Political leanings are a consequence of basic thought style

Separated at birth?

Occasionally I try listening to left-wing talk radio when I'm driving in my car.  Left-wing talk radio is a fairly new phenomenon.  It is modeled very closely after right-wing talk radio.  It works like this:  You get a host with a loud voice to express opinions very emphatically.  During the course of this, they may have guests with concurring or opposing viewpoints on to talk with them.  They may take calls.  It doesn't really matter, since the main content of the show is a brash person shouting about things as if they're just too fired up to modulate their voice.  If the guests agree or disagree, the host behaves more or less the same way.  I don't tend to learn much from these shows.  In fact, I can't listen to them for more than a few minutes without wondering what tapes I have to listen to in my car.  Generally, within five minutes of beginning to listen to Left-wing talk radio, I start listening to the B-52s. 

I'm not impressed by expression of strong feelings about issues like public policy.  I see a lot of expression of strong feelings whenever I watch TV, so I know that somebody somewhere believes that people are impressed by that kind of thing, and they are probably right, since it's their business to know these things, but I'm not impressed by it.  If you say that drug legalization or gay marriage is going to save/destroy society, you don't get to just say that emphatically and expect me to get your back on the issue.  You have to show me what you're talking about (especially if you think it'll destroy society, seeing as how the facts aren't on your side).  If you want to emphatically state that it'd be great if we all moved and grooved at the Love Shack, particularly if you do so in verse, I've totally got your back on that.  You don't need a lot of supporting evidence to get me there.

I think that having some asshole feign outrage and forecast the apocalypse is a routine that naturally appeals to people who are inclined to be conservative.  Furthermore, I think that it's more of a turn-off to folks who are inclined to liberal viewpoints.  You can't just look at the wild success of a bunghole like Rush Limbaugh and think "If only we had one of those!"  It doesn't work very well, because of big philosophical differences between conservatives* and liberals.

You see, the conservative point of view is a very specific point of view.  You have to accept a specific set of values absolutely to play.  The set of values has mostly developed over the last several decades as an opposition to US Social programs (which is peculiar, since most conservative people seem to think the whole shebang burst fully-formed from God's skull on the sixth day), since they were annoying to the wealthy (who don't use them).  Since the ideas that comprise US conservatism are largely created for the benefit of non-human entities, ie, corporations, and non-rational belief systems, ie, religion, You wouldn't expect the conservative point of view to have much cogency.  It doesn't.  So you just have to believe it and avoid thinking about it.Consequently, people on the right march better than people on the left.

This is fundamentally different from a lot of liberal ideas, which for starters, don't come in a bundle.  This is part of why it's tough to organize left-wingers.  They don't march as well as right-wingers.  And quite possibly, they aren't motivated by the same kind of noisy stuff.  Especially when it's reactionary.  A ton of liberal talk radio is devoted to pointing out the lies of right wing media.  I hope you can appreciate how distracting that is.

You want to convince me of something? Here's how you go about it.  You explain the context as you see it and give a reasoned argument for your views.  Or if you don't have one, express your feeling and go on.  Being all loud and mad-sounding about it just makes me tune out.

Remember, the left invented PBS.       

*Conservatives are a consortium of disparate entities who agree to believe a specific set of things.  Conservative beliefs are summarized as follows:

Border security is more important than food security
Israel has an important role to play in US imperialism/Armageddon
Gun rights are more important than human rights

Free market capitalism works even when it clearly doesn't
Unbending adherence to beliefs on principle is a personality strength
Christian morality is the only morality
Kids are for everybody whether they want them or not
Incorrect notions about the founding fathers aren't
No to taxes, but yes to increasing government spending exponentially. 
God hates it when you're gay.
 
Military intervention is the work we undertake for God and country
Old-fashioned values are best, except where they seem socialist
Religion should be mandatory in public school
Observe the US constitution and interpret it our way
New world order is the only logical order
States' rights are great because corporations can bully states easier than the fed

Drug decriminalization in Mexico has failed to destroy society as promised

Personal possession of most of the drugs you've ever heard of was decriminalized in Mexico around a year ago.  Somehow, this landmark change in drug policy wasn't much discussed in US media.  So far, the result of this has been that the Mexican government has more money to spend going after organized criminals.  This increase in meaningful drug war activity may be why it's been a fairly violent year in Mexico, which you might have heard about.  It's not actually the most drug violence in Mexico in recent memory, though, which is also something that isn't put into context in the US media treatments of Mexican drug violence I've read lately.  I thought that Mexico had a record number of murders this year, because they have had a lot.  But it turns out the recent figures aren't even close to the kind of killing during the'80s.

In latin America, it has become a commonly held belief that the drug war is impossible for anti-drug elements to win.  The pro-drug team has the anti-drug team outclassed in terms of intelligence networks, weaponry, and possibly even public sentiment.  They have way more money to throw at the problem, and are indeed the means of financial livelihood for a number of people who would not otherwise be able to feed their families.*

Generally, personal drug possession decriminalization has almost no effect on drug use, supply, or demand.  I think this is an argument for drug decriminalization, personally.  I suppose it would be nice if legal possession reduced one of those things, but it doesn't.  If it made use more common, that would be an argument against decriminalization in some people's books, since it would mean that there would be more criminal behavior in trafficking and dealing to keep up with demand.  Since it has no effect except to put drug users in jail, we should stop doing it.  After all, it's expensive and it doesn't do anything.  

This is why Latin American countries are decriminalizing personal drug use, by the way.  They don't care any more than our government whether or not drugs or drug policies are harmful to people.  It's just that keeping so many people in prison is expensive.  So they've decided to make the use of drugs legal... sort of.

Mexico has a peculiar set of legal limits of each drug.  Peruse the follow list and tell me if anything jumps out at you.

Drug	Quantity
Opium (raw, smokable)	5	gm
Heroin	25	mg
Marijuana	5	gm
Cocaine	500	mg
LSD	0.015	mg
MDA	200	mg
MDMA (ecstacy)	200	mg
Mescaline	1	gm
Peyote	1	kg
Psilocybin (concentrate, pure active ingredient)	100	mg
Hallucinogenic mushrooms (raw, off the farm)	250	mg
Amphetamines	100	mg
Dexamphetamine	40	mg
Phencyclidine (PCP)	7	mg
Methamphetamines	200	mg
Nalbuphine (synthetic opiate)	10	mg

 Does it strike you as at all odd that A person can carry a kilogram of peyote for personal use, but only 15 micrograms of LSD?  In case you aren't familiar, 150 micrograms is generally considered to be a dose of LSD.  Below 20 mics, no one would even notice they'd taken a drug. 
Peyote gets you high because it contains Mescaline.  The effective dose for Mescaline, which has more in common with LSD than the other drugs on this list, is around 250 milligrams.  a kilogram of dried peyote has about 36 grams of mescaline in it.  That would be enough peyote to make 144 people hallucinate and gibber for the rest of the day.  Then again, a person can only carry up to one gram of pure mescaline (the same drug as peyote, you understand)  which is to say, about a sugar cube's worth, but peculiarly, the dried plant is legal in volumes that would be a significant bulge in your knapsack. 

The psilocybin/mushrooms limits have the opposite problem.  A 1/4 gram of dried psilocybin mushroom is well below the psychoactive threshold.  A common dosage would be about 2 grams.  But 2 grams of dried mushroom would contain about 10mg of psilocybin, the active chemical.  If you just carry the chemical itself, you can have 10 times that much.  That strikes me as a strange rule.

The law says in effect that you can have enough fresh peyote for 100 people, or less mescaline than you can use yourself, and you can have too little mushroom to get high, but enough psylocybin for ten people. Ah well, hey, okay, whatever.  It doesn't totally make sense, but it's a start.  I assume that the folks who came up with this policy were not familiar with these particular drugs.  They made some strange choices.  It beats sending people to prison for carrying a few joints, anyway.

Anyhow, I made up the map you see here that indicates the legal status of drug use in various Latin American countries.  I couldn't find any reliable info for Suriname or French Guiana, but I did find this peculiar fact the other day.  Residents of Suriname made a liqueur out of avocados.  This drink had a thick texture like a pudding, but packed around the same alcohol content by volume as wine.  These folks couldn't get avocados anymore when they moved to the Netherlands, so they used custard to mimic the texture instead.  This delightful relative of eggnog is called advocaat.  

Back to the map, Uruguay gets special mention because drugs haven't ever been illegal there.  The Brazilian government has recently decided that drug users need counseling rather than jail time, so they're heading in the right direction. 

As you can see, Latin America is leading the world in drug legalization.  I think it's probably a good sign.  It may be a sign of what's to come, too.  Ain't the future grand?


* I could tell you about it, or you could watch movies on the drug war and see these people explain it themselves, so I leave it to you if you're inclined.  I highly recommend a documentary called Drug Wars: the Rise and Fall of the Worlds Largest Drug Cartels.  This movie is a 4-part series, and is badly edited, but extremely informative.  It's pretty unbiased, and will make you think about this stuff in different ways.  You can stream it on Netflix or buy it at Amazon.  It really is a great survey of drug use worldwide. 

Anchorage bicycle law about to be rewritten to be more stupid.

The Municipality of Anchorage Traffic Code is being rewritten this year.  The rules governing the use of roads and sidewalks are all being reviewed with the intention of bringing them into sync with the driving conditions of our city.  This sounds like a neat idea, but dig this proposed addendum to Anchorage bicycle law:

9.38.060(c): C. Persons operating a bicycle upon a sidewalk, recreational trail or bike trail

must yield the right-of-way to traffic before crossing a roadway, street, or driveway.

The justification for this rule is practical-sounding and goes something like this.  The right-of-way given to pedestrians crossing streets is based on the idea that the rider is going slowly enough to be seen by drivers.  But since bikes can go really fast, they are harder to anticipate, and so drivers shouldn't be held responsible for making sure they don't run them over.  This is a leading cause of accidents, and so by changing the law, we can make riders more responsible, and so avoid accidents.

The problem with that idea is that it's based on the faulty reasoning that bicycles are darting into the roadway in front of vehicles because they have the right of way and so causing accidents.  That's not actually what happens.  What actually happens is that bikers, and walkers for that matter, often travel on the left sidewalk of a road, facing oncoming traffic.  If you drive a car, you know that when turning right onto a street, the cars you are merging with are all coming from the left.  Thus, cars merging on to the street who want to avoid getting into vehicle collisions will generally be looking left while they are turning right. These people are engaging in what I refer to as Backwards-Looking, Oppositely-Oriented Driving (BLOOD).  They are actually the leading cause of vehicle/pedestrian accidents, since they aren't looking where they're going.

Nearly everybody who drives a car does this.  It's not rare in the slightest.  It's the most practical way to merge a vehicle into traffic.  The problem is, and this really should be the problem of the driver, that pedestrians can be coming from the other direction.  They usually aren't coming, because there aren't many pedestrians on most Anchorage roads.  That doesn't change the fact that people driving big machines around should be aware of where they are putting them at all times.  Giving them the right-of-way over pedestrians is definitely not going to make this happen.

Personally, I've been hit by cars on two occasions.  They were both caused in the same way:  I was crossing a street and the driver was turning right.  The first time, I was on the left sidewalk and they didn't see me until shortly after they hit me. They just looked at me and kept going, since I didn't appear to be hurt.  They didn't even stop.   

Here's a little thought experiment:  cars merging cause a large number of accidents.  So here's what we can do about it: give them the right-of-way.  That way, cars going straight on a roadway know that they have to yield to cars turning on to the roadway.  It's flawless, right?  That ought to prevent tons of vehicle collisions.  Write your assembly member.

I have a friend, let's call him Manfred, who is a regular bicycle commuter.  Prior to becoming one, he was a regular rollerblader.  When Manfred and I first started hanging out, we were riding somewhere up the left sidewalk. A car waiting to turn right pulled out in front of us in the crosswalk, causing us to stop riding so that we didn't get run over.  The driver then proceeded to turn onto the road, and never at any point did they so much as glance in our direction.  So my friend spat right on their passenger side window.  The driver didn't notice.  Manfred said he used to do that all the time back in his rollerblading days.  If they didn't notice getting a loogie on their window, they wouldn't have noticed running us over till it had already happened.   

To prevent both accidents and window loogies, I recommend the following addendum to the Anchorage Traffic Code:

9.22.010: A (continued). Drivers turning right shall turn their fucking neck and see if they're about to drive into something before they begin their turn.

 To sum up, giving cars the right of way isn't going to prevent vehicle/bicycle collisions.  However, it may increase the number of bewildered drivers trying to figure out who spit on their windshield.

I awoke yesterday morning to discover that our lovely houseguest had made hard-boiled eggs.  I like hard-boiled eggs.  I don’t really have cooking them worked out, so I don’t ever make them, but they’re pretty much the funnest food to eat.  They certainly have the highest fun to difficulty ratio of any food I can think of.  I like to carry them in my pocket.  It makes me feel like I’m carrying a delightful secret.  Plus, the shape of an egg is so agreeable for general fidgeting purposes.  Have you ever sat at a table and idly spun a hard-boiled egg?  You haven’t lived till you’ve done that. 

If there were no such thing as Easter, and no one had ever thought of painting eggs before, I’d have thought of it by myself, I’m certain of it.  The world is full of insane inventions that I can honestly say would never have occurred to me at all, not even in part, and it’s comforting to me to know that this one thing, painting hard-boiled eggs, would have been an invention I could count on.  I don’t really know how pulleys work, or why they don’t work when I think they should.  When my car stops working right, I have as much chance of making it run again by myself as a tobogganer has of making the mountain taller (though I do open the hood anyway).

I have an idea for an invention.  It’s a collapsible stepladder that’s shaped like a three-tiered wedding cake.  Instead of carrying it, you just roll it where you want to go, then pull it up, and viola.  Who doesn’t want to stand on a cake?  It would have a rubberized traction layer that was very reminiscent of frosting, which also made for easy rolling.  Cakes are, in part, made of eggs.

Once, at a céilidh, I met a guy who had invented a revolutionary new kind of mop and needed people to invest in their manufacture so that he could become a rich man and god among custodians.  I’m not making this up.  He needed like $15,000 to make the mop heads and he figured every custodian in the world would be stoked to buy one.  I told him that I didn’t have any money, though I wished him well, and that I had actually come to the céilidh to dance with girls, not talk to custodians, no matter how visionary.  I had had eggs for breakfast that morning.

Whenever I fry eggs, I always crack the first egg right in the middle of the pan.  This makes the finished yolk constellation pretty limited.  The shape is always set to some kind of lopsided thing by that middle egg, unless I cook six more and take care to arrange them around the middle one in a circle, which I’ve never quite done.  I ought to think it out beforehand, but I’m not a morning person.

I can never be sure how the egg I’m about to crack will turn out.  I fry eggs nearly every day, usually 3-5 of them, and I still always end up with the pan too hot or the oil to sparse.  Every egg I crack causes albumen to get on my fingers, which I think is a little bit gross.

Make a little birdhouse in your cathouse

 It's not clear what cockatiels are saying, It is clear that they mean it emphatically.

There's this house in my neighborhood that has cats. It was the first thing I noticed about the place, because I noticed the cats slinking around the neighborhood over a block away. I couldn't tell you how many cats live there. at least a dozen.

They all seem like pretty good cats, all things considered. A good chunk of them are related, I believe, and many of them clearly are not, so I suppose they have the makings of a good cat society: the family aspect, clanishness, to encourage sticking together, but with enough genetic diversity to keep fresh generations from getting harelips and things. They mostly seem to live on the front porch during the Summer, which is to say that the cat density is highest there, though individual members of the household probably wander as far as flat Top when the urge strikes them. They certainly set the tone for the surrounding block, which is to say that it is full of furtive, wide-eyed shadows crouching under cars and trees, and noticeably empty of mice.*

I'd say the cats have the run of the house, except that they don't appear to. I've never actually seen any people who live there, but each window on the South side of the house leads to an outdoor aviary which is full of cockatiels. Consequently, the East, South and West sides of the house are full of cockatiel noises, which are stunning, and then stunning again when you realize that they aren't being played on a nature sounds cd or something, but are actually piping fresh from the vocal cords of a flock of actual birds, that, as I have described, live in the house. The outside of the aviary frequently has cats crawling on it, trying to figure out some way to get those paint-feathered assholes to shut up for a minute.
With that visual and auditory barrage going on, the placid waddle and low murmur of the ducks in their pond on the house’s Southeast corner might go completely unnoticed.

Given all this, it should not surprise you particularly to learn that the house next door is for sale, and has been for some time, despite its quite reasonable asking price.

I’m always conflicted by things like these. The people who I must infer live there obviously put a great deal of energy into keeping these animals, and keeping them from killing one another. This would seem to suggest that they like their life the way it is. I feel a kind of jealousy. I imagine these Francis of Assisi types sitting I their sunny home, which contains a fountain in the living room, speaking to their birds and cats, their lives somehow serene. I also feel a squirmy kind of pity. I imagine them sitting, frazzled on their ruined furniture with their flock of birds and their herd of cats and whatever else they’ve got in there, feeling somehow a slave to the degenerate flow from two birds and three cats to four birds and six cats, to what the hell’s the difference, sure, we’ll take ‘em, we’re already deaf anyway and the toxoplasmosis isn’t so bad once you get used to it.

There but for fortune go me, anyway.  Except that I don't think I like birds much.


*I am actually referring to mouselike creatures of all kinds, as well as largish beetles, spiders, flies, unwary songbirds and anything else which has the unfortunate qualities of being smaller and slower than a cat, and therefore becomes a thing for a cat to play with until the thing dies, or if it thinks of it in time, feigns death. Those possessed of the mentality or instinct for playing possum, if they do it convincingly enough, find the experience of having to do so unpleasant, and usually find some other neighborhood to be small and slow in.

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.