Joy of Cooking

I started learning how to cook when I was four years old. I had to be lifted onto the counter, but I measured the ingredients with spoons I still have four decades later. When you start learning early, you start paying attention to what happens when you vary a recipe. You learn what upping or lowering the temperature does to the food, and whether its a good thing or a bad one. You learn a lot of things which can be described in the C.I.A. cookbook (Culinary Institute of America), but most people never bother reading in Joy of Cooking despite lots of useful information in each section. Nowadays people go online for recipes. Many of these sites also have videos showing what to do. These really help get you started on cooking. You won't master it from a video. You have to pay attention if you want to succeed.

Lots of newbies think cooking is easy. They are wrong. There are easy recipes, but cooking itself is a skill based on lots of experience. Being a good cook is all about that experience, and the willingness to experiment and find the limits of what works, and what improves the recipe in new ways. Most of the recipes online have duplicates. It is often a good idea, when deciding on a new recipe to actually try yourself, to look at all of them, compare the different options and remember that Sunset Magazine always uses exotic ingredients even when they have no flavor, and adding really spicy things to every dish is a great way to get indigestion and wipe out the flavor profile of those fancy ingredients or concentrated flavor caused by slow cooking a dish. Fast food is bad food. Slow food is the way to make food delicious. Restaurants don't do a lot of slow food, they mostly do things that can cook in less than 10 minutes because a 25 minute or 35 minute turnover in tables from group to group makes more money. And restaurants are a money business. At home you have no such restrictions, and slow cooking should always be preferred.

Good example: http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Spiced-Pumpkin-Bread-840
A good one for Fall. In a few months I'll be cooking this. It combines pumpkin, pound cake, and spices. You can also, once you are good at this, add sliced almonds, chopped dried apricot, and chocolate chips. These flavors give you the oil from the nuts and allspice, sour from the apricot, and bitter from the chocolate, which is a drastic improvement to "just pumpkin spice" and pumpkin itself. These tricks also work with banana bread. The result is loaded with calories, enough that a half inch slice = breakfast. Goes down a treat with strong coffee.

This is only one example, and there are endless more where you can cook something, taste it, and if you take the time to develop it further through additional ingredients or cooking method gets you a better result. That's the difference between a home chef and a mere technician.

Gone Fishing

Sometimes the right answer to the crappy politics dividing America is to start with finding places which agree with you and live there. The second step is to ignore all the propaganda coming from New York City and the whining of elected sociopaths in DC. Ignore those people.

Vote when it is time to vote, the rest of the time you can't do anything about them. Go fishing instead. Truck campers exist because men get married, and women go mean every month, so getting out of the house, with a flask of whiskey, a case of beer, and a quiet weekend away from her rage and fury is the right answer to avoid paying a divorce attorney.

If you have a big 1/2 ton or 3/4 ton pickup, or a Superduty duallie, one of these is a great way to get away from the wife during her lunar psychotic episode. These go for $10-14K, and while they're small for more than a couple days of camping, they are ideal for a couple days of camping next to a river or lake or car campground. They also make these to fit smaller pickups, even a Toyota Tundra or Tacoma, and the most modern ones carry a webcam so you can see behind you, acting like a rearview mirror. That's a kit you can install, btw. It doubles as a door security system.

The next thing you need is one of these. Motors are cheap enough, and it will mount an outboard. Or you can just use oars to get to the fishing spot, since most of the lakes around here aren't that big to take very long to reach a particular spot with oars. The sail is for fun, if you aren't into fishing.

I think one of these boats, and one of those truck campers, would be a pretty good place to weekend every month.

The Greater Failure of Education in America

American education used to be good, but it was good because it mandated literacy and basic math. Beyond that, it expanded into more esoteric wastelands of philosophy. And then the teachers union got something called tenure and the very worst teachers could no longer be fired. They became social cancer, demotivating quality and driving the schools into the toilet. Things have gotten bad.

The end product of moden education is the snowflake. That is a lawyer with a child whining on the front of a fishhook as bait. Snowflakes have ruined public life for civil servants like librarians. They reject free speech as offensive, just like Nazi SS-Gestapo. They have temper tantrums wearing black hoodies and ballistic nylon, assaulting people in attempted murder.

They are no longer civilized, and are now insurgents. At this point, anyone calling themselves a "social justice warrior" should be treated as terrorists, but the current Republican administration is unwilling to act on this threat, much like the prior one ignored Muslim terrorists until they became a daily threat at airports and public gatherings around the world.

The bigger problem has expanded past public schools and liberal colleges. These are now training grounds for leftist thugs. UC Berkeley has inadvertantly made its graduates unhireable. Allowing violence on their campus, by their students and professors creates an unreasonable risk for company insurance, so hiring a Berkeley grad puts your insurance rates so high you go out of business. You are better off refusing them without explanation, and those Berkeley grads are going to know this soon enough. Other schools with similar famous snowflakes or riots are also experiencing #blacklist problems. Social Justice Warrior are another kind of ethnomasochist terrorists. Harvard has banned clubs, associations, sororities, fraternities, etc and you can now be kicked out of the school for belonging to anything at all. Harvard is on my hiring #blacklist too. When I have the power to hire, I won't be hiring people from those schools.

Business today is mostly done with overseas cutouts, and other nonsense to avoid paying taxes. What used to be good paying jobs with that college degree now gets you a PT job for minimum wage. Voting to raise minimum wage has resulted in kiosk computers with ATM card readers to replace all those retail jobs. Fewer and fewer people are needed to run industry today. Automation has defunded everything. Without jobs, there's no money to buy stuff. The youngest generation is screwed, and they're pretty much in revolution. They aren't worth hiring, and robots don't complain.

The problem here is since education doesn't make a better paying job, and it doesn't with few exceptions, the point of education is largely lost. Higher education today is actually a negative. Both to time lost, and to your total income because you have to either pay off loans or work for years to catch up to those lost while you were listening to Leftist moron professors lying to you in a classroom.

In the real world, you only get a job when the work you do is both profitable and cheaper than a robot can do the same work. Or software. Maintaining robots that do work is one of the few growth industries, but the pay rate is falling, so whatever you think you'll earn when you start learning that job, it will keep getting worse pay and higher stress the longer you keep at it. Just like IT jobs. Expect to drive long distances to places without A/C in the worst weather, where a stressed out manager full of threats, looking for empty promises to blame you for breaking when the problem they've got is worse than expected because they cheaped out on replacement parts or a bad repair contract or sabotage causes these problems in the first place. You don't need a degree to do that. You may as well get hired on right out of high school.

What this means to librarians, like me, is that communists in our field with dreams of running a public pool or drug treatment program or cafe with Rasberry Pi tinker toys, all those non-librarian jobs, is lots of libraries are going to be closed, entirely. They are killing our public civic institution. The books will be sold off or discarded or given to charities who are still doing those basic jobs like store books for loan, and the public funded librarians are doomed. In places where there is oversight and strict limitation of library work to actual librarian jobs, not all this nonsense which most of my professors wrongly believe to be important. I suspect half the people I know in library science are going to end up serving coffee. Most libraries are going to end up as servers in a closet somewhere.

The other aspect is that colleges are becoming hostile work environments and could very well end up defunded by the Federal government, and lose their accreditation when the lose their libraries. And it won't matter, because colleges are a business, not educators. What they sell is adult babysitting for teenagers, not functional adults like they used to produce in the old days. And even when they create adults from the #SJW-Taliban trash that so many public schools produce today, there are few jobs for adults anymore, and those which exist don't pay enough to buy a house. Thank the Dodd-Frank act for that. Dodd-Frank is the big reason for the boomerang kids. And why I'm so in favor of homes on wheels. It avoids a bunch of the problems in home ownership, especially all the taxes or being trapped in a collapsing economy. You can hitch up and go. And so much of the Western states are really about Boom Towns. They boom and they bust. That's life.

Fixing The Motor Scooter's Flaws

This is what a motor scooter looks like underneath the plastic. This is its bones and guts, and what makes it work. It has inherent flaws.

The frame is a bent tube, which flexes. The wheels are usually around 10 inches outer diameter, usually with 3 inch thick tires to deal with bumps rather than the normally 1-2 inch of vertical suspension travel, which where I live is about half what they need. We have 4 inch deep potholes, tar snakes, and bigger wheels could save your life because they won't stumble in the hole. The other big problem here is that the engine is mounted to the frame on a pivot, and its weight is also the swing-arm for the rear wheel. So what? It adds to the rear wheel's weight, which means when it goes up it has to overcome the inertia, and when it goes down, the same problem. This wrecks its handling on rough roads, which where I live is ALL OF THEM. Despite this, people still buy scooters, and in Nevada City or downtown Grass Valley they make sense since these towns both pre-date cars and streets are narrow enough to spit across. Many houses were originally miner's cabins and have no garage, and most of the carriage houses got turned into more houses rather than a garage. Yes, they had carriages and wagons and buggies here. Mine carts too. The advantages of the scooter is its around 100 mpg and only costs around $150 in parts to make. Maintenance on a 2-stroke engine is around every couple thousand miles, or less, and requires changing the flapper valve, similar to a chainsaw, and cleaning the evil burnt oil out the combustion chamber and possibly the piston and rings if it has them, as well as the belt, pulley-weights, and bearings of the transmission. The whole process is around 45 minutes of work, which is not much.

Honda Wave 125cc EFI. Successor to the SuperCub

Why does it have to be such a stupid mess? How do you fix it? Well, a frame can be changed to be more rigid, with a longer base so the engine is firmly mounted and removed from the trailing arm of the suspension. This will drastically improve the ride and safety of the bike. The drive chain goes to a transfer cog, possibly with a belt drive like a motorcycle, itself on a pivot in line with the axis point of the trailing arm, which reduces complexity. This is such a no-brainer fix I am baffled why this isn't an industry standard. Another one is the transmission should have a type of mechanical lockout so you can use the engine as a brake going down steep hills.

Bigger wheels exist, and you can still have them and retain the looks of a scooter by scaling up the tires and suspension to deal with non-fantasy roads with real potholes and problems like the real world has. The frame flex is best fixed with a low profile box frame and retain the flat floor with the grocery bag net/hook, which all riders agree is one of their great features. I'm kind of surprised there's no open-source project for these.

As for the pollution, there IS a solution. First, direct oil injection, and fuel injection in a 2-stroke engine avoids all the smoke. You don't have to premix the fuel and 2-stroke oil. They go in separate reservoirs. You also avoid the engine blowback into the crankcase, which is what makes it so dirty and damages the bearings till the engine destroys itself. This is not a problem we need to keep having. Switch to the mastervalve setup on the muffler, which racing 2-strokes do, or just upgrade to a 125cc 4-stroke with EFI, preferably one that's programmable or multimode so you can test a new one without losing your existing one.

From what I have seen, the above solutions would fix most of what is wrong with a scooter, beyond the rider herself/himself. A scooter that doesn't try to kill you and starts every time, that's a vehicle which a really progressive California should have be in favor of, and would have cost less to give to every single person in the country than the money already wasted on the bullet train to nowhere. If California had good government this wouldn't be an issue. But we have terrible government so solutions are illegal.

The Trouble With SciFi Women and Mr. Darcy

Science fiction has a big problem. It is written by men, for men. Women who write scifi don't tend to do well. It is mostly a male genre. Much like Engineering, its a male thing.

The big problem here is that women characters written by men for men to read are not like real women. Most scifi authors tend to be pretty autistic, or chuuni fanboiz, and so have little comprehension of women or how they think. Scifi authors can't write women characters that act like women. They write male characters with women's bits. When you read scifi, or fan fiction of scifi, you keep running into women warrior characters, who don't mind being friends with other women, or share a boy who is mildly accomplished or worse a Gary Stu for whom the bubble gum has run out so he's been kicking asses all over the place. And that's the sort of character that teenage boys and man-boys like to read, unfortunately. Their decisions matter and save the world and feel WAY too proud of themselves for being ethical when it mattered. This is pure fantasy escapism.

That's not to say there isn't a corrollary for women and girls. They have Romance novels, which allows women to cheat on their husbands or boyfriends without actually losing the weight or getting all dirty or having a personality of their own. Romance novels are a big part of what libraries are actually for, btw. Women trade romance novels around. They started doing this well before we made official public libraries over a century ago. Japan's first novel, 1000 years old, was a romance novel traded around by serving girls, hookers, and nobelwomen alike.

In the YA section, most of the books are about teenage girls coming of age only to fall for a Boy or two, get talked out of their panties, and end up pregnant and abandoned, weeping. That's the major of YA girls books, right there. Put them in a setting with vampires, zombies, werewolves, or post apocalyptic ritual murder cults and you now understand 90% of all YA books. They're nearly all written for Girls, btw. Boys won't find much there they want to read. Most of what is called Steampunk isn't punk, and barely touches on steam or engineering, though there's plenty of Mary Sue posturing, Boy romancing, and childish behavior. Its the inevitable consequence of Emily Bronte and Jane Austen books being endlessly sighed over into some terrible distant remake.

Nobody even remotely sane would want a woman fond of those books. They are rotten spoiled princesses and the remakes are written by fat women with disgusting fantasy lives. 50 shades of grey's author is nobody's idea of a good lay. Its the physically unattractive and lonely people who end up being the writers of fiction. This difference explains a great deal about both their motivation and why the people they write are often better than they are themselves.

In books your characters have all the strengths you don't. They compensate for our failures, and allow us to imagine how much better our lives would be if we were someone else. 

In science fiction, nerdy unathletic people read books about people who are athletic and popular and capable and have all the best tools to get stuff done, and are popular with the opposite sex in all the ways that real people aren't. That's the biggest problem, because getting raised on scifi or YA-Romance will give you unrealistic expectations from the opposite sex. When you try for a relationship you're going to end up disappointed.

Girls want to marry Mr. Darcy, but the rich romantic guy doesn't exist in the vacuum. He's got a wife, kids, and a couple other mistresses. Romance novel fans get who they get, and they'll cheat on him or mistreat him because they still want the romance they don't deserve and haven't earned. Most women get fat and unattractive and find themselves failing to inspire a healthy sex life because self control and exercise is too much like work. That's how women really are. And men, too. We find our wives getting fat and ugly, and their personalities are revealled to be crap after all, once she gets a ring.

Cheating becomes inevitable (70% for either gender), and the consequences result in a broken marriage two times out of three, even if there's kids. Some couples stay together for the kids, making everyone miserable. Kids of divorced parents are usually unable to have stable relationships themselves. And guess what? Men warn each other of those kind of women. And we listen. We want nothing to do with Bridget Jones, the cheating skag.

Unreasonable expectations, that destroys so much in our society and I have to say we have, as a culture, failed. We want too much, and the stable, rational, woman is a unicorn. She does not exist. She's every scifi heroine, but she's myth. No scifi author can write a plausible woman with moods, rages, resentment, and frequent infidelity they actually do in the real world.

No female author of romance novels will tell women the cost of their bon-bons is a bored husband who won't touch her fat thighs. Or that their sex drives increase with age and their years of teasing and spite in their teens and 20's irreversibly changes their personality so the ugly inside will show on the outside by they time they're 30. This ugly personality shows in their wrinkles, in their faces and bodies, and men look for it to avoid. It will put men off them for life, just when they need us most. Mothers should teach this early enough to matter, but no luck. Schools skip straight to lesbianism, which is a Darwin award. Bad wives get traded out for the younger model. They behave unforgiveably so men may as well find a pretty body to sleep with rather than deal with bags of fat and anger.

The ugly on the inside will eventually become the ugly on the outside, and men watch for the signs, and avoid women like that. The downside is women who are already ugly on the outside could have a great personality, but end up alone anyway because men are superficial that way, or have stricter breeding requirements. Women get around this with surgery, painful exercise, and infidelity, breeding with any man they fancy, not just their married spouse. Women are strongly opposed to mandatory DNA testing, and block it in divorce suits to prevent proof of infidelity invalidating their child support claims. In medical studies of infidelity and STDs where DNA tests are performed, 25% of all children are from a non-spouse, born during the marriage because she cheated on him. Only 10% of those are admitted to in surveys, however. Men pay attention to that too. This reality is a fantastic motivator to avoid marriage. Women marry men for money, not for love. Love may come eventually, but I personally doubt this myself. Lots of long-term couples find serious love and survive the infidelity, and raise the children regardless of the father's identity. The species goes on. Even if a quarter of all couples are infertile, and many marriages fail before two years, almost always due to money, with infidelity just a symptom of the bigger problem.

In light of these very popular media genres it is a small wonder that men avoid women with romance novel fetishes, and women avoid men who like scifi. We are incompatible because of our tastes, and both end up Darwined though inability to breed. You don't have to die to get a Darwin Award. You just have to deny yourself the ability to reproduce. Advertising your tastes in the impossible is a great way to do it.

BOOK: Monstrous Regiment

One of the nearly-free-standing Discworld novels by Sir Terry Pratchett, humorist and folklorist author is Monstrous Regiment. It is the story of women going to war. Most are young, all are ugly and easily mistaken for boys, and their nation is losing the war. Most join the army to find missing family or lovers, or just to get away from the horrors at home. It being Discworld it is also comedy, and has monsters, and references wars on Earth. The style of war is similar to Napoleon, only before guns, so they're at the level of pikemen and crossbows. The comedy is largely along the lines of hiding by thin disguise and acting like the other gender, and people being Shakespearean level of dumb. Its an enjoyable book and surprisingly tender on the subject of civil rights, and the cruel stupidity of bad religion.

Certain soldiers in Syria fighting stupidity today might appreciate this book.

2-Californias Problems

The latest map of a divided california is this one:

Note the yellow line, somewhat hard to see. I got this from the UK Daily Mail, which is like the Enquirer. An English politician came to Orange County (LA suburb) to raise $1M in funds to help pay for a campaign to get this division on the ballot. This turns most of the coastal counties into a new state, and the eastern and middle parts into a different one. We'd be East California. They'd be West California. Fine. So what are the problems?

We do a lot of shipping here. Most of the state's ports are on the coast, and most of the water is here. I'm not sure we'd be willing to give them water at the same rate after they stole from us for 100 years. If we turn off the water to LA we save a lot of energy for the rest of our state, and they get to pay for desalination, which is very expensive, and requires many nuclear power plants along most of the state's fault lines.

A friend from France, fighting the ISIS bastards in Syria (woohoo!), said a friend of hers living here in PRK thinks that Sacramento should be lumped in. I have a problem with that. Hwy 99 and Interstate 5 both go through Sacramento, and the borders are likely to be patrolled and somewhat hostile, since WC is full of BLKLiesMurder and AntiFa assassins and UC Berkeley and Nancy Pelosi, the demented hag of evil.

She's proof there is no God, you know. Or that God is evil. Its one or the other. Which makes you less uncomfortable?

I looked at several other options for dividing the state. The one I came up with (LC/RC) doesn't take the entire North Coast, which hates San Francisco and Sacramento quite passionately. They've been abused and abandoned and would not want to be part of the same state as Antifa, since those bastards murdered their parents working as loggers in the 1990's. I might be convinced that Sonoma and Napa counties would join the commies, but not Lake County or Mendocino. Those are very rural and right wing. And the county with Vallejo might joint the commies too, since they mostly drive into the Bay Area for commute. However, Tracy is screwed, and I would absolutely expect roadblock stations for all the border roads, particularly once the water turns off. The LC will respond by blocking ports and barring travel through the bay into the RC, since Stockton and Sacramento both have ports for container ships despite been 80 miles inland. They aren't as busy as they used to be, but they still operate.

The other options proposed by some Silicon Valley billionaire type is the 6-Californias plan.

This is probably too complicated and "borrows trouble". Giving most of the water supply to Jefferson, which is largely dominated by Meth Junkies and pot growers and teen pregnancy isn't a good thing. Central California crosses the sierras but lacks good roads from west to east. The highest parts of the Sierras dominate, and those mountains are 13,000 feet for 150 miles NW to SE. West California contains LA, but doesn't contain the eastern part of the basin or Orange County. The rural parts like SLO get screwed by race-baiting murder hoboes and billionaire porn kings in Hollywood. South California is 90% desert and 10% San Diego. It would end up very poor and struggle to pay for paving all those desert roads. It might not try, turning the desert communities into the equivalent of Indian Reservations, only with white people. Silicon Valley likewise would ignore the southern part of their area, which includes half of Big Sur, Monterey, Salinas, and the Salinas Valley. It also has the South Bay and Peninsula. San Francisco itself is incredibly evil. Let me say that again. It is EVIL. It is multimillionaires in poverty, and poor people dying as a laugh. Its water and resources are all imported. Only natural air conditioning and port facilities are local. It doesn't make sense if you aren't in shipping. It is due to implode, like a zombie apocalypse. Possibly with cannibalism. I don't care much. I've visited the place too many times to forgive it for its EVIL.

Another option is 3 californias. This is divided up more by actual differences in politics. The Southern California is LA and San Diego. They can argue about rights, etc. It also holds half the desert. Central includes Sacramento and San Francisco and the San Joaquin Valley and Delta. Its big enough to argue payment for the various parts funding, and keeps two good roads over the Sierras. Three if you include the southern Route. The Northern section, possibly Jefferson, is the Sacramento Valley starting in Yuba City and up to the Oregon line, covering mostly rural places and no cities with lots of population. Chico might be the biggest city. Yuba City possibly the other. Most of the water is there, but there's enough agriculture need to keep water flowing south.

The problem with most of these is that you first have to get the state population to vote to divide. Then get the support of the congress and senate to agree to this. Which is possible since its been done a few times in history. There is precedent. If you deny access from ports inland, you have to ship around that, and the cost could be prohibitive by rail. The Western coastal counties are just this side of eating their children in a frenzy of violence, and most places in America think that's going a bit far. If they divide from where I live, and then decide to become another country, then block free access through the Bay for "taxes" or "tariffs" to keep their dreams going a little longer before the BBQ sauce runs out on the baby back ribs of cannibalism (because communists always kill their own eventually), if that happens we could see hostile borders, border patrols manned by drones and FLIR sensors, smugglers risking actual death crossing those borders while the commies invite in Mexicans and ISIS terrorists, and us deciding what to do next. PRK is my home. I was born here. I was raised (badly) here. I survived anyway. Dividing the state into two or three makes sense, and if we go for more I can only hope we don't come to blows if the Coasties go mad, as they likely will without water supply. They think everyone else should pay for their lifestyles, which is exactly the argument that makes for Libertarians in the rest of the state.