's got to be a singular fuckhead. Played at extraordinary rendition this year; got arrested for trying to physically extradite a Mexican national.

Exhibit A: "I'm not gonna take a chance ever in life of losing everything I've worked for for 30 years because some fucking nigger heard us say nigger and turned us in to the Enquirer magazine." Yeah, 'cause not saying "nigger" is just out of the question.

Sentence: Neutered, dewormed, given to Michael Vick's buddies for sparring practice.
...
23. Bill O'Reilly
Charges: If judgmentalism were sugar, anyone in the same city as this paragon of intellectual overconfidence would lose their teeth within five minutes. O'Reilly is everything that's wrong with America: Won't ever admit he was wrong about anything (and will lie repeatedly rather than correct himself), accuses all who disagree with him of treason or insanity, attacks all who criticize him, and glories in his own troglodytic bluster. Anoints himself an authority on morals, despite common knowledge that he is a sexual harasser. Pretends to be an "independent" who just happens to look, sound, and act exactly like a Republican. Hasn't engaged in a valid exchange of ideas in his entire career, because he knows he'd be crushed in seconds by an average college freshman. O'Reilly wins by interrupting, shouting, and if all else fails, cutting off his opponent's microphone. A tiny, scared child of a man.

Exhibit A: "And this is what white America doesn't know, particularly people who don't have a lot of interaction with black Americans. They think that the culture is dominated by Twista, Ludacris, and Snoop Dogg." Gee Bill, where would they get that idea?

Sentence: Marinated, barbecued, and served at Sylvia's restaurant in Harlem, where the blacks eat just like real people.
...
17. Hillary Clinton
Charges: Began in politics as a teenage Nixon supporter -- that's twisted. Moved on to corporate law, representing Wal-Mart and bravely defending Coca-Cola from disabled employees. Married out of ambition. Failed miserably as the first lady of health care. Has spent whole of senatorial career as a hawk and a panderer. Would have no shot at becoming president if she didn't just happen to be married to one already.

Exhibit A: Has deftly avoided the flip-flopper label -- by never, ever answering a question directly or committing to a position in the first place.

Sentence: Victim of vast right wing conspiracy to shove a brick up her ass.
...
9. You

Charges: You believe in freedom of speech, until someone says something that offends you. You suddenly give a damn about border integrity, because the automated voice system at your pharmacy asked you to press 9 for Spanish. You cling to every scrap of bullshit you can find to support your ludicrous belief system, and reject all empirical evidence to the contrary. You know the difference between patriotism and nationalism -- it's nationalism when foreigners do it. You hate anyone who seems smarter than you. You care more about zygotes than actual people. You love to blame people for their misfortunes, even if it means screwing yourself over. You still think Republicans favor limited government. Your knowledge of politics and government are dwarfed by your concern for Britney Spears' children. You think buying Chinese goods stimulates our economy. You think you're going to get universal health care. You tolerate the phrase "enhanced interrogation techniques." You think the government is actually trying to improve education. You think watching CNN makes you smarter. You think two parties is enough. You can't spell. You think $9 trillion in debt is manageable. You believe in an afterlife for the sole reason that you don't want to die. You think lowering taxes raises revenue. You think the economy's doing well. You're an idiot.

Exhibit A: You couldn't get enough Anna Nicole Smith coverage.

Sentence: A gradual decline into abject poverty as you continue to vote against your own self-interest. Death by an easily treated disorder that your health insurance doesn't cover. You deserve it, chump.

2006
2005
2004
2002

Excellent use of self defense principles

2007-12-24T05:01:00.000+08:00

From News.com.au comes this story:

December 20, 2007 06:51pm

A 95-year-old World War II veteran dared two knife-wielding home invaders to kill him.

Robert Taylor was sitting on the front veranda of his home in Liverpool, in Sydney's southwest, when two men tried to rob him yesterday afternoon.

One of them threatened him with a knife while the other went inside the house, cut the phone line and then rummaged through the elderly man's belongings.

Mr Taylor said the men told him to get inside the house or they would kill him.

He said he refused and dared them to carry out their threats.

"I said to them while they were standing there,'If you are going to kill me, kill me now','' Mr Taylor said on Channel 10.

The men fled without taking anything.

Mr Taylor, who served in New Guinea and Bougainville during WWII, had a message for the men.

"Wake up to yourselves and go and get a job, there's plenty around,'' he said.

Police described the incident as a "callous, cowardly attack''.

I really like this one. It demonstrates a number of important self defense principles that are easy to forget under pressure.

First, most people are lazy and prefer to do things on autopilot. This includes a lot of criminals. As long as things are going the way they want everything is good (for them, not for you). When something unexpected happens it takes time to refocus and do something else. Effective self defense rests on making things not go the way the criminal wants. Mr. Taylor made the lowlifes start reacting to him instead of the other way around.

Napoleon said "I might lose a battle, but I will never lose a minute." The earlier you mess with the bad guys' plan the better. This gentleman started his self defense the moment the criminals started their crime. The further along things go the more he's got invested in doing this particular crime right now.

Make them realize that what they want from you is not worth what they're willing to pay. Mr. Taylor guessed (correctly) that they weren't willing to kill someone in front of witnesses in the middle of the day. He gave them the choice of doing that or leaving. They left.

All of these are principles. When we taught self defense we had very few iron clad rules. One of the biggest was "Never ever allow yourself to be taken to a secondary crime scene or restrained. Nothing good can happen if you give a criminal the time and privacy he wants. If you let yourself be made helpless it just lets him get creative with the blowtorch and pliers." The defender refused to go into the house where g-ds alone know what the two thugs would have decided to do.

I suppose it could have been better. He could have shot them both between the eyes. The story is a beautiful example of the fundamentals of self protection.

A little good news with the bad - A real American Hero

2007-12-13T03:32:00.000+08:00

A Muslim saves Jews who were being attacked by Christians for saying "Happy Chanukah." Sometimes things happen that give you a little hope for the human race.

A suspected bias attack on four Jewish subway riders has resulted in a friendship between the Jewish victims and the Muslim college student who came to their aid.

Walter Adler is calling Hassan Askari a hero for intervening when Adler and three friends were assaulted on a subway train in lower Manhattan on Friday night.

The altercation erupted when Adler and his friends said "Happy Chanukah" to a group yelling "Merry Christmas" on the Brooklyn-bound train.

The 20-year-old Askari said he tried to fight off the 10 attackers, giving Adler a chance to summon police by pulling an emergency brake.

"I did what I thought was right," said Askari, a student at Berkeley College in Manhattan, who was allegedly punched and beaten. "I did the best that I could to help."

Eight men and two women have pleaded not guilty to assault, menacing and other charges in the case. Prosecutors have said the charges could be upgraded to hate crimes.

According to this article

Four Jewish subway riders who wished other people "Happy Hanukkah" were pelted with anti-Semitic remarks before being beaten, police and prosecutors said. The incident was being investigated as a possible hate crime.

The four were on a train in lower Manhattan on Friday night, during the eight-day Jewish Festival of Lights, when they were approached by a group of 10 people who offered holiday greetings. The victims responded, "Happy Hanukkah," and then were assaulted by the larger group, police said Tuesday.

[...]

One of the men charged, Joseph Jirovec, pleaded guilty last year to attempted robbery as a hate crime and was awaiting sentencing, prosecutors said. Jirovec, who is white, was part of a group that yelled racial epithets and assaulted two black teenagers in Brooklyn, prosecutors said.

Jirovec's lawyer, Peter Mollo, said Tuesday it was very unlikely his client would attack another person for being Jewish.

Hassan Askari, you're an authentic American Hero. If you weren't Muslim I'd say "Drinks are on me." But as it is, you have my profound thanks and heartfelt prayers. You fought evil, protected the innocent and brought honor on Islam. That's Muslim Chivalry and American ideals at their best.

Damn. Damn. Damn.

2007-12-13T03:17:00.000+08:00

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but Terry Pratchett has been diagnosed with a rare form of early onset Alzheimer's.

Folks,

I would have liked to keep this one quiet for a little while, but because of upcoming conventions and of course the need to keep my publishers informed, it seems to me unfair to withhold the news. I have been diagnosed with a very rare form of early
onset Alzheimer's, which lay behind this year's phantom "stroke".

We are taking it fairly philosophically down here and possibly with a mild optimism. For now work is continuing on the completion of Nation and the basic notes are already being laid down for Unseen Academicals. All other things being equal, I
expect to meet most current and, as far as possible, future commitments but will discuss things with the various organisers. Frankly, I would prefer it if people kept things cheerful, because I think there's time for at least a few more books yet :o)

Today's Martial Arts Topic: Affect

2007-12-10T11:40:00.000+08:00

A long time back, when dinosaurs strode the Earth, before Martial Talk, before Instant Messaging, before HTTP, when e-mail addresses (if you were lucky enough to have one) had !s in them, I did Kajukenbo. Al Dacascos was in Portland. He'd moved his school from Murray Road to Highway 8 right across from the Lexus dealership and the Dairy Queen. One of the new features of the school was notebook pages and lists of requirements for every student at every level.

I couldn't stand the half handwritten half typewritten badly photocopied pages. So I typed them into MacWrite and printed out master copies. Strange things happened because of that. I ended up editing the IKF newsletter for a couple years and tried to make working class guys from Hawaii sound like college professors - a challenging job of editing. They also had me go to a couple of the yearly meetings and write them up making it sound like everyone got along swimmingly and peace, love and brotherhood were the orders of the day.

These are martial artists we're talking about. Let's say that a bit of selective blindness and some out-and-out lying was required. Watcha gonna do

The first meeting was in a hotel. Tiel and I were supposed to direct everyone to the meet-and-greet as they arrived. It wasn't hard. A few people were wearing Kajukenbo t-shirts of one sort of another. But the rest? There was a look, an affect that was very common. We didn't miss many. There was a sort of walk, almost a swagger, that a lot of them had. There was also a certain sort of erect carriage and highly developed forearms that set them apart from everyone else.

I think Tiel had it pegged. She was talking about a group of the senior practitioners and said "They're Palama boys. They grew up on da Islands and some of them never did adjust to the mainland. Most of them [one group] except X and Y and Z are still kids. They take their martial art seriously, but they're basically tough guys, brawlers who are up for a fight on Saturday night." There's a quality to the way a lot of them move that reminds me (surprise, surprise) of a lot of Kenpo stylists. It's like the torso is a solid gun platform, and the arms and legs moving around are the guns. I don't know how to express it.

Now, that's not to say that all Kajukenbo practitioners are like that. Not at all. But when you compare a chunk of them to a lump of other martial artists it sort of stands out in the aggregate.

Just recently I was reading an Australian kids' book called "Toad Rage". That led to thinking about Cane Toads and the last thing I tried to put in the Kajukenbo newsletter. And that finally led to thinking about the Kajukenbo Look and what stands out in people from other styles.

Some. I don't know exactly what it is that screams "Cop" in a person's bearing, but Phil Messina's people all seem to have it, even the ones who are not in law enforcement.

The smug superiority and false politeness of just about every single Ki Society Aikidoka I've met never fails to set my teeth on edge. It's led to more than one unfortunate but amusing incident

When Tiel met three koryu practitioners who teach under the same instructor here in Portland she said "Thugs. Well behaved, educated amiable thugs." And she's right. They're not that sort of person, but they sure carry themselves that way.

Krav Maga was a special case. When I took it for a very short time I talked to the guy leading class, and we've had conversations with other ones. They all agreed that if you don't have the right affect you aren't going to make instructor. Now, that's a little extreme, and I think it's unnecessary. But it's their party, so they can do what they want to. I think it's interesting that they're aware of the fact and use it.

A few things really stand out in the Thai boxers we've hung with. They don't swagger. They don't tend to brag. There's a certain value placed on politeness and humility though not subservience. There's also a serious "Show me" attitude. You make a claim, you'd better be able to back it up. That and the sort of toughness that comes from knowing you're fit, strong and can take it as well as dish it out.

It's sort of similar to the MMA guys. They look and act like, well, serious athletes in an extremely demanding sport. Excellent overall muscular development and a certain confident grace in movement. You tend to find the arrogance of the serious competitor coupled with very good sportsmanship.

A lot of people who do FMA don't have much contact with Filipinos. Still, there are things that rub off. A few years ago I would have said "quarrelsome". To some degree I still would. Hey, I call 'em like I see 'em. And I see 'em like I was There's more at work. And I think I've figured out part of it. In a lot of the "Chopstick Culture" Asian martial arts - Korea, Japan, China - there's a very hierarchical tradition. You have a rank, a title and seniority. That tells everyone (including yourself) who and what you are within the group. Things and people move in well-defined ways.

Among the FMA there's a lot of organizations and some fancy titles and ranks. But it's more fluid. I swear that every guy who had a fight with his teacher moved to the other side of town, made up a new salute and became the Grandmaster of his own slightly modified system that had absolutely nothing to do with the guys across the way

It's less like a beehive than a wolf pack. In the hive your duties will change, but who and what you are is always rigidly defined. Among wolves it's all about respect. The respect you get and your position is always up for negotiation. Back down from a challenge, and you've negotiated yourself downwards. Make too many challenges and you're a troublemaker. Challenge too high or too low, and you're not to be taken seriously.

I think that's why there's a stereotype that eskrimadors will fight at the drop of a hat, and if one doesn't drop they'll throw in their own. It's not entirely or even mostly true, but it stands out compared to a number of other traditions. And I think that's a good part of why.

When we did more FMA we picked up on it. We took more things as challenges and were more ready to see how our steel was tempered. Of course, we were also almost twenty years younger. But that couldn't have anything to do with it. Nah Tiel definitely picked some of it up from Suro Mike Inay's group when she studied there.

Just to pick an example, we had a table at the Oregon Knife Collectors' show once years back. A guy who later made quite a name for himself started talking trash about Guro Inosanto. "He's got some sticks, but that's it. He doesn't have any real martial arts." Now, people talk trash about Guro Inosanto all the time. It's usually pretty clear that it's a reflection on the guy doing the insulting, so you let it slide. At the time Tiel took it as an insult to her teacher's teacher and therefore a challenge. She was more than half serious about grabbing her sticks and seeing how the guy's steel was tempered. No matter how that fight would have ended it would have been bad for him. "Famous martial artist whacked upside the head by 120 pound gal" or "Big strong martial artist beats up woman half his size"

The point isn't who would have won the fight. It's that she had that FMA attitude of "Don't make challenges. Never back down if you are challenged."

Or there was the story Sifu Tony Ramos told about when he was working as a cop in Vacaville. The PR-24 had just come out, and everyone was getting trained. When the instructor uttered the sneer "Well, I see you're still carrying a baton," it was like a Greek tragedy. A Greek tragedy right after the main character has insulted Blind Tiresias and gone against the Will of the G-ds. I knew how the story goes after that. It ends a short act later with the instructor laid out on the floor.

These are generalizations. Obviously. Obviously. Obviously. No doubt. But there's a surprisingly large kernel of truth in some of them. You can learn a few things from the exercise. It's hard to say how much is self-selection and how much is induced. That varies from school to school and person to person.

One thing that's pretty clear is that nobody is qualified to apply the lens to his or her own style. It's like trying to see the surface from the inside. And all of us know we've got a case of "What I do is great. If there were something better I'd be training in it," when we're being honest. I know there's a Silat affect or a couple of them. But I'm too close to see it myself.

So what are some of the things that strike you about different traditions or styles? What can you look at in the practitioners that stands out and distinguishes them from other martial artists?

Wisdom

2007-12-07T05:26:00.000+08:00

Six wise blind elephants had heard of human beings and wanted to know more about these mysterious creatures. So they had a human being brought to them.

The first elephant touched the human being and declared "Human beings are flat."

The other elephants touched the human being and agreed. Human beings are flat.

Rare Exports - What It Takes

2007-12-07T04:39:00.000+08:00

Warning: These clips contain graphic footage of cruelty, hunting, brainwashing, imprisonment and worse. But it's a sacrifice we must make to preserve our most Sacred Traditions. This holiday season tell yourself "It's for the Children."

Part I - Rare Exports

Part II - The Consequences of Failure

Kids' Martial Arts The Way it Should Be

2007-12-02T04:47:00.000+08:00

Whenever people ask "What martial art do you recommend for kids?" I always answer "Judo. No question about it."

There's a lot of reasons for this. It's wrestling, and little apes love to wrestle. You learn to fall. Most people never get in a fight, but everyone falls down. It wears them out. It's great exercise and does wonders for balance and coordination. It develops fighting spirit in a good way. Striking is bad for young unfused bones and can lead to permanent joint problems in ways that grappling just isn't. It works just fine for schoolyard troubles with a lot less chance for accidental injury than kicking some kid in the head.

Most of all it was my own experience in the early 70s.

Saint Street goes from one side of Richland, WA to the other. It starts at the Columbia River and heads West past the water treatment plant. It goes up a hill and crosses Stevens Drive, right where Stevens merges with the Bypass Highway. The trees and grass end suddenly at the range of the last home sprinkler system and give way to bare dirt, tumbleweed and bunch grass.

Right across Stevens there's a gas station which used to say "Last Gas for 7o miles". In those days it was true. Back then there was a Coke machine instead of a mini mart.

Just beyond it are two WWII era buildings built by the government for some mysterious Hanford Project purpose. All that construction to the North and West in the picture came decades later.

The first one has a green roof and flaking white paint. It used to be a martial arts school. Sensei Rising taught Ju Jutsu, Aikido, Karate and a number of other mysterious things. Lord only knows where he picked them up. All I can say for sure is that he and a couple of the other teachers there had officially been frogmen during the Second World War. He had a signed picture of William "Wild Bill" Donovan in a place of honor and seemed to know a really strange array of martial artists. I'd still give a lot to know how to find the Ba Gua and Dog Kung Fu teacher he brought to the Judo school for a demonstration one evening.

Kids my age weren't allowed to study there. He sent anyone under 21 including his own sons next door to the building with the brown roof where a really great group of men taught Judo.
It's the standard by which youth martial arts should be judged. I've seen a lot of kids' classes - all the Karate/TKD/Kenpo variants, Kung Fu, and about a million "Little Dragons" and "Junior Ninjas" programs. Some of them are very good. The Richland Judo Dojo could hold its head up with any of them and outshines almost all.

The facilities were nothing much to look at. It was a mid-1940s military building, ugly and sturdy. There was some heat in the Winter, no air conditioning in the Summer, a kids' locker room, and adults' locker room, two rooms with tatami mats and a back room filled with dusty exercise equipment. Dues were minimal and barely covered the costs of the facility. A couple times a year one of the school mothers would do a group buy of gis.

The teachers were a collection of friends. Most of them had picked up their Judo in the Service. They were mostly steam-fitters, engineers, government employees and other people who worked out in the Hanford area. Many of them had sons in the classes they taught. Years later a lot of them quit Judo and formed an amateur soccer team. They had a refreshing faith that if everyone just went to the dojo three times a week and trained hard in Judo the world would be a better place. And do you know, I think they were right.

New kids were taught in a group in the back room. When they could fall without getting hurt and had learned a couple throws they were moved into the main class. There were classes for adults and advanced belts only, but for the most part everyone was taught together. Everyone did light randori together. Everyone lined up by rank together.

Competition was important. We worked extra hard and got a lot of motivation before big tournaments. But there were no display cases of trophies, and there was no special emphasis on the hot competition prospects (and there were some). The emphasis was taking part, fighting hard, and learning.

Looking back I'm impressed by the results. Over the four years I was there less than half of the students I started with left. Everyone progressed, but nobody passed a belt test who didn't deserve to. There was a group identity that extended outside the dojo. Effort was rewarded more than talent. A number of kids got things important things from Judo that they didn't get at home. We got good solid Judo training and had a lot of fun. You really can't ask for more than that.

Why was it so good? Can it be repeated?

It would be hard. It was a combination of time, place and people which made the school what it was.

There is a lot more martial arts now, and for better or worse people have expectations about them and what a school should be like. It is much harder for kids and parents to take a school on its own terms instead of in the light of Karate Kids, sword-wielding reptiles, Jackie Chan and the UFC. Judo classes were more an alternative to basketball or wrestling than they were to Karate or Ninjutsu. The only other dojo I had heard about taught Tae Kwon Do out in the wilds of West Richland.

Part of it was the teachers. They were an exceptional bunch. There was a most senior teacher, but he didn't run the school. A loose group of school mothers did that in one of those mysterious female networks what men wot not wot of. The fact that their own sons were in the class helped keep quality up. The fact that there were several prevented favoritism. They really believed in the benefits of Judo and felt that it was something bigger than them. They took a very paternal or at least avuncular role to the students. A lot of them had what I now see as a top sergeant's attitude. No nonsense, not soft, but dedicated to the people for whom they were responsible.

Another important thing was the students. Since there was no need to make money the teachers could take whom they wanted and teach the way they thought best. I'm sure a few kids never made it past the initial interview, and trouble makers shaped up or didn't last long. Bad behavior was not tolerated, and their response to the one ethnic slur I ever heard was grimly intolerant. They acted shamed that something so "against Judo" would happen in their school. They were there to get a workout and teach Judo. Part of that was turning out young people who would be a credit to the Art and their country.

The club didn't take any students younger than nine or ten. The childhood development issues that you get with the three-to-eight set just weren't there. It was a club that met in the evenings, not an unlicensed after school daycare program. And it was part of "family and friends life" for the teachers rather than a separate activity. All of this set the tone in a lot of subtle ways. Most of them were good.

I don't know if mixed-age classes were an official part of Judo at the time. That's the way it worked out. I think we were better for it. Most were at an age where they wanted to copy what adults were doing and were proud to be accepted into an adult activity as junior but definitely part of the group. We were all Judo players together. Obviously, a six foot four wrestler who had been to the Nationals was going to go easy on a skinny ten year old in light randori. Just the fact that they worked out together was valuable.

Loyalty Oaths

2007-11-30T04:11:00.000+08:00

It was bad enough during the Truman and Eisenhower years. During the Red Scare University professors and anyone else the government deemed insufficiently patriotic and "soft on Communism" could be forced to take a loyalty oath. Not the Pledge of Allegiance but an affirmation that you weren't now, never had been and wouldn't be part of any subversive organization. The Supremes went back and forth on their constitutionality but finally came down against them. Colleges that refused to demand the oath lost government funding and even broke tenure for professors who refused to sign them.

In recent years the Republicans have revived the idea. If you want to attend an event where Bush is speaking you have to sign a pledge of personal loyalty to the Decider. Don't sign the Oath, don't go. This even includes active duty Servicemen and Servicewomen when he visits the troops. I suppose that billboards proclaiming him "Our Leader" were only logical.

Now it seems that the GOP has taken the next step.

Vote Virginia who want to vote in the presidential primary are now forced to sign an oath pledging that they will support the Party's nominee in next year's election. It doesn't matter who it is. It doesn't matter if you prefer the Democrats' choice. You can't vote your conscience and cast a ballot for the Libertarians. If you want to be part of the selection process you must either lie or sign away one of your most sacred civil rights to The Party.

The stated reason is that Democrats don't care who their Party throws up for the general election. They'll come in droves to vote for the Republican they believe will lose. It's a stupid solution to a non-problem. It won't survive the inevitable court challenge. But it does show the GOP's true values - rigid Party Loyalty, strict adherence to the Party Line and devotion to the Person of the Unitary Executive.

Even conservative papers like Reason and The Spectator are shocked at this one. The Weekly Standard barely raised an eyebrow saying that there's no evidence that voters cross over this way.

Me? I threw up in my mouth a little.

Quiz - How Insane Are You?

2007-11-30T03:54:00.000+08:00

My favorite Internet Personality Quiz courtesy of the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, creators of the musical A Shoggoth on the Roof as well as movies, Elder Signs and many fine products for Eldritch Investigations.

Your score is: 155

For easier understanding, the HPLHS SaniTest assessment algorithm converts your raw score to a scale of 1 to 10. This number is your INSANITY INDEX.
INSANITY INDEX 9.11 Well, that's a pretty high score. Science lacks an official term for your condition, but around the lunch table psychiatrists would doubtless say you're very dangerously mad. Other notable people who scored this high include noted horror film director John Carpenter and the conceptual engineer R. Buckminster Fuller.

Animal Styles

2007-11-30T03:33:00.000+08:00

Animal styles have always been big in martial arts. In some ways it's a lot like the furry subculture. There are lots of tigers and dragons and praying mantises. Precious few moles or pangolins. In response to a thread on another forum here are my martial animal inspirations:

Martial inspirations from animals....
To start with, since I'm actually a large amphibian Here are some important lessons from The Way of the Toad

Kill and eat anyone smaller than you
Run away or hide from anyone larger
If you get into a fight with someone larger, poison them
Praying Mantis is over-rated
White Crane is terrifying

From my cats

You'll never stay in fighting shape if you don't get your 16 hours of sleep a day
Kill from ambush
Killing goes better with torture
Eat what you kill but leave the not-so-tasty bits all over the house
Learn knife fighting first
If you're not afraid of a German Shepherd you must be as big as a German Shepherd. If you know it, so will everyone else

From sloths

The best defense is being so still and covered with moss that nobody sees you
Haste makes waste
The most vulnerable time of day is when you climb out of bed to defecate.

From bonobos

Make love, not war
Make more love, not war
Make really inventive love with your friends and neighbors, not war
Make love swinging from trees, in large groups and with everyone except your mother, not war

From bees

Only the Queen uses her sex organs for sex
The rest of us fight with them
And then we die (bee stings are modified ovipositors)

From elephants

Size is everything

From amoebae

Pound for pound, the amoeba is the most vicious creature on the planet
Eat your enemies

From plants

Plants give amoebae a run for their money
If you're not using it to eat, build, or have sex use it to kill something
Strangle your enemies
Starve your enemies
Poison the ground that they live on
Once you kill them, eat them

From skunks

If you have chemical weapons you don't need to be smart, strong or tough

From ants

Mindless ferocity and large numbers beat everything

Reality Malfunction

2007-11-05T10:08:00.000+08:00

I've put a couple new things up on Reality Malfunction.

Does a Day Ever Go By?

2007-09-18T04:47:00.000+08:00

Are there any senior Republicans who are faithful to their spouses or have steady (legal) boyfriends or girlfriends? Is that just too perverse for the Gay Old Pedophiles?

Larry "Wide Stance" Craig trolling for sex in public bathrooms
Mark Foley texting about his boy-parts to underage Congressional pages
Jeff Gannon, conservative gay whore and "press" cheerleader who threw softball questions to George Bush
Former head of Young Republicans gets five years for sexually assaulting a subordinate
Vitter hitting the hookers 2-3 times a week (doesn't his wife ever service him?)
Most recent former head of Young Republicans under indictment for sexually assaulting a sleeping (male) houseguest
Alberto Gonzales being investigated for covering up GOP pedophilia
The author of the Republican Adam and Steve campaign dies in lurid gay double homicide-suicide
Bob Allen comes up with remarkable response to presence of Black men - offer them twenty bucks and a blow job. It's just insurance against getting mugged. Honest
...and more and still more

Today we find that an Assistant US Attorney has been arrested for soliciting sex with what he thought was a five year old girl.

The undercover detective expressed concern about physical injury to the 5-year-old girl as a result of the sexual activity. Detectives said Atchison responded, " I am always gentle and loving; not to worry, no damage ever, no rough stuff ever. I only like it soft and nice."The undercover detective asked how Atchison can be certain of no injury. He responded, "Just gotta go slow and very easy. I've done it plenty," according to detectives.

A Cool Toy

2007-09-16T10:11:00.000+08:00

I just ran across the Bayeaux Tapestry Generator. It's kinda fun. There's a small palette of animals, people, buildings and other stuff which you can move around on the screen. For stories, make several frames. Unfortunately, there isn't an easy way to save them as Flash or animated GIF. Oh well, that's what screen capture is for. Since I've been in a culinary mood lately....

Yo ho, yo ho a pirate's life for me

2007-09-14T23:45:00.000+08:00

At least for a couple days.

Pirates are hot lately. It's not just because of the Disney movies. There's been something in the air for a good while. It could be the sense of freedom that the represent in an increasingly constrained and totalitarian world. It could be that the Great Heroes of Capitalism these days are looters and raiders rather than builders. It might be climate change. As we know, pirates reduce global warming. Maybe I didn't wash the dirty sweats after I spilled rum on them.

No matter what it is the Second Annual Portland Pirate Festival will be next weekend, September 22 & 23 right next to the beautiful St. John's Bridge in North Portland.

Last year's was a lot of fun. There were ships, Age of Sail recreators, rum, the guys who came up with Talk Like a Pirate Day (Sept. 19th) and some good bands like Captain Bogg and Salty. You'd be amazed how many of CB&S's "Eat a Lime" and "Yar" bumper stickers are around town these days. The only bit of poor planning was the food and drink. When you have small children standing in line for an hour to get a turkey leg isn't going to work. Oh well, the excellent Big Kahuna BBQ is nearby.

About this time last year we were driving back down I-5 from Silat class when we saw a pair of sailing ships firing signal guns at each other and maneuvering around. After a while they headed up the Columbia to the first PPF.

Oh, This is Going to be All Kinds of Good

2007-09-14T14:11:00.000+08:00

Just when you think there's some hope for progress in the human race

Rapist agrees to castration punishment for sexual battery

The Associated Press

PANAMA CITY, Fla. - A confessed rapist has agreed to be castrated in a plea deal that could save him from a life prison sentence.
Bobby James Allen pleaded guilty Monday to three counts of armed sexual battery and various other charges involving attacks that happened in 1998 and 1999. Allen filed a motion requesting castration in exchange for a reduced sentence.
Circuit Judge Michael Overstreet agreed to sentence Allen to 25 years' prison on Sept. 20 if has the procedure in the next eight days. If Allen does not go through with the operation, he faces up to life in prison.
"You understand that this procedure is the removal of your testicles?" Overstreet asked Allen.
Allen said he wanted to be castrated.
"I have spoken with all the victims," prosecutor Larry Basford told Overstreet. "They agree that this sentence punishes him and would deter him and others from similar acts."
Allen would be classified as a dangerous sexual offender and must serve every day of his 25-year sentence, prosecutors said.

How much imagination does this scenario take:

Judge (to a White guy): "10-15 years"

Judge (to a Black guy): "You have been convicted of second dee gree sex y'all assault. That's going to be life, boy. But if we cut off you black balls we might let you out some day. Completely voluntary. Think about it, nigger.

That Should Work Better

2007-09-14T06:38:00.001+08:00

Somewhere in the dim depths of time I screwed up the template. Comments didn't work. I've retemplated this blog, and everything seems to work better now.

Reality Malfunction, my blog for odder stuff and fiction, is up. It's just a shell, but there are some interesting links.

And that's the circle of liiiiiffeee!

2007-09-11T01:48:00.000+08:00

Now I know a few things that I didn't ten minutes ago.

Why the kibble bill is lower during the Summer
Broadband is a highly optimized little killing machine
She isn't one of those sweet kitties who brings her humans food gifts
The selfish little fuck eats it all herself
The dogs don't even try to take away her prey
I'm really glad I'm not four inches tall.

The crime scene:
The alleged perpetrator:

Fortunately, all evidence points to the deceased being a house sparrow. We have too many house sparrows.

[Update] Tiel has just sent me a picture of the real Broadband:

Pie!

2007-09-07T06:35:00.000+08:00

From Phil and Kaja Foglio's "Girl Genius"

Every Summer I make two pies. It's not for fun, Lord knows. It's serious business. You see, Tiel is an addict. She has a serious jones that can consume her. She's got the Cherry Habit.

It's good that we live in the Northwest. Both Bing and Rainier cherries were developed here, and prime growing areas like the Yakima Valley and Hood River are close at hand. During the early Summer we can keep the demon at bay.

A few years back we found the definitive treatment, Susie Bright's Eternal Cherry Devotion Pie. Ms. Bright is more noted for writing about sex, pornography, feminism and politics. "Sometimes," she says "you need to prepare a meal that will make someone fall in love with you." In Mommy's Little Girl: On Sex, Motherhood, Porn and Cherry Pie she makes a good stab at it. This has as much to do with the over sweetened corn-syrup glop that passes for cherry pie isolated in a dry crust that passes for cherry pie as Chef Boy-R-Dee does with Escoffier. It has three pounds of cherries, a classic sugar crust, brandy and other wonderful things.

I don't know if it will make someone fall in love with you. If I haven't managed to do that to Tiel yet something has gone very wrong. What I can tell you is that two of them keep the Rosaceae Prunus Avium monkey off her back for almost a whole year. Somehow the combination of crisp Raniers and sweet Bings tastes more like cherries than the pure fruit itself.

Seeing as I'm getting back into the workforce soon and never really mastered pie-baking it was time to kill two birds with one stone (cherry, peach or apricot); I've been on a bit of a pie kick lately thanks to copies of The Humble Pie by Teresa Kennedy (sadly out of print), The Joy of Cooking and Dessert Circus. So far they've been about half savory and half sweet. Peach, Mango Cream, Mango Mousse (Fred Meyer's has a sale on mangoes), Grape Clafoutis, Black Bottom (which spontaneously disassembled in the car), Key Lime, Leek and Sausage, Shepherd's, Pasties, Pirozhkies, Chicken, Koubielaka(sp?) and at least one other meat variety I'm forgetting. Still to go: Shaker Lemon pie and Shaker Fish pie, honest-to-goodness mincemeat pie this Christmas, Shoefly(dry variety), Tomato-Basil, Broccoli-Cheese and maybe one or two others. The freezer is pretty full, so that should do it for now.

I've tried a number of different pie crusts from old fashioned pie paste and whole wheat to shortbread. They're the tricky part of the process. It's taken over a dozen tries to get the gluten and moisture just right. I don't know what will happen when the temperature and humidity change. Well, that's why the commercial bakeries keep it all carefully controlled and why it's as much Art as Science in the home kitchen. Having the right sort of crust for the pie is important. The yoghurt crust really does add something to meat or mushroom pies. The clafoutis just wouldn't do with anything besides a rich, sweet crust. And black bottom pie that isn't encased in crumbled gingersnaps? You've got to be kidding.

Even for a novice like myself the results have been pretty good. The most expensive pie is the Eternal Cherry Devotion with three pounds of organic cherries at about five dollars a pound. A similar one in a reasonably priced bakery? At least half again as much, and they do cut corners for efficiency. With some like the key lime there really is no comparison on top of the lower price.

Savory pies other than pizza and one or two varieties of pot pie are essentially extinct in this country. Outside of the Upper Midwest you can't find pasties for love nor money let alone leek and sausage. They are tasty, convenient, store easily and are quick to the table. You can keep most sorts of crust dough in the freezer for a long while and whip up some sort of filling in almost no time.

About half way through the pirozhkies I ran out of dough. A few lasagna noodles and some cheddar to top and there was a dish which was recognizably lasagna although it had almost none of the canonical ingredients. No ricotta or mozzarella. No sauce. A layer of cabbage and egg, one of mushrooms in cream, another of meat with dill. It worked out pretty well. A cornmeal crust, an egg binder and whatever veggies were nearing their end-of-life and we had a vegetable pie - very simple and flexible.

It's puzzling that they have become so rare. Oh, I suppose that samosas and Hot Pockets are technically in the family, but the first are still uncommon, and the second is the inbred low-class distant cousin who's only in the family photograph out of a sense of completeness. Maybe the rise of the casserole, pasta, and other quickly prepared or pre-packaged dishes is to blame.

Or it could just be that we don't have to go to the extra trouble of making pies anymore. Back in the day pies were an important method of food preservation. in Fading Feast: A Compendium of Disappearing American Regional Foods Raymond Sokolov speaks of winter food in New England. For the most part a colonial farmer might get by on cheese, milk and apple pie for weeks on end. There was enough protein, minerals, carbohydrates and vitamins - especially C & D - on which to get by in forms which could be stored for months.

If you have a weekend to invest in saving time later on or if you would just like to try something that gives you control over the ingredients pull out a cookbook and make a few pies. Try sweet and savory. Or just make the dough and be ready to pull it out a few months later. You'll get something better and less expensive than you would buy in the store let alone a restaurant. A lot of them you just can't buy. And you'll be reviving an art that might otherwise be lost.

And who knows? You might even come up with an amazing piece of Mad Science like
this
and this
courtesy of Phil Foglio's most excellent Steampunk Webcomic

Timmmbbberrrr!

2007-09-05T07:05:00.000+08:00

There's been a bunch of trees dying in our part of the city, mostly oaks and maples. According to the city forester it's probably the weird weather. The ground has been saturated more of the year, and you get outbreaks of root-rot. The maple in our backyard didn't put out many leaves or seeds last year. This year there was no new growth. Late this Spring we finally admitted that it was dead. The maple was growing in exactly the wrong direction and was threatening one neighbor's garage roof, two fences, and another neighbor's garden.

So it had to come down.

The tree surgeons would have charged $300-400 to bring it down. I figured that it couldn't be that hard to learn how to use a chainsaw. I got some good advice from Brandt, Bobbe and Mushtaq - thanks guys - and rented a chainsaw from Home Depot for $30. This was the first full size tree I've felled since Boy Sprouts. The current project was a little over 20 feet tall and about 16-18 inches at the base depending on which way you measured.

It worked like a charm. Nobody hurt, nothing crushed. Everything fell the right way. Even gaged the depths of the cut well enough so that it was stable while I was near it but just took moderate pull to get things falling. We limbed it as high as we could, topped it at a bit over ten feet and brought the rest down at ground level. Cut a wedge out in the direction of fall. Make a back cut at 45 degrees. Use gentle tension with a rope to get it to fall, but not so much that the trunk kicks back.

It looks like there was almost no rot, so I'm going to get the wood under shelter, dry it slowly and use every bit that can be used. The big pieces will be cut into panels, cabinet doors and a couple newel posts. Limbs are going to become picture frames, balustrades and pen blanks. The chunks are slated to be practice bowl blanks. When we're feeling industrious we'll dig out some of the stuff below ground and see if there's any interesting burl. Ten pounds of paraffin should be enough to paint the ends to reduce checking. It'll be interesting to see how much of the wood becomes abstract art as I learn how to use the lathe.

So what did we learn today, class?

You can do a lot with a sawzall. It takes a lot of time and effort. A chainsaw is much better.
The rental Makita chainsaws at Home Depot are a pain in the butt. They flood, and they're hard to get started the first time. But they do the job and have good anti-kickback features.
Brandt wasn't shitting me. The vibration as you make deep cuts through hard heartwood can make your hands and forearms seize up.
Climbing a ladder with a running chainsaw is scary even if the blade isn't moving.
Ropes are good. So are safety lines. So are gloves, steel-capped boots, face shields and hearing protection.
Dogs don't like the sound of a running chainsaw.
The guy in Army of Darkness would have had a wrist and arm like a tree trunk to wave one of those things around one-handed.
Cutting down trees is fun.

Jack and John Company or No, Pirates 3 Didn't Suck

2007-09-02T11:54:00.000+08:00

Once in a while I remember why I still read Harper's Magazine. Sometimes it's the Index. Sometimes it's the articles. Once in a while it's a quote that skewers the truth. Long time back they had a roundtable about horror, movies and good writing and why the last two are so seldom found together. The panel tried to figure out how to make a movie out of Poe's The Telltale Heart. I hardly remember what they came up with, some sort of erotic/psychological thriller. But there was one deathless line. Robert Bloch said "It was a black day in Hollywood when producers discovered Roman numerals."

For the most part he was right. Sequels usually suck festering warthog hemorrhoids. That's why we were so surprised when three sequels - Spiderman II, Shrek II and Pirates of the Caribbean II - were all so good. We were looking forward to seeing the final installments but were prepared to be disappointed.

"Blessed are those who expect nothing, for they shall not be disappointed."

Spiderman III was lame, dog lame. The final (oh Lord I hope it's final) installment of Shrek tried to retread old jokes, play it safe and do everything safely by formula. It was set to be a Family Friendly Summer Blockbuster. And it did make a lot of money. Our low expectations were barely met, and we didn't quite feel ripped-off at three bucks a head.

With all the bad press that Pirates 3 got we weren't about to see it for full price. So we waited until it was playing at the Bagdad Theater.

For those of you not lucky enough to live in the North Wet the Bagdad is one of the McMenamin Brothers' chain. They pretty much started the brewpub revolution in this part of the country and have expanded from a couple pubs to hotels, old-style ballrooms with sprung floors, event locations, a winery and all sorts of other wonderful things. They specialize in taking old properties and converting them into really fun funky places. The Baghdad was a decrepit theater in the Hawthorne district. They added a bar and put in a cigar/pool/port bar around the corner. They also converted a lot of the seats into real chairs and sofas and ripped out a bunch of the rows to make room for tables. You can have beer and a pizza while you watch a second run movie.

So armed with cider, Hammerhead Ale and a couple pepperoni slices we saw Pirates of the Caribbean III. We weren't expecting much. They'd already hit the three greatest monsters in the second movie - Davy Jones, the Flying Dutchman and the Kraken. What was left? Oh well, at the worst we'd get to see Keith Richards playing a decrepit, broken down drunken pirate outlaw. Definitely character acting for him, and barely a stretch.

I can see why a lot of people didn't like it. It wasn't a clever roller coaster like the other two. It was pretty damned grim. The pacing wasn't quite off. The dialog wasn't inspired. And the end just plain isn't going to satisfy people who want a light-hearted wrap-up where the Boy and Girl live happily ever after and everyone ends up singing happy songs. It's not that kind of Disney movie. In fact I think Disney might just have gotten a little bit of its soul back in the post-Eisner era.

That's the real thing that I think bothered a lot of people about this film. It goes against the grain. The movie opens with endless lines of wretches being hanged. As they march to the gallows an Officer is reading out an edict. There's a State of Emergency. The following rights are modified: The right of habeas corpus. Suspended. The right to assemble. Suspended. The right to trial by jury. Suspended. The right to an attorney. Suspended. For anyone convicted of piracy or anyone associated with a convicted pirate the penalty is to be hanged by the neck until dead. Little children not tall enough to reach the noose are thoughtfully stood on barrels so they can be hanged with the rest.

You don't have to be a wild-eyed revolutionary to get the message there.

And the Authority isn't even the British Crown. It's John Company, the E.I.C., one of the first and greatest of the multinationals with its own fleets, its own armies and no responsibility to anything but its bottom line. The pirates are the terrorists. Many of them are swarthy Orientals. They stand against the Company and against an Authority that controls the terrible power of the Sea Itself.

This is not a politically correct or even personally safe position to hold these days. The people taking away civil liberties are the villains. They all look alike with their uniforms and pale skins. The Corporation, Holy Avatar and Chosen of the Sacred Market (Laaa!) is evil. Every single evil-doer is a White Male Anglo-Saxon Capitalist. The Company honors no agreements. As its representative Beckett says "It's nothing personal. It's just good business."

A bunch of swarthy outlaws who cause terror including Frenchmen, Ay-rabs, armed Negroes *shudder* and Chinese are the Good Guys. They represent all the races of Man and include women in positions of power. They include the wretched of the Earth. They represent freedom. Some are good. Some are bad. Some are brave. Some are treacherous. The pirates quarrel. Get a bunch of them together, and a fight breaks out. "That's politics," quips Jack Sparrow. But when it comes down to it they all obey the Pirate Code to which they all signed on. They stand for freedom. The leader leads so with the consent of the electors and is first into battle rather than hiding in an undisclosed safe location.

Corporate rule is bad. Freedom is good. Those who stand against authority are the heroes. People can have flaws and still be heroic if they do what is right when the chips are down. And there are worse things than dying if you're doing what you really believe is right. These are not popular sentiments today. Our entire media machine and the political tenor of the day stands for submission to authority, mistrust of democratic institutions, the union of political and corporate power and the abandonment of all rights including habeas corpus, assembly, association, trial by jury and the right to an attorney, so that an English-speaking elite will make us feel safe from the dark-skinned Other.

Nope. The media people just aren't going to like this one.

And it doesn't have a Disney ending. The Boy doesn't quite get the Girl. They'll live ever after but probably not happily. His job is necessary, even sacred. But it's lonely, unpleasant and one he was never really cut out for. She has to do what the wives of sailors have always done which is wait and keep his heart safe.The man best suited for immortality sailing the seas gives it up. All the major characters betray each other, lie, and do bad things for what they consider good reasons. And nobody gets away unhurt. It makes for better drama and a much fuller story than we'd expected. It certainly isn't formula. It doesn't give the audience what it expects from a Disney flick. But it just might be the most subversive even courageous thing to come out of the Magic Kingdom in a long time.

And Keith Richards has hella stage presence as Captain Teach.

Happy Birthday Steve!

2007-08-29T10:32:00.000+08:00

It's Steve Perry's birthday today. We met him a number of years back at a writing workshop at Portland State where he was skeptical about Silat. "Oh, I've got all the martial arts I need already." Good thing, too. If he'd had those extra few years of Sera he might have been able to pass more on to, hmm, certain people.

We can probably put it down to his colorful past and youthful indiscretions

Happy sixtieth and many more, Steve. We're happy you stayed. And we're glad to know you.

I Support the Draft!

2007-08-21T01:52:00.000+08:00

According to the Pentagon the war in Iraq might take ten years. The Surge isn't stopping sectarian violence or the breakup of Iraq. The government, such as it is, is falling apart, and our glorious allies the Iraqi security forces can't fight on their own. At least they can't fight on their own as cohesive units. They do a bang-up job as members of various militias and gangs.

The President has outsourced his Constitutional responsibilities to General Petraeus. I've spent a long time looking at the Constitution and just can't find a description of the office and duties of "War Czar". But now that the good general is sounding less than optimistic about declaring victory he's being silenced.

We're rattling our saber at Iran and have declared that units in their military are terrorist organizations. The rhetoric coming out of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue sounds suspiciously like it did before the invasion of Iraq.

The only problem with this wonderful adventure is that we're running out of troops. The National Guard and Reserves have been used like the only cheap hooker in town when the Fleet is in. Our servicemen and women have been in the field longer and with less downtime than the whole of World War II. The Army and Marines are having real trouble meeting recruiting targets and keeping officers. To fill the hole we've got over 125,000 "private contractors" doing the jobs that soldiers used to do.

[Just a note on these "contractors". The Geneva Convention is very specific about what constitutes armed forces. It is equally clear about mercenaries. It even describes guerrillas, militias and the civilian population. Blackwater and Dyncorp fit none of these categories. They are textbook-perfect examples of "unlawful combatants". They have no rights under the Laws of War. If they have guns, they are fair game. And I don't shed a single tear when one of them is killed, maimed or captured and disappears forever. If they were wearing the Uniform it would be different. As it is? Screw 'em. They deserve whatever happens.]

How can we continue the adventure? I can only see a few possibilities. We can rotate Guard and Reserves in faster. We can cut downtime between deployments or increase the length of rotations. These aren't going to work. Our Armed Forces are already seriously fatigued. Training and readiness are suffering. The latest compromise in Congress promised them fifteen months on and a year off which the DoD itself doesn't consider sufficient to maintain the quality of the military.

Or we could suddenly discover a whole bunch of new recruits.

That doesn't seem likely. The recruiters have stopped scraping the bottom of the barrel and have commenced to kicking the bottom out of the sucker to see what might be crawling around underneath. Active gang-bangers, drug users, an unprecedented fraction who score in the lowest cohort on aptitude tests and even severe autistics are already getting in. In the last few weeks the Pentagon has mentioned the possibility of a draft a couple times. Quietly. And they've always immediately denied it. But I can't see how else they are going to deliver enough meat to the grinder. Otherwise the insurgents, the Shiite militias, Iran and everyone else in the Administration's sights is going to say "Yeah? You and what Army?"

So I'm foursquare 100 percent in favor of a draft. It will have to be a special draft. It will have to be a draft which unites the country in a spirit of shared sacrifice instead of dividing it like the Vietnam years.

I propose the Carthage Draft.

There's some controversy about the ancient Phoenicians. Some people say they regularly practiced human sacrifice. Some say it was blood libel by their Roman enemies. In any case they had a custom. In times of grave danger they would publicly sacrifice children to their gods by burning them to death in a hollow brass statue. Here's the important part. These weren't orphans or the children of the poor. They weren't slaves. They were the favorite little boys and girls of the rich and noble. All of the families had to pony up in front of each other.

Here in 21st Century America those who rule do not suffer the same as those who serve. Hawkish Senators don't have children in the line of fire. The powerfully connected get to join the Air National Guard and go AWOL or get half a dozen deferments because they have "other priorities". It breeds resentment from the Lower Orders and removes the cost from those who reap the benefit. The only way they will stop making war is when it just isn't fun anymore.

So let them pay. Let them pay in a coin which can not be covered with money or political pressure. Let them pay with something that costs the same whether you are rich or poor. Let them show how much they support the war by paying with the lives of their own children.

Every Congressman, every Senator, everyone in the Executive Branch above a certain level and everyone in the Cheney Branch gets to contribute. Hell, let's go all out and include the wealthiest 1% of families and the board members of the Fortune 500. All of them contribute a child. By preference it should be a son or daughter. If there isn't one a grandchild, a niece or nephew, a younger sibling or a spouse will do. The chosen will be in for the duration. There will be no deferments, no exemptions, none of that. If they suddenly discover that they're gay then "unit cohesion" will just have to suffer for the good of the country. They go in as buck privates destined for frontline units with really dangerous specialties like Rifleman or Cavalry Scout. There won't be opportunities to get out of danger by going to special training, Officer Candidate School or one of the Academies. They're in the thick of it as long as it lasts. The ones who are disabled or killed get replaced by someone else in the family.

So the rich and powerful can have their wars. The President can surge all he wants, but Jenna or Barbara will be dodging bullets. The Democrats can rubber stamp everything - they do anyway. But they won't be able to "triangulate" on their wives and husbands when their only child comes back in a box. Halliburton really will have to trade blood for oil. But their own flesh and blood will be included. They can have all the war they want. But they'll have to endure whatever their families throw at them. They'll have to suffer the same sleepless nights and cry at the same funerals as the Little People. And they'll have to convince themselves and their loved ones that it was worth it every day for the rest of their lives.

Lineage and Fallen Houses

2007-08-20T06:34:00.000+08:00

Over on Steve Perry's blog there's an article about the politicking in our branch of the Silat family tree and attempts to end it. The squabbling has gone on for a long time and will probably continue until all of the old generation has passed away. Maybe not. The biblical precedent is a little bleaker

“For I the LORD thy G-d am a jealous G-d, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation”
-Exodus 20:6

The strife has gotten to the point where my wife and I have a joke: "Indonesian Brain Rot strikes four out of five. Please give generously." Look at the American Silat population - I hesitate to call it a community - from the outside and it seems ludicrous. Long-time students tossed. Strangers venerated. Odd superstitions. Conflicts that would embarrass a herd of fourth graders let alone grown men and women. Teaching certification and fancy titles given for favors and withdrawn at real or imagined slights. Wannabe-Wahabites saying that only the right sort of Muslim can do Silat while they ignore its Chinese and Indian roots. Histories rewritten to make the tellers the heroes of their own imaginary dramas. Young people stopping fights among their elders instead of the other way around. In the words of the Great Sages of my people "Oy vey. What meshugas." Maybe it's something in the water. Maybe it's a curse from the Clue Fairy who has turned her back on us.

If you haven't read Mark Kurlansky do yourself a favor and pick up a couple of his books. I strongly recommend Salt: A World History, The Basque History of the World: The Story of a Nation, A Chosen Few: The Resurrection of European Jewry, Nonviolence: The History of a Dangerous Idea (with the Dalai Lama), and Choice Cuts: A Savory Selection of Food Writing From Around the World and Throughout History. Whenever he writes you'll find the Basque, the Jews, the Caribbean and food.

A few years back I read The Basque History of the World and was struck by the expression "the house would vanish".

When asked for the antique recipe for her family's gateau Basque, Jeanine Pereuil smiled bashfully and said, "You know, people keep offering me a lot of money for this recipe."

How much do they offer?

"I don't know. I'm not going to bargain. I will never give out the recipe. If I sold the recipe, the house would vanish. And this is the house of my father and his father. I am keeping their house. And I hope my daughter will do the same for me."

The Dutch-Indonesians who brought Silat to North America certainly weren't Basque. But there's a very similar feel to their situation. They mixed more with the local peoples for a longer time than almost any colonialists except maybe the French-Polynesians while remaining a distinct population. They were landowners, government officials, the professional classes and very close to minor nobility for generations. Then everything was taken from them. The Japanese put them in concentration camps. After World War II when they were just beginning to get things together Indonesia achieved independence. Their lands and property were confiscated. They were driven out of the new nation because they were Dutch. When the surviving refugees moved to the Netherlands they weren't really Dutch. They were "coffee beans", half-castes. Some moved to places where their old skills could be used. Some ended up in the United States where everyone was an immigrant and almost anyone could become American. The weren't outcast, but they were just another group of immigrants.

Their house had vanished.

What was left of what they had been? The communities were gone. The physical property had disappeared. Their children might speak some Dutch and Indonesian at home, but their grandchildren wouldn't. About the only thing remaining was knowledge, especially when it had been passed down in the family. How do you keep knowledge? If you hoard it and don't teach it to anyone it dies with you. If you give it away to everyone the last thing you have that makes you what you were is worthless. If you show it to someone it becomes his as much as yours. In many martial arts, famously the Chinese ones, the solution has been to destroy the Art. You only teach your inner students 80% of what you know and keep the rest, especially the parts that make it particularly good, for yourself. You encourage cult-like devotion to your style and discourage the next generation from interacting with other people who have different strengths. After seven go-rounds nobody knows more than a fifth of the original system, and that's gotten fragmented.

You couldn't call what happened in America a solution although there seems to have been a greater willingness to thoroughly train selected students. Let's say it's the way things worked out. There's been a lot of jealousy tied up with the transmission of the family martial arts and a desire to hang on and keep control while passing it on to the worthy. Any rational person could see that you can't do both, especially after you pass away. But we're dealing with fundamental threats to identity here. People are rarely rational about that.

That's where the obsession with "lineage" comes from. In the everyday sense of the word it's where you come from, your ancestry. In martial arts the meaning is a little different. Someone is designated to maintain the organization, settle disputes and generally be the guy in charge. In Silat in this country it has mutated into a full out hemiptera-conjugating chiroptera-feces barking madness. The Lineage becomes something with an independent existence. It can be bestowed in a moment and removed on a whim. If you have it you are the Fair-Haired Boy, the Annointed of Heaven, possessed of some invisible supernatural legacy. If you don't have it or had it taken away you are suddenly diminished.

With those sorts of stakes riding on something completely arbitrary strange things happen. He who has The Lineage guards it jealously. It comes with status and the assumption that he is the best around. Those who don't have it but think of themselves as contenders politic for it madly. If you or your teacher has it you must be "real". Anyone who doesn't is suspect. Someone who had the magical prize but had it taken away must not have had the martial art to begin with. Obviously, neither do his students.

On the face of it it's insane. Knowledge once given can not be taken away. Skill is skill whether the practitioner is a saint or a 24 karat brass-plated jerk. An administrative title just doesn't signify.

If you look at it another way it makes emotional (although not rational) sense. The Lineage is more like a patent of nobility or chieftanship. It can be given and taken back. It is a mark of favor, the sign of who is entitled to the family lands. Of course only one person can have it. It's a unique legacy that represents the continuation of one's family and ideals in a single body.

The problem is that understanding is not like a farm. It is not diminished or divided if more than one person has it. Quite the contrary. If there are more good people who understand something there is less chance that the knowledge will be lost. Idolizing The Lineage will simply cause dissension and backbiting as people scramble to be The One and resent it if they aren't. Whole groups of students will have a reason to look down on or resent others depending on who is associated with the extra special teacher. The system as a community is designed to tear itself apart from the top down.

This is closely related to the habit some teachers have of withdrawing certification and recognition. If the Art is a thing it can be lent, sold, given away and taken back at one's pleasure. You can give someone a title or a certificate. It's yours to do. If he falls out it can be taken away in the way that the king can ennoble or debase someone. The honors are his and are no more or less than a mark of his favor.

Taken on its own terms the whole thing makes sense. Unfortunately, there is an expectation that the piece of paper and the title are supposed to say something about the quality of the person who has them. From that point of view it makes no sense at all. If someone really was a qualified teacher or a Master of the craft that is supposed to have some meaning outside of the personal relationship between him and his teacher. One could say "He and I no longer speak to each other," or "I recognize that he has these skills, but I can no longer trust his character," or even "He was up to par then. I don't know about now."

To say "He never was" or "He was but I take it back" is a different thing. None of the alternatives makes the teacher look good. One possibility is that the teacher is lying. Who would want to trust a liar? Another is that he has no interest in quality control. The honors are worthless. He could be in denial. He could have very poor judgment. Or he's subject to flattery and pettiness which makes the recipient suspect; the implication is that a teacher is one who can curry favor, not someone who can teach.

I'm afraid Steve Perry is right. A number of the last generation will have to pass away before things get better. We can only hope that when that happens people will act more sensibly. In the meanwhile let's try to treat each other kindly. Judge people on what they are and what they do more than who happens to be popular with the higher ups this week. Don't take the ornate titles seriously. Don't even ask about them. Especially, forget about who has The Lineage. Just ask "Can he fight?", "Can he teach?", "Does he have good skills?", "Where did he learn it?" and "Is he a decent person?" Those are what's important. The rest is rubbish.

Blogging and the Beeb

2007-07-15T10:36:00.000+08:00

On Thursday morning I went through my morning web trapline - New York Times, the Guardian, Raw Story, previous day's 9 Chickweed Lane, Girl Genius, the CJR and CSM, Slashdot and Fark.

One of the daily Fark links was to a BBC story. The Commission or Racial Equality wanted to ban Tintin in the Congo, the 1930 adventure's of Herge's famous character and Belgium's national hero. The book's certainly dated. Tintin exterminates animals wholesale trying to get his man. The locals are caricatures. They don't speak well. They aren't bright. They look about like you'd expect. Herge was embarrassed by it in later years. It's never been heavily published or promoted and is mostly forgotten by his fans.

That obviously wasn't good enough for the British government. They wanted it to be banned from sale because the depictions of Africans are pretty distasteful by modern standards.

The BBC had a comment form, so I entered one hoping that it would be accepted for publication on the website. It was a little surprising to get a call half an hour later asking "Are you Dan Gambiera? I'm from the BBC World Service. Would you like to be on BBC World Have Your Say?"

Yes. Certainly.

At 11AM they called back, and I got to speak for a couple minutes. It was nice to see that almost nobody wanted TTitC to be banned. Moved to the adult graphic novels section, maybe. But most saw official censorship as heavy-handed even for today's UK.

So what did your Faithful Amphibian have to say? It's hard to remember exactly, but I recall a couple points....

"As a Jew whose hijab-wearing Afro-Asian Muslim wife loves Tintin..."
Prohibition won't work, especially in an age where information is freely available. What the CRE did manage to do was catapult it from obscurity to fame. It jumped from somewhere around 30,000 on amazon.co.uk to 9th place in overall sales in a few hours including a copy that is now heading for Oregon by Royal Mail.
If it is so patently offensive to various groups that it must be banned we will also have to include the Quran, the Gospels and anything written by any Jew anywhere. Various members of the Abrahamic faiths find all of these offensive and blasphemous.
While we're at it we'll have to ban H. Rider Haggard, P.G. Woodehouse, Damon Runyon, Gone With the Wind, Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Mein Kampf just to start with. All of these are available in high street shops.
Other racist material is readily available. How many kids are going to spend the equivalent of two hours' pay for a Midlands carpenter to buy any book these days?
Dangerous ideas are good. With another turn of the Wheel the CRE's own white papers might be banned. And we wouldn't want that to happen. I mentioned the McLibel lawsuit as a case where commercial interests found a pamphlet to be offensive and objectionable and tried to crush the authors in what turned into the UK's longest trial. I may also have brought up the fact that Rachel Carson's Silent Spring would probably be illegal today under American Food Disparagement Laws.

That's all I can remember saying. Someone else made the point that it should be a matter of parental responsibility and that context is important. It was a different age. People thought differently, and it's dangerous and dishonest to revise history to make it more palatable.

Come to think of it, Herge turned pretty much everyone who wasn't a Belgian into a caricature. Look at Tintin in America or any of the books that take place in Russia or the Orient.

So it was a good day. Thanks to Rustin Wright for reminding me about the McLibel incident.

Update: It looks like the book will not be banned. Barnes & Noble will be reclassifying it as an adult graphic novel.

Am I a callous prick or is it a sense of perspective?

2007-06-26T14:02:00.000+08:00

There was a story which started off on the wrestling websites, made it to fark and then to the mainstream media. It seems that a popular actor/entertainer in the WWE by the name of Benoit has died along with his wife and seven year old. At first the wire services wouldn't touch it. It might have been a publicity stunt by the wrestling industry. Nobody wanted to be the first dupe.

It seems that the report was real. Chris Benoit, his wife Nancy, and their son Daniel really are dead, and the police are treating it as a murder-suicide. Investigations continue, but they're working from the hypothesis that he killed the woman and child over the weekend and himself today.

This is a tragedy. No doubt about it. I'm certainly sorry for the needless deaths of his wife and seven year old. I'm reserving judgement about the man himself. If he did the crime he deserves nothing more and nothing less than any other man who murders his family which is to say the thin end of nothing whittled down to a point. What disturbs me is the reaction of a number of people on tha Intrawebs. This sort of thing happens every day to people in their communities, sometimes people who they knew personally. Those deaths raise not a tear. But let someone who has been on television and played a popular character be the centerpiece of such an event and it's a cause for all sorts of mourning and grief. And according to some of them I'm seven separate sorts of soulless shitheel for treating these celebrity deaths with the same sort of measured regret that I do in all such cases.

These were not people I knew. I know nobody in their families. Their lives didn't touch mine, and mine didn't touch theirs. The fact that they were on television means somewhat less than nothing to me. Is there any reason why their passing should have more impact than that of humbler people who met the same sort of fate?

I think not. If you don't value those closer to you than complete strangers your love and sympathy aren't worth much. If you're deeply affected by every bad thing that happens you can't function. And if an industry creation - an acting persona - is a good reason to treat a death with particular concern, then a portion of your soul has been branded, bought and sold.

When You're Pack

2007-05-23T14:37:00.000+08:00

Today, instead of heading out to Michigan for the Gathering of the Tribes I'm sitting in bed recovering from a really nasty fever that came on suddenly and has decided to settle in for a while. At least they say the ravings were interesting when in the ER. Dunno. I wasn't there at the time.

What's interesting is the way the dogs have been acting. They've always been Good Dogs, better than we've been good masters. They protect us faithfully from the three guys who are up to no good - Fred X, The Man in Brown and Usmail With the Bag. They're German Shepherds. It's their job.

Since I got sick they've stepped it up a notch. When I'm in bed one of them is right outside the door or on the landing. The other is on the landing or at the front door. Dogs they'd normally bark once at for form's sake get a real bark or two. Packages get left far away from the front door. When I'm in some other room they lie down in the doorways facing out towards danger instead of towards the people in the room. Their ears stay up, and it takes them a lot longer to go into the special power saving mode that dogs do so well.

It's really sweet. One of the Pack is sick. So they go all out to protect him. I'm only glad that they see I have food and water. If they didn't they'd probably provide some, pre-softened and easy to chew and digest *bleagh*. They don't seem to like the sick smell and try to wash it off me. If they knew how they could probably tell the doctors exactly what was wrong with me. Those noses are amazing.

That Shepherd guarding instinct is very strong. And I do feel safer having them around. Whoever said it was right, if there's a heaven most dogs will earn it and darned few of their masters.

The Real Truth

2007-04-01T02:55:00.000+08:00

Bobbe has come up with a decent cosmology, later corrected by Jay Carstensen and further extended by Mushtaq.

They're close, but didn't quite get it right.

Here's how it really works:

It's all about Tsathoggua.

Almonds and Saffron

2007-03-11T02:46:00.000+08:00

For the Ringing of the Bards Poetry Carnival . This is what comes of reading seed catalogs and old Italian cookbooks.

Bitter white nut in tight brown skin
Milk for Carnival's meatless days
Heart of peaches for linen hued thickening
Mixed with sugar confectioner's clay

Oh rarest of spices the crocus stigmata
When plucked from the pale blue field capture the sun
Red gold on the table or robe for renouncer
The light in the heart of the blossom is one.

From field to market to mortar and pestle
Bruised and battered, ground fine and torn
The essence released sleeps dead in the vessel
Wakened, refined then through fire reborn

Gold filament and tapered silver seed
Through fire and care their finer nature's freed.

2007-03-09T16:47:00.000+08:00

I've been collecting odd implements of destruction for a while. One that you hear about but don't often see is the old sailor's weapon known as a slungshot or slung shot. It consists of a length of rope about as long as the user's forearm with a loop at one end and a monkey's fist knot at the other with a small lead cannonball inside the knot. Slungshots were never part of a ship's official armament. They were improvised for defense while ashore or made by criminals as "life preservers".

Since I was at the hardware store anyway I picked up a little of this and that and put one together this evening.

Materials

3/8" three strand Sisal rope
Jute twine
16 oz. "cannonball" lead sinker
Paraffin wax

Procedure

Made a three-strand eye splice in one end of the rope.
Made a monkey fist knot at the other end.
Before tightening up the monkey fist, put the lead ball inside.
Tightened the monkey fist knot.
Whipped the rope around the splice to protect splice and to hide messy job
Continued whipping (West Country Whip) around the loop with waxed jute twine
Gave the who thing another waxing.

Time elapsed for everything but the whipping: about ten minutes
Whipping: about twenty minutes.
Time to learn the knotwork: about fifteen minutes.

It's ugly, improvised and will bring the ones that don't usually come. Next time I'll use hemp rope and twine and add a couple extra loops in strategic places on the monkey's fist so the ball is completely concealed.

Note to self: It might be legal to carry this openly in Oregon. Just because it's legal doesn't mean it's a good idea. It will certainly make you fail the Police Attitude Test.

Old Age and Cussedness - I see Mushtaq's 70 and raise him 30

2007-03-01T02:19:00.000+08:00

Just the other day the Traceless Warrior posted a news story about a septuagenarian tourist who killed an armed robber in Costa Rica and helped drive off his partners in crime.

Today's story comes from UK.

28 February 2007
MAN, 100 FIGHTS OFF MUGGERS

A 100-YEAR-OLD man fought off three teenage muggers after being surrounded at a bus stop. Buster Martin, who still works five days a week as a car washer and mechanic, was followed by the gang when he left a pub.
He said: "They pushed me against a wall and tried to take my money from me.

"I went mad. I was lashing out on the floor and then I stood up and was kicking them all.
"I pushed one and kung-fu kicked the other one between the legs.
"They ran off scared after I did that and I still had all my money.
"They thought I was an easy target but they didn't realise what a fighter I can be."

After the attack in Camberwell, south London, Buster staggered into hospital for treatment for a bruised rib and a bump on his head.

But his boss at Pimlico Plumbers, Charlie Mullins, said Buster still turned up for work the next day.

A police spokesman said he had been interviewed and patrols in the area had been stepped up.

Good and Bad News in Islam

2007-02-23T04:42:00.000+08:00

Another day, another piece of idiocy from religious nutjobs in the UK. And a couple very welcome pronouncements for women from the Grand Mufti of Egypt, one of the most authoritative voices in Sunni Islam.

First the bad news

The Daily Express reports that the Muslim Council of Britain has slipped its cams and demanded strict Islamic standards for all schools in the UK. How strict? Well for example...

Everything from playground games, plays, parent meetings, sports and field trips would be single sex. Singing class would consist of the Quran. Muslim students would be exempt from learning about other religions, but non-Muslims students would be forced to learn Islamic doctrine. Girls would be subject to a dress code mandating that only hands and face would be uncovered. Vaccinations would be ended. Muslims children would be taught in Arabic. "Un-Islamic" activities would be banned. All schools would have special rooms for prayer and wudu. During Ramadan science classes would be modified, exams would be stopped and swimming would be forbidden in case students accidentally swallowed water.

This wouldn't normally be a cause for concern except that the report has the support of at least one senior Government adviser. Add that the MCB is a powerful political pressure group, and it is a bit worrying. I don't think that the recommendations are going to be implemented any time soon if we define "soon" as "before the Chassids make Porky Pig Bar Mitzvah". In light of the current Muslim/everyone else problems in the UK it's going to be a source of added aggravation. I'm taking odds, long odds but odds nonetheless, that we'll see anti-Muslim riots or non-governmental pogroms in Britain within five years.

Now the good news

Back in November the Grand Shaykh of Al Azhar and Aly Gomaa, Grand Mufti of Egypt, and two of the most prestigious scholars in the Sunni world issued a fatwa on female genital mutilation. Earlier rulings said that it was "not recommended" and "not obligatory". This one went much further. The two scholars announced that it was completely un-Islamic. In a country which has seen multiple secular prohibitions against the practice ignored or opposed this is a very welcome development.

This time Mr. Gomaa took on virginity. According to old custom in the area a woman's fitness for marriage was determined by the state of her hymen. In a country where honor murders still occur this is a very serious matter. The particular question was hymen-reconstruction surgery. Shaykh Gomaa stated that not only was it permissible, but that a husband had no more right to demand proof of virginity from his wife than she had to demand it from him. Shaykh Gindy went further saying "Islam does not care for the feelings of ignorant people, just as the law does not protect the idiots." They noted that women without hymens were subject to violence, which was the only justification for permitting the surgery. Further, if they were not virgins but truly repented their lack of chastity before G-d there was no need to tell their new husbands, particularly if they felt they would be in danger.

This extremely humane set of pronouncements is to be applauded. The Shaykhs have taken quite a risk in a country which is struggling with the relation between religion, ethnic customs and modernization.

George Takei Slips the Ol' Pink (or Light Tan) Tentacle to Tim Hardaway

2007-02-22T01:30:00.000+08:00

A few days back Tim Hardaway, NBA All-Star went on a rant about gay people. He hates them. He doesn't think the belong in America. America is for heterosexuals. He thinks gays are evil. He's proud to be a homophobe. The usual stuff. My immediate response would have been to say that I don't like porch monkeys, am a proud racist and think that America is for Covenant People, not muds. That would have been at about the same level but unworthy of a proud Amphibian-American. Back a few decades when Doonesbury was funny there was a pithy conversation between two characters that summed it up nicely:

"I hear you're gay."
"I hear you're Black."
"But that's normal!"
"Didn't use to be."

Hardaway seems to have lost his spot on the All-Stars this year and a number of endorsements for his remarks although he probably picked up the KKK and the AFA. The worst thing that happened to him has to be this video clip by George Takei. Warning: Do not watch if are drinking hot liquids or have easily dislocated ribs. May be hazardous to those suffering from chronic irony deficiency.

The SaniTest

2007-02-21T16:50:00.000+08:00

There are web-based tests for everything, what Tarot card or superhero you are, which flavor of peanut butter you most resemble, or even how White and nerdy you are. The fine folks at the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society have a useful test. They will tell you how sane you are.

In the spirit of full disclosure...

Your SaniTest(TM) Results

Your score is: 159

For easier understanding, the HPLHS SaniTest assessment algorithm converts your raw score to a scale of 1 to 10. This number is your INSANITY INDEX.

INSANITY INDEX 9.41 This alarmingly high score suggests that you are moderately psychopathic: emotionally and behaviorally disordered. You seem to have a clear view of reality, but not of your own place in it. Your desire to lash out in violence might be kept in check by your deep-seated fears of other people. Other notable people who scored this high include Mark David Chapman, the assassin of singer John Lennon, and Aaron Spelling, producer of such TV hits as 'Beverly Hills 90210.'

The HPLHS has been trying for years to put on their delightfully eldritch musical A Shoggoth on the Roof. Unfortunately, the cock-sockets who own the copyright to Fiddler on the Roof always show up with corporate lawyers, cease-and-desists and huge lawsuits whenever anyone tries to do a production. Parody is protected by law.

That doesn't mean diddly when the big money guys can spend
whatever it takes to destroy a small community theater.

May their souls be devoured forever by the Formless Spawn of Tsathoggua. And not in a good way.

Cult Classics - Old School and New School

2007-02-21T14:20:00.000+08:00

Following along the lines of the last post, I've read a couple books recently which have much to say about fear, control and knowledge. One of them is a Cult Classic in the literal sense. There are cults and cultists. All the classic tropes get explored. I'm hoping the other one will become a cult classic the usual way, by selling lots of copies.

Anyone who has been around Your Humble Amphibian for more than about ten minutes will know that I like lots and lots of tentacles, especially when they are attached to shambling, hopping mind-blasting Eldritch Horrors. When I was just a tad my father read me H. P. Lovecraft stories at bedtime. People say this explains a lot. Dunno what they mean by that. In any case, for those who are mercifully innocent of sanity-shredding Reality and the Angles outside of Time, most of the stories of the Cthulhu Mythos have strange books of forbidden lore that tell Secrets Man Was Not Meant to Know. Chief among these is the unspeakable Necronomicon written by the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred. There have been about a thousand Necronomicons written. Most of them are dog-lame. Everyone knows HPL made up the book, so there's no need to pretend it's anything but fake. The authors should feel free to make up amusing interesting fakes. Almost none of them do.

A few months ago someone recommended Al-Hazred: Author of the Necronomicon by Donald Dyson. I have to admit, I was skeptical. Dyson is a long-time writer for the usually insipid New Age publisher Llewellyn Press. It's hard to imagine someone who write for the crystal-gazing bark-eater crowd appealing to the tentacle and unspeakable horror set.

It may be hard to imagine, but it's true. Dyson has done a fantastic job. I had no trouble turning every one of the 666 pages. Mythos stories are full of deranged cultists, evil necromancers, vile cultists and ravening ghouls. This is one of the very few I've seen that gets inside their head and lets you see the world from their admittedly wild eyes. We see Al-Hazred's origins as a stupid, self-absorbed young man horribly punished, mutilated and driven insane by the King (and he deserved every bit of it) and left in the desert to die. From there everything follows naturally. His adventures make sense once the reader decides to step over the edge and abandon humanity, conscience and a useless sanity. In fact, a couple hundred pages in I was beginning to be worried at just how reasonable it all seemed.

The author takes us through a lot of the classic elements of the genre. Cults hiding under the Sphinx. Hideous semi-human shamans. Elder horrors. Unspeakable deals with terrible gods. Murder. Cannibalism. Torture. Opposition to everything that is good, wholesome and human. Necromancy. Voluntary demonic possession. And it all follows completely naturally which makes for horror of an unusual sort.

It's an awfully fun and twisted ride.

Dyson has written his own Necronomicon. It's a summary of the other book and contains spoilers, so be sure to read Al-Hazred first. It's head and shoulders, or at least pseudopod and pale leprous polyp above most of them.

John Twelve Feathers' first novel, The Traveler, doesn't have any slithering shoggoths. Its horror is a little more early 21st century more of David Brin's Transparent Society and 1984 than alien monsters. The monsters are here. They are the forces which want the world to be predictable, controlled, under surveillance and efficient. Over the centuries they've come awfully close to that goal. The only really random factors left are those few who choose to live off the grid as well as the mysterious Travelers who can travel to levels of reality beyond this one and the nearly extinct secret society which protects them.

Most of the elements are all familiar to readers of science fiction and thrillers. Somehow Mr. Twelve Feathers presents them in a way which has immediacy. The message is nothing new. People need to wake up and open their eyes if they want even the hope of freedom. It suits those in power to keep the sheep stupid, distracted, afraid and unaware of just how badly they're being screwed. When everyone believes that he is being watched there really isn't much need to watch the people. The victims will do the heavy lifting themselves. The one thing that must be prevented is the knowledge that anything else is possible, that there are facets of existence outside of socially-approved authorized reality.

We have a powerful Conspiracy, genetically engineered monsters, a beautiful but emotionally stunted lady assassin, a roguish martial artist, a Magical Negro or two, amoral scientists, wise Native American Elders, a Good Girl who will almost certainly end up in bed with the roguish martial artist by book three, mysterious aliens from other dimensions, enchanted swords and astral travel. He makes it work and doesn't let the somewhat shop worn trappings detract from the story or the message. The Nobel Committee isn't going to be calling him soon, but the series is worth reading, even at cover price.

The TSA and Boiled Frogs

2007-02-21T13:40:00.000+08:00

"Boil 'em Slow and They'll Never Know" goes the saying. It's not completely true. Frogs will hop out of water when it gets too hot. They are simple, straightforward creatures without enough brains for self-deception. Humans aren't as lucky. We have a nearly infinite capacity for, well, exploitation.

From the little bit I've learned about hypnosis and propaganda the most important key to success is to get the subject to do something. Once that has happened it becomes progressively easier to get him or her to do the next thing. Every Army in the world does this. Basic Training isn't about developing skills. It's a process of destroying the capacity to say "No" much less "Screw you. That's insane!" and replace it with immediate obedience to authority.

Since the middle of September in 2001 we've been subjected to an increasingly bizarre sequence of instructions and demands. First there was the cessation of all air travel. Then there was increased surveillance at the airport "Has anyone else touched your bags?" It became illegal to sell tickets (which pleased the airlines). Then there were explosive tests everywhere, random surveillance and searching of all luggage. Airport security kept growing although it was mostly pointless since they weren't hiring skilled investigators. They were loading the airports down with barely trained idiots. We went from metal detectors to shoes off, to partial strip searches in public to TSA drones groping women's breasts and having the victims arrested when they objected.

Restrictions on what we can carry started small. The hijackings may have been carried out with knives or box cutters. So they were banned. Then extra-sharp knitting needles, the tiniest of scissors, cigar cutters, screw drivers and an ever-growing list which we have learned to accept. Now flights get diverted when someone finds a utility knife left by maintenance workers. A sane person would just stick it in his pocket or point it out to the flight attendant. People have been arrested for trying to wear shirts with Arabic writing into departure gates. Then a scare about binary explosives allowed them to ban liquids. Even after the explosives experts repudiated it as utter bullshit the regulations remained. We were used to bowing to further limits which now extend to carrying food onto the plane. In the UK they've gone even further. Books, electronics, magazines, and toys are all forbidden. When one considers the prospect of a trans-Atlantic flight with two toddlers and a five year old with nothing to do, no snacks, and a government-mandated minimum of diapers the prospect of being blown up in mid-air begins to sound attractive.

The right to travel has become a privilege subject to arbitrary revocation by anonymous authorities. One need not be suspected of a crime. In fact, given the nature of Type I and Type II statistical errors it is inevitable that thousands of innocents will be wrongly detained or denied for every potential evil-doer who is stopped, not to mention the ones who slide through.

"Total Information Awareness" with its Eye in the Pyramid (I shit you not) logo was condemned as a totalitarian wet dream. When they changed the name to "Terrorism Information Awareness" last year the nation didn't even blink. They didn't even have to change the office stationary.

Now we are at a point where the Attorney General can say that habeas corpus isn't a right, the President can disappear, torture and kill anyone at his whim with no judicial review no matter what law Congress passes. The government has copped to secret prisons in Indiana for specifically for Muslims which almost certainly violate the Constitution. The Republican Lie Machine is saying quite literally that disagreement with the President is literally the crime of treason.

If any of this had been proposed even five years ago the person suggesting it would have been shown the door at least of his office if not the door to an asylum. Now we say nothing. Every time the head of the Department of Homeland Security, which translates nicely to Committee for State Security, reaches into his bag of M&Ms or the mantra "9/11! 9/11!" is bleated a few times we have been conditioned to submit and surrender a few more of our freedoms in the hope of a feeling of safety which we are never allowed to experience.

I'm convinced that Terry Pratchett is this generation's answer to Nasrudin, the Turkish mystic who was cursed with supreme Enlightenment but was only able to express it in jokes and pranks. Mr. Pratchett summed it up beautifully in his book "Interesting Times"

The Empire's got something worse than whips all right. It's got obedience. Whips in the soul. They obey anyone who tells them what to do. Freedom just means being told what to do by someone different.

The Scott and Mushtaq Travelling Knife Show

2007-02-15T03:58:00.000+08:00

A while back Mushtaq Ali Al-Ansari, wandering Dervish (semi-retired), martial artist, cook, knife-maker and many other things convinced us to go to the first PATH seminar run by our old Silat training bro' the writer Steve Barnes and Coach Scott Sonnon of RMAX. I have to admit we were skeptical. But we went, we learned a lot, and we were very impressed.

This time around Tiel had a shoulder injury and I was playing host, so we missed the seminar. We were able to make it to a special training event afterwards. Mushtaq and Coach Sonnon did what I hope will be the first of many knife workshops.

These days everyone has a knife workshop and a special secret sacred edged weapons combatives system along the lines of "Fear No Man. Add Inches To Your Penis." But Mushtaq is old and cunning and knows way too much about sharp things after decades of bumming around the world getting into trouble and learning local knife arts from the Mescalero Apache Reservation and Indonesia to Persia and South Africa. He's the embodiment of the Capoeira saying "Old holes have snakes in them." I'd never seen Scott's martial arts in person. On the other hand, he's a frickin' genius. His Sambo, Hardwork and other material are impressive. He's had the best training the old Big Red Soviet Sports Machine ever produced. It was worth a look.

I'm glad I took that look.

The first good thing was that there wasn't anything stupid. Ego just doesn't enter into what they do. It was simple (but not easy). It made sense. There wasn't any nonsense of the sort that can get you killed. It was lines of attack and defense, distance, timing, body mechanics and drills that you can build off of on your own. There were a few moments when I was afraid that the two very different backgrounds wouldn't mesh, but they did.

Mushtaq covered basic lines of motion, body mechanics and Silat knife fundamentals. Scott emphasized commonality of training, more body mechanics and the essentials of distance, timing and targeting. I found myself having saber and epee flashbacks which isn't surprising. Much of the Russian knife footwork is related to fencing. I learned a fair bit. Ideas like moving between rather than at the joints and sensitivity drills to minimize damage by moving with the attack were very thought-provoking. More to the point, people who have been and done like Terry and Bobbe left the seminar nodding their heads and smiling.

My only concerns were time and depth. Two hours wasn't nearly long enough for the material they were presenting. I've had a fair amount of exposure to Southeast Asian martial arts and Western fencing and was able to keep my head above water. Without the background it would have been hard to absorb that many important concepts in such a short time. And this stuff was deep. Some of the things they mentioned casually require a lot of time to bring out and mature. Without more time for explanation, demonstration and practice a beginner could get lost.

So yes. It's good. It's not perfect yet, but it was great for a first try. If they come to your area and you have an interest in bodywork, martial arts, or self protection you will find this valuable, especially if they expand the class to the length the material demands.

Molly Ivins, Requiescat in Pace

2007-02-01T10:43:00.000+08:00

Molly Ivins, the sharp-tongued warm-hearted columnist who covered the Texas Legislature and national politics for years has died of breast cancer at the age of 62. Her satire was funny, humane and intelligent and her politics unabashedly liberal.

Goodbye and Godspeed, Molly. We'll miss you.

Fish fly. Sun rises in the West. Seattle reaches Espresso-Saturation

2007-01-30T15:35:00.000+08:00

For years I've been wondering if the Northwest would ever reach its limit for espresso joints. Now it has, at least in Seattle. How do we know? Simple. Coffee shops have all been pretty similar. There are a few different styles, but they follow a pretty similar pattern. And mostly they've gotten by without the cheesier gimmicks.

That's changed. A number of caffeine dealers including Cowgirls, Natte Latte, Bikini Espresso, Best Friend and Moka Girls are offering your favorite morning drug served by scantily clad girls. It was inevitable. Eventually sex will be used to sell everything. It's significant because it offers pretty clear evidence that new shops are surviving by getting consumers to switch for something other than coffee rather than serving unsatisfied demand.

A Failed Experiment

2007-01-28T10:30:00.000+08:00

Back when I was just a tadpole my parents got me a history of the Civil War with songs. I must have played that LP to death on a kid's record player. Two of the songs were about food, a Confederate one about peanuts and a Union one, to the tune of Hard Times, called "Hardtack". I hadn't thought about it for years until the Portland Pirate Festival last Summer. There was a contingent of British Navy re-enactors complete with ship's biscuit. I'd always heard that the biscuit was full of weevils. They assured me that they had done experiments. As long as the bread stayed dry the weevils dehydrated and died.

A few months later I was messing around in the kitchen and thought "Why not?" Searching online yielded three different recipes. One was the classic ship's biscuit - white flour, water, salt, a little soda. The second was the official Union Army hardtack - whole meal flour, water, salt. The third was a Swedish military version - rye and wheat flour, buttermilk, water, honey, salt.

The marine version was a bit like an overgrown saltine. Hard, pale, crisp, bland. I can see as how it would keep forever as long as it stayed dry. Of course, that's easy to do on land, not so easy at sea in a hull full of wooden kegs. Boring, but it will keep you alive with enough grog.

The Swedish version was dark and very slightly flexible. It made a good cracker and actually had a little flavor. It probably wouldn't keep nearly as well as the other two. The extra moisture and sugars would provide a better medium for mold and insects.

Then there was the Union Army hardtack. If an army travels on its stomach we can only hope that the Yankees had steel-rimmed all-weather, deep-tread studded tires. It's not much of a food, but you could use it to shingle houses. I quite literally had to break it with a hammer and was in serious fear for my teeth. After I went through one four inch square and three expensive ceramic crowns it was transferred to the dogs' biscuit box. They seemed to like it. The stuff has a lot of salt which they don't get very often. It makes a little bit of history more comprehensible. Union troops saved their bacon grease to cook the hardtack in. It was pretty much the only way to make it edible day in, day out.

Sauces again...

2007-01-17T11:32:00.000+08:00

The last few weeks have been hard on the appliances and the kitchen. First we had to replace the furnace. Then the kitchen floor. And last Wednesday our stove, which was old enough to run for President, gave up the ghost and would have cost as much to replace as to fix. Now we're cooking with gas! With that and the cold weather I've been staying in and cooking more, which means a chance to go through a few more classic sauces courtesy of Raymond Sokolov.

So far so good. The recipes all work. I haven't managed to screw one up yet. Tiel is surprisingly open to them.

Brown Sauces Derived From Demiglace

Every over-priced restaurant serves something-something demiglace. It's not usually worth eating, especially with what they charge for it. The thing is, demiglace is the basis for dozens of sauces. It wasn't meant to be a finished sauce itself. Take a cow. Boil it down until it fits in a jar. That's a wonderful flavor and color, but it doesn't stand on its own. It's like saying serving spaghetti with plain tomato paste or passing off plain ground meat as sausage.

Sauce Bigarade There is no comparison. I've tried Duck a l'Orange in restaurants. It's usually a gelatinous and too-sweet mess. Getting the real Seville Oranges, degreasing the stock and using tapioca flour instead of cornstarch made the difference. The recipe makes about twice as much as you need. Make the recipe a few times, keep the extra and have a big dinner where you use the reserved sauce and precut duck breast instead of cooking the whole bird. This sauce is a little involved, but the citrus and vinegar cut just enough of the duck's oiliness to complement it without overpowering.

Sauce au Madere Unfortunately his recommended recipe is based around ham. Lord, why couldn't You have forbidden okra or eggplant? Goes perfectly well with braised beef. Childishly simple - just add Madeira to the demiglace.

Sauce Robert Sauce Robert may be the pork sauce, but it goes wonderfully with rib roast. He's right. The stuff they sell under the same name in the yuppified food stores isn't the same color, flavor, smell or texture. The FTC and the CIA (the other CIA) should take out a hit on the people who make it.

White Sauces Derived From Velouté

There are all sorts of sauces based on velouté. It's easier and less time-consuming that demiglace. It's also so expensive I screamed like my nadgers were caught in a vice. It uses veal which has gotten unbelievably expensive lately. This Spring I'm going out to the dairy farms near Tillamook and picking up a couple newborn bull calves. They won't have that much meat, but they are cheap, and I can make a freezer full of jus de veau and velouté and maybe a dish or two out of sweetbreads without taking out a second mortgage.

Sauce Andalouse Better than we'd expected. The flavor was just enough to go with the chicken. With a stronger meat it would be lost. The leftover went well with eggs.

Sauce Aurore The sauce was simplicity itself. Heat velouté. Add tomato paste. Swirl in butter. The recipe, Poularde a L'Aurore, was the tough part. In essence you turn the chicken into the casing for a big veal sausage by filling it with a veal forcemeat - make that a chopped beef forcemeat. The price of veal has gone from outrageous to downright unchristly. Make sure you sew the chicken up! Otherwise you will end up with your sausage filling leaking into the stewpot.

Other Sauces

Bechamel There are about a thousand ways of making Bechamel. Every single one is The One True Way™. His is easy and cheap because it doesn't include veal. It goes very well with mixed vegetables.

Hollandaise Hollandaise is supposed to be very difficult and finicky. The directions worked beautifully as advertised. It might have been a little tarter than ideal, but it's the way I like it. The way authors talk about Hollandaise you'd think it was anhydrous sodium. The slightest hint of water and boom! The souffle d'asperges worked well. Everyone says "Hollandaise" in the same breath as "Eggs Benedict". The problem with that is that no matter how careful the preparation, how delicate the sauce or how artful the presentation there's still a poached egg in the middle of it.

Mayonnaise The Hellman's and Best Foods don't make mayonnaise. They make a white goo that will last forever in the fridge. It is not the same thing at all. The real stuff isn't immortal. It tastes much better. It's almost as cheap as the ersatz mayo. It's surprisingly easy to make. Raymond Sokolov's secret is a teaspoon of Dijon mustard for each cup of oil. I can't taste the difference. You can't taste the difference. But I can tell you the difference. You don't have to fiddle over a broken, separated mayonnaise.

The Extension Agent will probably come and take away my Master Food Preserver badge for the raw eggs. And they'll probably run me out of town for trying it the way he suggests - on very thinly sliced raw beef. But man is it good.

Before we go too much further we'll have to come up with a few substitutes. Lots of recipes call for larding something, usually a bird, with bacon or fatback. Cooking parchment soaked with olive oil works well enough, but it's not quite satisfactory. The game sauces look spectacular. Finding partridge and quail and rabbit and venison trimmings will take some work. It's not like there's a deadline.

So far it's all been pretty easy and straightforward. Sauces are an almost-lost part of the art of cooking. It's a darned shame. I hope a few people will be amused enough to try them out.

Disturbing Pamphlet. Is it the NRA?

2006-12-27T04:54:00.000+08:00

It's not hard to be a pro-gun liberal. Most of my friends are. I'm one. The good people over at the Oregon Democratic Party's Gun Owners' Caucus are. What's difficult is dealing with some of the people who support the Right to Keep and Bear Arms. Somehow during the seventies it got tied up with Right Wing politics, and many of the major gun rights organizations started getting into unrelated issues like immigration, tax cuts, religion and foreign policy. Lately it seems like they've been genetically grafted to the Republican Party.

It's a shame. Essential civil rights shouldn't be a partisan issue. It does nobody any good when they're used as a wedge to divide people. The NRA has been falling closer to that trap, but they've mostly stayed focused on firearms. That may have changed.

A couple days ago Wonkette's blog posted pictures of a pamphlet supposedly from the NRA. The art is excellent. The text is disturbing. The artwork is very high quality and utterly disgusting. The race-baiting isn't even a subtext. The good guys are always White. Every single dark-skinned person except one is a member of an (and I quote) "Alien Gang". The one exception is a huge demonic head bursting out of the television set to snap its enormous teeth at the White suburban family. The police officers holding the helpless (White) little old lady down with guns to her head are dressed head to toe in black. The nameless hordes descending on the (White) homeowner are silhouetted so as to appear, you guessed it, black. George Soros appears in as a grotesque caricature with an exaggerated hooked nose.

Since then it's been all over tha Intrawebs. An African-American NRA member on Daily Kos expressed some skepticism. There were more comments on Wonkette, Boing-Boing and Raw Story - both of which are hosting the whole document. It's probably discussed been on every single forum that even touches on self defense or guns. So far it's all conjecture. Nobody knows who the real author is or where it came from.

There are references to the National Rifle Association and NRA logos throughout including several pleas that only the NRA can save our precious freedoms and one would assume our precious bodily fluids. Several people including me have called to ask if this is a real NRA publication. The responses have ranged from "No comment" to "I'll have to get back to you." I got through two layers to someone who wouldn't give his name but said it was the first he'd heard of it and the NRA's publicity people would issue a statement as soon as he could do some research and find out what was going on.

At some point you've got to take people at their word. If the NRA comes out in the next day, two at the outside, and says "It's not ours. We never had anything to do with it. We're going to sue whoever it was who used our name and trademarked emblems without our permission. That's a disgusting piece of tripe," or "Someone in our organization did it. We didn't realize what he was up to. He's been sacked and has moved on to bigger and better things in his new job with the Ku Klux Klan. So have the people who green-lighted it," that should be enough. If they weasel and say something like "This has never been an officially released document of the National Rifle Association" or "We consider many options for getting our message across" or just say nothing we'll have to assume that it's theirs. If it is I'm sending my membership card back and will not renew it next year. This is some really hateful race-baiting crap, although the vicious lobster scuttling out of the water to pinch with its tiny claws and the Spotted Owl carrying a dynamite bomb are pretty funny. And the hairy-legged environmentalist chick looks kind of cute even if we can't see her face.

It would be a real shame if the NRA has stooped to the worst excesses of current American politics. I'm still holding out some hope that this they haven't but not for too much longer.

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Thanks to Tiel for the Poem

2006-12-16T02:48:00.000+08:00

The haiku in the new header is courtesy of Tiel.

Why I hang onto cars until they start to rot

2006-11-27T03:11:00.000+08:00

Every few years the car I'm driving finally gives out and it's time to get a new one. The sunroof turns into a Y2K-compliant drinking water collection system with repairs that would cost more than the car was worth. The old Ford pickup was like the Wonderful One Horse Shay, It ran and ran until everything gave out at once. When one of them goes I feel that old cavalry sergeant in the classic Bill Mauldin cartoon.

This time the car was running fine until some idiot rammed his Nissan into it while it was parked in front of the house. He didn't have a driver's license. After this he didn't have a working car. But he did have the stupidity to tell the cops that he was under the influence of "pain pills". Fortunately he also had insurance.

The last time I bought a car I didn't really understand how useful tha Intrawebs were for little guppies like me swimming with the car sharks. Thank you Autotrader and special thanks to Consumer Reports for their in depth analyses. A few hours pretty much told me what the best cars were in my price range and mirabile dictu some of them were even new. The best choice is new and in limited production; there didn't seem to be but half a dozen in Oregon.

There were two dealers close by with similar cars at about the same price. I made an appointment with one for late afternoon and called the other to come in for a test drive.

The contrast couldn't have been greater. Jay Lee Honda started the pressure right away. "There are three other people interested in this car. First one in with MSRP gets it." After the test drive lo and behold there was an extra $2000 "ADM" (Added Dealer Markup - thanks Consumer's Union for the heads up) package, "I need to talk to the manager in the backroom. Sorry, if you could just add a few hundred more dollars. No the invoice isn't available. What will it take to let you drive away in this car." And any time a salesperson starts a sentence with "I was honest with you" you can be sure of one thing.

It was a positive pleasure to say "What you want isn't what you said on the phone. Your deal is unacceptable", walk out and ignore the half dozen phone calls.

The experience at Ron Tonkin Honda couldn't have been more different. They were happy to show me the invoice. MSRP was within Consumer Reports' acceptable range. In fact the margin was awfully narrow, so right upfront they said "We want you to buy a couple hundred bucks worth of dealer accessories." All weather floor mats - a good idea in Oregon - and cargo cover for the trunk took care of that. There weren't any attempts to upsell except the traditional stab at an extended warranty. I ended up with a somewhat better model for a fair bit less money.

I guess it's a game-theory problem for both of them. Jay Lee is willing to have a few people leave if the rest will buy at a higher price. They aren't really expecting repeat business. And there are miles of car dealerships on 99E between Portland and Oregon City. If you leave they've lost you. Tonkin has a number of dealerships. If you want something a little different they can send you to get a Toyota or a BMW. They're counting on a bit of repeat business and customers who don't like the hard sell or don't become emotionally attached to a particular car in the showroom.

James Baker III Duc de Richelieu Comes Back to Washington

2006-11-19T11:22:00.000+08:00

As Bush Senior saw the trouncing the Republicans were about to get at the polls it was obvious that something would have to be done for the good of the nation, the Party and his son. He seems to have decided on sending his old counselors to the White House to straighten things out.

It was brutally quick. Rumsfeld carried out the only successful military maneuver of his career by falling on his sword right after the election. According to wonkette some of the more outrageous claims of what happened behind the scenes have been confirmed. A tame treatment is in the current Newsweek.

And I reinstalled Photoshop. Shakespearean tragedy? Maybe. There's definitely a little Richard II here. Something Roman Empire? It's a stretch. Besides, Baker isn't Cincinnatus. Then I thought of a time when someone outside the royal family took charge of the country because, dammit, someone had to.

If I Grin Any Wider the Top of My Head Will Fall Off

2006-11-09T13:21:00.000+08:00

I was born by the river in a little tent
Oh and just like the river I've been running ever since
It's been a long, a long time coming
But I know a change gonna come, oh yes it will

It's been too hard living but I'm afraid to die
Cause I don't know what's up there beyond the sky
It's been a long, a long time coming
But I know a change gonna come, oh yes it will

I go to the movie and I go downtown
Somebody keep telling me don't hang around
It's been a long, a long time coming
But I know a change gonna come, oh yes it will

Then I go to my brother
And I say brother help me please
But he winds up knockin' me
Back down on my knees

Ohhhhhhhhh.....
There been times that I thought I couldn't last for long
But now I think I'm able to carry on
It's been a long, a long time coming
But I know a change gonna come, oh yes it will

--Sam Cooke

And damned if it didn't.

If anyone shows up here in the next week the Santorum Shots are on me.

I went into this election afraid that once again the Democrats would snatch Defeat from the jaws of Victory. Or maybe the Republican dirty tricks - voter suppression, letters to Democrats, Blacks and Latinos that they'd be arrested if they voted, Saddam Hussein's finely timed verdict in the Court of Judge Wallaby, Diebold, poll-switching and all the rest - would steal enough votes to swing the election.

It didn't matter. The Democrats took back the House, the Senate and the governor's mansion in the biggest mid-term reversal in recent decades. No Democratic incumbents lost at the national or gubernatorial level. Not. One. Single. Seat.

The Progressives will point to their get out the vote effort. The DLC GOP-lite will say that their "triangulation" strategy carried voters in Kansas or Indiana. The foreign press is pretty much writing off the Bush presidency and sees it as a massive repudiation of him and his policies. Polls seem to show that people have gotten tired of the Republican strategy of appealing to raw fear. "The faggots are coming! The faggots are coming!" and "If you vote against us the terrorists will come and steal your precious bodily fluids" just stopped working. Even 30% of evangelicals voted Democrat this time. Here in Oregon it was nearly as good. The "vulnerable" Ted Kulongoski was easily re-elected despite Saxton's enormously expensive campaign. He will start his second term in the same Party as both Houses in the Legislature. It would have been nice if Measure 42 had passed and 47 hadn't.

What will the Democrats do? Will they take a Progressive turn? Will they do a Tony Blair and position themselveds slightly to the right of the GOP? Will we see deadlock? Dare we hope that they will shine lights into the dark corners and watch the roaches scuttle? Those are all tomorrow's questions. Right now I'm basking in the warmth of the first good political news in twelve years.

Thank you America. You did the right thing.

[Note: It was really, REALLY hard not to make Santorum jokes.]

On a Lighter But Still Political Note

2006-11-07T13:37:00.000+08:00

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The good people at FCC-FU have some great material in defense of the First Amendment including a passionate speech by Carlos Mencia.

Also making the rounds...

Things You Have to Believe to be a Republican Today

Jesus loves you, and shares your hatred of homosexuals and Hillary.

Saddam was a good guy when Reagan armed him, a bad guy when Bush's daddy made war on him, a good guy when Cheney did business with him, and a bad guy when Bush needed a "We can't find Bin Laden" diversion.

Trade with Cuba is wrong because the country is Communist, but trade with China and Vietnam is vital to a spirit of international harmony.

The United States should get out of the United Nations, and our highest national priority is enforcing U.N. resolutions against Iraq.

A woman can't be trusted with decisions about her own body but multi-national corporations can make decisions affecting all mankind without regulation.

The best way to improve military morale is to praise the troops in speeches, while slashing veterans' benefits and combat pay.

If condoms are kept out of schools, adolescents won't have sex.

A good way to fight terrorism is to belittle our long-time allies, then demand their cooperation and money.

Providing health care to all Iraqis is sound policy, but providing health care to all Americans is socialism.

HMO's and insurance companies have the best interests of the public at heart.

Global warming and tobacco's link to cancer are junk science, but creationism should be taught in schools.

A president lying about an extra-marital affair is an impeachable offense, but a president lying to enlist support for a war in which thousands die is solid defense policy.

Government should limit itself to the powers named in the Constitution, which include banning gay marriages and censoring the Internet.

The public has a right to know about Hillary's cattle trades, but George Bush's driving record is none of our business.

Being a drug addict is a moral failing and a crime, unless you're a conservative radio host. Then it's an illness and you need our prayers for your recovery.

What Bill Clinton did in the 1960's is of vital national interest, but what Bush did in the '80's is irrelevant.

Gays and lesbians are a moral threat to the sacred institution of marriage, but it's okay to be a pedophile as long as: the cause can be linked to alcohol abuse, sexual abuse when an adolescent by a member of the clergy, and your attorney announces you're 'gay' in a press conference.

If you don't send this to at least 10 other people, we're likely to be stuck with more Republicans in '06 and '08, and remember:

"Friends don't let friends vote Republican!"

Time For One More Pre-Election Rant

2006-11-07T12:39:00.000+08:00

When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross. -Sinclair Lewis

Just about a lifetime ago one of our greatest Presidents, Franklin Roosevelt, said "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." Today the worst President ever tossed up by the electoral process has said "All we have is fear." The only thing he and his Party have to run on is fear of terrorists, fear of homosexuals, fear of women, fear of Mexicans, fear of sex, fear of non-Christians.

We've seen the USA PATRIOT Act which dealt body blows to our civil liberties.

We got no-fly lists.

We got a war which we are losing at a cost that would pay for gold-plated health care for every American for the next ten years. It's trashed readiness and America's stock of military materiel to an extent not seen since the end of the Vietnam War.

We've seen American prestige put in a hole it will take a lifetime to dig itself out of.

We've seen corruption on an unprecedented scale where the Vice President's company gets billions in no-bid unaccountable contracts and personal supporters of the President are given unfettered access to the White House and the public purse.

On October 17th a craven, cowardly, treasonous Congress gave the Executive the right to declare anyone an "enemy combatant" with no rights, no habeas corpus, no trial by jury, no access to lawyers or the courts. Any one of us can be disappeared - tortured, sent to a third country to be abused or worse - if the President so decrees. Yes, yes, yes. The Military Commissions Act forbids torture. But it lets the President decide what is and isn't torture with no Congressional or Judicial review. The very same day we got the John Warner Defense Act which lets the President, again at his whim and with no checks or balances, declare martial law, rule by decree take over the National Guard and put "potential terrorists" and "undesirables" into camps. There is no appeal. They have no rights and no recourse. Congress and the Courts have no power to stop him. Oddly enough the camps are being built by Kellogg, Brown and Root a Halliburton subsidiary.

This is the same Administration which claims the power to crush the testicles of an innocent child to make his parents talk and says that no law can stop it.

Now our right to travel is on the verge of becoming a privilege. The Department of Homeland Security proposes that no citizens be allowed to enter or leave the country without official permission.

George W. Bush now has powers equal to Stalin or Hitler. How much worse does it have to get before people realize what we have lost? Do they care? Even old line conservatives like the editors of American Conservative Magazine are calling for a repudiation of the Bush doctrine.

We have a chance to reclaim some of what we gave up. The mid-term election gives us one more chance to set things right. The Democrats aren't great. Many are spineless consultant-ridden triangulators. They are the only real force opposing our slide into authoritarianism and totalitarianism.

Get out there and vote. Throw the bastards out.

CDC Warns of Virulent New STD

2006-10-29T10:00:00.000+08:00

Gonorrhea Lectim

The Center for Disease Control has issued a warning

about a new virulent strain of sexually transmitted
disease.

This disease is contracted through dangerous and high
risk behavior. The disease is called Gonorrhea Lectim
(pronounced "gonna re-elect him").

Many victims have contracted it after having been
screwed for the past 4 years, in spite of having taken
measures to protect themselves from this especially
troublesome disease.

Cognitive sequelae of individuals infected with
Gonorrhea Lectim include, but are not limited to:

Antisocial personality disorder traits;
Delusions of grandeur with a distinct messianic flavor;
Chronic mangling of the English language;
Extreme cognitive dissonance;
Inability to incorporate new information;
Pronounced xenophobia;
Inability to accept responsibility for actions;
Exceptional cowardice masked by acts of misplaced bravado;
Uncontrolled facial smirking;
Ignorance of geography and history;
Tendencies toward creating evangelical theocracies;
A strong propensity for categorical, all-or nothing behavior.

The disease is sweeping Washington. Naturalists and
epidemiologists are amazed and baffled that this
malignant condition originated only a few years ago in a
Texas Bush.

New Experiences in the Kitchen

2006-10-28T12:14:00.000+08:00

No outrage today. No torture-crazed Vice Presidents or rants about Tesco's Peekaboo Pole Dancing kit for the four to sex year old set although that is really foul. Nope, I've finally started something I've been meaning to do for quite a while. I'm making sauces.

Back when Raymond Sokolov was food critic for the New York Times and had his wonderful monthly column in Natural History magazine he wrote books. There were excellent history books like Fading Feast which chronicled the disappearance of regional American food and Why We Eat What We Eat: How Columbus Changed The Way the World Eats. He also wrote a number of cookbooks such as The Cook's Canon: 101 Recipes Everyone Should Know and How to Cook. I picked up Saucier's Apprentice, a guide to the classic French sauces and let it sit on the shelf for a long time. The idea of spending two days watching glace reduce down from twenty quarts to five was a little daunting.

A while back I figured it was now or never. Between Gartner's Meats, the last of the old style butchers and Pastaworks which lives in symbiotic bliss with Powell's Books for Cooks I was able to get all the ingredients, twenty six pounds of cut up veal and beef bones and so on. All of the professional cooks I talked to and all the butchers liked Saucier's Apprentice. Most had copies of their own. All of them thought I was a little mad to be doing this in a small home kitchen.

Mr. Sokolov was right. It's painstaking and requires a lot of time and energy, but it's not that difficult if you devote a weekend to the task and are willing to do an unchristly amount of skimming and straining. By the end of Sunday there were five quarts of classic demi-glace in one cup containers. The dogs were happy to help get rid of the strainings and a few of the boiled bones. I did change a couple things. He recommended leaving the stock to cool on a counter overnight. Couldn't do it. The County Extension Agent would probably have descended on our house and confiscated the Master Food Preserver's badges. We'd have to leave town in shame. Bad all round. The stock went straight into the fridge in open containers. In the morning removing the fat was trivial.

Tonight we tried it out. Was he blowing smoke when he said you could make really good meals quickly with the mother sauce? As it turns out, no. A few minutes, one sautéed onion and a quick reduction produced Sauce Robert which was nothing like the stuff you can buy in the store. The wine expert at Wild Oats who used to be a chef gave some very good advice about modifying the Robert for use with beef instead of pork (a tablespoon of sun dried tomato paste). Hollandaise turned out to be just about as quick and easy. Maybe it was beginner's luck, but the emulsion took and didn't separate or get too thick.

Next week it's on to other mother sauces: chicken and veal Veloutés, Glace Viande Blanc and Sauce Allemande. It doesn't take any longer to make a gallon than a cup, so it's good that the stock pots didn't get buried again.

We'll probably go through the classic sauces at least once. It's a fascinating look at one of the most important parts of canonical cooking and opens up some wonderful possibilities. If you're interested give it a try. It's straightforward, and the results are well worth the time invested. Be warned that this is industrial cooking. A regular kitchen is going to be cramped, especially with all the tools and cookware that need to be cleaned. Now I lust after deep sinks, a stock cooking gas burner and a deep refrigerator.

Congratulations to Neil and Maritza

2006-10-16T03:51:00.000+08:00

A year or so back two of our favorite people, Neil and Maritza, called.

Maritza said "We'd like you to marry us."
"OK, but I'm already married. You'll have to check with Tiel first."
"No, you *bad words in Spanish*. We're getting married, and we want you to do the ceremony."

I'm not a judge. The IRS dropped the Big Hammer on the Universal Life Church some time back. Yeshiva would probably take too long, and besides I don't look good in a beard. A quick web search turned up the Church of Spiritual Humanism, a sort of grandchild of Unitarianism. Free ordination with a wide choice of titles. Unfortunately "Crazed Degenerate Cultist of the Great Old Ones" wasn't on the list. Close enough, though.

Enough time went by that the wedding became a running joke. Then a couple weeks ago Neil said that they'd set the date for October 7, right in the middle of the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival. Greater love hath no man than to forgo the pleasures of Great Cthulhu for his friends. Something came up, and the wedding was moved to the 14th.

The bride was beautiful and nervous. The groom was surprisingly laid back. The women of his family put together the reception meal. Nobody fumbled his or her lines. Tiel read a poem from Rumi that started with "Love comes with a knife" which pleased the couple and shocked the audience. Neil gave back the engagement ring which we had lent him after he lost the old one in an accident.

The paperwork got filled out and mailed off to the proper authorities. We were gratified to see that "race" is no longer required on the license application. When we got married some fifteen years ago it caused problems and required some friendly Legislators and a new State law to change that bit.

It's great to see them finally married. Congratulations and long life to the new couple.

Think he hit bottom? Fred Phelps pulls out the shovel and digs.

2006-10-05T07:06:00.000+08:00

Fred "G-d Hates Fags" Phelps of the unspeakable Westboro Baptist Church isn't content with interfering with the funerals of US servicemen and women killed in Iraq or gay teenagers. Now he wants to picket and disrupt the funerals of the Amish girls murdered by a killer-rapist in Pennsylvania. According to what passes for logic in his mind the deaths were a punishment for Governor Rendell's mockery of Phelps on Fox Radio.

Mike Gallagher headed off the whole sordid thing by giving the WBC an hour of airtime to rant. Good on you, Mike. You may have negotiated with terrorists, but you did save the bereaved from a truly hellish experience.

One wonders what Phelps' next stunt will be. Does he plan on breaking into maternity wards to berate new mothers for bringing homosexuals into the world? You really can't put much past a man who brings a crowd bearing "Thank G-d for IEDs" to soldiers' memorial services.

Empty Store Fronts in a Brightly Colored Building

2006-10-02T11:06:00.000+08:00

Twenty years or so ago Hawthorne Boulevard in Southeast Portland was a sleepy, artsy place, home to antique shops, a shuttered movie theater across from a dance studio, a few restaurants and an aging Fred Meyer's supermarket. Then, as such things happen, it was discovered. The supermarket got a facelift. Junk shops gave way to more upscale boutiques and many of the artsy bohemian crowd which gave the neighborhood its character either got better jobs or moved out.

Oregon has a notable history of segregation. In fact, when we got married we ran into the last vestige of the old Oregon Constitution which forbade a "member of the White race" from marrying a "Mulatto, Free Negro, Kanaka or Chinaman". The actual miscegination law was toppled by the US Supreme Court in 1954, but there was still a requirement which we objected to. You still had to put down "Race" on the marriage license application and could only put one. The wouldn't accept "human" or "pongid" for me, although when I finally scrawled "1500 meters" illegibly they gave in. Tiel could honestly tick every box except "Hispanic" and "Australian Aborigine". They didn't much care for that either. Eventually we gave in and were married. During the next legislative session our State Senator was kind enough to introduce legislation to remove the requirement.

What does this have to do with that brightly colored building? Quite a lot as it turns out.

To this day the demographers tell us that Portland, Oregon is perhaps the most integrated large city in America for those of Asian descent. Chinatown has shops, but nobody really lives there. The same goes for the Vietnamese businesses in the Northeast Hollywood district and the pan-Asian spread on 82nd Avenue. You find concentrations of businesses but not homes.

It is also arguably the most segregated for African Americans. From the early days it was "Nigger, don't let the sun set on you in this town." There were only about 11,000 in the whole state up until 1950. Most of them lived in Vanport, a quasi-city in the Columbia River floodplain. In 1948 the Vanport Flood forced the (Black) residents into Portland itself. Most were packed into the Albina district in Northeast. Redlining was a matter of policy. Banks, insurance companies and realtors would not allow Whites who wanted to live in the area or Blacks who wanted to live pretty much anywhere else. No houses shown. No mortgage approved. No insurance sold. In much of Northeast the only business loans were for liquor stores, bars and pawnshops, hardly the stuff that a healthy local economy is built on. While it was officially forbidden in the 1960s it was common into the 90s.

Rising housing prices and city administrations which wanted urban renewal ended the practice. Unfortunately for the people who lived there it meant that many were priced out of their homes, and newcomers started the businesses. Such is gentrification in an insane housing market. On the other hand, it is much safer and life is generally better. When I lived here in the late 1980s Northeast Alberta Street seemed to have declared unconditional surrender in the War on Poverty. There were few businesses. Many were liquor-related or the traditional auto-body, valve-grinding, garbage company sorts of places you find in commercial space in poorer areas. During my brief stint with the Guardian Angels we met in a rickety abandoned building with boarded up windows, no heat and only a couple of lightbulbs on the corner of 15th and Alberta.

That building is now the mostly-organic Alberta Food Co-op. It's brightly lit, freshly painted and has lots of windows.

Business loans and relaxation - though not elimination - of informally enforced segregation completely transformed the neighborhood. The last of the idle buildings are being brought up to code and house shops, restaurants, the Oregon Tradeswomen, and a few civic organizations. The area has switched from mostly rental to mostly owner-occupied. And in all fairness many of the new owners are old renters. Turning a tenant into a stakeholder changes his perspective and attitude like nothing else. Most of the businesses will fail. But the investment they made in the infrastructure and the area's new attractiveness will make it easier for their successors to get started. The entrepreneurial earthworms will make soil from the detritus of dead shops.

I suppose you could say that Tiel and I were either the last of the old or the first of the new. Ethnically mixed, educated, not much money, upper middle classupbringing. We were on the cusp.

If you turn South at the corner of NE 15th and Alberta and head walk four or five blocks you'll find yourself on NE Prescott. For a long time there was a house on one corner, a dilapidated drug house on another, a rundown convenience store on the third and a long-closed unlicensed social club on the last. The drug house was sold, remodeled and sold again. The convenience store is still rundown but has been repainted, Lord only knows why, in battleship gray. There is talk about how much more valuable the land would be as practically anything else. I expect it will be sold, torn down and sprout a mixed-use complex pretty soon.

The dull, dirty social club is the interesting one. Its history resembles nothing more than ecosystem succession. First there's nothing. Then the small first colonizers arrive and a simple ecosystem develops. Populations succeed each other. Eventually a balance is reached until the next chance occurence or change in the environment alters conditions and the mix of species again. World without end.

A few years ago the building was sold. A video store moved into part of the space. Then a really good taqueria opened up. More of the building became a carniceria, a hair and nail place, and a Mexican specialty store and so on. The carniceria folded and was replaced by a panaderia. The rest of the businesses mostly owned by Latinos and most of them from Guerrero or Chiapas. I had some doubts about the bakery. The owner didn't charge nearly enough for what he sold. A hand decorated half sheet tres leches cake should cost more than fifteen dollars. Flan at three for a dollar is a steal. No matter. He seemed happy.

The building lost its old gray/black shades a piece at a time. Chilango's Taqueria went through a couple of shades before settling on its current hue. The whole building has been repainted in colorful greens, yellows and reds.

A few months ago the panaderia, the Mexican goods and the hair and nails place all went out of business at pretty much the same time. Chilango's was closed during what used to be prime business hours, and a few familiar faces were gone from counter and kitchen. When we asked we were told that Immigration had done a big roundup. The missing businesspeople were probably illegal immigrants. I believe pretty strongly that a nation has the duty to defend its territorial integrity and should only allow in those whom it deems in its national interest to welcome. But the loss of productive businesses in a formerly blighted area doesn't seem terribly productive. It should be difficult. It should be expensive. It shouldn't be as easy as "You broke the law for enough years that you get in ahead of the people waiting honestly in line." But there should be a way for people like that to legitimize their residence.

Chilango's is still there. The video store closed. A barbershop and a coffeeshop, both owned by lifetime neighborhood residents, have just opened. The Mexican goods store is an upscale bar, and the panaderia's space is going to re-open as a barbecue joint. Life goes on. Alberta becomes Hawthorne. Hawthorne becomes Northwest Twenty Third. Somewhere there's a can of paint in a different shade waiting to be brushed onto the storefronts on the corner of 15th.

Update to Nurse Strangling Intruder

2006-09-16T02:24:00.000+09:00

It looks like the nurse I referred to in the last entry wasn't attacked by a random intruder. He was a hitman. Not a very good one, but a hitman. Her estranged husband seems to have hired the deceased because his wife wouldn't reconcile with him.

A Fine Example of the Self Defense Mindset

2006-09-09T07:36:00.000+09:00

http://salon.com/wire/ap/archive.html?wire=D8K0S26O1.html

Nurse Strangles Intruder With Bare Hands

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

September 08,2006 | PORTLAND, Ore. -- A nurse returning from work discovered an intruder armed with a hammer in her home and strangled him with her bare hands, police said.

Susan Kuhnhausen, 51, ran to a neighbor's house after the confrontation Wednesday night. Police found the body of Edward Dalton Haffey 59, a convicted felon with a long police record.

Police said there was no obvious sign of forced entry at the house when Kuhnhausen, an emergency room nurse at Providence Portland Medical Center, got home from work shortly after 6 p.m.

Under Oregon law people can use reasonable deadly force when defending themselves against an intruder or burglar in their homes. Kuhnhausen was treated and released for minor injuries at Providence.

Haffey, about 5-foot-9 and 180 pounds, had convictions including conspiracy to commit aggravated murder, robbery, drug charges and possession of burglary tools. Neighbors said Kuhnhausen's size -- 5-foot-7 and 260 pounds -- may have given her an advantage.

"Everyone that I've talked to says 'Hurray for Susan,' said neighbor Annie Warnock, who called 911. "You didn't need to calm her. She's an emergency room nurse. She's used to dealing with crisis."

I'm sorry that she had to do this without the physical and psychological distance a firearm would have given her. On the other hand, good for her. She did better than most people would have.

Fine Leatherwork

2006-09-06T06:21:00.000+09:00

I just received two superb examples of the leatherworker's craft from Chas Clements of Denver. The first is a book weight modelled after the classic from St. John's College in Santa Fe, NM. It's made from soft leather (elk hide?)and nicely outlines a page from a typical hardback. The other is a soft sap, a slightly larger version of his standard Bouncer's Pal.

It's hard speak too highly of Chas' work. His pieces are very well constructed, almost over-engineered. The choice of materials, quality of craftsmanship and attention to detail are all top-notch. He also does other leather goods - cases, belts, holsters and the like.

Is This the Face of the Urban Future?

2006-09-05T12:24:00.000+09:00

Back on August 11th there was a bank robbery in Tacoma. This isn't really news unless you live there. It wouldn't be except that the three people arrested were Army Rangers. That got me thinking. The diagnosed rate of stress disorder for returning vets is about 1 in 10 or 1 in 5 depending on whose statistics you believe. Returning veterans are finding it difficult to get work where "difficult" means an unemployment rate of fifteen percent for younger vets. There have already been a couple cases of soldiers and Marines coming back with their urban warfare reflexes intact - unable to deal with American cities as anything except a war zone. At the same time wages are a smaller fraction of GDP than at any time in the last 47 years. Real wages are at best holding steady while benefits are shrinking and vacations are disappearing. In short, it is not a good time to be a returning veteran from Iraq.

This would be bad enough if the military had its usual high caliber of recruits. Unfortunately, that's no longer the case. The only way the Pentagon has been able to maintain manpower has been by "stop loss" - keeping servicemen and women after their hitch is up - stretching the National Guard and Reserves beyond reason, calling up the Individual Ready Reserve and lowering standards.

How are they lowering standards? The Army has tempered its policy of zero tolerance towards fascists and neo-Nazis. They are getting into the military with the specific goal of getting combat skills. More recruits are getting in with criminal records of a sort that would formerly have disqualified them from the Service. The Army has even upped the proportion of Category IV recruits, high school dropouts and those who score in the lowest third of the AFQT from two percent to twelve. In a military which increasingly relies on complex skills and advanced technology this is alarming.

What's the problem? A bunch of guys who aren't too smart will end up carrying rifles. A few people with criminal records will learn to fear their sergeants so much that they'll turn into soldiers, Marines, airmen or sailors. During WWII and the later parts of the Vietnam War the military would take almost anyone.

Aside from the implications for the nation's defense I'm afraid that it means serious trouble for law enforcement. Sooner or later they will come back. Most will reintegrate into society. But there will be a large number of unemployed or unemployable young men and women with professional experience in urban warfare. More than the regular number will be pre-disposed towards crime or violent political extremism. If our last extended war is any indication many of them will be badly psychologically damaged. It sounds like the makings of a perfect storm. It won't happen all at once, but I predict that we will be paying for the current war for years through professionally executed violent crime. Bank robberies may be only the beginning. Home invasions done by groups with combat experience clearing houses? Criminal gangs who are better trained than the police who oppose them? It sounds bad. So far it hasn't been part of the national consciousness.

I'm afraid that that will not last.