Big Jobs

The Wee Free Men believe they are dead, so party and fight as their reward after a life forgotten, probably working in some dumpy job. They are a parody of smurfs and highlanders, and paint themselves with woad, making them blue. They love fighting, drinking, and stealing. They call humans "Big Jobs". They don't care about milk, but if you leave them a dish of it they'll steal your cow in retaliation. They prefer Special Sheep's Lineament, which smells suspiciously like ouisquie and should never be given to a sheep. They are about 3 inches tall and run faster than most people can see and use the ability to steal things. They call themselves the Nac Mac Feegles. They are very funny. Unfortunately, nobody has yet made a movie or cartoon of them, unless you count The Smurfs, which I don't. Smurfs aren't drunk, exactly. And smurfs are red communists. Always reading that red book.

In "A Hat Full Of Sky", the Mac Feegles are looking after an 11 year old girl who has just been taken on as an apprentice Witch. In Discworld, witches are about knowing stuff, and most of their magic is knowing answers others don't, often by paying more attention. They also act as midwives, make medicines and pain relievers, and pass along food people pay them with to those less fortunate, who repay the favor later on. It all balances out, so they say. Some witches in discworld are single. Some marry. Some marry many times. Some have quite a few children, so the term grandmother is literal, but all witches over 30 get called grandmother, and bow rather than curtsey because they have to do things differently. The pointy hat is compulsory identification and saves time, like a badge of office. The witches often say that they say the most by speaking the least, and resolve disputes best with a firm look. In villages with fewer homes than you can count on the fingers of both hands, they are the law, the mayor, the govt, and the doctor. Discworld witches are practical in all the ways that hippies aren't. I despise hippies. They were hypocrites and monsters when I was a child, and they haven't changed today. This is a real shame, but I shouldn't be surprised. Their nature is selfish, after all. They, of course, deny this.

Movie: 100 Below

Ever watch a 1 star movie for a laugh? I do. Its a habit I picked up from running out of anime to watch, back when you had to rent it, and then renting bad Jackie Chan Kung Fu movies, and laughing at them. 100 Below was like this. Made with a budget of nearly thousands (of Francs) and with acting like you'd get in a high school play I felt the need to paraphrase most of the "dialog" they mumbled and turned that 90 minutes of digital snow into these key phrases:

Why are there trees on Iceland, the island famous for having no trees and no wild animals whatsoever. This footage looks like Wyoming. Oh look, there's a sudden freak volcano.

"Ah! I have a concussion again. Why do I keep falling down? Why don't I have a helmet? And a coat? It is cold. Why can't you run, sister who looks nothing like me whatsoever?"

"Why? Concussion! Need Helmet! And I smell like dog shit. What did I fall in?"

"Oh good, coats. Leave the gun behind. People are acting crazy so we totally won't need it."

"Hey, French soldier! Why aren't you running away? And why are you shooting at priority rescue civilians? Are you stupid? We're going to the Louvre? Why? And who builds a hospital out of tents at the Louvre, which is covered in glass and having literally no hospital supplies, nor does it have a landing field for the helicopters you said are flying us out of Paris despite apparently nobody being in Paris instead of the 20 million usually teeming around. With all their cars that still work despite the snow that doesn't seem to be accumulating on the roads and streets. So why are we flying? Oh hey, we just drove past a hospital."

"Yay! We're driving through the channel tunnel road in an earthquake. Oh look, the tunnel is cracking. Digital water! Go faster!"

"I can't. This is a French car. It's floored. 45 mph is as fast as a Peugeot city car hatchback goes."

"Wasn't this titled 100 Below? It's just snowing. Why are we driving on grass with 6 inches of snow on it? What happened to the freeway? I'm sure they have freeways in France. I saw them on Top Gear."

"Why does this NATO air base have no fence around it? And only one guard? And one hanger and its painted white? Where did the 6 foot long icicles come from if its 100 Below and never got a chance to melt because the hanger is unheated. And why are you trying to start a helicopter inside a hanger? You tow those outside, dumbass. You just said you're a pilot. Oh, look, the only guy at the whole base was conveniently killed by the falling icicle after opening the door so we don't have to get out."

"Now we're flying in heavy snow and volcanic ash in a soviet Hind helicopter from a NATO airbase for no possible reason I can think of."

Oh look, the teenagers got mugged. Good thing they didn't keep that gun!

"Hey, Dad is coming to the Eiffel Tower with a helicopter. Let's climb up it for no explainable reason instead of wave your bright hot pink shirt to get their attention in this large cleared area where they could land and we can get ON the chopper and fly away into this snow storm. Because it doesn't have a heater, probably. And we gave our coats to the French muggers with two by fours. Because we left that gun, and the two soldiers guns, back there. Because we didn't need them."

"Hey did you know the Eiffel Tower is made out of cast iron and brittle as heck? And its bolted together. And totally cannot take earthquakes. We should totally GO HIGHER up the tower to the observation platform. Oh look, its a snow tornado, because you can get tornados in a blizzard, and there's a helicopter. Why is dad flying a Hind? That's really weird. And is that step-mom just older than we are? Huh. Oh good, let's slide down this wire instead of get onto the helicopter from the ground. Wee! How in hell did that work. Oh, we're crashing."

"Okay, it is snowing in Europe for the next 2 years. There's only ONE plane leaving ONE NATO base, going to Australia on ONE tank of gas. Off we go!"

"See Dad, hitting on women everywhere I go has landed me a hot girlfriend whose life I saved, gave her my coat, and watched her coat get stolen by French muggers in the tunnels under Paris, still strangely lighted despite the power being out everywhere else."

"There is one thing I learned. I got concussions everywhere. I am never leaving home without a helmet again!"

Fade to credit reel, all Russians and John Rhys Davis who is NOT the Monarch of the Sea, nor a dwarf with an axe and looked quite regretful to be the only star in this high school drama.

I am sure this won't be the end of his career. Sometimes you do a film on a bet, or because of bad debts you owed to Russian Mafiya. And this paid it off.

Pies

The town of Grass Valley has a substantial Cornish population. The Cornish miners imported for the Empire Mine and several of the others, which operated until 1937 pulling gold out beneath my feet, and has left another $4 billion dollars still down there, at current market price, brought their own cuisine to the area. You can still buy Pasties at a couple local shops and many cafes sell them too. A pastie, not to be confused with a pasty which is a sort of ornamental adult jewelry worn by strippers (not the kind that remove paint), a pastie is a type of pie with the crust folded over and pinched shut. It is sustaining food. You make the crust a bit tougher by briefly kneading it, and wrap it around a filling usually made by a semi-dry stew mixture of diced beef and potatoes, usually with herbs too. The steam from the potatoes cooks the beef and the crust keeps the heat inside.

Cornish wives would rise early, bake pasties for most of an hour in an oven, and then load them and some other things to eat, and a tub of hot tea, into a stacked lunchpail that their mining husband and the older sons, into the mines with them. They'd set down for lunch at some junction, covered in rock dust, smelling explosives and quietly praying that the water pumps don't turn off, and that they don't hit a bad gas pocket that will asphyxiate them all. Mining is dangerous. And it pays really poorly. Gas is more of an issue in coal mining rather than gold mining. Gold tends to be in granite, so the danger is more from flooding and explosions gone wrong. And deafness from the drills. It is a loud business, mining gold. The good old days of rocker arms and pneumonia and laudanum addiction were well past by 1937. It was a modern time of cyanide leaching ponds, hammer mills, Pelton-wheel driven water power, and eventually Gold was extracted, sealed up in a box, and shipped down in a locked box on an armed stagecoach or train, to San Francisco, where the Mint would coin it or store it as bullion bars.

Gold is rare, shiny, and valuable because it reacts to nothing, though it does alloy with Silver, and spontaneously melts in Mercury, which is one of the elements you can sometimes use to find a Gold mine, the hydrothermal kind associated with hot springs. The local gold was found with tin and silver and antimony (similar to tin but different element) and arsenic. Most of the gold and other metals are the last things to react out as underground magma cooled during the formation of the granite depths of the Sierra Nevada Mountain range. They tend to stay with the quartz and sulphates and then burst into cracks when the quartz and water do something called Second Boiling, a chemical reaction which tends to be explosive and is currently causing earthquakes under The Geysers as well as Long Valley Caldera, feared by the curious but not going to erupt again. The magma source is cut off so its just cooling into a nice granite down there. No more supervolcano eruptions in Long Valley. Sorry. If you are interested in those, Yellowstone would be your culprit.

I appreciate a pastie, done properly. They are difficult to cool fast enough to avoid food poisoning, which means they really should be eaten fresh, not reheated after freezing. While traditional pasties are meat and potatoes, older varieties could be apples or pears or peaches or raisins. Since the crust is relatively strong, you were after the filling anyway, and it was proper Medieval Warm Period food, you know, that time there's a ton of tapestries and historical records about but the Cult of Global Climate tries to ignore because it makes them look stupid. I'm just glad that these records exist. I especially like the one based on salt cod barrels from the shoals of Iceland. Kept the Vikings busy doing honest work instead of raiding and such, and the English and Scots bought this cod and learned to like it. Same as the sardines caught off the central California coast got canned in Monterey and shipped to Ireland and England for Kippers breakfast in 1900. We fed Great Britain instead of letting them suffer famine. We also overfished. Sardines are a good pie filling too, apparently. If you find yourself with a lot of spare time and some leftover stew, you can make a pie crust and fold in the filling to make a pastie.

Doesn't that look tasty? Better than a burger. Sticks to your ribs. Stays hot inside for hours.

Cyberpunks of Yesterday's Tomorrows

There's a website called The Verge (not to be confused with The Verve), which posted an interesting article about the recent recovery of Cyberpunk, not as writing or futurism so much as photography posted on Tumblr. And isn't that weird. As a member of the cyberpunk movement back in the 1990's and someone who got into the internet on the ground floor, from before people had computers because they weren't graphic yet, to the various iterations of Netscape Navigator and the Dot.com boom and bust and Y2K, GIS, and cellular phones with wireless data... smartphones are now everywhere, soccer mom's are using cybertechnology more powerful than we could imagine back in 1994, and the alienation caused by technology sort of evaporated. Wireless data is easy. Getting an electric car with real battery capacity when lithium is headed for precious metals index pricing... well, cyberpunk's flashy bits of technology means we're SOL. Those flying cars with antigravity aren't happening. And post-oil means the high energy future is going to be rather dusty, populated with lots of bicycles, and you can't have total control when you can't get there to impose your will, much less get past the power outages. Cyberpunk died. Now it's just art.

I have to agree that I got suitably tired of black leather coats and dusters by the time Matrix came out, and its not something I ever took to wearing once I could afford it. I did like my Wife's old army jacket, but that was mostly because it was really comfortable and waterproof enough for drizzly weather. Leather is the wrong thing for real weather.

The cyberpunk obsession with guns is mostly out of ignorance. Video games and Hollywood movies make it look so easy, but hitting stuff you aim at is actually hard. And getting consistent ammunition requires more effort than a Mall Ninja is ready to put into, what is basically, a fashion statement with murderous implications. I don't like those kinds of people. The great strength of scifi authors is admitting that if there's going to be science in their scifi, they'd better study well the subjects they're writing about. Most authors just want the cool scene, the pose. They loved The Matrix even though it isn't science and badly fails basic math like everything in Hollywood, which is leading to Video Games leaving Hollywood to sullenly pout, alone and unwanted while video games have higher production values and profits. Funny how that is.

Who needs cyberpunk anymore? We live there. Your car has more computing power than the space shuttle. And your video game console's graphics processor is more teraflops than a 90's supercomputer. Suck on that. We live in the future. There is no "punk" in the cyber. Its just people, being people. And modern people are worse than the villains of 80's scifi. More callous, more cruel, more indifferent, more abusive, more disrespectful. Its not what we thought it would be. That's the trouble with Yesterday's Tomorrows. They become interesting footnotes of our own naïve imaginings. How messed up is that?

ANIME: Disappointments

There are a lot of good anime, if you focus on Slice Of Life genre. Non Non Biyori is both adorably moe and a surprisingly beautiful, scenic look at modern rural life in Japan.

Unfortunately, for every gem like Servant Service, you get a dog like Galilei Donna. The sisters of Galilei, descended from Galileo in a modern ice age, COULD HAVE BEEN a fascinating Japanese take on Girl Genius, which is what the first pilot episode implied. Instead it was a redshirt slaughter fest that never redeemed itself. I was quite disappointed. Unbreakable Machine Dolls could have been a fun one about AIs but ended up being another slaughterfest and it was grotesque. The best part of that show was the cheery end credit music.

Most people cite the violent dismemberment and carnage inflicted on Asuka in Evangelion as Anime's LOWEST BLOW, and resulted in actual serious death threats against the director. Some naturally some idiot decided to go a step worse and take Robotics; Notes and do something similar, though with less reason. What could have been a playful story about geocaching and Augmented Reality GPS games, and early primitive robotics instead became a vicious and bloody conspiracy murder-power plot. Completely unnecessary. There was enough plot in the games and setting without bothering with actual murders. And they viciously murdered a good character I liked, killed her for no good reason. This is an author who needs to be groin kicked.

I liked that there was a wild programmer hiding inside a computer building coding games. I don't like that they decided to give her a tragic backstory. It wasn't necessary. Otaku programmers are already a tragic backstory. If they had left the data found through the geocaching as a GAME instead of actual data, and if it had been pursued as a game someone put too much time into, as a sort of historical anomaly, and the reason the officials warn them off being that the guy responsible was seriously nuts and killed himself when nobody wanted to promote it because it was nuts, that would have been enough darkness and tied everything back into the AR games the Otaku writes, and could have been used to help drag her back into reality and becoming a useful member of society that has friendships with other people. That would have been a suitable plot appropriate to the audience and material. Instead of the high pressure bloody spray it turned into. What were you thinking?

Apparently the same thing as they were thinking when they took Steins;Gate and turned it from an amusing tale about crazy time travelers who aren't always hallucinating and murdered a crucial moe character so you could tell it was serious. Same people, if you can call them that. I dumped that show for the same reason. I must avoid this studio if they're going to keep pulling this crap. Face punching is needed. Do Japanese express their outrage by repeated face punching, like Americans do?

See that banana? That was amusing. So why go murder the moe chick? There was no point other than viciousness. Who watches that? Who rewards that? And are there really enough fans to justify making such a series of murder programs into children's anime? And Japan wonders why we don't close our military bases there, as if they're vicious and liable to attack their neighbors. Steins Gate and Robotics Notes rather proves my point.

And keep in mind I steer clear of the boys anime which are mostly a series of ever-more-vicious bloodbaths of ego and violence. It is like Japan is trying to breed more violence in its sons, in hopes of restoring the murderers to power that wrecked the country in WW2. Their refusal to punish rape as a real crime when committed by a Japanese male (its serious when someone foreign does it) with maximum penalty merely 2 years in Japanese prison, a sentence rarely handed out, and maximum fines of $20K. That says a great deal about a country. Yep, so our bases aren't going away. And Japan will become more Korean, quietly, as their racist and insane population die off. And their young women move to California. They are welcome here. We don't expect them to look after our parents or be a perfect housewife. This is a shame, too, because Japan's interior is largely empty, and while there are lots of densely populated towns and cities, there are also lots of fields and land to be cultivated. If only farming paid. This is the upside of gems like Silver Spoon and No-Rin, which are both anime about farming, because they show the heartache of failure as well as the joys of success. Farming is intensely risky, and the smart money is planting without getting a loan or risking your own land. It is being very safe so when disaster hits, as it can only hit in farming, you don't lose your farm, just your shirt.

The good shows from Japan are charming and beautiful and I wish them the best. The bad shows bother me that they exist at all. Do the Japanese not understand what that says about their culture? Do they not understand this is why they are imprisoned for the next few centuries, to prevent WW2 ever happening again.

WINE: Tarkettle Road Zinfandel

So ironically, the hard labor of shelving books has made my body sore enough to justify the use of alcohol to soothe my muscles, which does work. Lactic acid from serious exercise damages your muscles, which makes your muscles create more muscle fiber in response, making your stronger. As I work for 6 hours at my volunteer job shelving books, which rather impresses the librarians who are ladies and rather exhausted minding the front desk and answering questions for library patrons, my shelving the books so they don't have to deal with it is a huge weight off their shoulders.

So Dad and I lucked into a rare vintage called Tarkettle Road Zinfandel, from Lodi. Lodi is a smelly place between Sacramento and Stockton. You can tell you're in Lodi because the silage stink is so foul you curse out loud and reach for the Air Recirculate button on  your car dashboard, but it is always too late. The stink is inside. You can't escape except by driving away several more miles and opening it again. Sigh. Silage is nasty. I doubt the cows like it much either. Cows are easy to understand. They aren't nice, and I always feel glad to eat them because I was raised next to a cattle ranch, so I have no illusions about nobility or other ignorant crap. Anyone calling a cow noble needs to have their face shoved in some cowpies. Cows are mean creatures. Eating them is doing them a favor. The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe has an ideal cow. One that will nip off and shoot itself so you can eat it. And is glad that you will. That's how a cow should be. Not viciously hoping to gore you. Like real cows.

This Zinfandel from Lodi is good, once you let it breathe, as in oxygenate, and goes well with beef, as in steak or ribs or hamburger or various other cuts of beef. Beef and wine are happy friends. And beef is happy to be roasted or BBQ'ed and devoured by the one clever enough to buy it, rub it in spices, and cook it properly. California is all about the good beef, the good cheese, the good wine, and the good beer. We are also about the avocado and the Spanish style architecture. Cordelia Chase may be a total bitch in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but she's a fairly accurate rendition of a Socal Princess, even if the actress is from Las Vegas, and is a mix of Cherokee and Mexican. I wouldn't throw her out of bed. Charisma Carpenter is a Beautiful Woman. I wonder if she likes steak and zinfandel?

The Cycle of Collapse

Humans are cockroaches. We survive everything. Even fallen cities had survivors. They probably went somewhere else, and fallen cities tend to be places where the payment for janitorial services was missed so they stopped being repaired and nature did the rest. And nature is an aggressive SOB. You can lose a paved road in about 5 years, just from windblown seeds and water. So its not all pillaging and fire and teeming hordes of barbarians. People love to talk about the Roman empire falling, yet they tend to be the less educated so don't realize it took about 400 years to collapse. Stair step after stair step, generation after generation, values declining and being discarded until what made it an Empire didn't exist there anymore.

Discover Magazine online posted an article which is kinda sloppily written titled: Society Is Doomed. It's the usual limited drivel about the diverse causes of collapse. The truth is a lot simpler. Societies collapse because there's drought. Its always about famine. Drought leads to crop failure and no civilization is more than three meals from rebellion. Remember that phrase. It's true. The article is another one of those thinly veiled diatribes that we should all be liberals and peg our hopes to egalitarianism, or authoritarianism by the enlightened, specially educated liberal tyrants like we've got in charge now, running this country into the ground. Of course. The thing about insane loyalty is it is insane.

The good news is that collapse is inevitable. Only Water Monopolies last, because they can open or close a canal gate and a million lives are lost through deliberate famine. This is the population control aspect. But collapse comes due to lack of drinking water to irrigate crops. What if you don't have to depend on nature to provide that water? What if you can get it out of the ocean, cheap enough to use it to grow food? This is why I keep harping on Cheap Desalination. It is the second best protection from famine, and prevents collapse by buffering water supply. I feel the same way about wild game, and terraced fields and dredging reservoirs and planting wild orchards and heritage seeds in places where they'll self-cultivate. Do this everywhere. Refill the fossil aquifers so all those abandoned farms in the Dakotas and Nebraska can be used again, growing grain. Apply the same technology and efforts to fixing soil and water supplies so everywhere dry can be growing food. Just because we have enough to eat doesn't mean we'll be breeding like rats in Riyadh. Raising kids is a lot of work. A bit of a bother. And they kill themselves off doing "Hey bubba, watch this!" stunts so not all of them live long enough to have more rats, I mean kids of their own. Environmentalists believe that the entire human population should be what we had in the Stone Age, with no technology beyond fire and skins and stone tools. True Luddism couched in angry hatred for the rest of us. If that isn't selfish, I don't know what is. This is a good reason to ignore the buggers.

I would like for California, where I live, to get serious about cheap desalination, starting in Los Angeles where they get only 11 inches of rain a year, enough for 150,000 people yet they have 12 million living there. Most of their water comes from up here and is pumped uphill and over a couple passes to reach LA where it tastes terrible and is loaded with poisons which are likely responsible for the violence there. LA has great weather, since it rarely rains, and it's warm. It needs to get it's water from the Sea. This should be a priority and should be implemented very soon, using no petrochemicals, because we're going to ship those to China as long as they can pay. Since Malaysian Muslims just (two weeks ago) murdered 237 Chinese citizens for some reason, I'm thinking China may get peeved about it. The Chinese coast gets lots of rain. Inland is where the deserts lie, and has had some form of aquifer, mostly man-made, for a couple thousand years. In the last few years, the Chinese started bulldozing them in order to sell more bottled water. Corruption in China is so well understand they plan for it. The very nature of Confucian Philosophy is that. The Uighur Muslims of Western China getting screwed over by the Commissar with the brother in law in the bottled water business was cited as the reason for the Hijacking. That this story leaked several years ago, and the Chinese have done NOTHING but make it worse, it could lead to retaliation. That's probably speculation, but maybe it's true. Cheap Desalination won't do much for the Uighurs, but it will do wonders for the West Africans, for the Sahara, for Peru and Chile and Ecuador, and for Baja Mexico which would be transformed by cheap water for agriculture. Right now, Baja Mexico is a 1500 mile long peninsula surrounded by warm seas, with mountains tall enough to get snow, and dry as a bone most of the year. What little water they get is usually from broken up hurricanes that reform after crossing Central America from the Caribbean and end up becoming pretty thunderstorms in the desert Southwest of the USA after dumping some heavy rain as it drifts up the Sea of Cortez like angry wasps. This is a useful stretch of land, provided you can get water there. The desert soil will grow good crops, if there is water. This is one of the ironies of the desert. While some parts are unusable due to excess calcite, other parts are extremely fertile. The Sahara blooms with 1-3 inches of rain. The Mojave is the same. Small amounts of water and stored seeds erupt, grow, pollinate, and drop new seeds in a matter of a week or two for the next annual rain. Rather amazing resilience. Osage Oranges are a nasty orange ball of fiber meant to be eaten and carried by mastodons, now extinct, yet have managed to hang on despite lacking their natural seed spreading mechanism. Nothing else would eat them.

I think, if the USA breaks up, states like California and Arizona and Texas, all having close ties with Mexico despite pretending to resent each other, may find themselves entrepenuers building cheap desalination and selling it to rich farmers or businesses interested in agriculture to start developing the exceedingly cheap coastline down in Baja. With work, it will bloom. And food is money. People always want money.

So when articles tell me that humans are just going to slaughter each other in an endless cycle of collapse because it always happens like that, I laugh. Cheap Desalination is already happening. We likely won't do it with the current Nihilists in charge of govt turning us on each other like starving dogs. We'll do it for our own profit as this Union fails and the Nation becomes independent states, bonded by trade agreements rather than endless turning the other cheek so some Eastern Bastard can feel smug. Hell with them. California Republic should be finding the cheap ways to make seawater fresh and strengthen its natural resource so when harder times come, they aren't so bad.

This is also why I think we should legalize cheap scooters properly and make that the first option, not $15 million dollar bus stops. How many scooters can you get for $15 million bucks? Scooters won't work in Wisconsin Winters, but I don't live in Wisconsin. I live in Sunny California. We care about Water, and our roads stay dry most of the year, and only a few places get icy. The rest of the state would work fine with scooters. I really wish the local bike shops offered a motorcycle safety training course here, so I don't have to drive down to Rocklin, which is 45 minutes in traffic, three days, and $300. Additional courses cost more commutes, more time, more money. It should be up here. There are people interested in it, even old people, who ride scooters because they would rather pay for a hundred tanks of gasoline to get 100 mpg scooter than grit their teeth filling their gas guzzlers. This is an easy answer to fuel economy. It should be the answer well before electric cars. You can buy your neighborhood scooters for the cost of one bus to carry them, nevermind the cost of the bus driver.

Collapse in modern times is idiotic. Adapt.