The antonym of density and a dearth of suffixes

 (picture not related)

Back when publishers printed the daily news for local areas on paper (if you will believe it) made of tree pulp, There was a little trivia column that was nationally syndicated that was called L.M. Boyd.  L.M. Boyd was the name of the guy who wrote the column, which was usually a collection of sentences which didn’t have to do with each other, except that each sentence was a fact, and it was usually a surprising fact.  Though Mr. Boyd wasn’t above periodically taking these facts out of context, one did get the impression that he was wont to do scrupulous research to determine, before a factual sentence made the cut , that it was, in fact, a factual sentence, at least in some sense.  Today’s blog is inspired by L.M. Boyd, except that I have trouble expressing everything I want to about a topic in a sentence, even a run-on sentence, and also I don’t care if what I’m saying is actually true or not.  In fact, I think today’s blog may have almost nothing to do with L.M. Boyd at all.  I’m not sure now why I brought it up, except that I was thinking about it. 

The other day while playing Frisbee with my dogs at the lake, which for some reason everybody calls a bog, the dogs missed a pretty long throw.  This is not really something I fault them for.  Riley is, God bless him, kind of a pussy when it comes to water, and doesn’t normally like to get his belly wet, though for some reason, he’s willing to swim at the lake, but I knew that he wouldn’t go for a Frisbee that was out that far.  I was throwing the Frisbee for Ursa.  She loves to swim out and fetch things, and will do it whenever the opportunity presents itself, and would probably continue to do it until she collapsed from exhaustion or hypothermia.  She’d have gone out ten times for that Frisbee, but she was distracted right when I threw it, because we were actually sharing the beach with ten other dogs and their attendant humans. 

Connor’s bog is an off-leash dog park, and for some reason, there is a narrow stretch of the lake, maybe forty feet of beach, which has sand on it.  The rest of the shore is mud, sticks, brush, and moose.  So people kind of stick to the sandy section.  This works well for the wildlife that are trying to raise a family in the area, but it does get a little crowded there from time to time.  I’m afraid that, with so many butts to sniff and so on, Ursa was distracted at a critical moment, and within a few minutes, the prevailing winds had pushed the Frisbee out to the middle of the lake, where lillypads grow.  After a few minutes of hemming and hawing on the beach, during which time it was determined that I had on a pair of underwear which bore some resemblance to swim trunks, I decided the smartest thing to do was to swim in after the Frisbee myself. 

I waded in to my knees, and it was warm water.  Warmer than you’d think a lake of this size would be at that time in the afternoon in Alaska, in fact.  Then, as I went on,  I began to sink into a substance that was some species of mud.  I then waded into that.  It was extremely thin mud, having a lake on top of it to keep it nice and wet, so it wasn’t very sticky, and so, I didn’t actually begin swimming until I was wading in mud to my thighs, when the water was above my navel.  It was about this time that I began to appreciate the distinction between a lake and a bog.  A bog, you see, is a lens of water that sits on a lake of mud. 

A person of a less hearty disposition would have probably decided to turn back at this point, but I felt I had committed to this course of action, and I wasn’t coming back empty-handed.  I squelched on.

When I got to the part of the lake with the lillypads, I found the Frisbee, and I also found two forlorn and hopeless tennis balls, which I offered a ride back to shore.  They accepted, although one of them did momentarily find itself lodged in the top of the mud, where I lost it.  It returned soggily to the surface a few minutes later with a story about its own heroism in the face of muddy specters to terrible to repeat, which I didn’t believe for even a moment.  I was simply not in a good position to believe things like that about the mud that hovered below me, or I would have freaked the fuck out. 

We got back to the shore and dried out.  Well, I dried out (mostly) and the ball was almost immediately descended upon by a pack of ravening dogs, who collectively slobbered on it.  I had no sympathy.  I wringed out my underwear as best I could.

Eventually, I decided to put my clothes on, because I’m not the kind of guy that hangs out in my boxers with a bunch of fully-clothed people around.  I looked forward to the wetness of my shorts which were different from swim trunks in that they were made of cotton flannel. 

It wasn’t till the next day that I discovered that a seam of bog mud had goosed me during my swim, and that it remained lodged in my buttcrack until it was removed by force.  I won’t tell you the entire story, but a power sprayer may have ultimately become involved.

The whole event got me thinking.  This mud, you know, it was very thin.  It seemed to be quite a lot different from your typical mud, which stacks up on itself more densely.  This particular mud was less dense than your typical mud.  It made a very high stack on itself, like a house of cards, or the frosting they put on cakes at the supermarket.  At first, I thought the action of the lake must be enough to keep it constantly stirred up, but on consideration, I decided that the component sediments must themselves be undense.  That’s when I got really annoyed with English for not having a concise word already available that means “less dense.” 

It just got me that I can say hotter or colder, I can say higher or lower,  I can say baller or loser, but then I have to say denser or…less dense.  See? It’s unreasonable.  So I wondered what to do about it.  At first I set out to invent a perfect antonym for dense.  But then I got discouraged.  It’s not a very good way to go about it, you know?  I can’t just go around inventing words piecemeal, because then I have to spend half my time explaining the fuckers.  So what we really need, instead of a full-time vocabulary developer, is just a nice, tidy antonym that means “less [adjective]” and that’s way easier to explain.  We don’t have so many words that actually mean “less [anything],” and it would come in handy. 

I think –et would be a good one.  So then I could just say “this mud is denset than other mud I’ve experienced.” And leave it at that.  And just Reckon that when you want to say something is the “least [adjective]” you could say it’s the [adjective]ets one.  

I think the whole thing’s got a lot of potential. 

My coffee fetish

Just to make this political, I'd like to point out that Eric Cantor is a piece of human shit.  Now then...

I drink coffee every morning.  Like many folks, I arrange a cup of coffee for myself pretty early on in my morning routine, being somewhere between taking a leak (first order of business upon becoming ambulatory) and taking the dogs for a walk (which requires a fairly alert state of mind).  I usually have this set-up where I filter my coffee by pouring hot water over a filter that's set on an Erlenmeyer flask.  I don't do this because it's efficient or because the resulting coffee is especially good.  I do it because the entire process is pleasing to my fetishistic fascination with coffee and my addiction to it.  I pour water from the kettle gradually, and it seeps through the ground bed and drips into the clear glass flask, and becomes the stuff that causes my head to stop hurting.  I'm am confident that all baroque coffee making methods throughout the world exist to satisfy this fetish rather than making especially good coffee. I mean, we can make good coffee at home without spending two grand, but if you want it to look like this:

...well, basically, if you shell out the bucks for this, you have inherently acknowledged that drinking the black stuff is more important to you than having friends.  There are also the "tower of power" style espresso makers:

You wanna spend your time polishing a big brass cock?

  A person should feel embarrassed to own such a thing, even if it was a gift or something.  But if you actually spend $9000 on it, you're gayer than Michael Jackson.   Actually, maybe not.  Here's Michael Jackson's espresso machine:

This isn't so much an appliance as a shrine

But anyhow, to return to the topic at hand, I recently started making cold-brewed coffee and adding hot water to it when I'm ready to drink it.  Why?  Cold-brewed coffee is awesome, mainly.
Cold-brewed coffee has a ton of additional flavor that ain't in hot coffee.  When you cook the beans, you eliminate a lot of the organic compounds that provide aroma.  If you've ever had an iced coffee from a shop and thought to yourself Why's this coffee so damned good?  Then you know you like cold-brewed coffee.   So making my coffee this way makes it taste great, and it's easier too.  But I don't plan to stick with it.  It's just not intricate enough for my tastes. 

death of a restaurant, high-food diet, and Spring has partly sprung

Spring has sprung!  Or anyhow, the spring has become rusty and tired and has partially sprung, or perhaps not, or maybe the weather will drive you crazy if you try to think about it too much.  It's probably that last one.  Anyhow, the temperature has gotten above freezing regularly for a while now and looks like it's going to keep doing so for the next week or so.  This is a bit early for Anchorage, maybe a couple of weeks, and people are desperately hopeful that it won't snow again and that the global warming disaster will finally proceed as promised, since it will turn Anchorage into a paradise.  The dog turds are melting out of the snow.  Seeing no other way to help it, I grabbed a fly off the sidewalk where it was forlornly backstroking, as they sometimes do when they are considering becoming dead, and brought it into the beautiful atrium of the Integrated Science Building.  If you happen to go there and see a fly flying around, or more likely, being a carcass, then I did that. 

I need a picture. How about Star Trek rule 34? Note Vulcan mind meld during copulation.

 A while back I made a blog about an Indian restaurant in my neighborhood called Kebab And Curry.  I tried to make it clear that this place was something special, and that the food was the work of a creative genius.  Well, the restaurant's still there, but the creative genius has moved on.  Word is, the owner fired the chef for yelling at the wait staff so often that they couldn't keep the positions filled.  There may have been other problems with the chef as well, since as I mentioned in the other post Chris ordered a whole tandoori chicken which cost like $10.  The thing is, he was being given a double order every time he ordered the chicken, and he always ordered the chicken, since he's on a high-protein diet.  Now, I'm not a businessman, but it occurs to me that if serving customers food is the profit mechanism for your business plan, it shouldn't be a net loss to do so.  So the chef may have had words with the owner, and he packed his knives and his spices and his recipes and his genius and took off.  Now the place is reportedly considerably less good.  That sucks.  If you wanted to eat there and missed your chance, you can still go in memoriam, but my advice is that you go Namaste Shangri la instead. 

For the last week, I have been on a high-food diet.  I'm supposed to eat 3000-5000 calories of high protein, low-simple-carb food each and every day.  I don't know exactly how well I'm doing at this.  It's sort of a nuisance to tally up the calories.  I spect I'm doing alright though, since I've been eating twice as much as usual.  It's not treating me too badly.  I'm extremely sick, which could be related, I don't know.  I tend to be warm all the time, which suggests that I'm the opposite of starving, or that I have a fever.  I'm generally pretty hungry, except that I'm getting tired of eating eggs all the time.  The reason I'm doing this is to build muscle, by the way.  There's a weight routine that goes along with it that's meant to stimulate the body's production of growth hormone, and the result is several additional pounds of new muscle.  That is, the result is supposed to be that.  So far, the result seems to be an ear infection.  Hopefully it's just a phase.

A friend of mine was house-sitting for some friends and I went over for a visit the other day.  Normally, when I get access to somebody else's house, I turn the place upside down to see what kind of secrets they've got stashed about, and I bet I'm not the only person who does this.  It wasn't necessary to go looking in this case.  right out on the nightstand, there was an orange glassy-looking thing that I momentarily mistook for drug paraphernalia.  As I got closer, I noted that is was in fact an orange silicone disposable vibrating cockring.  IT looked just like this...

 
...except that it was covered with pubic hairs.  I kept looking over at the photo on the wall, one of those happy couple photos where they're wearing sweaters and  hugging and it's all a waist-up deal, the sort of thing a good, christian couple might have done up at Sears to send to the family.  I found the two bits of information oddly congruent, as though the cockring and the photo might be the artifacts of a specific good day they'd had recently.

My resignation letter

A lot of people these days want to quit their job, but they don't know how to write a decnt resignation letter. Here is an example of a resignation letter which I've recently submitted

It is with a heavy heart that I announce that I will no longer be available to work at APT as of the first Friday of March, March 5th, 2010. Though I will be sad to leave, I look forward to having more time to devote to the better things in life, such as playing outside and pursuing extramarital affairs.
It's been a pleasure working at Alaska Power And Telephone.
Sincerely,
Owen Gourley

While I've got your attention, let me try to satisfy the recent demands of my three readers. First off, El Nortenoe has asked if I would type less, but on consideration, he's willing to accept more pictures of tits instead.  So here's one for you, Eric:

 

Erick Salado, this jug's for you.

Brandon has asked for verse.  I can accommodate that.  Finally,Ashley wants longer posts.  I'm basically done writing for now, but I can use recursive blockquotes to increase the length of the post, so Here you go, a timely news piece, with apologies to Ernest Lawrence Thayer.

The outlook wasn't brilliant for the Malmo Jews that day, the score stood four hundred to seven, with but a dirty old toupee.  So when the Muslim immigrant population cursed them,and the mayor did the same,

A Berlin-like apprehension could be felt through the congregay......shun.  A straggling few got up to go to Tel Aviv. The rest - clung to that hope which springs eternal in the human breast;

They thought "if only I would move to Stockholm, that'd be rad.  I betcha that is Stockholm Antisemitism ain't so bad."

Though folks that went to Stockholm said they had it better there, the writing was upon the wall, Jews just weren't treated fair.

It seems.....

How does the poem end?  Ask me in five years.  

 

Frank Zappa: still dead, still a genius, pupupupupupu pu, ta na nah.

I search youtube for Frank Zapa's recordings now and then, and I'm always pleased to find several that I didn't find last time.  A good chunk of musical recording on youtube are accompanied by a still image (like this)or out-of-context video, which is cool, cause sometimes I'm just looking for music to listen to and I don't care about looking at anything.  But today I found several video versions of the song Montana from throughout his career, and I gotta say, it's pretty interesting to watch the videos and see what's going on onstage.  It's super neat to have several recorded versions of the song too, since they're with different groups and have very different arrangements for a song that's kind of a set piece.  I've included a few here in chronological order.
1973.

 
1974

1988
Note how incredibly bored Frank Zappa seems, causing him to say things like "on the other hand, I might keep the wax, and mehneh moo, hulda han, and hulda da han."  It must be pretty tough to be famous for the ingenious stuff you did a while back, when you're still doing ingenious stuff now and people aren't so big on it.  Then again maybe he should suck it up.  He is making good money to go on tour and stuff.

I also enjoy reading the youtube comments people put up since they are composed by admirers and trolls, and largely consist of arguments between them.  A lot of people who are posting less than admiring comments are likely just people who think trolling is fun, which by the way is retarded, but whatever floats your boat, I guess.

The remainder of negative commenters are probably people who just don't get Zappa and are too young to effectively do so.  They're stunted by their historical perspective.  I can completely understand that, and here's why.  I didn't really become aware of much of anything that went on in the world around me until 1984.  At that point, Tina Turner had this hit single called What's Love Got To Do With It and I thought it was a pretty good song.  I was 7, but I could appreciate the song as being pretty unusual.  Most folks stick to the premise that love is real important and stuff, and here was this song where she's saying it's basically irrelevant, obnoxious and she's done with it.  It was a pretty cool song idea.  Plus it was catchy.

Quite a while later, I became aware that she had a previous career as a pop singer with her husband Ike and that they had a public divorce and so on.  In my mind, I think of Tina Turner as this sort of elder statesman of pop music, and the idea of her literally running away from her husband and hiding out with friends to keep him from finding her is pretty tough to imagine.  It would be like discovering that Genghis Khan was afraid of getting wet.  I'm just hindered by my 1984 perspective.  I can't even fix it.  I can't learn the history and see her differently, because I'm just too deeply embedded with this idea of her as a superhuman. 

Don't get me wrong, I still hate people who troll on the internet.  What's wrong with those people?  But I dig where they might be coming from.

Kebab & Curry is a ludicrously good restaurant

My people and I waited for what seemed like a year for a new restaurant to open up in the building where Amore's Pizza used to be. There was a sign proclaiming that Kebab & Curry would be opening soon, but it was at least 6 months before the doors opened. I was excited about the prospect of an Indian restaurant opening a block from my house, so I felt a fair amount of expectant frustration passing the building every day, and seeing no apparent change in its status. Would they ever open? Anchorage restaurants have a tough go of it, by all accounts. Maybe they ran out of money before they even printed the menus. Maybe the charming little building would stand empty, a tiny carcass in Spenard like so much roadkill... Oh wait, hang on, they opened. Oh, good, then.

When will you ever open?     (Yeah, I stole this picture from Google maps, so what?)

Right after they first opened for business, Bridget brought me lunch from K&C.  Due to a mix-up of some kind, she mistakenly ordered 4 meals instead of 2, but it was perfectly alright because:

• I love Indian food
• I love leftovers
• I like supporting local businesses
• The portions were hella small anyhow

On that occasion, we  weren't overwhelmed.  The food was tasty and made wonderful use of fresh herbs and high quality spices, but at the price, it just wasn't too exciting.  The selection that day was two of four available items (of which two weren't available), and a dessert,  gajar halwa.  Gajar halwa is a sort of hash of carrots, butterghee, nuts, cardamom, and other things near to hand, which manages to be too rich and too sweet without really satisfying any of my expectations of what a dessert is.  This is not something I hold against any particular restaurant.  I just don't really like the stuff, I guess.  It seems like high altitude baby food to me.  Anyhow, I didn't plan to eat there again any time soon, and after two weeks of not eating the halwa, I baked it into a loaf of bread and it was delicious.

But then Chris asserted that this place was better, BETTER than Namaste Shangri-la.  Now listen, I'm skeptical of this sort of comparison in general.  You don't just go and say something's better than something else unless they are doing the same thing.  Which is better, motorcycles or oral sex?  The answer, of course, is oral sex, except when you're stuck in traffic, and...yeah, actually, the answer is oral sex...bad example.    The point is, that you don't talk bad about my homies at Namaste or else you're getting into a fight.  So I punched Chris in the mouth.

Actually, I just told him he was wrong and he said he'd prove it to me on Tuesday.  So I had to go to K&C and give them a fair shake.  we went last night to settle this debate like gentlemen: we ate food and talked about stuff.

Chris and Sarah are on a slow carb, high protein diet, so Chris ordered a whole tandoori chicken and Sarah ordered a small bowl of translucent soup with leafy things floating in it.  Sarah has what someone in the health profession told her was a virus, and probably didn't want to eat anywhere, but she drives the car, so I guess she didn't have a choice.  She may or may not have a virus.  The doctor and nurse crowd use the word virus to describe a wide and various set of symptoms which boils down to the following chart:

Congrats, you're a doctor now.

But I digress. Bridget and I had paneer sikh kabobs, paneer korma and saag paneer with peshawari and kushkush kalonji naan.  The kabobs came out first.  They were skewers as you might expect, but they didn't have hunks of paneer on them.  They had been deep-fried, and were composed of a batter with bits of paneer in it.  They were wonderful, golden and had shreds of fresh herbs in them.  I would say the sauces they came with distracted from the flavor of the actual kabobs, but they were also quite tasty, being a pomegranate sauce and a mint chutney.  By the time they brought out the main course, I began to see what Chris meant. 

With respect to the paneer korma, let me just say that the chef is a better cook than I am a writer.  Eat there sometime and you'll see that I'm bragging.  I was stunned by this dish.  Creamy, garlicy, with a lemony undertone, I just wanted to carry a spoonful in a vial around my neck as a keepsake.  One gets the impression of a person behind this dish who has a sense of the flavor they want and uses the seasonings to express their intention.  The saag wasn't bad, but didn't impress me as intensely as the korma.

The naan was positively ingenius.  It was so unusual in texture.  Thick, not very chewy, it had a nice outer crispness and a deep-dish, sensual moisture inside.  It was not like other naan I've had elsewhere.  It's its own animal.    

When we were done, Chris said  "So, what do you think?"

Was it actually better than Namaste?  Well, no.  It was almost entirely different.  Kebab and Curry clearly comes from a gastronomically different point of view, seeks a decidedly higher class of clientele, and presents Indian dishes in new ways that I suspect are the personal interpretations of the chef.  Namaste is not only an Indian restaurant, but has Nepalese and Tibetan food as well, is considerably less expensive, and is extremely delicious.  So eff you Chris, you're still wrong.  But thanks for inviting me to a new and wonderful experience.

Black gold: we need a new OPEC!

   I suspect we invaded Afghanistan because of the 2001 opium yield.

Afghanistan, as you may or may not be aware, is the primary supplier of the world's opium, producing ~90% of the planet's yield. Prior to The Coalition Of The Willing's (COW's?) invasion in 2001, the Taliban had discouraged the growth of the drug.  Just prior to the US invasion, there was hardly any opium coming out of the country, since leaders had banned its growth by making it a sin (really!). Since then, Afghan opium production has more than doubled its prior average, and so, therefore, has the availability of opium worldwide. In 2007, 2.4 million people, approximately 10% of the population, of Afghanistan were directly involved in the production of this crop (To get a perspective on this, in the US, the total percentage of the population that does any kind of farming at all is around 1%). A big point here is that in 2007, Afghans were making more opium than they had ever made before.

Consequently, the price of opium has dropped dramatically in the last two years. This in turn has resulted in a considerable drop in production of the drug as folks got back out of the racket, and grew food crops instead (you know, to eat). Here's a real humdinger: the total *decline* of opium production over the last two years in Afghanistan, which is about 20%, is about twice the total worldwide, non-Afghani-produced opium crop. Just to make sure you're paying attention, the point here is that opium production in Afghanistan is pretty much the same thing as opium production worldwide.

The first year that opium production declined, the UNODC decided it was due to bad weather. Then it happened again this year, and they had to revise their analysis.

Of course, there are organizations that are patting themselves on the back for the way their tougher tactics on opium have curbed its production. But the fact of the matter is, there wasn't really any stepping up of drug prevention efforts. They're taking credit for something that has more to do with economics than fighting crime. Drug busts were up because drug production was up. They're trying to say it's the other way around.

Additionally, they're fluffing the numbers by saying things like 20 of 34 provinces are opium free. This is probably true, but it's probably also meaningless: They're basically saying that half the country, geopolitically, is not producing opium. You know which half? the Northern half, in fact, because opium production is and always has been focused in the Southern part of the country. The provinces they're talking about aren't all the same size, either, and a lot of the big provinces are located in the South.

The decline in drug production has given folks there an idea on how to further curb this illegal form of farming. It's simple: keep the opium from leaving the country. What a terrific idea! Why didn't we think of that? Oh yeah, we have. Afghanistan, as you probably will pretend to already know, shares a large, porous border with Iran. There is also a much, much larger shared border with Pakistan. When you think about what border means, you might imagine a customs station, inspections, a fence, etc. There is no such thing. The border is not well-defined, and the idea of making it a hard border through which drugs cannot escape is, frankly, preposterous. Short of building and manning a 30-foot high wall around the country, nothing is going to stop the smuggling of opium out of Afghanistan. You could improve border security to ten times it's current state and opium would have about as much trouble getting through as so much Cap'n Crunch through a sewer grate.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but poppies grow in the ground and are bright red. It certainly wouldn't take much effort, even if it weren't well known, to figure out where they're growing. Now the drug prevention policy is supposed to focus on stopping the borders? This entails allowing people to grow as much opium as they want, and then, once they've harvested it, processed it, packaged it, and arranged for transport of the drugs, then the idea is to try and stop it from passing into Pakistan and Iran? We're occupying Afghanistan, right?

The way the UNODC determines if people in Afghanistan are growing opium poppies is by asking them. So the UNODC is not trying to prevent the growth of the drug in a direct way. the growth of poppies is overt in Afghanistan.

I can't help but feel there is a vital bit of data missing from this picture.

To tie it together a bit, the farmers of Afghanistan will grow poppies if it is a profitable enough crop. An Afghani poppy farmer can get a whopping $22 per pound (from USODC website, linked above) of opium.