01 Feb 2011
Ripped and Righteous

I've always considered the obsession with gyms, abs and weight loss to be a rather ridiculous exercise (pun intended). If you want to stay "fit", no gym is required: just hard work. I frequently listen to my co-workers talk about paying to go to the gym and offer them my own half-price deal: they can come help put up hay, shear sheep or set fence and I'll only charge them half of their current gym fees for the privilege.

So far, there's been no takers.

There’s a bullying strain to the modern fitness ethos, a blurred line between cheerleading and hectoring. And it’s hard not to wonder whether that kind of intimidation — in addition to the social and economic realities of diet and exercise — helps explain the paradox that for all the newfangled aerobic machines and reduced-rate January gym memberships, Americans aren’t noticeably haler and healthier.

(link) [New York Times]

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So far, so good...

Power has been very spotty, but so far we've managed to go without many multiple hour outages. That's good: if the stock tank freezes solid we'll be in deep doo-doo. We have a generator, and gas to power it, so if worst comes to worst we can keep things frost free for a while. But we're hoping that worst doesn't come to worst, and so far that prognosis seems to be holding.

Right now the weather is very strange - it's ice pellets, mostly, with the odd snowflake cast in the mix. I drove to the station earlier and the roads are terrible - consequently there's virtually no traffic at all. The wind is picking up, and with the blowing ice pellets it's kinda like taking a stroll in a sandblaster. Painful.

The large animals are holding their own, but the chickens are very confused. Lights out, they roost. Ten minutes later, it's morning again! The darkness.... wait, morning! It'll be a week before we get eggs again!

The storm is supposed to pass over completely by 7am, so I guess we've only got another twelve hours or so to hang in - shouldn't be a problem. But the aftermath may be very interesting indeed.

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31 Jan 2011
Hunkered Down

Awaiting the storm - and it's a whopper by all accounts. We're right on the line of ice and snow - if the system moves a few miles south, we get 20+ inches of the white and fluffy. I never thought I'd wish for two feet of snow, but I am. Because if it stays where it is (or, gods forbid, tracks a few miles north) we get a massive dose of ice. They're talking 2 inches of icing - if that happens, we'll be without power for quite a while. Out here, that's a Bad Thing™. Two feet of snow would be a vacation by comparison.

Took me close to two hours to drive home tonight - normally it's 45 minutes. Lorraine had sheep, goats and chickens fed and eggs gathered by the time I arrived. I got the water hooked up and topped off every tank and bucket we've got, then managed to get the truck in the garage.

We're as hunkered down as we can be. Let's hope it's good enough.

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27 Jan 2011
The North of the South

Proof that truth can be stranger than fiction - history is never as tidy as we'd like.

First African Baptist Church was among the largest and best-known religious institutions in Richmond, Va., during the mid-19th century. By 1861 its congregation numbered over 3,000 — a megachurch by even 21st-century standards. A quarter of the city’s total black population, free and slave, belonged to what one white observer deemed "the largest Protestant church in the world."

(link) [New York Times]

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22 Jan 2011
China's Hottest Cuisine

Sichuan cooking, done right, is nothing short of wonderful. And we're lucky enough to have an excellent restaurant locally. It's just down the street from my office, and my colleagues and I hold a sort of informal software/hardware engineering lunch there every Wednesday. The buffet is awesome, and the price is right too - all you can eat plus tea for $6 and change.

Sichuan food is renowned for its intense, spicy flavors, owed to the liberal use of chili peppers, numbing Sichuan peppercorn, bean paste and garlic. Westerners are familiar with versions of some classic Sichuan (also spelled Szechuan) fare—think kung pao chicken. But the cuisine features some 5,000 dishes, the vast majority seldom tasted beyond China's borders.

(link) [Wall Street Journal]

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21 Jan 2011
Overdrawn at the Memory Bank

Overdrawn at the Memory Bank VHS coverWell, I missed blogging for a day in January, after all. But I've got a good excuse! The movie I ordered last November finally arrived - after getting lost in the mail from the original vendor and refunded. I ordered it again last week, and Lo! it arrived.

We first saw this in the 80's shortly after it was released, on American Playhouse. It's based on a story by John Varley, one of our favorite SF authors, and with a screenplay by Corinne Jacker, author of The Black Flag of Anarchy, which is simply the best overview of 19th century American libertarianism available.

I loved it then, and after seeing it again, feel fully justified. The story is eerily prescient - the protagonist's personality is transferred into a computer after the corporation loses his body, where he begins to program the machine from the inside out, all the while creating his own reality based on Casablanca. The tagline is "They want to control his mind, but can't find his body!"

There's some really good actors in here, too. A young Raul Julia and Linda Griffiths are in the lead roles.

I'll grant that the movie has some really cheesy specials, but I just don't understand why it's been so roundly panned. Mystery Science Theater 3000 even featured it.

Critics be damned, I still love this movie. The writing is clever: nearly continuous fold back references to itself, the movie within the movie within the computer. Rebellion, conformity, love and politics. What hasn't this puppy got?

Well, it doesn't have a five star rating from anywhere but here, and that's OK by me. I own it, and will enjoy it many time before the tape finally wears out and I'm overdrawn at last.

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18 Jan 2011
Steampunk

Steampunk is a, a, eh....

steampunk.

It's something that's starting to deeply fascinate us - Lorraine and I both find ourselves attracted to it from a lot of different angles. Shiny brass fixtures. Alternate history. Period fixation - for us more Edwardian than Victorian.

I imagine we'll undertake a pilot project at some point - something we can work on together and see if we like doing it as much as we think we will. Where it goes from there...

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13 Jan 2011
One of those days...

cross eyed opossum

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10 Jan 2011
This Day In History

13th Legion Lion

Alea iacta est.

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07 Jan 2011
Death: Bad?

This is an essay inspired by Book of Dead Philosophers by Simon Critchely. You know what: he's right. It's the fear of death that drives this culture. Or at least the Christian parts of it, which is to say, nearly everything.

We have nothing to fear but fear itself. -- FDR

If Roosevelt was right, we should be afraid, very afraid. For there is an epidemic of fear that sweeps across this land like a dark shadow, clouding everything we think, do and say.

We are scared to death of dying.

It's been growing in our culture since I was a kid - so the effect of being middle aged is serving me well, as I can see the "before" and "after". I now understand the impulse to nostalgia that is evident in many of our senior citizens, and is getting more evident in me with each passing day.

You can see it in the health campaigns that regularly convulse our culture: we all want to live longer. When I was a kid, a mere 4 decades ago, seat belts weren't even standard equipment in automobiles. Car seats were unheard of. Smokers made up nearly 60% of the population, and a non-smoking bar would have gone out of business in a day or two.

Now, don't get me wrong: I don't particularly want to cross the Rainbow Bridge. I'm not suicidal. But neither am I obsessed to the point of rearranging the details of my life merely to prolong it by a year or two. Because, statistically speaking, that's the net effect of counting carbs, quitting smoking, selling our Harleys and giving up skydiving: one to five years added to our life expectancy. Which has already been stretched beyond the wildest dreams of our ancestors.

Fear of death drives this. I've tried to think of other motivating factors, but can find none: it's got to be raw, naked fear.

This fear is manifested in our obsession with safety, to the exclusion of nearly everything else.

In 1965 we didn't make our kids look like the Michelin Tire mascot just to ride a bike or a skateboard.

It's manifested in "ghost hunter" shows: "oh, look, somebody actually died here..." Death is mysterious, remote and creepy.

The fear shows up in folks like Ray Kurzweil:

Some elements of Kurzweil's lifestyle are conventional. He exercises frequently, does not eat to excess, and does not abuse recreational drugs. Many others, however, are controversial and may be explained by his obsession with living as long as possible. Kurzweil ingests "250 supplements, eight to 10 glasses of alkaline water and 10 cups of green tea" every day and drinks several glasses of red wine a week in an effort to "reprogram" his biochemistry.[55] Lately, he has cut down the number of supplement pills to 150.

I'm not saying that any individual course of action for safety purposes is necessarily wrong. I'm not saying everybody should go drive drunk while puffing a cigar and munching a Big Mac. I'm saying that it's our collective reaction to fear of death that is driving large segments of our culture. Death is a part of life. We're all going there, kicking and screaming or not. We can't take it with us.

It's one thing for individuals to dream of immortality. But a culture that denies the reality of death is a culture that's doomed to die a quick one.

What defines bourgeois life in the West today is our pervasive dread of death.

(link) [New York Times]

Update: Here's a perfect example of what I'm talking about, as well as the benefits of overcoming this morbid fear.

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Conan the Barbarian

One of my favorite movies of all time. Nice to see it recognized as something other than a mindless action flick.

Conan the Barbarian sounds like the ultimate beefcake action movie. But the film is actually a fascinating curio, starring a cast of non-actors and featuring one of cinema history’s great scores. The first major starring role for Arnold Schwarzenegger (who supposedly had to lose muscle mass in order to swing the sword), Conan has very little to do with Robert E. Howard’s character and everything to do with the particular obsessions of director John Milius, who mashed several different Conan stories together, sprinkled on some Nietzsche and some caveman religion, and then poured in a river of blood. Voila: Conan juice! Like revenge, it’s best served cold.

(link) [Popwatch]

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05 Jan 2011
Random Thoughts

An idealist is that person who does not believe that evil is an intrinsic property of the universe. A realist is a person who's sure of it.

All monotheist religions are tolerant as long as they are the ones who must be tolerated. They're not very good at tolerating others. At their very theological core they are by definition intolerant: There Can Be Only One! They're the Highlanders of theology.

We've gotten into the habit of watching "ghost chaser" shows - quite amusing! There's something so absurd about watching tattooed, mohawked and pierced 20-somethings run around in the dark saying things like "So, are you dead, or what?". The gadgets they use are amazing - well, amazingly stupid. Random background noise and codec artifacts become "spirit voices", or "EVPs". Even better is the spirit box: a speech generator running on some undefined software that acts as a sort of hi-tech Ouija board. I feel like we've discovered as video version of one of our favorite publications of all time: Weekly World News.

An even older (and perhaps odder) habit of ours is going to sleep by Coast to Coast AM, whose predecessor "The Art Bell Show" was a favorite late night habit of mine when I was on the road in the late 80's and early 90's. The show is probably 50% commercials, selling survival kits, gold coins, and investment advice. The remainder of the time is taken up with international callers discussing aliens (as in space), reptoids, ghosts, various versions of the apocalypse and who knows what else. Somehow, and I can't explain it, it's very relaxing, and puts us to sleep in a matter of minutes.

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04 Jan 2011
Gone But Not Forgotten

Miniel lost her fight for life today. Lorraine was holding her when she passed - I was on my way home from work. She was fighting to the end, but had developed complications from her long immobility. We managed to get an intestinal blockage cleared over the weekend, but she was getting pneumonia, and that's what finally did her in.

She was a fine little sheep. We did everything we could possibly do, going way beyond our normal practice for her. She fought, we fought, and we lost. I would've liked to have had her for several years, to have watched her raise lambs of her own, and watch my wife spin beautiful yarn from her lustrous fleece, but such was not to be. Nonetheless, she taught us a lot - about sheep, and about ourselves. She is gone, but she will not be forgotten. And I'm sure she'll find a place in the All-Mother's flock.

A Sheep Farmer's Prayer

Heaven won't be so lonely
If what I hope is true
If a little lamb is there
Or some old friendly ewe
In those celestial pastures
Beside still waters deep
May the eternal future find me
With a little band of sheep

 

Frigga Spinning the Clouds

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01 Jan 2011
Back to Blogging

Well, this gap has been the largest since I started blogging - almost 2 months with no posting. Lots of reasons for this, but mostly I've just been busy. Very busy.

The lack of an aggregator hasn't helped either - the whole of 2010 was slow without the ability to rapidly post news items from my aggregator. I lost that when I lost the home Suse server.

Then there's been Miniel - she's still alive, and getting (marginally) better every day. Together with our vet, we deduced that her base problem was probably meningeal worms. It's been quite a trial - emotional ups and downs galore. Saving this lamb has become an obsession for both of us - she's caused quite a bit of introspection about why we do what we do.

We've not spent all that much money on her treatment - less than $200 total. Of course, at market she'd wouldn't be worth any more than $100 if she was completely healthy, so I suppose you could say we've over invested. But money hasn't been the main component of our investment - time has been. The only analogy that comes to mind is caring for a quadriplegic child. The neurological symptoms were terrible for the first month and a half, until the worms themselves died off. Now the problem is giving her physical therapy to rebuild her muscles so she can walk again. On good days she can get up on her knees - on bad days she can barely lift her head. But the improvements are there, slow but sure.

So why the obsession? I've kept a flock here for better than 8 years now, and in that time I've seen more than a few sick sheep. And it didn't take me long to develop a rule that I've followed in every other case - if an animal goes down and can't walk, it needs put down and out of it's misery quickly, because the next thing it's going to stop doing is eating and drinking. But Miniel did not - in fact, Miniel refuses to believe that she's down at all - she will continually try to stand and graze, even if she's too weak to do it. Sheep are not known as fighters - this one is a fighter par excellence - she simply refuses to lay down and die.

That kind of behavior demands respect - if we gave up and put her down for our convenience I would feel as though we'd broken our implicit oath with the flock, to care for and protect them in return for wool and meat. We'd be giving up on an animal that has not given up on us.

Our friend and neighbor Tim, also a shepherd, related a tale in which he and his wife spent a massive amount of time rehabilitating four ewes that had been injured in a hayfall in his barn. They had to do basically the same thing we're trying to do now - ovine physical therapy so the sheep could walk again. And it worked - he still has some of the ewes, and they've always been among his productive best.

So maybe we're not so weird after all.

You can read more of Miniel's tale on Dances With Ewes.

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05 Nov 2010
A Sick Sheep

We've been dealing with a sick lamb for the past few weeks: Miniel (one of the twins pictured here) has had a bizarre problem. The wife has blogged  about it alot, her latest post being a call for general help and advice.

Some more research tonight has pretty well convinced us that she's suffering from a septic arthritis of some sort, and we're exploring all our options. It's becoming rather important to save this little girl. She has a nice fleece and would make a superb petting zoo denizen (due to size and disposition), but I've got to confess that the real reason is simple emotional attachment. Considering the investment in time and energy we've put into her already, it'd be unnatural not to be attached to the little bugger. So any advice is appreciated - leave a comment her or over at Dances with Ewes if you have any clue that might possibly help.

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