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.

I Do Things The Hard Way or Only a Slim Minority of the People With Which You Went to High School All Went to High School With Each Other

I used to know this guy named Michael who is an albino. You may not know this, but folks who have albinism can't usually see well. They tend to have a variety of things about their eyes that aren't how you'd want them. The parts of the eye that focus the light and pass it to the optic nerve, etc. tend to be shaped irregularly, and their optic nerves are often not that great either. So while albinism is a damn sight better than being blind, you don't see that many albino sharpshooters. This has consequences for the person. For example, I'll tell you about the time Michael almost died while the rest of us watched and didn't say anything.

The four of us took a trip to the Washington coast. It was me, Diana, Michael and that one gal whose name I can't remember. Her and Michael were a couple. Diana and I were too. It's not really relevant to the story. What's-her-name had this mildewed old Volvo, tan and rusty, and she drove us out there. We wandered around on the beach and were drawn, as people are, to these enormous boulders that were strewn here and there in the sand.

The boulders were about 30 feet or so in height, and being the only things on the beach that weren't sand or water, you couldn't help but climb them, which is what we did. Diana, ol' Bess or whatever the hell she was called and I went up first, and Michael was a bit behind us, having been distracted by something that looked neat to him. So it was that the three of us looked down, crouched at the top of the rock while Michael, with a look of calm confidence, did something crazy: he scaled the cliff face of the boulder. The way started out fairly easy and got gradually more difficult until the very top, where there was a bulge that overhung the cliff. We all watched him climb up to this point with dismay growing in our faces, because there were pointy rocks below him, and he was free-climbing a 5:10 face in a plaid shirt, Converse and jeans. When he neared the top and was clinging to this bulge with his arms outstretched and one of his feet level with his head, we all held our breath and hoped for the best. Once he got into grabbing distance, we hauled his skinny ass up off the rock.

Beatrice was the one who said something, finally. It was along the lines of “watching that was terrifying.” Michael asked why, and we pointed to the way we had come up, just a few feet to the side, where a little gully made for an easy ascent. He only realized then that we hadn't done what he'd just done, and I think he had some pretty complex feelings about the whole deal.

Michael was actually in a movie you might have seen called Me, Myself & Irene, where he played an albino.I don't know him anymore, but he seems to have turned out alright.

Anyhow, Michael, because he couldn't see, and because he didn't know better, is a pretty spry fellow. My brain is like that. Here's what I mean.

It sort of seemed to me as I was laying in bed that you go to high school with a lot of people that didn't go to high school together. You actually occupy a pretty unique position in the history of the school, but it seemed like too complex of an idea to just “get,” so I had to work it out.

I built it up from the simple case. If you imagine a school with only one person in it for every graduating class, and furthermore imagine that nobody ever drops out of high school, and also that high school is only one year long, then you are the only person you went to high school with. As a result of this, 100% of the people you went to school with went to school with each other. But if you imagine that high school lasts two years, then it gets more complex, because now you went to high school with three people, yourself included. There was one person who was older than you, and they hazed you and taught you how to smoke cigarettes or whatever, and then there was the kid below you that you stuffed into a locker that one time. The thing is, these two didn't go to school with each other. The oldest third of your classmates didn't go to school with the youngest third. Each of them went to school with only 2/3 of your classmates, which is to say, themselves and you.

Now that you have that situation, throw on another year. High school lasts three years. Your yearbooks collectively have a grand total of five kids in them: two older than you, two younger than you, and, of course, yourself. Well, the oldest kid doesn't know the youngest two, the youngest doesn't know the oldest two, for starters. Also, the second oldest doesn't know the youngest, and the second youngest doesn't know the oldest. You're actually the only one that went to school with all five kids, but it's complex because the two kids closest in age to you knew each other and they each knew the one other kid, so the majority of the kids at your school know the majority of the kids at your school, but each of the five kids has a differently overlapping set of your classmates that are also theirs. As it happens, everybody went to school with most of the people you went to school with: two of them went to school with 3/5 of your classmates and the other two went to school with 4/5. Again, only 1/5 went to school with everybody.

Now the four-year of high school is easy to figure out. You had a total of 7 classmates including yourself, the oldest didn't get to beat up anybody younger than you and the youngest has no scars which he can attribute to anyone older than you. The oldest and youngest, in other words, know 4/7 of the students you do, the second youngest and second oldest each know 5/7, the kids on either side of you know 6/7 of the same students you do, and you're the only 1/7 that knows all 7.

A couple of things might occur to you at this point. The first might be something like “Wow, Owen! you're really boring!” or “That's a really stupid thing to think about when you ought to be out doing drugs or something.” But you might also see the simple fact that your graduating class is the only class that knows all the graduating classes that you do. I didn't see that. It was pretty much the last thing I realized, actually. I had to take the limit of the minimum number of students another student would know as the number of graduating classes approaches infinity (½) before I realized that glaringly obvious fact.

That is why when people ask me why I think so much, I tell them that it is because I am so stupid. And it also happens to be why old people tend to think that young people are less intelligent than the old people were when they were young: the older people had more time to think, and these young whippersnappers just have to come right out with the first thought that comes to them, because they're texting it to their friend while driving. That's another story, though.

Bus Driver Crashes While Texting - Watch more Funny Videos

New AIDS Policy in South Africa Threatens Evolutionary Strategy of HIV Prevention

      Until there's a cure, there's AIDS.

Starting in April of 2010, pregnant, HIV positive women will receive treatment to prevent the transmission of the virus to their unborn children sooner than they ordinarily would have.  Child mortality is very high in South Africa as a result of very high levels of mother-to-child transmission of the HIV virus.

At this point, an expectant mother will be given treatment when their T-cell count drops below 200 per cubic mm. That number will be raised to 350, greatly reducing the child mortality rate in that country.

Prior to this time, the overarching strategy of fighting HIV in the Southern African region has been to allow HIV to spread, so people who are susceptible to the disease will hurry up and die.  Eventually, people who remain alive in Southern Africa must be immune to AIDS, since they certainly will have been exposed to it. Although this strategy receives a great deal of criticism, it very well might have worked if it had been allowed to continue unhindered. With this policy flip-flop to a more widely accepted approach, they have the worst of both worlds: they now have to attempt to prevent the spread of HIV despite incredibly high existing rates of infection, and we may never know if their original idea would have eventually been effective.

Personally, I'm a bit disappointed.  This is what happens when you listen to namby-pamby scientists after decades of buying into the poo-poo that squirts out of religious and otherwise ill-informed mouths. For years, HIV prevention policy in Southern Africa was about abstinence. Condoms were hard to find and largely not used. Now, with the successful consciousness raising efforts of do-gooder Westerners, armed with their scientific studies and their highfalutin' Germ Theory of Disease, saner prevention policies based on actual, physical barriers to transmission threaten to drastically limit the spread of the virus, and now the mother-to-child transmission route is threatened. By now that's just prolonging the inevitable!
Look at it this way: suppose one in three of the population of your breeding pool has some disease.  People are born with it. People get it by various vectors before they even become sexually active.  People don't routinely get tested for it.  There is a tremendous amount of misinformation about how the disease is spread.  You can't contain the disease at that point.  The effective window for that strategy has closed.  Everybody is gonna get the virus eventually, and that's just tough noogies.

Let me show you an example.  In the United States of America, one in four people is infected with the Herpes simplex virus.  The overwhelming majority of these people are unknowing asymptomatic carriers.  It is, by all accounts, the most widespread sexually transmitted disease in America.  There is a class of drugs that, when taken by infected individuals, prevents the spread of the disease pretty well.  Nobody in America wants to have Herpes, but you actually have to go get explicitly tested for it if you want to know if you have it.  If I go to the doctor and say "Doc, I wanna get tested for sexually transmitted infections."  She'll grab a stack of vials and a couple of bristle brushes and test you for Syphilis, Chlamydia, HIV, Hepatitis B and Gonorrhea.  She may additionally test you for  HPV, PID, and a bunch of other letters.  She is not likely to test you for HSV unless you ask her to, because so many people have it that the consensus among the health community is that its not worth the effort to try and track.  They don't try to get everybody tested and make sure the medication is available.  They're just like "Don't worry about it."

So in Southern Africa, the HIV infection rate is higher than that, plus people don't go to the doctor as often.  No credible person believes that they can actually prevent the spread of HIV throughout Africa.  But, there are a fairly large number of people around who are immune to the virus.  So just wait it out, man!  In a few generations, you won't have to worry about any of this crap, because, well, you won't have to worry because you'll be dead.  But nobody else will have to worry either, because everybody will be immune.

Breakdown of communication

Hugs Should be free, or at least given a fair trial.

I just noticed on Facebook that a friend of mine joined a group called Love Your Hooker and Pay Them Well. This struck me as an odd group to join, but being a progressive guy who has slouched around a bit and seen some things, I wasn't too surprised that it was a pro-sex-worker group. Upon inspection, however, I became aware that the group wasn't necessarily pro-hooker so much as it was anti-murdering hookers, which to my mind seems like the kind of thing you don't have to waste a lot of your life being against. Who goes around killing hookers, after all? Serial Killers, I suppose, but they have to go around killing someone, so why should hookers get special rights?

Delving a bit deeper, I discovered that the group arose in direct opposition to another group (take your pick) on Facebook, which it believed to be inciting the murder of sex workers. Again, I was a bit incredulous, but I was starting to get a little tickle in the back of my mind, like killing hookers is a meme that's fairly widespread. And so it is. In fact, I know dozens of people who have killed hookers in order to avoid paying them - they all did it in a video game called Grand Theft Auto.

In GTA, the main character is not a nice guy. He is, in fact, a ludicrously antisocial guy who has a knack for getting a hold of guns. The primary means of travel in GTA is to walk up to a car that is stopped at a light, beat the driver up and steal their car, then drive around shooting out the window and crashing into pedestrians, cops, motorcycles, and basically whatever else is available to crash into. A widespread fact about gameplay in GTA is that after a sex worker has provided you with their service, you can kill them to retrieve any money you paid them. This fact is interesting for a couple of reasons. First of all, it is not in any way an objective of the game to procure the services of a prostitute. Doing so in the first place is completely unrelated to any other goals the player may have. Secondly (and probably more relevantly), killing the hooker shouldn't really be thought of any differently than killing anyone else in the game (and you really can kill just about anyone in the game at any time), however, to most players, it is considered different. In a game where the primary joy of play is the realistic simulation of driving around and killing strangers, killing the hooker is considered by most players to be something of a transgression. That's why it's a meme: it's a notorious act, and it is treated as a curiosity by GTA players.

So, the original Facebook group, which appears to have been removed and replaced by 4 others, was a childish in-joke amongst video game players about something outrageous. Far from inciting violence, it was in itself a sort of ironic whistling at the extremity of the violence in question. As for the anti-hooker-killing group, I suppose it is composed of people who don't play such video games.

I would say that the pro-sex-workers group has a great deal of redeeming value in and of itself. Love is positively grand, and hookers, well, they're better off being paid well than not, I suppose. I don't believe the group's grand purpose should be to shut down one Facebook group. Particularly if they're only doing it because they don't understand the context the group is speaking from.