Wilbur Scoville, famed for his "Scoville Organoleptic Test", was in 1931 awarded the Haleburg Company Exciting Foods Competition prize for "Best rendition of heated meat slurry".

Still on the farm, harvest has been crazy but is beginning to mellow somewhat. The toads, alas, are becoming scarcer, and surely this is the deepest root of all autumn melancholy.

The harvest rolls on apace, however. Our compost heap is full of beautiful tomatoes and melons such as you cannot purchase in stores. The tomatoes especially are a heartbreak: gorgeous striped psychedelic orange and yellow ones, which also happen to be especielly delicious, sit rotting in the soil. Sic transit gloria. We simply do not have time to preserve any substantial number. Mrs. Peculiar has been successfully sun-drying a few, however, so perhaps we'll have some fond memories of September come winter.

If one were growing crops for survival, cucurbits would seem a good horse to back. Our summer squash and cucumbers are appallingly prolific. They do require a measure of tolerance for creeping, crescent, Lovecraftian vegetable horror, though. I'm fairly convinced that if left alone for a week, many of our plants' arms would become mobile and prehensile, sprout suckers and reveal a snapping beak in the middle. It is still far too warm; a frost would bring great peace of mind. Our edamame, on the other hand, merit much praise. Our farmer saved seed he acquired in Japan, and the things are friendly, easy to harvest and carry, actually seem like they enjoy being domesticated. If only more crops desired happy symbiosis instead of despotic overlordship!

In personal news, it looks very like Delta County, Colorado will be our long-term home. Mrs. Peculiar landed laudable employment at a cider mill/distillery (there's success for you!!) in Paonia, and we have found housing. We are quite pleased.

I was much lost in Portland, whirling around various labyrinthine streets, when I came across a sign that chilled my very marrow: Lovecraft Biofuels. How pleased I am to learn it was not a joke. Ia!

By Friday the population had risen to a somewhat alarming number.

Entomo-Taxo-Bleg
Okay, naturalists. Can any of you identify these to bugs for me? the first was found last week on a green bean plant in Hotchkiss, CO, about 5,300':

The second is this larva in the central Idaho mountains, July 21, about 3,400':

Anyone?

While I'm online, here are a couple shots from our mountains last week:

You're The Guns of August!

by Barbara Tuchman

Though you're interested in war, what you really want to know is what
causes war. You're out to expose imperialism, militarism, and nationalism for what they
really are. Nevertheless, you're always living in the past and have a hard time dealing
with what's going on today. You're also far more focused on Europe than anywhere else in
the world. A fitting motto for you might be "Guns do kill, but so can
diplomats."


Take the Book Quiz
Haven't read it, but the result doesn't sound too implausible.

Heaven does ten thousand things for man. Yangtze dolphin declared extinct.

This is no ordinary extinction of the kind that occurs frequently in a world of millions of still-evolving species. The Yangtze freshwater dolphin was a remarkable creature that separated from all other species so many millions of years ago, and had become so distinct, that it qualified as a mammal family in its own right. It is the first large vertebrate to have become extinct for 50 years and only the fourth entire mammal family to disappear since the time of Columbus, when Europeans began their colonisation of the world.

Not the sort of thing we can breed back.

UPDATE: Hurrah!

A little more photo-blogging. First, an action shot from the iddle Fork of the Salmon. The rapid, Lake Creek, formed only a few years ago when soil loosened by the 2000 fires flowed into the river. The rapid has changed substantially every year, and this year it has a tree in the main current. The ideal run would be rather farther from the tree. An oarstand was harmed in the making of this photo:

A scenic, also from the Middle Fork:

Finally, a shot which begins to convey a faint idea of the most dramatic sandstone erosion I've ever seen. The location is in northeastern Utah, and doesn't need extra publicity. The genuinely interested can no doubt sniff it out on their own.

AfriGadget. I particularly like the windmills. And the bicycle/grindstone.

Taking down a sperm whale by hand.

Via Deep Sea News, of course. There's video, too, as well as another giant squid!

Update: Boy, turns out it's whale day. Via Chas, apparently whales can live a jolly long time.

To return to somewhat more elevated themes, we're having a very nice time with the Odiouses and their numerous animals. And it turns out, despite myriad indications to the contrary, that if one perseveres westward through Oregon, there is indeed a very large body of water at its edge. Odious and I went there yesterday, where we were entertained by many obliging birds, old growth trees, waves and waterfalls.

Gulls:

Vocalizing indignation:

Cormorants:

Surf crow:

The pelicans were reluctant to be photographed, but the anemones had little choice:

Notes from the Road

We're in Oregon with Mr. and Mrs. Odious now, and quite a time it was getting here. Our car ran hot up through Wyoming, and when we took it to a dealership in Bozeman, MT (mistake, I know), we were brusquely and unhelpfully informed that it had a bad head gasket and required a $1,900.00 repair. Inasmuch as two grand would be very ill-spent on an '88 Subaru with 225,000 miles, we sought a second opinion. A much more helpful mechanic quoted us $900 for the gasket and the likelihood of a warped head and sundry related irritations. A 50% improvement for driving a quarter-mile wasn't bad progress, but we were referred to a man down the road who ran a Subaru junkyard. After gleefully wasting an hour of shop time idly telling us about Subarus' general qualities, he strongly advised us not to mess with the head in any way, guaranteed to be cracked, can of worms. "What you need is a new radiator." Turns out Subaru radiators only hold a quart of fluid when new; ours was probably down to less than a pint to cool four cylinders pulling a very heavy little load. He put in a new used radiator in an hour (Happy Birthday, my sweet wife!), and spiked it with a tablespoon or so of black pepper, a trick of Alaskan motorists that allegedly seals minor coolant leaks. We took a test spin up Bozeman Pass, 70 mph, passing semis, A/C running, better than it's driven in years. Total bill: barely over $100. Competence is so satisfying to witness these days.

Mrs. Peculiar a few thrills on the drive, sights formerly never seen. She saw her first really enormous, torrential waterfall in Wyoming, and not long after she saw her first mountain goat near Beartooth Pass:

And some days later, we both stumbled upon the much-recounted delight of the annual demolition derby in Salmon, Idaho. Tales of the legendary intermission event have been related for years, but most people assume that such doings cannot happen in our time. In eastern Idaho, however, legends remain.

Pinky, the moral victor, off to an inauspicious start:

But demo derbies, though always laudable, are common enough. The particular pleasure of Salmon's event comes halfway through, with a contest wherein local teeneagers may show their heroism. Two boys to a motorcycle: one drives, one wears a balloon taped to his helmet and wields a bat. The rest should be obvious.

Though plastic bats seemed to be regulation, a couple weapons on the field did not look so plastic. Three separate fistfights broke out, and the contest at last came down to two teams whose disqualification was somehow not justified.

When the derby proper resumed, Pinky proved remarkably tough, somehow surviving several heats and assuming an ever more accordian-like form. He did not win, but he was definitely the first car into Valhalla.

...Nessun maggior dolore
che ricordarsi del tempo felice
ne la Missouria...

Apologies. But 'twas apt: I recently journeyed from this:

to this:

Fortunately, I also returned again, sorry though I was to travel home without a single Dolly Parton lollypop, which I initially took for a succubus with burning eyes and bleeding nipples. Many other marvels and wonders also remain unvisited. Very sad indeed were we to decline a kind Ozark invitation to light our fireworks at a big cat refuge on the Fourth, surely an ideal venue for pyrotechnic revelry.

We did however enjoy some truly excellent tapas in Dallas, and had a delightful stay with Reid, who assures me that there are some really wonderful river floats to be had in Missouri. And the flight from the midwest to Denver was oddly delightful. One passes dreamlike over the clutching effusion of greenery that is east Texas, through a Euclidean hallucination of square acreages and trigonometric circle-pivot fields, into the dendritic fractal landscape of eastern Colorado's slowly eroding plains, at last reaching the Wagnerian welcome of the Rockies.

In Montana at the moment, and off to Oregon and Odious tomorrow, on the wings of newly-installed used radiator (Mrs. Peculiar's birthday present). Blogging next from there, in the best of company.

Badgers? Badgers? We don't need. Anyway. This fellow has it about right.

I’ve just heard the latest news
I’m not impressed and I’m nae amused
They say if I want my kilt to use
I’m going to need a licence

Let the wind blow high, let the wind blow low,
Through the streets in my kilt I'll go,
And all the lassies shout hello
Donald, where’s your licence?

Hey there laddie, got a licence for that thing?

Where's Athanasius when you need him? From Tinkerty-tonk, "I am both Muslim and Christian":

Shortly after noon on Fridays, the Rev. Ann Holmes Redding ties on a black headscarf, preparing to pray with her Muslim group on First Hill.

On Sunday mornings, Redding puts on the white collar of an Episcopal priest.

She does both, she says, because she's Christian and Muslim.

And also because she doesn't understand why exactly the Arians cheesed off the church so much.

In truth, this is exactly the sort of thing that cheeses me off, too. A refusal to deal with the hard questions...

Redding doesn't feel she has to resolve all the contradictions. People within one religion can't even agree on all the details, she said. "So why would I spend time to try to reconcile all of Christian belief with all of Islam?

"At the most basic level, I understand the two religions to be compatible. That's all I need."

...and use our God-given reason to deal with the logical incompatibilities of these faiths. I honestly don't understand this refusal to examine one's beliefs. As with Old Father William, I certainly acknowledge that there comes a time when any inquiry must practically end. But I would argue that this contradiction is far from that point. This is just intellectual laziness.

I will also note that, as an Episcopal priest, she doubtless confesses the Nicene Creed at least weekly. Which, as one might note, mentions Jesus Christ as "the only Son of God", not, as Rev. Redding would have it, that "Jesus is the son of God insofar as all humans are the children of God, and that Jesus is divine, just as all humans are divine — because God dwells in all humans."

I really need to get to work on my quatrains.

Plasma rocket!

Scientists in Costa Rica have run a plasma rocket engine continuously for a record of more than four hours, the latest achievement in a mission to cut costs and travel time for spacecraft.

The Ad Astra Rocket Company, led by Costa Rican-born former

NASA astronaut Franklin Chang-Diaz, said on Wednesday it hopes to use its rocket engines to stabilize space stations in a few years, and then to power a trip to Mars within two decades.

Two worthy tidbits from the execrably authored The Wandering Scholars by Helen Waddell:

Han Yu, whose friends washed their hands in rose water before opening the manuscript of his poems... rid his province of a large and pestiferous crocodile by addressing to it a written censure, committed to the river along with a pig and a goat, a censure still regarded as a model of Chinese prose composition

Puts one in mind of the incident in Eyrbyggja Saga when a malignant ghost is exorcised by bringing a formal Icelandic legal action against it.

Secondly, wise words from the Latin poet Ausonius:

...for it is outrageous that a strictly abstemious reader should sit in judgement on a poet rather drunk.

Two Snapshots of Aspen, Colorado

Overheard beside a store front displaying a very nice array of ammonite fossils: "Oh look! Petroglyphs!"

On a store front: "Dog & Cat Boutique" "25% Off Cashmere"

Women in art. E. R. Eddison would flip his wig.

Crochet Yoda.

Via Alice.

Sushi!

Occasionally tuna mania overtakes an auction. Hiroyasu Ito, the president of Chuo Gyorui, the biggest of the wholesalers and auction houses in terms of sales volume, tells me of a January morning in 1999 when an Oma tuna came to auction through his firm. It appeared to be the perfect tuna, a vision of true kata.

Ito-san remembers that the auction started modestly at ¥9,000, or about 75 bucks, per kilo. "And then ¥10,000, ¥20,000, ¥30,000, and ¥40,000. And then three men wanted that tuna very badly." The bidding among them escalated furiously. "At ¥50,000 per kilo, one of them gave up." The remaining two continued to compete. "Ninety thousand, and then ¥100,000 was the last."

The tuna weighed 200 kilos. At ¥100,000 per kilo, the possessed bidder had paid ¥20 million—the equivalent of more than $170,000—for a fish whose parceled meat could never recoup that amount.

"Big loss, big loss."

So worth it.

Mercy, the largest goat, has just had triplets! Our naming tradition is that goats are called for virtues we wish them to possess; my votes are for Candor, Pudor, and Eustochia.

UPDATE: Prudence has had twins. Thoughts?

Checking In

A few images from our recent travels and environs, viz. a small farm on Colorado's west slope.

An excellent roadside attraction (you can feed them like ducks):

The Black Canyon of the Gunnison:

A Roguelike creation tutorial.

In this tutorial we will look at the process of making a really simple (yet really cool) RPG dungeon using ASCII art (letters, numbers and symbols [^$%&()”$:@~}{P<>] put together to make pictures).

The game will be inspired heavily by an old freeware ASCII RPG called Rogue that, despite being a bit basic on the graphics front, was perhaps one of the most fondly remembered games I’ve ever played… In fact one of the top on my list of games I’d love to have made…

It's for C++.

If you ever want a demonstration of the inevitable failure of Maxwell's Demon, try getting two chickens out the garden gate while denying entrance to the rest.

Man er ikke rigtig sømand før man har sejlet på det Røde Hav. You are not a real sailor before you've sailed the Red Sea.

In which I destroy Western Civilization. We all have our faults, and mine is being wicked obsession with roguelike games, among others less mentionable. A roguelike game is, of course, a game which is like Rogue. You are a brave amphora, sent forth into dungeons (generally) to slay monsters (generally) and gather treasure (always). Rogue spawned a host of imitators, most much better than the original. NetHack is probably the best known; I cut my roguelike teeth on Moria, illicitly installed on my school's computers.

So many games have followed in Rogue's ASCII footprints because, foremost, Rogue is fun. There's a lot of re-playability in the random generation of each level, treasure, and swing of the possible sword. Also, they are easy to create. There's a quasi-annual contest called the Seven Day Roguelike, in which various developers create a playable game in a week. If yours truly can write a sorta kinda maybe workable game, anybody can.

But even with such randomness within each game, the genre was growing stale. Crawl and ADoM are both excellent, innovative games--but if you've seen an white @ bump a red D for 2d6 damage once, you've seen it enough. GearHead took Rogue and added giant robots. I am firmly of the belief that giant robots make anything better, and this is no exception. But lately only one game has haunted my days and chilled my dreaming nights: Dwarf Fortess.

Dwarf Fortress lets you command a scrappy, half-trained band of dwarves out to form a new colony, delve deep into the mountains, and discover things better left undisturbed. The controls are not particularly intuitive, and you'll probably find that the first ten games or so are lost to some freak of the rules you didn't know (like "don't tease the mandrills" or "if you put that floodgate there you will drown" or "yes, dwarves do need to sleep"). One grits one's teeth are recites the mantra of the developer: Losing is Fun.

And by some intellectual sport of nature, it is. The first time your dwarves correctly take out the garbage, you'll cheer. They make friends, and pets, and take lovers. You control a great deal of their lives, but never them directly. They will disobey when they want; take a smoke break; get angry and break things; wander off; go mad. But they'll also build a surprisingly functional little community, if you guide them.

Anyway, if you are the compulsive type, as am I, I cannot discommend this game more. Prepare to lose sleep over it, wondering if your carpenter needs mangrove, specifically, or if any decent wood will do. If your Hammerlords can hold off the kobold archers until those useless Marksdwarves can get from the barracks to the Great Gate. If your sparkling stained glass window and elaborate sculpture garden will stop your dwarves from needing to go outside, where the elephants are waiting. Oh, Axe and Maul and Hammer, the elephants.

Evidence for a once wet Mars.

"This is some of the best evidence Spirit has found for water at Gusev," said Albert Yen, a geochemist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. One possible origin for the silica could have been interaction of soil with acid vapors produced by volcanic activity in the presence of water. Another could have been from water in a hot spring environment. The latest discovery adds compelling new evidence for ancient conditions that might have been favorable for life, according to members of the rover science team.

I will just note that the reasoning used to speculate about Martian 'terrain' is precisely that used by Lyell.

This is one of the few cases where the term 'sixth sense' is not entirely misused.

Reporter Quinn Norton, who had a magnet implanted into her finger to allow her to 'feel' magnetic fields has finally had it removed - returning her to the normal world of the 'five senses'.

Very cool, but wouldn't something external have worked as well?

Via Eve Tushnet.

Lloyd Alexander is dead. I spent a great deal of my youth in the Marshes of Morva.

A public service announcement. Somehow we have avoided commenting on the efforts of various outbreaks of penis-stealing. I meant to say something in March, but life was going on and now the Nigerian Daily Independent article seems to be down.

"But Odious," I hear you say (yes, the devices I had installed have audio), "what on earth can you contribute to this issue, so vital in our troubled times? If true, can you prevent this atrocious supernatural crotch-yeggery? If false, what else can be said on the subject?"

You've got some nerve, mister. And anyway, you're wrong! As an eternal Scarlet Letter on the breasts of those who claim that a liberal arts education, particularly a truncate one, is useless, I can reliable reassure the victims that privy-pinching is only an illusion.

There is no doubt that certain witches can do marvellous things with regard to male organs, for this agrees with what has been seen and heard by many, and with the general account of what has been known concerning that member through the senses of sight and touch. And as to how this thing is possible, it is to be said that it can be done in two ways, either actually and in fact, as the first arguments have said, or through some prestige or glamour. But when it is performed by witches, it is only a matter of glamour; although it is no illusion in the opinion of the sufferer. For his imagination can really and actually believe that something is not present, since by none of his exterior senses, such as sight or touch, can he perceive it as present.

Straight the horses'... mouths of Messrs. Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger. Let the Malleus Maleficarum be your guide, gentlemen; let not this genital jiggery-pokery bring you anxious days and restless nights. This sort of thing goes on for pages.

The Hammer, by the way, is among the worst reading material I've ever come across. I take a pretty sunny view of the Middle Ages (so far as centuries of heterogenous human existence permits of summary judgment), but the Hammer is the sort of thing that makes me reconsider. Imagine Aristotle on an off day, writing justifications for Stalin. That's the Hammer. The Papal Bull (oh! I faint for aptness!) that begins it does not bring ease, either.

And although Our dear sons Henry Kramer and James Sprenger, Professors of Theology, of the Order of Friars Preachers, have been by Letters Apostolic delegated as Inquisitors of these heretical pravities, and still are Inquisitors, the first in the aforesaid parts of Northern Germany, wherein are included those aforesaid townships, districts, dioceses, and other specified localities, and the second in certain territories which lie along the borders of the Rhine, nevertheless not a few clerics and lay folk of those counties...are not ashamed to contend with the most unblushing effrontery that these enormities [straying from the Catholic Faith, abandoning themselves to devils, incubi, and succubi, by incantations, spells, conjurations, and other accursed charms and crafts slaying infants in the womb, calves, grapes, beasts of burthen, orchards, meadows, pastureland, corn, wheat and all other cereals--you get the idea. O.] are not practiced in those provinces....

Thanks for clearing that up, Innocent VIII. People claim there aren't any witches around here? The effrontery!

Wolves, at Querencia.

It seems an article of faith in American environmental circles that wolves are harmless. While (until recently) there was no record of modern North American wolves harming anyone, a bit of research shows this to be an anomalous situation. Wolves of the exact same species preyed on humans in Europe and Russia; wolves even smaller than ours eat humans in India to this day.

The recent death of a young man in Canada raised the possibility of wolf- human predation. Eminent mammalogist Dr. Valerius Geist was charged with investigating the incident. His conclusions, soon to be released, are not comforting.

Do not misunderstand me here, or Val. I believe that wolves are wonderful top- of- the- food chain predators, and ecosystems are healthier for their presence. I can thrill to a howl in the night. But attitudes must be realistic, and wolves should be hunted to keep them wary of humans. Wolves that become habituated, that hang around humans and their livestock in broad daylight, are a disaster waiting to happen.

Steve was kind enough to send me some of Dr. Geist's work. I'll have more to say after I've given it another read-through. I will, however, say that the case he makes for the potential for wolf-on-human predation is quite convincing.

Darwin's correspondence, online.

Darwin exchanged letters with nearly 2000 people during his lifetime. These range from well known naturalists, thinkers, and public figures, to men and women who would be unknown today were it not for the letters they exchanged with Darwin.

Darwin's correspondence provides us with an invaluable source of information, not only about his own intellectual development and social network, but about Victorian science and society in general. They provide a remarkably complete picture of the development of his thinking, throwing light on his early formative years and the years of the voyage of the Beagle, on the period which led up to the publication of The Origin of Species and the subsequent heated debates.

Via Tinkerty Tonk.

Neal Stephenson got me thinking about phosphorus; and the Internet was there for me.

As is before shewed, take Urine well putrefied in a Tub, exposed to the Air for seven Weeks, all one as you do when you're to make a Spirit of it; the Spirit being drawn, or rather the whole of it being evaporated to the consistance of Honey, in which lies the Fosperus; but the Art is somewhat difficult to get it from thence, in two cases, the one is in making choice of a proper Agent to be mixed therewith, and the other is the exact regiment of the Fire.

I cannot, however, track down an online edition of Boyle's The aerial noctiluca: or some new phoenomena, and a process of a factitious self-shining substance.

Please don't try the last experiment on the above website. There exist easier ways.

Axolotl Pie
(Trad.)

(Chorus)
Axolotl pie, O
Axolotl pie,
Tastier than chicken and
Warms you up inside
If there is a Heaven and
I go there when I die
I'm asking for a slice of
Axolotl pie

O there was a time, and
Shamed I am to fess it,
I wouldn't touch a piece
However Mama dressed it.
I didn't know how tasty
Those sweet external gills were
Nor that they were possessed of a
Unique aquatic filter.

(CHORUS)

In vain she did insist that
The Aztecs did ingest them
I shut my mouth, and shook my head,
And wouldn't even test them.
They were added to our diet
To break up monotony
But I wouldn't touch a critter
Noted for neotony.

(CHORUS)

Finally I had a taste
Of axolotl pie.
The moment that it touched my lips
It opened up my eyes.

(CHORUS)

On to other things! I've been watching some minds fail rather spectacularly to meet lately, and got to wondering why that was. I decided after some thought that at least one of the parties had reached a sort of fundamental opinion--something that simply couldn't be disbelieved because it was one of the first principles of their thought. I suppose that good philosophers, at least since Descartes, try not to let these have their way, but I was never much good at philosophy anyway. It did get me thinking about what my own first principles were, however.

I was also at the time thinking about this post at Querencia, and musing on those really excellent joyous evenings referenced. This in turn took my mind back to any number of meals. In Paris, mussels in beer. A tiny vegetarian Indian restaurant, rolling up neat spheres of lentils. Santa Fe, eating out at 315 with Peculiar, starting with Gruet Blanc de Noir, working our way through a bottle of Beaujolais as I ate tuna that had only just met the grill for a moment (I'm sorry, Peculiar, but I can't remember what you had!), duck confit, and finishing with a really excellent creme brulee (hey Ari, what did you decide about who had the best? 'Cause my vote remains 315) and hot, sweet espresso. Steak Dunigan at the Pink, many many times (sometimes even paying for it!). Actually, a number of things at the Pink: lamb chops, very rare, with butter melting on top of them; Chilean sea bass crusted in walnuts; Armando's personal salsa ("Don't cry, primo; be a man"); Brandy Alexanders on the boss's dime; Ladera '01 merlot, a bottle of which I chose as a parting gift over Dom Perignon, and have never regretted doing so; hell, popcorn and gin and tonic at the end of a shift.

I could go on like this for hours. In fact, I'm going to. My wife makes chocolate chips cookies the size of my hand, full of dark chocolate chips, walnuts, and oatmeal. In the mornings I get up and have two eggs from my chickens. My eggs are not regular eggs. Regular eggs explode in my hands now when I try to crack them, so used am I to the thick shells of real eggs. And my yolks stand up almost hemispherical, and the deep orange of Betelgeuse. In France when I was there the summer after I graduated from high school, I would drink kirs after riding from town to town on my bicycle, and they still taste like Provence to me. At Steve and Libby's, eating lamb stew with garlic yogurt on top.

Reminiscing further, I found that all the most enjoyable moments in my life had a really, really good meal within twenty-four hours of them. Even as a kid I liked the idea of eating with friends. The saddest part of Wind in the Willows was always when Mole realized that he didn't have anything to feed Rat; the only redeeming feature of the execrable Redwall books was the description of the feasts. I always thought that drowning in malmsey sounded like a sensible way to go. Reading M. F. K. Fisher or Brillat-Savarin or Dumas' cookbook always cheers me up. One of my favorite conversation topics is last meals, planning them course by course (champagne to start and finish, of course). Contrariwise, the nadir was also the time when I lived on Snickers bars I got from the vending machine at 3:00 am, when I could be sure that no one else was around.

At a recent job interview, I was bs'ing about how much I liked feeding people. It's only now that I realize that it's true. When things are bad, I want to eat, and when other people are having trouble, I want to feed them. I told this to a psychology major who responded that I had confused food and love. This is utter nonsense (I am in no danger of eating my wife or son). Food makes things better. Things are always worse on an empty stomach; only after a seriously good meal, and some good drink, and good company, is life manageable.

Which is why efforts to take away food always piss me off. From NYC's ban on transfats ("The hardest one for us was the croissant. We replaced butter with palm oil. From my perspective it’s not a croissant any more. It’s lost all its lamination and flavor.") to attempts to reinstate Prohibition--apparently thinking that this time we'll get it right, which reminds me of John Keynes comment on Betram Russell: "on the one hand he believed that all the problems of the world stemmed from conducting human affairs in a most irrational way; on the other hand that the solution was simple, since all we had to do was to behave rationally" to efforts to reduce agriculture in America to a mono-culture of Large White Turkeys and shit-fed chickens, all in a greasy HFC sauce--it all makes me angry all out of proportion with the actual danger. Food is not something I can be rational about, since to me it is connected so vitally with existence as human beings. You are what you eat, they say, and I think we are how we eat, too. We eat fast these days, and poorly, and alone. Food should be something that people gather around, prepare together, eat lots of, and so should drink (my beer comes on well; so does my kombucha). It's no accident that breaking bread and drinking wine together is a sacrament.

So, apparently one of my first principles is that there is nothing on Earth that cannot be fixed with good food, good drink, and good company. I suppose I should hope for something more spiritual, or philosophically unassailable ("Something's going to happen"? "Cogito ergo sum"?), but this is up with what I came. At least I'm in good company: "If you offer Plato a dish of figs, he will take them all."

UPDATE: I forgot the best story! When I was between two and three years, my parents were celebrating Christmas Eve by cooking lobster in their apartment. They had put me to bed, but I woke up and toddled out to the kitchen. They gave me a little taste, and then sent me back to my room. At the kitchen door I turned around.

"I'm coming back for a snack later," I said. "And it better be lobster."

A bit late, but sensible talk about gin is always timely:

Before we discuss the findings, though, we need to clear up a little matter. It’s come to my attention that some people believe martinis are made with vodka. I hate to get snobbish about it, but a martini should be made with gin or it’s not a martini. Call it a vodkatini if you must, but not a martini. Gin and vodka have as much in common hierarchically as a president and a vice president. Vodka can fill in for gin from time to time and might even be given certain ceremonial duties of its own, but at important moments you need the real thing. Vodka generally makes a poor substitute for gin in a martini or any other gin cocktail.

...

Indeed, gin is more of a thinking person’s spirit. Vodka is neutral in aroma and flavor, which is also how gin begins life. But where vodka stays neutral, gin is infused with botanicals — a witch’s pantry of roots, berries, herbs, dried fruits and spices — dominated by the piney, breezy aroma of juniper berries. Other common botanicals include angelica, cardamom, coriander, cinnamon, lemon peel, licorice, fennel and ginger. It is the closely guarded combination of botanicals that makes each gin distinctive.

Precisely. Also, take a look at the empires each spawned. Would you rather be a British colony, or a satellite state of the Soviet Union?

Via Three Martini Lunch.

A few years back, one dreadful boy ran up to me and said, "Mr. Bradbury?"

"Yes?" I said.

"That book of yours, The Martian Chronicles?" he said.

"Yes," I said.

"On page 92, where you have the moons of Mars rising in the East?"

"Yeah," I said.

"Nah," he said.

So I hit him. I'm damned if I'll be bullied by bright children.

I just got spam that quoted Tolkien.

Pulled out of a previous post's comments, Steve says, intriguingly:

Also-- a better "re- creation" may be the ongoing efforts to breed quaggas out of (possibly conspecific) Burchell's zebras with quagga- like markings. That was going quite well last time I heard-- should check...

And a little Google later, I find that it continues apace, despite the founder's death.

On 20 January 2005 the most quagga-like foal was born in our selective breeding programme. The striped area of its body is not only much reduced, but the body stripes themselves are considerably narrower and fainter than usual, more so than in some of the museum specimens of the former quagga population. However, there are some stripe remnants on the hocks. Such remnants are not present on the museum specimens.

Sadly, the aurochs may not be as accessible, genetically, as the recently divergent quagga.