Nogs and Toddys

Holiday Nog

I like my holiday nog "to taste." That means you are going "to taste" the dooky. The ratio I prefer is about 1 oz brandy to 4 oz of nog.

A major debate every time I mix a nog is, "rum or brandy?" And the debate has been settled via thorough experimentation with the answer "both." You'd think that a hearty dark rum like Gosling's (the ultimate sipping rum) would be ideal for mixing in a rich drink like nog, but it doesn't work out as well as others. For some reason a lighter rum seems better. For brandy, I prefer Spanish brandy, but the nazis at the liquor control board have seen fit to import Mexican instead. So, El Presidente brandy works just fine. However, I recently discovered a great product called Laird's Apple Jack, which is apple brandy. It imparts just a hint of fruitiness to the drink.

I read somewhere that the British used to add wine to their nog, which at first sounded rather disgusting, but if brandy works, and brandy is simply fortified wine, then why not? I found that floating a bit of wine on the top of the nog imparts a slight bouquet that offsets the nog's heaviness.

8 oz Egg Nog
1 oz Mount Gay Silver Eclipse (white rum)
1 oz Laird's Apple Jack (apple brandy)
1/4 oz (teaspoon) red wine or port

Pour the Egg Nog into a large glass (pint glass works well) and stir in measures of rum and brandy with a fork. Stirring in prevents curdling the nog. Pour mixture into two goblets or cups. Use a teaspoon to float the wine on top of each glass, then stir just the surface with the tines of a fork, to make a swirl pattern with the wine. Makes two small cups of 5 oz each.


Irish Toddy

This is the traditional toddy I mix for Nadine when she's sick. Here's the Rx:

1 oz Jameson's Irish Whiskey
1 heaping tablespoon of sugar
1/2 oz fresh squeezed lemon juice
8 oz boiling water

Pour the sugar and lemon juice into a mug, and stir into a slurry. Add boiling hot water to this and stir, then add the Jameson's last.

The Mother Lode of Sublime Noise

If you don't already know about The Internet Archive, you should give it a visit. Disarmingly generically named, it has a little bit of everything: electronic texts (eBooks), audio, and videos. They even have a collection of classic intermission shorts. As one reviewer commented, "For those who get this kind of stuff, this is pretty much the ultimate."

I discovered it because it was the only site where I could download a certain song I'd heard on Internet radio--namely "Mum's Snow Day" by Jenglander, and though it's difficult to categorize, it's probably best described as Electronica. Not only did I find Jenglander, but also Mikronesia and Mimi Majick. Mikronesia produces remarkable sound textures that has no discernible melody or beat, but taken as a whole nevertheless scans as a vague music. (The songs I liked most are "Air Curves Vicious," "Gate," "Moke Cene," and "Savage Bees.") The Mimi Majick Utilities are noteworthy short pieces representing that rarest of things, experimental art that actually works.

So I've been exploring The Internet Archive to find more music in the Chill or Electronica genres. I will keep my Gentle Readers apprised of any new discoveries in this veritable Mother Lode of sublime noise.

Greetings, I have painted myself to match your shower curtain

In case you ever thought of painting yourself to match your surroundings in order to become invisible, then taking a picture of yourself to prove just how invisible you are, meet Liu Bolin, Invisible Man.

The brilliance of Liu's technique is that it is the only known invisibility technique that does not require you to be naked. And for that very same reason it is my least favorite.

Let's Buy Iceland

It seems that the European Union has declined to guarantee accounts in Iceland's ailing banks. While Iceland is not a member of the European Union, it does belong to the European Free Trade Agreement (EFTA), which provides for a private guarantee fund in each member state assuring a minimum compensation of €20.000 (approximately $29,000) for each depositor account.

Since Europe has experienced a credit crisis similar to our own, the member states, in particular Britain and The Netherlands, have problems of their own and have left Iceland out in the cold, so to speak. The full story is reported in this article:

Iceland Is Sacrificed to Save EU: Shame on Britain and Holland

As our government contemplates raising the debt ceiling to One Gajillion Dollars, I would like to put forward a stimulating proposal: that the US simply buy Iceland. With such a credit limit on the national credit card, we could, in addition to buying up controlling shares in several auto manufacturers, mortgage banks, and insurance companies, certainly afford a small republic here and there. We could offer something like $160 billion (10 times Iceland's GDP). Or more. After all, the more we spend, the more stimulating the effect. Much like a strip club, but let us not vulgarly digress.

Iceland could opt to become an autonomous unincorporated territory like Puerto Rico, or vote for statehood. As a Scandinavian socialist state, it would be slightly more conservative than Massachusetts. Its citizens could enjoy a favorable immigration policy, such as the "wet-foot/dry-foot" rule we apply to Cubans--though in this case we might simply call it the "hypothermia rule."

The tourism trade on both sides would thrive. Perhaps we could finish that bridge to nowhere and make it go to Rejkjavik. Both are somewhere up north, we are told. For our part, Americans will get Volcano and Ale tours. The Icelanders would have an opportunity to experience sunlight and intimate congress with people with whom they are not distantly related. Best of all, they could thumb their noses at the British, Dutch, and French. True, the French did not deny the Icelandic banks support, but they could thumb their noses at them nonetheless.

It's really hard to see a downside.

Japanese War Tuba

This proves that everything can be found on Wikipedia, whether it is important or not. Mostly not.

This Had Not Occurred to Me

As I contemplate lack of work and general direction in life, here are sage words of guidance I had not previously considered:

"I may live badly, but at least I don't have to work to do it."

Blowed up Real Good

I haven't been posting for a while due to the necessity of attending to this annoying matter of unemployment. It's a kind of limbo, wondering where you'll end up working. On the positive side, job openings abound. On the negative side, applying for jobs and endlessly revising one's resume is about as exciting as negotiating on a used Aries K. And then there is the angst:


It's also an era of firsts for me. In 25 years of working, I've been fortunate enough never to have had to make an unemployment insurance claim. Now, however, I find that the instructions are quite easy to follow, viz:

If you applied for benefits this week by phone or over the Internet, you must begin filing your weekly claims starting next week.

Exception: If you filed your Internet claim on a Friday or Saturday (week 1), and you receive this notice on the following Monday or Tuesday (week 2), file your weekly claim for week 1 the day after you receive this notice. You only have until 5:00 p.m. on Friday of week 2 to get your weekly claim filed for the previous week--week 1.

Well, that sure cleared it up for me. Not to mention this addendum, which I think might be important:

IMPORTANT: File your weekly claims even if we are still deciding whether you are eligible for benefits. If you are allowed benefits, you will be paid for all weeks you have claimed. You will NOT be paid for any weeks you have not claimed.

Just think, our health care system could be this clear and efficient. Keep filling out those papers, we'll tell you if you qualify for that chemo. In the meantime, write your congressman. What's government for, after all?

Ah, be still my beating heart... let me not wax too negative. There is fresh hope since our President recently appointed a Jobs Czar:

Wow!

Correction: A gun is not only a tool...

...it is also art. Chris Hausbeck turns guns that have been destroyed by the US Attorney's Office into furniture and steampunk artifacts:

The War On Terror (T.W.A.T.) Secret Weapon


Triplex Cobalt Mass Desocializer


Royal Duck's Foot Pentablaster

A Gun is a Tool, and Only a Tool

I tried to comment on Harold Pollack's recent piece about the Ft Hood shootings in The New Republic because it stands out as so profoundly clueless in a sea of cluelessness about firearms and the principles of self-defense. Unfortunately, one must hold a subscription to The New Republic in order to comment on its articles--an effective means of keeping the riffraff out, I suppose--so I shall comment here for my gentle readers.

Mr Pollack's article is not very cogent on the fundamental and derivative rights of self-defense, and is in danger of being just another cathartic huff of hoplophobia. Nevertheless, the piece is rhetorically well-written. It successfully blurs the distinction between a motivated religious fanatic and the garden variety active shooter. It also skillfully leads our focus away from the perpetrator and onto his chosen tool of destruction.

Guns Don't Kill People...Er, Actually...
http://www.tnr.com/blog/the-treatment/guns-dont-kill-peopleer-actually

Mr Pollack asks whether Hasan was:

1) An Islamist lunatic murdered a bunch of people he saw as the enemy /oppressor

2) A angry and deeply disturbed employee who gathered up a bunch of guns and ammo, went to his workplace, and embarked on an indiscriminate killing spree.

Was Hasan the first who happened to be the second or the second who happened to be the first?

Maj Hasan happened to be both. According to the reporting, he is an Islamist who was angry and deeply disturbed enough to take action on his extremist beliefs. I believe we'll find he was insane to the extent that other terrorists are insane. To put it in secular-progressive terms, there we find a moral grey area. Whether Hasan is a crazy Islamist fanatic or simply an Islamist fanatic, we still have a terrorist act from an Islamist fanatic.

And regardless of his weapon of choice, revolver, semiautomatic rifle, or katana, an armed maniac can wreak devastating damange in an enclosed area full of unarmed opponents. To someone with sufficient practice, two 10-round magazines (which comply with the legal limit in California) are, tactically speaking, virtually equivalent to a 20-round magazine; you merely drop the spent magazine and insert the full magazine.

Cho Seong Hui, the killer at Virginia Tech didn't have higher-capacity magazines--nor did he have a higher degree of skill. He was, like most active shooters, inexperienced with firearms, yet he was able to reload repeatly and at leisure while his victims cowered or hid. He could also assume, as do most active shooters, that his victims would be unarmed.

As to the FN Five-seveN pistol, which was somewhat controversial even before Maj Hasan's misuse of the weapon, it is no more or less deadly than any other commonly used caliber. It was designed for European police and paramilitary to allow high capacity magazines and a light 5.7mm round that can penetrate body armor (similar ballistically to a .22 magnum cartridge). However, the body-armor-piercing variety of the 5.7x28mm ammunition is strictly controlled, available only to police and military, and expressly not to the US public.

20-round magazines are available for other commonly owned pistols, e.g. the SIG P226 9mm:

Also, body armor is not a magic protective vestment--even 9mm rounds can penetrate kevlar vests at close range. The 5.7x28mm cartridge may have an edge insofar as it is a specialized round, but this does not make it extraordinarily devastating.

All variety of tools are available for malicious people to create mayhem and are impossible, and I would argue immoral, to restrict from the public. Sane and law abiding people should have access to the same tools for the purpose of self-defense and the protection of others.

The True Fiction of Water on the Moon

I read with interest the recent news that not a little but a "significant amount" of water has been discovered on the moon.

Yahoo News: NASA finds water on the moon
Space.com: It's Official: Water Found on the Moon

This strikes a chord with me because I once wrote a story about people marooned on the Moon. In this fiction the Moon held an abundance of water and oxygen in underground caverns, and a small amount of atmosphere in low valleys and craters, due to the many ice comets that had bombarded the moon over the eons. But I also echoed the classical and renaissance theme of the moon being the repository of all things lost from Earth. Although at the time I wrote it I had in mind Cyrano de Bergerac's Orlando Furioso (which I remind gentle readers is not about a trip to Disney World), the tradition started with Lucian of Samosata's True History, the title of which is self-satirical.

In it, Lucian and a group of adventurers are transported to the Moon by means of a waterspout, the classical equivalent of the wormhole I employed. Particularly amusing is the treatment of Herodotus and Homer being punished rather than venerated for their literary "lies." The idea of all fiction being essentially a lie and a hoax is remarkably modern.

Here then, are excerpts from my own false history of the Moon:

Luna (1997)

“But we really aren’t on the Moon, are we?” Eva asked nervously.

“It's obvious,” said Trautigan. “We stumbled onto the fake Moon set that NASA used to stage the lunar landing. And they won't just let us walk away.”

Orlando smiled and shook his head. “Poor Inchwell. He’s been trying to explain it to them for a week now.”

Inchwell sighed. “For Ms. Stranek’s benefit, I’ll go over it again. Please believe me--it’ll be easier if you just accept it.” He explained that the Moon was the place where the lost things of the Earth are found. Lost explorers and wanderers from all periods of history have appeared within a 30-mile crater in the Sea of Vapors--the ‘eye’ that appears to your right when you look at the Moon’s ‘face’. The crater had been formed by the impact of a massive ice comet, the remnants of which were still buried under the surface. The sun heated the area, releasing a thin but breathable atmosphere that lingered in the deepest parts of the crater. The atmosphere, and one’s chances of survival, thinned out the further away from the center one went.

“Bah! I don’t believe it!” insisted Gyorgy. He turned to Diana. “This makes sense to you, or is all bullshit?”

Diana thought a moment. “I suppose so, in theory. There’s a thin oxygen atmosphere on Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons. But I mean, just disappearing in one place and appearing in another. That’s impossible.”

Trautigan said, “You ever hear of the Philadelphia experiment? A whole aircraft carrier--poof! Just like that.”

Orlando tilted his head toward the window. “Diana, come over here.” She went over to the window with him; he handed her a spyglass. She surveyed the surrounding crater. Nothing but harsh light spread over vast, vacant steppes. But at various points she made out impossible artifacts: an aqualung, helmets of sundry wars, wooden sailing vessels fully rigged, dreadnoughts of dull grey iron, siege engines dead in their tracks--the plain was littered with them. She followed the trail of wreckage out to the horizon, where luminous mountains rose like jagged teeth against the dead maw of space.

And later, as they travel out of the crater in an attempt to find the departure point at which to escape the moon:

There they passed a panorama of lost expeditions; zeppelins crumpled like rotten melons; phalanxes of armor incorruptible; treasuries of silver shekels; cuneiform ledgers counting two thousand oxen and thirty thousand measures of corn assayed this day golden in the sun under the all seeing eye of Sammash; the lockets of forsaken loves; works lost to the eye of man: the final chapters of the Satyricon, the arm of Praxiteles’ Apollo, de Tour’s St. Sebastian Attended by Irene; ranges of mediocre poems littering the windless plain; forgotten hieroglyphs, faded syllabaries, oral traditions wayward and mute. Prehistories of technology: flints, batteries, flywheels, implements unpatented, new and useful methods abandoned, a miraculous herb for curing baldness. And wooden ships beached on the desolate silver sands, sails hanging slack in breathless heaven.

Gentle readers need not remind me that my style is hopelessly baroque and unacceptable to the disciples of the Iowa school of fictive lying.

.:.

Getting the Finger

Chinese Fortune Cookie advice is what it is, but some divinations are better than others. One gem I have kept--currently saving my place in a long-neglected copy of CS Lewis' That Hideous Strength--reads as follows:

Could more sage advice be dispensed? I think not.

Cathartic, Liberating, Humbling

After a long string of crappy events, something good finally happened. I got laid off.

I've never been laid off before, so it felt strange. After the initial numbness wears off, you feel the reality. Doubtless it's different for each person, but as for myself, I can sum it up in three words: cathartic, liberating, humbling.

In other words, what a relief. Finally an end to the interminable effort of trying to fulfill inscrutable goals based on ever shifting schedules. Trying to write impossible documents based on hilariously confected specifications. Even when things were going well, I felt alienated. It wasn't always like that. For the first nine years, things went well--my efforts were appreciated and rewarded. After that, I felt I was expected to do something that I wasn't doing, but I could never determine what. Even worse, I felt I was expected to be someone else, to care about things I didn't care about.

What do I mean? On one level it simply means being really enthusastic about meetings. Wow! Another scrum! When's the next one? Tomorrow? Great! On another level, it's a matter of passion for the product. Which I thought I had for computers generally, but I have ever more reservations. I worked on smart phone technology, but I seriously doubt their value. I mean the value of people constantly being connected wirelessly to vast amouts of data--I suspect that it makes life more complicated, not rich--more virtual, not real. And that we end up serving these devices rather than the other way around.

But, it's over. I had been looking already, but not very hard. I needed the push. Whee!

If you don't know where to start, start with Now

A chance encounter with a friend who writes--a hairdresser with the soul of a writer, or more likely a writer trapped in the body of a hairdresser--motivated me to start this. Not that I'm new to blogs, oh no. Some of you might recall the infamous "Bolus" ("All the News that's Indigestible"), which started as a series of emails to friends in September 1996, and was shut down in 2000, I am convinced, by Castro's agents in the media. It was probably best described as a cranky version of The Onion.

I haven't blogged at all since then because of ennui, which I dress up as a condescending disdain for those who record their every thought on public fora. Now that my doctor has prescribed ennui pills, I shall join their insufferable ranks. Granted, not all my thoughts are worth logging, and neither are they really anyone else's business. So what are you doing here? Don't you have anything better to do?

You now see what I mean by "cranky."

Nevertheless, I've recently been making observations that aren't stories or poems or any genre, except possibly what the French call actuelles, which are these little hors d'ouvres made out of capers and goat cheese. Maybe it's because I drive so much--the road is an entrancing, treacherous muse. After careful analysis I felt that this was the optimum venue for such observation: it allows one to record thoughts quickly, it provides a chronology and an archive, and most importantly, it is free.