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barton cole :: veni, vedi, vero scripsi
 Friday, January 16, 2009
Once upon a time, I was a "cat person." That's right - I was devoted to my cats, but didn't have time for dogs, and couldn't, in fact, understand why someone would want to live with one and deal with all the work: the walking, the dealing with the crap…
Still, there were some dogs that I admired, but as a rule, I was pretty ambivalent about dogs.
Part of my awakening as an adult over the last twenty years or so has been a constant and deeper embedment with my natural surroundings - I pay more attention to the flora and fauna, and couldn't be happier than I was today, for instance, when I was working in the woods, and chirped at a winter wren, encouraging it to be interested and follow me, which it did (they're my favorite small bird - which may be on the quiz). Not long after, a douglas squirrel (native to woods in our region) got my attention by chirping at me from a few feet higher on a douglas fir. I was on my way to my truck for a tool, so I told him to hang on: I'd have some nuts for him in a few minutes…
[NB: I keep nuts - usually pistachios, since everybody likes them - and birdseed - blend of black oil sunflower and cracked corn - and dog biscuits stashed in my truck, so I can feed whoever might be around - occasionally, chickadees, which are highly gregarious, will eat out of my hand]
But I never had time for dogs, as devoted to animals as I felt I was, and declared myself to be.
Eventually, I realized I was nothing but an elitist - ever the trap, especially when humans think about animals, or in the case of Orwell's Animal Farm, when animals think about themselves: "Four legs good… two legs better!"
I made a rational decision that I needed to embrace dogs, and be curious about them, and get to know them, and include them in my personal zodiac (circle of animals).
It wasn't that I got to know a special dog, who made me feel deeper about dogs, but being a Capricorn, I was rational (I believe I tend to be, although I'm sure I could find dissent), and decided to feel deeper about dogs.
And for this task - to be the ambassador for all dogs everywhere in my life - I chose the nastiest, little dog I knew - an obnoxious Chihuahua that belonged to a nutso woman that I worked with.
He was one of those dogs that didn't understand my boundaries, and would leap in my lap spontaneously - even when I had seen him coming and tried, discreetly, to actively discourage it (had to be discreet - it was politically unwise for the nutjob dog's nutjob owner to realize that this particular nutjob - me - didn't like her dog - in fact, would have moved slowly if an eagle were swooping down after the dog…)
I decided that I would befriend this nasty little dog, and that by having through this intense hazing ordeal, this trial by nasty dog, I would be welcomed in the Dog Clan (as I am in the Wren Clan and Squirrel Clan, as noted above, and if you follow me…).
Quite an undertaking, really, but insert your own mental montage of me befriending the dog, giving it treats of my own when I declared my satisfaction with its behavior, which improved… you may complete your montage with me sitting on a bench next to the dog looking over the East River at Manhattan and the sunset, but that's just a bit too much of a stretch. Suffice it to say that I did become friends with this little dog, who also befriended me.
  A few years later, I met my cousin's dog, Mauritz, in Germany. He's a Hofawart (Hoe-fuh-vart) which means "farm guardian" auf Deutsch), and was bred in East Germany, known for breeders and trainers of gentle dogs, while the West Germans bred them for police work.
A big dog, Mauritz was also handsome, with the false eyespots and the black-and-tan gorgeous long coat.
I had learned that the best way to approach a dog, when meeting it, was to ask it to do something, and praise it when it complied.
I gave Morris my standard suggestion, "Sit." But he wouldn't. Most dogs, in my experience, know that one - in fact, I am usually stunned when I meet a dog who won't simply sit.
Oops - I remembered where I was, and asked again, quite politely, "Mauritz, setzen Sie, bitte," and he promptly did.
I met another dog on that journey, an Irish dog living in Hamburg, who spoke no German at all, but his English was quite good...
I got to know Mauritz well during the two weeks I spent with him, and discovered that he had a fundamental understanding of geometry:
Like many dogs, Mauritz was into "The Ball." He would prance and leap through tall grass, which was splendid to see, and dash across the yard after it; a favorite game was to walk around the yard with a beer (a Flensburger Pilsener), kicking the ball for Mauritz, who would scamper after it, and return it, tossing it with a flip of his chin to give it a little air, so it would bounce a bit, so you could boot it farther.
But if the ball were on the ground, and you were poised to kick it, Mauritz would line himself up with it about three meters away like a lineup for a soccer penalty kick.
If, as you addressed the ball, poised to kick, you stepped to the side, Mauritz would shift himself accordingly, so that all three components were on a line, geometrically. A small step by the one with the ball, but he would have to step a couple of meters to the side, which he would do with gusto. The game was economical that way, giving Mauritz much sport as one did a slow foxtrot at the ball, beer in hand.
Although a rural resident, I saw Mauritz in action in an "urban" environment, walking in a little town near Denmark - he stopped at all the curbs until instructed to proceed, a skill he learned when young and living in Hamburg.
These dogs taught me that they have an excellent capacity for complying with instructions, but like anybody, they need the instructions to be clear.
Today, I was at the lumber yard getting some quotes on materials; while I leaned on the counter, one of the staff asked me, "Do you have a black dog?"
I raised an eyebrow.
"No," I said, "why?"
"There's one just walked by the door, outside."
"Oh," I told him, "If I had a black dog, it would be right here with me, and you'd be amazed at what a good dog it is."
What's a good dog?
A dog who does just what you tell it to do. You give a dog a clear job description, and they're off and running, eager to get the task done. All you need to be is clear (a subtle Zenmaster thing that dogs can do, similar to the Zenmaster thing that cats can do, showing us ways to live - in this case, by seeking mental clarity - if you can explain it to your dog, you can understand yourself).
 I know another dog, my friend Choux, who was described to me, when I met her, as "a really dumb dog."
Well, in my experience, dogs aren't dumb - they're good at doing what they're told to do. If you think a dog is dumb, maybe you're dumb. The Zen mirror again (which, being a Zen mirror, is Empty).
Within five minutes after meeting this "dumb" pooch, she was looking at me, waiting for the subtle shift of eyebrow and nod to indicate that she could now eat the cookie that was sitting on the ground between her two front feet, which she was too nervous to even look at, fixating on me instead.
She has since learned how to hold a cookie on her long, slender nose - cross-eyed dogs are particularly charming - and wait for the nod. Smart pooch.
And I dispense lots of loving to my dog friends, knowing that I will start out, as a default, right up at or near the top of their hierarchy, and that they will want lots of jovial praise.
Dogs, like lots of other animals, tend to like me, and I like them.
I see a couple of guys who walk by my house with their dogs; neither of them uses a leash, but the behavior is totally different.
One of the guys walks in the morning, past my house every day, no matter what the weather, with his old Russian wolfhound walking alongside, the two of them in tandem, connected like Fred and Ginger, even when the dog is checking out who peed on the fence post, then picking up and catching up.
I enjoy this simple evidence of mutual respect, how the two of them pay attention to each other, and walk together.
This other dude, though, is a different story. The dog, an old golden retriever, comes in my yard and carries out his annoying dog business, and eating the food left out on the shrine for the crows to eat, and I holler at him to leave and he won't . I holler at his dude, who often walks along reading the local newspaper, "Hey, get your [goddam] dog out of my [goddam] yard!"
Both the dudes in this scenario, human and dog, aren't paying attention.
But if you work with a dog, and make it clear what you like and don't like, you can encourage them to engage in all kinds of fun, proactive behavior, and find fulfillment by completing the task you have set out for them.
And of course, I am obligated to make an ironic leap out of all this, but I will do that tomorrow.
Thursday, January 15, 2009
 I couldn't think of anything else to write about, so I'll write a bit about the source image I used for this page - the Crow Screen, a hallmark of the collections at Seattle's Asian Art Museum.
They're a pair of painted, six-panel screens, about fifteen feet long (each), and six feet high? Something like that.
As many times as I have stood in front of the screens when visiting the museum, I have never counted how many crows are painted on the screens, but I would guess there are about one-hundred-fifty in all?
The screens are usually on display at the Seattle Asian Art Museum (SAAM), being, as I mentioned, featured items there.
Once, though, I confessed to a woman I knew, when she asked me what I wanted for my birthday, that I would like to see the Crow Screens when they are not available to the public - a private viewing, I suppose.
Rather bold of me, I was told, but my friend, who worked for years at the Seattle Art Museum, might yet have connections that would enable me to have my wish fulfilled.
It took some doing - such as fielding questions about my credentials, and worthiness for such a private viewing, but my friend apparently held me and my desire in high enough regard to influence the museum staff, her old colleagues, to set the screens up in the basement.
Years ago, my dad was heavily involved with the Puget Sound Maritime Historical Society; the officers would meet weekly at The Museum of History and Industry (which has the iconic stuff polar bear seen widely), and I had the run of the museum.
Among other things, in the summer, I would use the working periscope, which was installed on the roof, but penetrated to the main floor, from which you could see the view outdoors, to stare at girls taking the sun over at the ship canal embankment in their bikinis.
My favorite thing, though, was to scout around in the basement.
That's where the action is, at a museum. Think of it - you won't see more than about ten percent of a museum's holdings on display at a time, but to see the rest of the iceberg, stored some floors below the galleries, is astonishing.
And to see the Crow Screens set up in the basement, under poor artificial light, was magnificent. I was close enough to caress them with my eyelashes, although I made a point of not touching them.
And to see the brushstrokes; the painting is clearly a devotional work, painted by a passionate observer of crows and their demeanor.
For the theme image, Mr. Corax (the graphic designer who does much of our work) copied a section of the screens from a scanned image, then replaced the painted background with a stylized facsimile. You'll recognize the style of the original in the version Andy Corax set up for this site, but his is just enough different, I think.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
You can make alcohol out of anything that has fermentable solids - sugars, that is. Anything.
POWs making booze from potatoes? Sure, if you have barley (you need the enzymes to convert the starches to sugars - see barley).
Making the alcohol is easy - you just add yeast.
The yeast digests the sugar, converting it to carbon dioxide and alcohol.
Alcohol, as we know, is toxic - if it's too concentrated, it will kill the yeast, which generally can only handle around 8%. Some yeasts, such as those used in winemaking, might be able to manage higher concentrations, say 15%, but that's about it.
What about whisky, which is up above 40% alcohol?
[a note about "proof" - pure alcohol is 200 proof - which is unattainable, really, since alcohol absorbs moisture from its surroundings, so even pure alcohol is adulterated with water - 195 proof is as high as one can purify alcohol.
"Proof" refers to the first method employed to assess the alcohol content of a liquid - if a puddle of it caught fire, it was considered "proof" - as in, proof that the alcohol was sufficiently concentrated. This became known as "100 proof," which is 50% alcohol.]
The only way to make the alcohol more concentrated than where the yeast left off is to remove some of the water from the solution, to concentrate the alcohol.
Or, put another way, one has to pull the alcohol out of the solution. How is that done?
It's simple - in a solution of liquids of different boiling points, the solution will begin to boil at the lowest boiling point on the list of its contents.
"Boiling point" refers, of course, to the temperature at which the liquid overcomes the pressure pushing down on it and begins to escape the liquid - few days in a high school chemistry class will tell you that the energy of the molecules (from added heat) has now encouraged them to be so active they leave the solution.
Once that first solution has been entirely evaporated, the temperature of the solution will raise to the next boiling point on the list, and so on, until all the solutions have boiled out, and you're left with the ultimate solvent, water.
This is one way water can be purified, with the caveat that solids will still be in the solution - only the distillate, the liquid that has been evaporated, is really pure.
How can we exploit this concept with our freshly-fermented alcohol?
Perhaps you recall that the boiling point of water is 212° Fahrenheit (100° Celsius).
Yet the boiling point of ethanol (ethyl alcohol) is only 173°F (about 78°C).
So if we bring a jug of wine to the boil, it will boil at 173°F until all the alcohol has evaporated, and then, the boiling point goes up to the next one - in this case, to 212°F, since all that's left is water.
All that alcohol evaporated as steam (highly flammable, too, in case you attempt this at home); if only we could have captured it somehow, and condensed it back into liquid…
That's easily done, too - I think we all have the mental picture of a still, with a coil of copper tubing being somehow involved.
Of course, you can guess what the copper tubing is doing - the steamy alcohol is directed up it, and it condenses, by cooling off (the longer the tube, the more cooling you get - since you've increased the surface area of copper that can transfer heat from the distillate to the room). Out the other end drips pure alcohol.
My own still has a copper coil coming out the top, as well as an old outboard-motor heat exchanger, so I get excellent condensation - it is possible to have such a vigorous boil that the alcohol comes out the coil as steam, but it never does with my still.
I made mine from an old pressure-cooker, which, if you've worked with one much, has three holes in the lid - all with a function:
There is the pressure gauge, and the spring-loaded safety valve - basically a ball-bearing held down by a spring, but which, if the pressure climbs unsafely high, will allow pressure to escape by being budged out of the way.
And there is a little stop-cock, a tiny valve that one opens to let the air out, as it fills with steam, at the onset of pressure cooking.
[NB: pressure cooking works by being able to cook at a higher temperature - remembering that a boiling point represents a liquid's ability to overcome the atmospheric pressure keeping it in place - raise the pressure, and the boiling point goes up.]
To convert the pressure cooker to a still, I wouldn't need the pressure gauge, so I replaced that with a threaded piece of copper pipe, which was then connected to the condenser (the copper coil and heat-exchanger).
I kept the safety-valve, having heard stories about exploding stills (which generally happens when the grain in the mash - from which distillers don't remove the fermentable solids, but brewers do) clogs the coil. Pressure goes up - boom.
But the last little port, the little stopcock valve in the top, I replaced with a meat thermometer inserted into a cork, for a tight seal.
Why the thermometer?
Well, as soon as the alcohol is all evaporated, the thermometer would show that the temperature was rising, so I'd want to shut it down, not wanting to dilute my distilled alcohol with distilled water.
Once, I had made some cooking wine from a can of grape concentrate, but the protective covering on the fermentation vessel fell off, and it was in the sunlight for some days - all kinds of things started happening to the flavor, so it was unsuitable as cooking wine.
Didn't want to waste that alcohol, though - think of it: in a five-gallon batch of wine, with, say, a 10% alcohol concentration, that's a gallon of 100-proof booze. Let's get that out of there.
So I ran it through my still, and had some nice brandy - a bit raw, but nice. Did the job. I felt good, too, by rescuing an asset from what would seem to have been all waste.
Of course, the principles of distillation are easy to exploit - and anything sweet can be fermented - so read on, to learn about an adventure I had, once upon a time, during my long-and-checkered career as a mercenary cook:
I was the sous chef in a restaurant in Seattle. We did a huge Mother's Day brunch business (a big day in the restaurant year, as I'm sure you can imagine), but even though we served hundreds of plates, we ended the day with about eight gallons of fresh-squeezed orange juice left over (out of about thirty or so).
I noticed them every day in the walk-in refrigerator, wondering what to make from them that we could sell.
A few days later, the jugs began to swell - clearly, fermentation was already beginning… which gave me an idea:
I instructed one of the cooks to prepare a large pot by sanitizing it (washing it out with bleach - didn't want any microbes in there other than the yeast), and then to dump in the orange juice.
To make sure our efforts were more than worthwhile, I also had him dump in about five pounds of sugar, and stir it up.
Then, some yeast from the baker, cover the pot, and put it away (discreetly - it was fun to imagine we could do this without the chef knowing).
Fermentation doesn't take that long, if the conditions are favorable (room temperature is excellent) - in this case, I determined that fermentation was complete after about a week.
Meanwhile, there was a curious, fruity fragrance emanating from the storeroom - which the chef noticed and asked about, but after telling him that none of the rest of us could smell it, he ignored it.
Okay - now we had converted orange juice into orange wine - how to get the alcohol out of it?
Fortunately, I am blessed with attributes that would benefit me on a desert island, or in prison… I know how to make things: alcohol, soap, bread, cheese…
And, being a devotee of alcohol manufacture, I knew the principles behind distilling, and could utilize them to our advantage, using materials one would find in any kitchen.
Let's think it through - there is alcohol in the orange wine that we want to remove: simple to do, merely boil it out.
But we want to condense that vaporized alcohol and collect it - also simple to do: merely put a lid on the pot - the steam will condense there and drop back into the pot.
We want to remove the alcohol though, so how can we prevent it from falling back into the wine?
In my reading on distillation , I've learned of an old desert trick for getting water: dig a deep hole in the ground, cover it with a tarp that has a rock in the middle of it. Put your hat in the hole, under the depression caused by the weight of the rock.
The heat from the sun evaporates any moisture in the soil, which condenses on the tarp, and runs down to the low spot, created by the weight of the rock. From there, it drips into the hat. Now, you have water to drink with.
In our case, if we set up a bowl, rather than the pot lid, that was larger in diameter than the open top of the pot, we could condense the steam, which would run down to the low spot - the bottom of the bowl - and drop back into the liquid.
If there were another bowl below the drips, to catch them, like the hat in the desert pit…
So we set up an old colander in the pot, down in the wine, which supported a smaller bowl, and kept it up out of the boiling wine.
We filled the large bowl, which was serving as the lid, with ice, to enhance condensation.
Fired it up, and an hour later, had a nice two quarts of orange brandy ("brandy" being the generic term for distillate from fruit wine).
Everything worked as planned. It was easy, amazing, and empowering for the staff, since they had just done the impossible - turned orange juice, about to spoil, into alcohol, and distilled it.
All with items one would find in any kitchen.
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Once upon a time, we had two ways to be found: our telephone number, and our address. If you wanted, you could have an unlisted number and a PO box; you could keep a pretty low profile.
Now we have email addresses, too, and often, more than one.
And a business line, and maybe also a fax, and of course, a cell phone number - I think about Tony Robert's character in Woody Allen's film, Play it Again, Sam - constantly leaving numbers with his secretary so she'd know how to reach him - but now, we have many addresses that hook us into the web.
Many now have a presence on the web - a MySpace page, or the Book of Faces, or a blog, or maybe they're real mavericks and have their own website.
Here I am, for example, writing in this blog - which I'd rather not think of as a blog, but as a venue for essays - since that's what I like - and intend - to write. I mean no disservice to the devoted "bloggers" out there, but I just don't want to think of myself as one. An essayist, but not a blogger -
I have other sites, too:
A personal favorite is geniusweirdo.org - I've realized that many of the items which might appear here would also be good to have on that site (visit it and you'll see what I mean), and no doubt, some of the stuff on there might show up, in some form, here.
Another web concept I'm working with is Argyle9. Check it out. I wouldn't know how to begin describing it, anyway.
Sue Frause, a friend of mine, writes a blog; mostly about her travels, she also writes about life here on our island. Once upon a time, Sue, who has been around in the publication business for some time, wrote for the local paper. Each week, she'd have a little sidebar featuring her Best Bets. I was headlining a poetry reading, and Sue wrote it up (the favorable attention definitely contributed to the size of the crowd - thanks, Sue). However, my name was spelled "Baron," without the "t" that makes it "barton."
I wrote a reply:
"While I am flattered to have been mentioned in your "Best Bets," Mrs. Frause, I must point out a slight error: You refer to me as a Baron, but I am actually a Viscount (a mere notch above a baron in the peerage), a title conferred upon me by Rex Incognito,the Very King of Langley Himself.
Protocol dictates that use of my title is optional at all times."
Often, if a local is engaged in something she finds noteworthy, she'll interview them and feature them on her blog.
Apparently, I'm the noteworthy one this time around.
The local arts center is having a fundraiser show called "Something to Crow About," and I learned, via the invitation in the mail, that I was to be the entertainment. That's appropriate, I suppose, and appropriate, considering that it's a show invoking Crow Energy, that I found out in a weird way -
Sue had mentioned something about it some months ago, last year, but then it was rescheduled, and I hadn't heard much about it.
"This show has had more glitches," Sue said when I brought the curious disposition of my recruitment to her attention. "You know? I think it's the Crow Thing."
"Gee, Sue - do you think?"
So she interviewed me for her blog today; we met at the Useless Bay Coffeehouse, here in Langley, on Whidbey Island, off the northwest coast of America. As befits an interview, I was actually interviewing her for my blog -
 I did learn much about Sue during our hour-and-a-half together, but it's personal stuff, so I'll leave it for now.
One thing that was a bit comical - she wanted to take my picture, as she does, but pointed out that Gary, who owns Mukilteo Coffee Company, out in the woods, chided Sue for conducting her meetings and interviews at Useless Bay Coffee Company here in Langley. "I don't even want to mention where I met them any more," she said, "but people will be able to tell from the picture," sweeping in the surroundings as if washing them off glass.
"I know - "I told her, "I have a picture of myself in just about the position you find me here, but at a table outside a coffee bar on the Boulevard du Montparnasse in Paris in the summer."
I went on to suggest that we met there, so she could use the photo and claim it as her own.
Monday, January 12, 2009
I live in a little town, across the street from a pasture. I was telling someone who had asked where I lived that I was on "Cemetery Road [our name for the road that leads to the graveyard], a few houses up from the corner."
"On which side of the street?" she asked.
"Well," I said, "since I'm not a cow, I must be on the left."
She was a bit put-off by my smart-alecky remark, but it was a silly question.
You get to know the cows. When the apples are ripe, we'll toss windfalls over the fence - "Hey - want to see a stampede?"
There has been a black cow standing in attendance over her black calf, who has had some challenges. It's a small, new guy, but one day a week or so ago, I saw it just laying next to the fence that divides the pasture, and by the end of the day, I was concerned that it was even alive, since I hadn't seen it move all day.
It showed up elsewhere, so it was somewhat mobile, but two nights ago, its mother was bellowing, and keeping it up for hours, all night.
Yesterday, there was activity at the gate; Jans, the farmer, had driven his truck into the pasture, and so had another large truck; I heard Jans holler from across the field, "You don't have to close the gate, Doctor…" so the vet had arrived.
I was working on cleaning out the truck at the time, so was outside when this was happening.
I was curious about the activity - three trucks were across the pasture, parked side-by-side, next to the calf.
Soon, the vet was driving away. I figured that was either a good sign, or a bad one.
I looked out across the pasture and saw that Jans had moved his truck, apparently, so he was parked next to the calf, and facing north - it had been south before. I saw the calf making some motions, as if it were trying to get up, and looked away. Went back to work on the truck.
A few minutes later, he came driving across the pasture and had parked his truck across the road from his fence. He was over to close the gate.
I went out to see what was going on.
"Hey," I said, "my guess is that you fellows were attending to the calf? We'd noticed its mother bellowing all night…"
"Yeah," he said, "the vet was here…"
"Is everything okay with it?"
"No, it's dead."
By this time, I had approached close enough to see that he was upset by it.
"I'm sorry," I told him.
"That calf was born on December 16th, and it's never been right," he said. I mentioned that I had seen it most days just laying in one spot all day.
"It had septic arthritis in both front legs," he said.
"I had to knock it on the head."
I realized that I had witnessed some of its death throes - and that Jans had likely parked his truck next to it to obscure his deed from view of the houses across the road.
"I'm awfully sorry," I said.
"Well, the only bright side, if there is a bright side at all, is that it was a bull, and not a heifer - they're going to be my replacement cows in a few years…"
I thought about the cows there now, some of whom I feel close to, recognizing from afar, designating thrown apples for…
"I had five black calves, now I have four."
Meanwhile, I had helped him get the gate back on the two pegs, lined up like hinges. "You ought to try to do one of these yourself," he said, unaware that I may be a bohemian, but I know my way around farm work.
I reached out and shook his hand - the hand that had raised a hammer to strike the calf - I felt compelled to take some of the energy away with me, so it wasn't all his…?
"What's your name again?" he asked.
"I'm Barton Cole, I live right here," I said, gesturing at my little house.
"Yeah, I know where you live, I'm just real bad with names," he said.
"That's okay - I can keep track for both of us," I said, which has become my stock thing to say when someone says that.
"If you ever need anything, here I am," I said. "Just let me know what I can do to help you out."
A couple of times during our conversation, I had glanced at his truck; the dead calf was in the back, but I couldn't see it.
A bit later, I heard the ravens over at the corner of his land; no doubt something had come their way, too.
Sunday, January 11, 2009
"Though I do not believe a plant will spring up
where no seed has been,
yet I have great faith in a seed.
Convince me you have a seed there, and
I am prepared to expect miracles."
-- Henry David Thoreau, Faith in a Seed
A seed is a package that conveys the plant's genetic material into the future, like a slingshot or a slow, persistent rolling ball, but forward -- think of a pod traveling through deep space, drifting among the stars, eventually arriving at landfall and deploying itself on its mission, which is to create the machine that makes more pods and shoots them into the future, again and again...
They're perfect machines, seeds. I find myself constantly amazed at the means by which they travel from the source plant to their destination. They store the instructions on how to deploy the mechanism, and how to utilize a native energy source efficiently. They just arrive, set up shop, and get busy.
Some seeds take longer to arrive than others: some plants rapidly grow and distribute seeds (think of dandelions, et al), while others seldom do, and perhaps not many seeds.
The seed; a projectile aimed at the future. And essentially, its goal is to propagate its genetic material into the future in a successful, self-replicating mechanism.
This is much the same as a book, isn't it? A repository for data, to propel it into the future, with the added imperative to propagate itself.
An idea is the same way - this, and the preceding notions, are outlined cleverly and compelling by Richard Dawkins, in his book, The Selfish Gene. His concept of a self-replicating idea, an abstraction, is called a meme.
This essay is a meme; a moderately successful one, I hope - i.e., able to self-replicate.
I learned, yesterday, that Monsanto had acquired Territorial Seeds; which, if true, meant that we sensitive organic gardeners would have a hard time doing business with them; Monsanto has long been accused of aggressive, global, agricultural terrorism, and our organic dollars are unable to support that.
The situation was hyperbolic, and before making scattershot, reactionary statements, I needed information.
Naturally, the search engine retrieved my downed fowl in nanoseconds, and I learned some of what was going on…
Monsanto had indeed acquired Seminis, the world's largest vegetable seed company. This gives Monsanto, the developer and promulgator of the "terminator gene," control over the largest quantity of vegetable genetic material on earth.
Without genetic diversity, most people on the planet would experience profound deprivation and famine in short order - imagine the square miles, upon thousands, in the Midwest United States, all planted with the same crop - say, corn - and all the same strain, likely from the same source.
Plants are under constant barrage from pathogens, just like everybody else. By being resistant to fungal and viral diseases, plants succeed in launching their projectiles into the future, blindly, although they might be launched into the bellies of the world.
If, however, a pathogen develops the ability to affect this up-to-date, genetically-modified foodstuff, there goes an area larger than the state of Illinois, not producing any food. Not only that, but likely providing a successful host for the pathogen to make landfall, so to speak.
Our cornucopia is in peril.
Botanists are constantly trying to stay one step ahead of the pathogens by breeding in resistant genes from strains which show favorable characteristics. Where do they get those? Often from "landraces;" strains grown in some remote valley far off in the world, and kept as heirlooms.
The fundamental right of our relationship with seeds is to be able to hold that projectile for a moment in your palm before you send it on its way to the future. It mustn't die, quivering its last, in your palm.
If Monsanto acquired Seminis, how does that affect Territorial and Johnny's? Not to mention all the other completely reputable seed companies out there…
Well, I have learned that, as you can imagine, seed production and distribution is complicated. For one, if a farmer is growing fields of cabbages that are seed crops, they mustn't be within a certain distance of any other of the cabbage family (broccoli, kale, Brussels sprouts, and on), lest the plants cross and the field produce some unintended hybrid seed.
Of course, this shuffling of genetics is how diversity generates new strains, with favorable traits or perhaps not, but it doesn't, in this case, serve the interests of the seed farmer - he wants to produce a wagonload of valuable, consistent, dependable-performer seeds, not some random hybrids. So they've got to work together, to ensure that they're not risking pollen "contamination" from neighboring fields. They plan and cooperate; the avenues of communication and resource development are serpentine and complex.
That's merely the arcane and complicated network and cooperation of the seed producers; the seed distributors are another layer in the web.
So companies like Territorial, et al, sell products generated by Seminis all the time. They have their own sources, true, but to fill in their inventory, they purchase it from a broker, who's getting it from the producer - being the world's largest seed producer, that's often Seminis, directly or indirectly.
Personally, I will do nothing that will line the pockets of Monsanto; consider this syllogism:
1. Monsanto has developed, patented, and deployed the "terminator gene," as well as other dangerous genetic modifications;
2. Monsanto now has control over the world's largest producer of plant genetic material;
Therefore, Monsanto is in a position of dangerous power...
The enlightened concern has been the issue of water rights, but what about the rights to genetic material?
It's no small leap to putting this plot in an international intrigue scenario, complete with the desire for world domination…
Think of it - if you control the access to seeds and genetic material, you control access to food.
Essentially, you have control over the human population of the world.
I won't support Monsanto. I won't, therefore, support Seminis. I think that also means that I won't support Territorial, and others.
What's to be done?
For one, as I discovered has already begun to happen, consumers should put pressure on seed companies to disclose, in their catalogs, who produced the seed, so they can make informed choices and support Territorial's own production of seed, and not support Seminis or its subsidiaries.
As our right to have access to genetic material, we also must demand access to information about its provenance.
Second, gardeners should endeavor to save their own seed.
I've been saving seed for years, among them, the garlic I replant every year, and also a lettuce of which I am quite fond that I have casually (but successfully, over some years) selected for cold-tolerance (it's a Cos type that handles snow just fine), slow-bolting, and superior flavor. It's also attractive.
I grow what other seeds I can, considering the need to isolate some plants and varieties, as described above.
There are many other gardeners who save seeds; now, they're aggregated into a successful network of their own, like the big producers: the Seed Saver's Exchange.
Members grow seed crops and make them available, essentially trading them with other gardeners for other seed crops.
Diversity is maintained - I have acquired dozens of different lettuce varieties from a gardener in Monroe, Washington, USA, who raises over four-hundred varieties of lettuce - that kicks the seed catalog offering way in the ass.
Many of the seeds available through the Seed Saver's Exchange are venerable, often nearly-forgotten heirloom varieties, many of them noteworthy for the home gardener, although unsuitable for market production - hence their marginalization - growing such plants enables gardeners to participate in the noble business of carrying on the genetic diversity, and thus saving the planet.
Again, the Action Steps:
1. demand that seed companies provide the provenance for the seeds they offer;
2. encourage legislation to demand it by contacting your elected officials;
3. save your own seeds, and propagate those projectiles, the future-seeking pods;
4. Join the Seed Saver's Exchange today.
Don't let a menace take away our access to genetic material.
Protect our seeds. A seed is the ultimate expression of hope and faith;
be a seed yourself.
Saturday, January 10, 2009
Let's represent a sugar molecule like this:
X
Although there are many different kinds of sugar (glucose, sucrose, fructose…), we'll keep it simple.
Take a little leap, though, and think of the molecule as C6H12O6 (six carbon molecules, twelve hydrogens, six oxygens - put together like building blocks).
String a bunch of sugars together, and you have a starch (just a long chain of sugar molecules):
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
A much longer chain of them gets you cellulose, which is wood fiber:
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Starch is an excellent way to store sugars for energy, which is why grains are starchy - they need that sugar to get the sprout up and out of the ground; the plant needs an energy supply until it can get some leaves photosynthesizing and making its own energy.
To break the starch down into sugars, you need enzymes - they take the chain apart.
The enzymes that take sugars apart are called amylases; enzymes that deconstruct proteins are called proteases, and fat-breaking enzymes are lipases…
There are two principle amylase enzymes: the alpha and the beta. The alpha assesses the starch molecule, finds the middle, and cuts it there, like this:
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX becomes
XXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXX
It keeps doing it, too - it will take those two halves and halve them again.
The beta enzyme works from the end of the starch molecule, taking off two glucose molecules at a time, like this:
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
becomes
XXXXXXXXXX XX XX XX XX XX XX XX
Barley is loaded with these enzymes, much more so than any other grain, an attribute we can exploit, as we'll see.
But it doesn't serve barley for the enzymes to convert its own starches to sugars until it needs them, so it has a meager supply, basically, until the seed gets "switched on," and its time to utilize that efficiently-stored energy (the starch molecule takes up far less room than the sugar molecules it's composed of, since it's kind of like a neat coil inside the grain, a tightly-packed chain).
How do you switch the seed on?
You sprout it.
In the case of barley, you soak it in water until it germinates, and the little, ambitious "acrospire" (the sprout) emerges.
When the acrospire is about ¾ as long as the grain, the enzyme count increases dramatically, much longer, and the enzymes will begin digesting the starches in earnest, but you want to hold off a bit…
So you switch the seed off. How?
You dry it out, so the acrospire withers, and that's that.
The barley you began with has now been "malted," and you now have "malted barley." That's all there is to it.
Beer is made from malted barley. How do you do that?
Beer is a fermented beverage, which means that the sugars have been converted to alcohol by yeast, which are simple organisms. Yeast digests sugar (just like we all do, fundamentally), excreting alcohol (C2H5OH) and carbon dioxide (CO2).
If you're into it, do the balance sheet -
Sugar: 6 C 12 H 6 O
Alcohol: 2C 6H 1O
Carbon dioxide: 1C 2O
If you balance it out, you see that one sugar molecule generates two alcohol molecules, and two carbon dioxide molecules, nothing left over.
(For extra credit, ponder how plants use CO2 and water [H2O] to make sugars, including chains of starches, and obviously, cellulose [plant fiber, remember?]).
Looks like making alcohol is going to be pretty easy - start with malted barley, get some yeast…
You've got to make conditions favorable for the enzymes in the barley to convert the starches to sugars; turns out that the ideal conditions are wet heat - around 150°.
First, though, you have to render the grains into a form that makes it as easy as possible for the enzymes to get at the starches, so it gets crushed by passing it between rollers.
If you add water that's hotter than 150°, and plan it out ahead of time so you start with water of the right temperature, once you add it to the crushed, malted barley, the temperature settles into the favorable range. Of course, it's also possible to apply heat to the wet, crushed grains to get the temperature into the zone.
This is called a "mash."
I always wanted to know what one was; see rapid research.
And the enzymes get busy - soon, they have converted all the starches into sugars, which is easy to verify: pull out a spoonful of the grains and drop some iodine into them - from chemistry class years ago, you may recall that iodine, which is red, turns black when it contacts starch - one simply tests for the presence of starch until it isn't present any more, maintaining the temperature of the mash in the favorable range.
Now, you have a mass of wet, crushed, malted barley that is now sweet - all the starches have been converted. Bootleggers go this far and add yeast, fermenting it until the yeast activity ceases, once the yeasts have converted all the sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide. Then they distill it (a topic for another day, but a dear one, to me).
Brewers, though, start the same way, but have to get the sugars out of the grains - who wants porridge in their beer?
Usually, they'll put the mash in a pot that has a screen bottom, and wash the sugars out of the grains with hot water, collecting the water and putting it in a pot.
This is called "wort," and once it's boiled with hops (a perennial vine with bitter flowers growing in clusters like grapes), it can be fermented and will have become beer (sake, generally called "rice wine," having been made from grain is actually "rice beer").
Pretty straightforward stuff, really. Beer has been around for over four thousand years, having been invented in Mesopotamia.
How would someone know what to do to the grain to make beer out of it, though?
It was either advice from the alien overlords who seeded the earth with people and ideas, or it happened accidentally, which is easy to imagine:
Let's say you have a sack of grain, and it rains. The grain sprouts.
But you want to eat it, not plant it, so you try to rescue it by drying it out.
Darn it, though! It gets wet again, but this time, you don't catch it until it's been there for a couple of weeks, the grains floating around, and now yeast has gotten at it - which is common, there being so many yeasts drifting around.
It's really ruined now, but not wanting to throw it out, you eat some of the grains, and discover alcohol in the process.
For extreme extra credit, consider this:
Agriculture began in the Fertile Crescent, around the Middle East. Grains were grown, stored, and marauded by rats.
Cats to the rescue!
This is when cats became our companions - by protecting the grains by hunting the rodents who were eating and spoiling it.
What if cats hadn't come on the scene?
Rats would have had their way with the silos of grain, and people would likely have given up growing grains.
"Forget this agriculture thing," the early, pissed-off people might have said.
"Let's go back to hunting/gathering."
Without cats, we might have abandoned agriculture, and that would certainly have meant no beer!
So we have cats to thank for beer getting off the ground in the first place.
The next time you have a beer, raise your glass to the cat and shout its name.
Friday, January 09, 2009
The other day, I wrote about technological compression (see kilobyte, mb, gb, tb, pb...); I was talking with someone about barley and alcohol, and thought some more about how our tech tools have given us so much of what would seem to be power…
Being the youngest of four children (in five years! My mother was pregnant nearly the entire time…), I absorbed all that I could from my siblings - including learning how to read, which I did when I was three (my only claim to precocity).
Once I learned how to read, I never stopped. I read everything I could get my hands on, and lived in a bibliophilic house, so there were lots of books around.
Librarians have always, apparently, recognized my passion for books and reading, and one of them frustrated the hell out of my step-mother: she never charged me overdue fines, since she didn't want to discourage my devotion to reading. My step-mother, on the other hand, wanted me to learn responsibility. Sorry - looks like the dreamers win again!
I read all kinds of stuff, but acquired an early interest in science-fiction; fostered, likely, by watching Neil Armstrong stepping onto the moon when I was six years old, so I grew up in the space age.
An early favorite was John Christopher's excellent Tripods Trilogy, in which humans have been enslaved by aliens, The Masters, who traveled in little vehicles with three, long, tall legs - when I was a boy, we used to pass a water tower standing among the firs by the highway, and it would f*r*e*a*k m*e o*u*t.
Three boys evade being "capped," a rite-of-passage in which the young submit to The Masters' mind control, becoming like all the adults. They meet up, learn of the Resistance, hook up with them, and volunteer to endeavor to infiltrate the alien city, hoping to discover a weakness.
Which they do - don't let me spoil it for you -
The Resistance learns that the Masters are extremely susceptible to alcohol, and manage to communicate this to the lads, who are enduring heavy servitude in the alien city, the gravity being artificially enhanced, and the atmosphere poisoned, to duplicate the home planet of the aliens.
All they need to do is introduce alcohol into the Masters' water supply - but how to smuggle in the alcohol?
Impossible. They'll have to manufacture it.
How?
By making a mash of the starchy biscuits they are given to eat, and then fermenting it.
They do, and the plan succeeds.
So there I was, six years old, and wondered: what's a mash?
I was completely intrigued - a "mash" must really be something, if one is able to make it out of crackers and ferment it.
Books in the library were no help - I remember asking an uncle, but he had no idea.
I grew up with this quest, occasionally and profoundly curious.
Finally, I don't remember how, I learned that a mash was a means of heating crushed grain in water until enzymes had converted all the starch to sugar - which you can ferment.
I suppose it took me about twelve years to answer that question (and once I had the information, I began brewing beer, and never looked back - in fact, perhaps tomorrow I'll write about how one starts with a field of barley and ends up with pale ale, or lager).
Not long ago, I was curious - how long would it take to answer that question with today's tools?
Twenty seconds - I used a stopwatch, even.
That's about 19,000,000 times faster.
It took more time to open Firefox and type in the Google search than it did for the browser to return the links.
Never take access to information for granted.
Thursday, January 08, 2009
In December, we had over a foot of snow, the snowfall spread out over a few days, which was uncommon for my region (although more common in the last several years - is that what the onset of an Ice Age looks like?). It hindered Christmas travel plans, so there were parties and events we didn't get to - since we seldom have much impact from snowfall, the authorities are underprepared - hardly any snowplows, and when they did come through town, they just skimmed off the recent snow to get back down to the dangerous, icy layer.
Looking at the weather reports, I could see that rain was forecast for the week after Christmas, beginning Christmas Day. The National Weather Service pointed out that the temperature wasn't going to rise dramatically, so there wouldn't be a rapid melt, which would result in flooding for sure.
This week, though, things are different. We had a bit of snow the other night, but it was wet and minimal, and now, the rain has begun in earnest. Out on the Pacific coast west of me, they're expecting up to twenty inches of rain over the next few days, with as much as three inches in the interior - where I am, poised on an island north of Puget Sound. That's a lot of rain.
We can use it - on our island, we have a "single source aquifer," which means that all our drinking water comes out of the ground. The only way to recharge the aquifer is rainfall, so we're looking at our future tap water.
And the temperature is up in the forties - call it 5°Celsius. So the snow in the mountains to the east is rapidly and unseasonably melting; the metropolitan areas get their drinking water from reservoirs, filled by snow-melt. As has happened in recent years, the snow melts too much in the winter and spring, so the reservoirs get low in the summer. Too bad for them!
Of course, all this snow melt means the water has to go somewhere, so it does, flowing down the rivers to link back up with the sea. The weather service upgraded the status from "Flood Watch" - which means conditions are favorable for flooding - to "Flood Warning," which means the rivers ARE flooding. I heard flood warnings for several Western Washington counties, including Island County, my own.
I find that rather comical - I live on an island - there are streams, but no rivers, and the highest elevation is around five hundred feet - so there isn't a snow cap that will melt. We're going to be just fine. Nothing to worry about.
Certainly, one of the benefits of living on an island.
And even if the ice at both poles of the earth melts and the sea level rises (unfortunately, it's possible, thanks to our way of living and our impact on the planet and its ability to regulate its temperature), I'm still up at one-hundred-fifty feet - so maybe I'll be able to dig clams just down the street, instead of having to go all the way down the hill to the beach.
An island has other benefits: to get here from America, I have to take a ferry. It's a short crossing, us being only a few miles from the continent, but enough to provide a nice, psychological distinction between the Island and the rest of the world. I recall that in Dracula, the vampire's prey, in London, was able to elude him by exploiting his inability to cross moving water - Dracula could only cross the Thames at the moment of slack tide, when things were briefly static. So the ferry crossing keeps the vampires out, which is comforting, since they manifest themselves in all kinds of metaphorical ways.
I used to live in Seattle - was born there; I grew up in a little town on the water about thirty miles south. I lived in Seattle as an adult, with my family; we gradually moved north, away from the city. The house we lived in from which we moved to the island over fifteen years ago was ten blocks north of the Seattle city limits, in a town called Shoreline, but we still referred to it as Seattle.
That's the way it is with a city. The border is arbitrary, and can even change, when the city annexes neighborhoods, increasing its size and tax-base. Not so with an island - the distinction between what is the island and what is not is pretty clear - you go down to the water's edge, and that's the end of your island.
Islanders, in my experience, are pleased with being so. It's a special thing, to live on one. Culturally, we think of an island as remote and disconnected - the Latin words, "insulate" and "isolate" both refer to the condition of an island. We're isolated, yes, although a mere twenty-minute boat ride to America. And as remote as we need to be.
Wednesday, January 07, 2009
I read an article in a recent New Yorker about a fellow who is ferreting out the dimensions of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan to end the Pacific theater of WWII. An interesting point jumped off the page: a day on which the crews were training to drop the bombs was the fortieth anniversary of Wilbur and Orville Wright having demonstrated that powered flight was possible.
Merely forty years, and a plane was able to fly high and drop an instant sun.
That seems like pretty extreme technological compression - forty years? From limping along the sand in North Carolina and packing the bits of airplane in barrels afterward, to flying high over the ocean and destroying cities.
Add another twenty-five years or so, and Neil Armstrong was landing on the moon.
Other technological marvels include the news I just received yesterday: my brother, the Luddite, not only has a computer, but is online. He called me with the news, and left a message saying he wanted me to give him some links of my web design work; since I had missed the call, he thought he might just get the information from my sister.
Well, jeez, pal, why didn't you just tell me your email address?
I frequently tell my son how things we take for granted didn't even exist when I was his age. There weren't calculators (unless you count an abacus), I seldom saw a color television, personal computers were relatively far off, and there certainly wasn't an internet.
I had an IBM pc back in the 1980's - I bought it used from a friend for $700 (which seemed like a pretty good deal).
The hard drive was massive, for those days - 256 kilobytes. That was the hard drive. The machine I'm working with at the moment has a 320 gigabyte hard drive, which is over 1.3 million times the capacity.
A mere eight years ago, I upgraded from a machine with a 1 gigabyte hard drive to one with an 8 gigabyte drive, and I thought I was really stepping up.
Over the recent holidays, one of my nephews was excited that he had just acquired a 500 gigabyte external hard drive.
"Is that all?" I said, "I recently picked one up that's 1.5 terabytes." -- (that's about 6.3 million times as large as the drive in that old PC, and the unit is about half the size of a box of facial tissue).
Twenty-five years ago, I couldn't even conceive of a gigabyte. I might as well get used to petabytes [about a million gigabytes, which is a bit over 8.5 billion bits - a bit being the binary unit, a zero or a one - on, or off]). And exabytes: a bit over a billion gigabytes - and zettabytes - over a trillion gigabytes. Yottabytes? That's more than a billion terabytes, which is more than a million megabytes, which is more than a million bytes, which is eight bits. That is a huge heap of zeros and ones, and they all will have something to do, one day.
Monday, January 05, 2009
Today is my birthday.
I had a dream just before I woke up; I was out in the yard by the birdfeeder. It was dim light, nearly dark. I heard a double-thump, which I thought I recognized as the sound of both ends of a deer hitting the ground, having jumped over the fence. I was looking for it, and spotted it discreetly hanging out by the garden fence. There was a section of wooden fence a couple of feet outside the fence, and it was discreetly behind that, too (the wooden fence was in the dream; I don't have such a thing near my garden in waking life). I didn't go over to it, preferring, generally, to experience nature from a respectful distance, but said something soft to it.
And then I saw, coming out from under the grape vines, a little fawn. Wrong time of year for a fawn, I thought. And this was the smallest fawn ever - as big as a Chihuahua - and pulling its umbilicus behind it. The fawn was curious and coming over to me.
But wait - there was a threat - up in the threadbare pine from which the birdfeeder hangs was a large cat, which began to walk along the top of the fence, in that low-to-the-ground way that makes them seem so clandestine.
And it was a big cat - like a lynx, or bobcat.
And then I woke.
I'm not generally a dreamer -- no doubt I do dream, but there's rarely anything fresh in the archives when I wake -- so I'm willing to consider this one auspicious.
Please don't feel like you need to send felicitations; I like to keep it low-key. In fact, that's been frustrating my wife, who's been pestering me to find out what I want to do, what I want for dinner, do I even want any presents?
For me, it's complicated. One of my old slogans is, "No sympathy, no praise." I'd rather be sort of invisible, and hang out in the woods with the flickers, the Douglas Squirrels, the ravens, the crows… and since I was the youngest of four kids, frequently regarded as the mascot or the toy, I definitely learned how to be invisible. I used to disappear into the woods as a kid, even. Still do, when I can. I just don't like to call attention to myself.
But even that confuses my intimates, since I'm an actor. I get onstage, and everyone in the room can see me; the lights are so bright, I can't see them, but they can see me. How does one reconcile that? Being highly visible, for someone who professes to prefer invisibility?
Simple. The guy onstage isn't me. He's whatever character I happen to be playing. Once, even, the actress who played my love-interest asked my young son (he was about ten), "How does it feel to see me kissing your dad?"
"You're not kissing my dad," he replied, "you're kissing Freddy the Bartender!"
This year, I would almost have opted to let the whole birthday thing go, but I tried that once, and it doesn't work:
I turned nineteen, some years ago, and decided I would keep it to myself. I don't know why, something grown up about it? Early-onset intentional jaded lad? But I was content, and smug, knowing that I had this little secret: it was my birthday, and I was the only one who knew.
I finished work that day, and as usual, went over to a friend's house to hang out.
It was a big house, and a bunch of guys lived there, so it was a routine hang-out. We'd muster there, smoke some dope, drink some beer, listen to records, or, in this case, we were watching television.
How ironic: it was a M*A*S*H re-run - remember that show? And the asshole doctor, Frank Burns, was having a birthday. It was a funny episode, and almost made me spill the beans during a commercial break. "Hey guys, guess what?" But I kept it to myself.
And then a friend came over, a girl I was close to - "There you are!" she said. "I've been looking for you everywhere! Happy birthday!"
It was a big surprise to all my chums, who made much of me sharing a birthday with Frank Burns.
So I learned then, and told my wife yesterday, that you can't put dynamite in a garbage can and not expect the lid to get blown off. When it's your birthday, the energy can't really be contained and hidden.
But I don't want a big deal made of it, you know? I'd prefer it if my wife didn't tell her friends, or anything like that, since I just want to have it to myself, and with my closest intimates: her, my son, my daughter, my cat. A few others, perhaps, but from a distance.
No guests for dinner.
And what's for dinner?
That was hard, too - I have a notorious passion for food (I used to be well-paid to play with food, having been a chef - it's true, I was a chef, and not a mere cook, but actually the executive chef in a French restaurant); you should see me try to decide what to order in a restaurant. I finally have to practically pick something out with a blind finger, like selecting a number from the phone book to make a prank call. So how am I going to decide what I want for dinner?
[going out to eat isn't much of an option - all those years in commercial kitchens make eating out not so easy, unless I know the chef has a fondness for the classics as I do]
And I don't want to pressure my wife or my kids into trying to execute some favorite dish like cassoulet, or braised chops, or anything like that, so what to do?
Finally, I hit on it - being a High Priest in the Church of the Sandwich - we're going to have my old favorite, Reuben sandwiches. When I told my wife this, "Hey, I know! - " my son said from the other room, "Good choice, Dad."
For dessert? I can't decide. "You get something you'll like, and I'll enjoy it," I said.
Really, I find it surprising that she thinks my whole attitude about this is kind of pathological. I just want to be low-key.
But it's my birthday - so the constellations will be in the pattern they were in when I entered the world, and I'll think of my mother, who died soon after my third birthday (she was the writer, which is partly why I write), and I'll remember other birthdays - my seventeenth, when my estranged girlfriend from another city took me to see a movie, and I was so despondent those days, I was doing a lot of drugs, so I ate a bunch of hash while we stood in line after buying our tickets waiting to see the feature - which was Apocalypse Now - an excellent film to see in my hashish condition.
And my forty-first birthday, the day before I flew to Germany and somehow landed safely in Hamburg while there were hurricane winds. Many others, too -- mostly all memorable, and few of them even remotely disappointing.
One thing is for certain - I won't be working on my birthday - I never have. Even when I was a boy, eleven-years-old and with a paper route, I trained a buddy to deliver my papers - since it was my birthday. I've never worked on my birthday (although my wife was getting so frustrated with my down-playing the thing that she finally said, "Why don't you just work, then, since it's such a no-big-deal?" - I turned and tried to glare at her: "What did you just say?").
But happy birthday to me, and happy birthday to Umberto Eco (the writer), and Hayao Miyazaki (the animator), and Robert Duvall (the actor)… and anyone else who is fortunate to have been born on the fifth day of the year. We're special - but in my case, I'll try to keep it to myself (yeah, right, I'm only writing about it on the WorldWideWeb...).
If you wanted to do anything to honor my birthday, spend some time outside. Feed the birds. Learn the name of one of your local trees. Marvel at the crows. That's what I'm likely to be doing, as I do whenever possible. Let's be outside in the world together, under the same stars, no matter where we are.
The constellations have wheeled around to the configuration they had the day I arrived on this planet; let's gaze at them and make up new stories.
Sunday, January 04, 2009
It's funny - this is a new thing, this "blog" - funny word, that - and working with it will be like having a relationship. No, not like a relationship, but it will be a relationship. And, per yesterday's snippet of a post, I'm working on customizing the thing, so I can have it look and behave the way I want - just like an ignorant man might try to manipulate his wife. But since we're pushing around zeros and ones (with me? the whole electronic binary thing?), I can do what I want. Who knows, maybe I'll spend more time with this than I do with my wife…
Really, though, it's intriguing to develop a relationship such as this. For instance, I bought a laptop a couple of years ago, and since it was a machine I was going to use exclusively as my own, not like my desktop computer in my library at home that we all use, I could customize the interface, install software I wanted, and make it just the way I liked it. Took some time to get it set up to my satisfaction, but we're plenty satisfied with it (and in the interest of full disclosure, it's a PC - which I prefer to Macintosh, but, unlike many of the militant Mac users I know, I'm not going to cast judgments - and in the interest of full disclosure, I know PC owners who are the same way - truly, I would have one of each if I could afford it).
I spent some time yesterday altering the look of the page, having started with a provided theme, but it's the other stuff, too, that needs modification, as we do the little dance of figuring out how to configure the thing to suit my needs and desires.
For example, I like to type with Word, since, although I made hubristic reference to what an excellent typist I am, I really depend on Word's "autocorrect" function. Yes, I am one of those who types, "teh." Word fixes it for me. Maybe I think I'm a good typist because my tools correct my errors before I realize I'm making them…? At any rate, I can type pretty fast.
I tried that trick - creating the text with Word (I've done that when composing long emails, too), then pasting it into the entry page to make a blog post, but the formatting was all wonky. Selecting all the text and fiddling with the font and size and all that did nothing - the paragraphs, every time I had hit the return key, had lots of space before and after, like a fifth-grader's report ("two typewritten pages" - sure, with 16 pt type, and double-spaced…).
So here's what I've discovered I need to do:
1. type the text with Word;
2. spell-check it;
3. copy it, then open NoteTab (an excellent little piece of software I use for writing html for hand-coded websites -- I use the Pro version, since it was so useful I wanted them to have some money), and paste the text into it.
4. from there, I copy it - which has now stripped all the formatting, except for case and line-breaks;
5. and finally, paste that into the blog entry page -
6. and then post it.
Lots of steps? Not necessarily. I end up with something I like. Easier than trying to get the blog software to overcome the formatting that Word has crammed in there.
We're figuring it all out.
Sunday, January 04, 2009
Here's a little post...
I spent my day working on a nice pot of chicken soup with vegetables and matzoh balls (although I'm a Gentile, my matzoh balls find favor with rabbis, cats, and anyone who sits down at my table). When I wasn't working on that, I was looking under the coding hood of the theme of this site, and making alterations to the template files, the CSS, and the primary image. I should be done with that business soon, so the thing will look a bit more like me, and less like some other developer's theme.
Yeah, okay, when I'm able, I'll write my own theme. For now, though, this one suits me -- with the exception of some of the style, so I'm tweaking it.
Maybe I'll pull a screenshot of the current appearance and post it, so you can check my work?
Saturday, January 03, 2009
A good friend tells me of “morphic resonance” – I won’t explain it as he does (he’s an intellectual), but you’ll get the idea.
For instance, he says, let’s say you’re walking along, and spot a rubber band on the ground. You pick it up, but not after making a conscious decision – not, “Hey, I might need that.” No, you just pick it up and put it in your pocket.
And sure enough, he explains, in a short time, you encounter a situation that requires a rubber band. And you have one.
Morphic resonance.
He told me of this little concept a month or so ago, and I’ve been eager to investigate the phenomenon… which might be a bit tricky, since it seems key to not engage with the object you find, you just pick it up with no agenda or expectation.
Today, just as I was leaving to go work on an outdoor project for a client in my neighborhood, I went into my office and fetched a piece of paper. I thought it was an obsolete printed document from a stash of scrap paper, but it was a virgin sheet of 8 ½ x 11. I folded it in quarters and put it in my pocket.
Not long after, I was working away, and hear, down the hill, my friend – who happens to live next door to the client for whom I was working – calls out and asks if I can help him pick up some furniture from a friend here in town.
I walked down the hill and into his house.
He needed to write a note, but couldn’t find a piece of scratch paper. I had one in my pocket, so I gave it to him. He tore off a quarter of it and handed me the rest.
We got the furniture; a bit later, I headed down at his house for hot tea, but wrote a note for my client, telling her I would be back in half an hour to discuss the project, and tucked it in the window of my truck. Then I headed down the hill.
During our brief visit, my friend was telling me about a Bob Dylan tune he thought I should know, and wanted to write the title down. He remembered that I had the paper.
Now I had a quarter of it left.
When I left my friend’s house, his wife offered me a cookie, a gluten-free Pfeffernuss (don’t laugh, it was a killer cookie). She wanted to roll it in the confectioner’s sugar, and after doing so, said, “Oh, now I need a napkin to put it on for you, so you can take it away.”
“No problem,” I said, and whipped out the last of the paper.
I had used it all, and without planning it.
Morphic resonance.
Friday, January 02, 2009
Here we are, on the first day of a new year.
Among many interesting conversations last night at Tom Bombadil’s house at the end of a road in my little town, a bit outside space and time, we talked of the arbitrary nature of our calendar. New Year’s Day? Just another day.
And yet – when we collectively embrace turning a page, wiping the slate clean, you can’t escape it – it’s like planting peas on President’s Day in my part of the world – that’s the day to begin the Spring Garden, and that’s all there is to it (to reduce it to a protocol an amoeba could comprehend).
I don’t go in for the New Year’s Resolution bit, though, but prefer to generate a “Manifest List.” I write down the things I want to bring into my life in the new year, and even try to examine things and determine what ballast I should jettison.
Five years ago today – 1 January 2004 – I again attempted to develop the habit of writing daily. I had always had determination to be a writer, after having learned that my mother, who died when I was a wee boy, was a writer, and not only that, but a good one. I wanted to fulfill her legacy.
Lots of people want to be writers, but it’s like wanting to be a gardener (two samples, now, of my favorite source of metaphor and aphorism) – you don’t talk about it, you clear a plot of ground, plant seeds, and water them!
Want to be a writer?
You write.
So although I had tried the discipline of daily writing, I would peter out after a month, or maybe two – that’s a lot of work.
But five years ago, it stuck. I started on the first day of the year, and kept it up, and kept it up, and never looked back (not true – I read the crap occasionally). I kept typing, and in a sense, learned some things about being a writer. Learned how to type, for one.
[My philosophy, really, is that you don’t tell people what you do: “I’m an actor,” or, “I'm a poet,” [hearing that is like nails on a chalkboard] or, “I'm a ____.” No, what you do, instead, is what you do, and if it matters, people will catch you in the act of doing it – as a wise friend put it to an extreme example of this that he’d encountered, “Who you say you are is speaking so loudly about who you think you are that I can’t hear who you are.”]
But yes, I’m a writer, because I write every fucking day.
I haven’t missed a day in the last five years. I track my word count, occasionally (it will take me a week or two to get caught up on the last quarter of 2008), and discovered last year that if I kept up on my current word count average, I’d hit over two-and-a-half million words in the last five years – which counts all but email and incidental text… take a look at that subtitle up above: “confessions of a compulsive typist;” may you be able to handle being an email correspondent of mine).
In 2005, I spent a couple of weeks in Europe in the winter. I wrote every day. Didn’t have a machine, so I wrote by hand, all the time, everything. Thirty thousand words in two weeks, by hand. That felt like an achievement.
Then, after returning to my island off the northwest coast of amerika, I had to be my own emanuensis and type it all into a file, so I’d have it in the archives.
Last year (summer of 2008), I was in Europe again, but this time, I had a laptop. Not only that, but I had a handsome and ultra-durable (and mildly chunky) Pelican Case – as I have described that to friends, “You can put the computer in it, throw it off Seattle’s Aurora Bridge (a historic destination for suicides, once upon a time, who didn’t mind ending life in Lake Union far below), go down and fish it out of the water, open the case, and get back to work.”
My companions complained, once, about the imposing laptop case – I didn’t have it in a slender neoprene sleeve, as is customary, it seems, but in this sturdy case.
“You might find my laptop case a burden, but don’t you think the Secrets of the Universe should be kept safe?”
It was a bit easier to write daily with a machine along. In fact, I’m fond of this photo of me typing away on the train from Amsterdam to Paris. Now, having completed five years of that gig, I want to diversify a bit, so we’re cranking up this weblog. I don’t intend to be attached to posting daily, but frequently, at least.
Now, I just installed the blog software at the domain a couple of days ago, in anticipation of today’s embarkation, so don’t be alarmed if the appearance is altered now and then – I haven’t had a chance to modify the theme, but I will. The interface might change, but the content will truck on, and right steadily.
Care to join me?
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