I KNOW I’m funny; I’m just underappreciated

There’s a running joke in the office about the large amounts of scotch consumed by “Bob”. Last week, another employee was trying to use Bob’s computer, which kept crashing. I pointed out that there was biometric identification built into the mouse: It measured Blood/Alcohol levels.

In a conversation between manly men, the inevitable “I like my (beverage) like I like my women” discussion came around. I opined that “I like my coffee like I like my women.” “Hot and black?” came the question. “Ground down and bitter,” I clarified.

On a message board a few years ago, it was pointed out that the National Organization for Women had turned 40. I suggested we trade it in for two 20-year-old women’s’ organizations.

When an article in our local newspaper tried to blame Grand Theft Auto for a shooting, I asked “Since I’m usually wandering around with no clue as to what I should be doing, can I blame Myst?”.

A story online mentioned that a big rig carrying vacuums had been hijacked, with no clue as to the identity of the perpetrator(s). My suggestion was that authorities should be on the lookout for Nature.

Too much effort

It's absolutely amazing how much garbage six people generate every day. I'm glad we don't recycle; it'd be a pain in the ass to sort through all that.

Idle Irritation

I always know when I've been idle too long, because the weirdest things start getting on my nerves.

Stupid letter "X."

Just when you thought it was safe to go back online

Did you miss me?

Sorry for the extended absence, Gentle Readers, but we were computerless for a while. What follows will be a series of mini posts so I can catch up on my average.

Even though these will be short blurbs about whatever crosses my mind, I still have no desire to Twitter. Take that, new media!

We got the tools; we got the talent

You can spend thousands of dollars in acquiring hundreds of pounds of gear for every conceivable situation. Good luck carrying it all. As I’ve stated before, the trick is to make your gear as multi-functional as possible. It’s not just a hammock; it’s also a fishing net and a source for lengths of rope. It’s not just a garbage bag; it’s a tarp, ground cloth, rain slicker, wound sealer and water heater.

The way to build a good kit is to take it in stages, from bare minimum survival to all the comforts of home. You’re shooting for something in between, but closer to the “bare minimum” end of the spectrum.

The Rule of Threes
A handy rule of thumb is the rule of threes. You can survive:

· three minutes without air
· three hours (in severe weather) without shelter
· three days without water
· three weeks without food

This list should guide you in building your kit. A ballpoint pen case, for example, could serve as an emergency tracheotomy tube (you probably ought to read up on it first, though).

So, shelter, water and food. Off the top of my head, you should have, at minimum:

· a sturdy tarp and/or a few large trash bags
· a couple of those metallic “heat blankets” (not the cheap ones; they disintegrate too easily)
· 550 cord (parachute cord). Many suppliers weave them into bracelets or belts for easy carrying.
· compass
· fire-making supplies
· a Sierra cup
· whistle and unbreakable mirror (for signaling)
· fishing line and hooks
· duct tape (flatten it)
· Swiss Army knife or Leatherman tool
· small first-aid kit (including a suture kit)

All of that will fit into a gallon-sized Ziploc bag. Once you’ve got those, you can start adding to it as you like. I’d throw in a few carabiners, a fixed-blade knife, maps, a hand-towel, a sturdy liter-size water bottle, small-gauge wire, surgical-grade rubber tubing, a pencil, a hand-cranked LED flashlight, a small tin pot, a small wire rack, a plastic trowel, a tube tent, and a survival handbook. All of that will still fit into a daypack. Adding too much more starts trading off between creature comforts and maneuverability.

How do you get to Carnegie Hall?
Don’t wait until the bombs drop or the plague sweeps the country before you use any of this stuff. Camp with it. Pack everything you think you might want to have along “In Case Of” and hit the trails. A couple of season’s worth of campouts, and you’ll narrow your selection down automatically. You’ll find what’s worthwhile and what’s useless extra weight. If camping isn’t feasible for you, play in your back yard. A bow drill is simple, but it still takes practice to get it to work.

Well, I can’t think of anything else at the moment, so maybe that has cleared out enough space in my head for some other topics. Hope you found it useful, or at least entertaining. Have fun building your kit.

I’ll see you in the aftermath.

The “Oops” Diet

So you got lost, and your weekend campout is now on its second weekend, or panicked looters cleaned out the local Piggly Wiggly, and you didn’t get any of those canned peaches you were counting on. Fear not. Fortunately, you can go without food for about three weeks. It won’t be pleasant, and it will affect your energy and judgment, but it won’t kill you outright until then, so you have some time to forage.

Teach a man to fish
It always amuses me to see fly fishermen with their two-hundred dollar reels and massive collections of hand-tied flies. They get all dressed up in their catalog gear and lug the forty-pound tackle box to the nearest river. To do battle with fish. Sorry, guys, but a survival situation doesn’t lend itself to your romantic recreation of A River Runs Through It.

If you’re lucky enough to have a body of water nearby, you can catch fish all day long with a minimum of effort at the beginning. If you didn’t think to pack fish hooks in your kit (why not?), small twigs can be woven into a fish basket (or if you’re scrabbling through the wreckage of civilization, try to find some chicken wire). Anything that will let water pass through but trap fish can be sunk into a river to collect food as you tend to other needs. You can even build a series of small fences to guide fish into a shallow pool. You can also string a fishing line (or dental floss!) from bank to bank, with a number of different lines pointed downstream. The water flowing past will make the bait bounce convincingly. Check the lines occasionally and replace bait as needed. There’s a nifty little gadget called a Yo Yo fishing reel that you mount on an overhanging branch. When a fish takes the bait, it has a spring-powered action that sets the hook for you.

Waiter! I made a soup out of flies.
If you don’t have a body of water nearby, you can always eat the bait yourself. Insects are nothing but protein on legs. Anything with six legs is safe to eat (though not necessarily easier). The best way to overcome the squirm-factor is to kill the bugs and let them dry a bit, then grind them into a powder and mix it into your water. Not pleasant, but it beats starving to death.

Kentucky Fried Squirrel
Do you have your dental floss or small-gauge wire? Good. Learn how to set a few simple snares. If it walks or flies it can feed you and, like the fishing, it’s something you can set and forget while you do other things like fix your shelter or find more firewood. If you want to duct-tape your big hunting knife to a limb and attempt to bring down a deer, by all means go for it. Make sure you have plenty of other food sources, though…just in case the deer manages to outrun you in the woods. The simplest way to field dress any mammal is: remove the head and limbs; cut straight down from the neck to the crotch (being careful not to nick the intestines); pull the skin off; spread the rib cage and scoop out the organs (unless you enjoy organ meat); stoke up the fire.

Vegetarians be damned
Unless you are absolutely, positively, 200% sure about plant identification, don’t even attempt to forage for greens as a food source. Most wild plants either have no nutritional content at all, contain dangerous symbiotes, or are outright poisonous to humans. Seriously. Don’t do it.

You keep mentioning all this gear, 'Cat; what should I carry?

Good question.

Not a drop to drink

How much water should you carry with you on the trail or on the run? It depends. If you’re moderately to highly active, you need between 1.5 and 2.5 liters of water per day. That’s just drinking water, too, not including what you’ll want for cooking, cleaning, etc. Now, water’s heavy, weighing almost 8 ½ pounds per gallon. Carrying that weight gets real old real fast on a hike, trust me. It’s much better to carry just a liter bottle, hike near water sources and have treatment methods to hand.

Toil and Trouble
These days, you can get all kinds of fancy filtration systems – UV wands, straws with filters, pumps with filters, drip-filter bottles, etc. The problem with all those, though, is that they either have a ton of parts, or don’t give you any indication as to when they’ve stopped working. Chlorine droplets are another method people like to use, and it’s very effective. Personally, I never could get the dosage right and always ended up throwing it out because it tasted terrible. I’ve since learned that you can add chlorine a few drops at a time to filtered water (cloth-filtered, not charcoal, though there are instructions for making your own charcoal filters if you want to be really hardcore), shake it, let it sit a while, and give it a sniff test. If you can’t smell chlorine, it’s still hazardous. The reason being that there were more microbes than chlorine molecules in the water, so the chlorine was completely used up. You want the opposite, so if there’s a faint chlorine odor to the water, the microbes are all dead and it’s safe to drink (and probably tastes a lot better, too). I think I’ll stick to boiling, though. Some people complain about the flat taste of boiled water, but all you have to do is shake it up to take care of that.

It’s not like water just falls from the sky
So it hasn’t rained in a while, and you’re thirsty. Find a stick with three prongs, like the letter Y. The short prongs should be about six to eight inches long, while the long one should be about two feet long. Hold the stick by the short prongs and turn in a circle. While you’re turning in the circle, look for a waterfall, garden hose, or car wash, because you have a better chance of finding water that way than relying on the dowsing bullshit. If you’re serious about finding water, walk downhill; you’ll find it eventually. Know why? Because water flows downhill (unless you’re in a Doc Savage novel).

Another neat way of collecting water is called a solar still, and there are several variations. Look it up, I’m not going to explain it all here. Not only does it generate water, but as the name implies, the water you get from it is pure.

Basically, if you’re not in the desert, you have no excuse for not having enough water. And if you are in the desert, you can still find water. Run across a dry riverbed? Dig down at the outside bank for a better chance to find damp soil or even pockets of water. See a tree or animals in the distance? Chances are, there’s water nearby. You might even have dew on the ground in the morning. To quote Heathers: "Lick it up, baby." Darker patches on a sandstone cliff may indicate water. Lava and limestone are porous, and may contain hidden pools. It’s not easy, but it’s not impossible, either.

Oh, and if it’s winter, or you’re above a snowline, remember that it’s about a ten-to-one ratio of snow to water. So if you plan to melt snow down to fill your liter bottle, you’ll need ten bottle’s worth of snow.

So after a hard day’s work of finding a clear route, building a shelter, starting a fire, and collecting water, you’ve probably worked up an appetite. What’s for dinner?

Man’s Red Flower

You a fan of Disney’s Jungle Book?

You can’t survive without fire (and if I hope I don’t have to explain why), so you need several methods of starting one. One of America’s pre-eminent survivalists, Tom Brown, Jr., teaches seventeen different ways of starting fires in his classes. His books are interesting reading, and you can find a bunch of his articles online. Those water-proof, wind-proof, strike-anywhere matches sure are nifty, but you can buy a five-pack of Bic lighters for a dollar. That’ll give you between 5,000 and 7,500 fires, or a fire per day up to twenty years. Keep them wrapped up in a Ziploc bag, and you’re golden. Even if they do get wet, just wait until the flint dries out and they’ll work just fine. Again, though, that shouldn’t be your only method of starting a fire. Pack a small plastic magnifying glass, too, and/or a flint & steel striker. You can also buy small blocks of magnesium to use in wet weather. (You scrape flakes onto your pile of tinder; don’t throw the whole thing in there.) You might want to bone up on the old “rubbing two sticks together” method as well.

When Mrs. Cat and I watched Cast Away, I impressed her by critiquing Hanks’ method of fire-starting. My suggestion was to tie one of the laces from an ice skate to each end of the skate, and twist a stick into the loop once. Using half a coconut shell to provide a pivot at the top of the stick (and protect your hand as you apply pressure), you could then draw the ice skate back and forth (like bowing a stand-up bass), which would spin the piece of wood much faster than by hand, and produce an ember more quickly. As you can imagine, this contraption is called a bow drill. It’s relatively untested technology, having been used for only about 7,000 years, but you may find it worthwhile to know how to make one.

Tinder-hearted
Having an ember is like carrying a soap bubble. It’s pretty, but it ain’t gonna be around for long. You need to get it onto some tinder. Small wood fibers or bits of bark are good. Cotton balls are excellent. The fuzzy parts of cat-tail plants work well, as do dead grasses and leaves. You can collect them as you travel (except for maybe the cotton balls, unless you’re in the South) and carry them in a shirt pocket; your body heat will dry them out nicely. The way to build a fire is small to large. Tinder first, then twigs, small branches, large branches, and finally, logs.

Home is where the hearth is
You’ll want to keep the fire from spreading, so make a fire ring out of stones. You can also place a flat stone upright on the side of the fire away from you in order to reflect heat back towards you. If you’re lucky enough to shelter against a stone wall (natural or artificial), sleep between the fire and the wall, as it acts as a reflector as well.

Note: Do NOT use rocks from a river or wet ground to build your fire ring. The moisture in them can flash into steam, causing them to explode. You don’t want to take shrapnel because you had a hankering for s’mores.

My favorite kind of campfire is the “lazy man’s fire.” Once you’ve got a blaze going, you place just the ends of your bigger pieces of wood in the flames. As they’re consumed, push them in further. It stays small, is easily controlled, and can be doused quickly if necessary.

Should I advertise?
If you want to be found (when lost in the wilderness, for example), build a fire and use greenery to make it smoke. If it’s a humid day and the smoke’s not rising, three fires in a triangle is the international distress sign. If you don’t want to be found (by mutant cannibals, for example), there are ways to build hidden fires not easily seen at night. In a cave is the first choice, as long as it’s not already occupied by an angry bear, pissed-off rattlesnakes, or mutant cannibals. If you don’t have a cave handy, you can try this Air Force-recommended method: dig two holes about elbow deep, approximately a foot or so apart. Diameter is up to you, but I’d estimate no larger than a two-liter bottle or small coffee can. Dig a tunnel that connects these two holes. Build your fire in one hole and light it by reaching through the tunnel. Keep it small, and you should go undetected. Be careful, though, mutant cannibals have a keen sense of smell.

Bile
This is how people in the Appalachian Mountains say “boil.” You may have heard that you should boil your water for five or ten minutes to make sure it’s sterile. You’re just wasting time if you do that. Think about this, your body starts killing off invaders (viruses and bacteria) by raising your temperature to around 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Water boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit (at sea level). If it hits a boil, you’re good to go. And don't worry if you're not at sea level. Water boils in Denver (the mile-high city) at approximately 202 degrees. If your water boils at less than 100 degrees, you're almost in the stratosphere, and viruses are certainly the least of your worries.

So where are we getting all this water, anyway? Stay tuned.

Getting there is half the fun

I’m still in an apocalyptic frame of mind since that last post, so bear with me as I exorcise. I’m going to break this out into discrete categories to try and impose some sort of order on the swirling mass of tidbits I’ve accumulated over the years. The legal department requires me to state that this is by no means a complete survival guide. People way more paranoid than this cat have put together much more complete sites, so find one of those.

Location, location, location
Whether you’re hiking in the backcountry or fleeing the zombie horde, the most important part of any plan is to know where you want to end up. For instance, we know that if we ever have to make a run for it, we’re heading to Mama Cat’s place in the mountains. It’s ideal for a number of reasons:

· everyone there is family
· well water, with a spring-fed reservoir as a…well…a reserve
· gas heat, with wood-burning stoves and timber for when the gas runs out
· only one road in – dynamite two bridges and you’re cut off from vehicular traffic
· woods full of game and a river full of fish
· several large gardens, with a smattering of chicken coops
· one family member has a full machine shop beside his house
· a water-powered grist mill nearby

So you see, it’s a pretty good place to hunker down (and no, I won’t tell you where it is). But as I stated, you have to have a plan for getting there. Usually, whenever I picture “The End Of Civilization As We Know It,” I imagine my car will be useless due to the massive gridlock on our highways and byways, so what would ordinarily be a few hours’ drive turns into a month-long trek (or more).

Get the right maps
Your Rand-McNally isn’t going to help if you have to trailblaze, so pick up a backcountry map that covers the area you’ll be travelling through. Personally, I’d add a railway map, too, because you may want to follow the tracks as a compromise between joining the throngs on I-95 and pulling a Lewis & Clark 2.0.

Get a good compass
Your maps are useless if you don’t know how to orient them, so buy a good compass and learn how to use it. This is coming from a Cat with the directional sense of your average piece of drywall. I like the ones that have a built-in scale, while friends of mine prefer those with the pop-up sight. Learn how to find the North Star, but don’t plan on being able to see the sun or stars on any given day. And certainly don’t rely on that “moss on a tree” nonsense. Just for fun, I checked five trees at random: two had no moss, one had moss facing southeast, one had moss facing due west, and one had moss completely encircling the trunk, so…not that handy.

But ‘Cat, I hear you say, I have a brand new GPS accurate to within ten feet. Why can’t I just use that? You can, of course. I have one, too, but I’m not going to rely on just that. Plus, if it’s an emergency situation, I don’t want to be lugging fourteen pounds of batteries. Since my Doomsday Scenarios generally involve total Grid loss, I tend to overlook things like cell phones and other electrical devices. It’s halfway intentional. You’ll find that the two most common themes in the survival genre are redundancy and flexibility. The gear you carry should have multiple uses, and you should think creatively in using it. More on that later.

It ain’t the Ritz, but it’ll do
While you’re travelling, you’ll need shelter. If you’re sticking close to the remains of civilization, you’ll have your pick of abandoned vehicles, outbuildings and homes to choose from. If you’re out in the wilderness, you may want to blend in with your surroundings. Sure…a tent’s nice. So’s a 35-foot Pace Arrow motor home. Lacking either, you should have a few more tricks up your sleeve. If you don’t know how to build a lean-to at the very least, be sure to carry really good gear. That way, the next person to happen along the same way will find some useful stuff on your corpse. The secret to a natural shelter is to think small. There should be just enough room for you to crawl into it. That way, your body heat will be sufficient to keep it warm. And forget what the environmentally-minded say about only using dead wood. You don’t want your shelter to be made out of the same stuff you’re burning nearby, understand? One shift in the wind, and the next person to happen along the same way will find only slag.

Whether the weather is cold
You can get a small thermometer that attaches to a zipper, but why? You know if you’re too cold or too hot. Dress in layers to easily regulate your core temperature. Know what the signs of hypothermia and heat stroke are. Don’t worry about getting rained on unless you’re already cold. Easy ways to forecast the weather: look at the smoke from your campfire - hugging the ground, there’s a lot of moisture in the air; rising easily, it’s not likely to rain. If the deciduous trees are turning their leaves over, rain’s on the way. A ring around the sun or the moon means rain or snow is on the way. If you get caught out in a deluge or blizzard, the fastest way to warm up if you’re dangerously cold is to drink heated water. The fastest way to cool off (if there’s no handy stream or pond) is to pour water on yourself. You’re going to want to use clean water, though, and that means fire.

We’ll play with that next.

Apocalypso

Apocalyptic stories are always popular. I think the reason for their popularity is that people want to think they’d be a survivor. Talking about the purely fictional stories, here. The religious ones are usually more depressing – whether it’s the Hell on Earth immediately following the Christian Rapture, or the total destruction of everything as foretold by the Norse Ragnarok. I’d like to note the whole 2012 thing from the Mayans, but researchers (and crackpots) disagree as to whether it will be a good or bad thing.

I’ve noticed that a lot of post-apocalypse stories have a very industrial feel to them, which is kind of ironic considering we’d lose our industrial base immediately. It always annoys me when a writer sets the story far enough in the future that modern-day technologies are puzzled over when the remnants are found (It says ”Pan…a…son…ic.” What does it mean?), but people are still driving around in gasoline-powered automobiles.

Another cliché is that we’d return to a feudal/agrarian society. The agrarian I’ll grant, but I have doubts about the feudal system taking root in America, even after everything falls over and goes squick. I figure cities will become No Man’s lands – the refuge of scattered groups protecting their rooftop gardens and rain barrels, while small rural towns will dynamite their bridges or otherwise barricade themselves in. Bartering will become the norm, and xenophobia will be seen as a rational worldview.

The Postman, The Stand, The Road Warrior, Jericho – they all use the end of civilization as their starting point, and they all approach it differently. Brin’s Postman brings hope to suspicious, insular townspeople, while King allowed his survivors to restore the power grids before Good fought Evil. The Road Warrior didn’t even try to be anything other than a popcorn romp. I enjoyed Jericho because the writers did a good job exploring the problems (technical, social, and otherwise) involved with a town suddenly cut off from their entire support structure (i.e. everyone else).

One of my favorite books on the subject is Lucifer’s Hammer, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. Two scenes that stand out in my mind: the diabetic scientist who collects (and hides) engineering books and Chilton manuals to increase his worth, so he can convince a township to let him have a valuable pig or goat every month in order to make the insulin he needs; the Boy Scouts that become guerrilla fighters who prefer to stay in the mountains rather than join any of the towns.

Sometimes, when I’m mowing the lawn or washing dishes or doing some other repetitive, brain-neutral task, I think of the different types of people you might run into in a post-apocalyptic world. The military would probably be the only governmental agency to come through fairly intact, because they already have the infrastructure in place to function in other-than-first-world conditions.

Then you’d have the paranoid survivalists who have been preparing for just such an occasion, and have stockpiled food, water, medicine and toilet paper. I think we’d probably lose about 5% of them in the first week because they’d be picked off while they were gloating.

If, for whatever reason, we did end up as a feudal society, expect the D&D and SCA nerds to rise to the top, because they’re already used to working within that framework. The Scadians in particular have studied the Dark Ages closely, and have developed skills that aren’t dependent on electricity.

Similar to the diabetic scientist mentioned above, I imagine reference librarians would be in demand, just for their knowledge base. Similarly, chemists and medical personnel would be sought after. On the opposite end of the spectrum, gossip columnists and American Idol “celebrities” would become food.

Farmers would find themselves targeted by desperate, short-sighted people, and we’d probably lose most of them to mob action.

That’s all just off the top of my head. It would take a much larger canvas than this blog to explore all of the ramifications.

Of course, you have to wonder how you would fare in “Year Zero.” A friend who read my comment a few days ago about snaring birds and rabbits called to chortle at me, because she thought I had no skills in that area. I assured her that I had plenty of dental floss.

If you understand that last comment, you’ll probably be among the survivors. For the rest of you, I’ll explain.

Dental floss is one of the most useful filaments in the world because of its high tensile strength. It can replace a shoelace, slice cheese, serve as heavy-duty thread, and replace Teflon plumbing tape. You can braid it into an extremely strong rope (a few years ago, a Washington prisoner escaped by scaling the prison wall on a dental floss rope), hang pictures with it, replace a broken zipper pull, or even clean your teeth with it.

In addition to all of the everyday uses, dental floss is also a vital part to any post-apocalyptic survival kit, as it makes a great fishing line, suture thread, tripwire, garrote, or small animal snare.

My Scout troop once went on a “Shoebox Campout.” As the name implies, all of the gear we carried (apart from food) had to fit inside one shoebox. That will prioritize you in a hurry, and force you to think creatively. It also serves as a pretty good model for an emergency kit in case the bombs go off or the zombies arise.

There are a metric buttload of sites that offer survival packs, ranging from the outdoor enthusiast sites to the oh-my-god-we’re-all-doomed-dig-a-bunker sites. They’re all fun to browse through, though. This site

http://www.survival-gear.com/

is pretty good because they offer pre-made kits, as well as the individual pieces to build your own custom kit.

Whether it’s nukular war, alien invasion, zombie uprising, plague, or you’re just hiking in the backcountry, these kits don’t do a bit of good if you don’t know how to use them. Throw a Boy Scout manual in there, too.

Or you can just come get me.

Red Tape and Bandwidth

One of the current debates in our community is whether the state should deny a license renewal to a hydroelectric company in favor of the state taking it over. I am amazed at the number of people that think this is a good idea. Their reasons for approving the theft of a private business by the state seem to distill into one of two arguments: 1. The company has polluted the water (the hard Left), and 2. They might sell it to foreigners (the hard Right).

My stance is that if pollution is your concern, enforce the laws already on the books and make the company pay for cleaning up their mess. And if you’re concerned about “Johnny Foreigner” controlling your water access, make it a condition of the relicensing that the state gets first option on any resale of the license, whereupon they can offer it to another local company.

My primary worry is not that a governmental group wants to steal a private business – hell…that doesn’t even blip on my radar anymore; I assume that’s a matter of course lately – my concern is that these folks that think it’s a good idea aren’t really considering the ramifications of the group that taxes us having total control over a truly necessary commodity. What do they think will happen the next time the state hits a budget shortfall? Our Governor has already diverted funds from our “Education” lottery to prop up their deficits, I can’t imagine she’d hesitate for one damned minute on raising fees for the water the state supplies.

On another stage, our city is planning to start a new fiber-optic service to every resident, and the big cable monopoly here in the area (Time Warner) is spending a hellacious amount of our subscription fees to lobby against it. At the same time, TW is trying to institute bandwidth “caps” because so many people are using the internet to watch shows when they want to, not when cable broadcasts them.

I’m squarely on the side of the city in this one because they’re not taking over anybody’s existing business, and it’s about time someone challenged the cable monopoly. With the amount of streaming data I consume, I’d be thrilled with fiber-optic. One of the very few things government does effectively is projects that involve dense infrastructure, and running lines to everyone’s house and business falls under that definition.

I’ve had people who know I lean Right question how I could be pleased with the city government offering internet service and be against the state offering water service. The answer is threefold: 1. The internet is not a necessity. As much as I joke about it, I don’t have to have it to live. Water, I do. 2. If I don’t like the city’s services, prices, etc., I can go back to TW. Competition is a good thing. If I don’t like the prices of my water bill (or the taxes attached to it, more likely), what do I do, invest in rain barrels and a home filtration system? Sure, there’s a monopoly with the private company, too, but they don’t raise their rates every time another division loses a few million dollars, and the state would. 3. State bureaucracy versus city bureaucracy. The larger the agency, the more complicated the labyrinthine warren of petty power players. Obviously, the Feds are the champions of this, but it’s plenty bad at the state level. At their best, they are merely competent. At their worst, they are colossal fuckups insulated behind thick tomes of regulations and phone trees whose maps resemble illustrations of the more complex ganglial structures. You can ask three different people in the same department the same question, and get three different answers. And if you call them back the next day, each answer has changed, and none of the six answers agree.

I think this is how, four years later, there are still Katrina refugees living off governmental assistance. They just keep calling FEMA employees until they get the answer they want, then cling to it as if it were holy writ.

Try that with Time Warner and see how far you get.

Got Swine Flu?

I was watching the news last night because Mrs. Cat had taken over the computer and I was too lazy to get up and change the channel after Castle went off (but the remote is way over therrrrrre!). The anchor droids were ecstatic because they’d managed to find some local connection to the Swine Flu brouhaha currently rooting through the airwaves, and got to show scary pictures of people coming into our airport wearing surgical masks.

We had the Closed Captioning on because the litter was asleep, and I noticed that whoever is in charge of it really wasn’t very good at keeping up. Since I know the vapid piles of clothing behind the anchor desk are just reading from a TelePrompTer, wouldn’t it make sense to load that script into a scroll across the bottom of the screen? Someone’s already typed it up once; why duplicate the effort? You might miss some “light-hearted banter” in between segments, but have you really missed anything?

Fission Chips

I was doing some skimming on energy sources, mainly because I saw a reference to Tesla’s plans for providing unlimited energy, and of all of the options currently available, I still think nuclear power is the way to go.

Comparing production costs per kilowatt-hour:

Solar=30.5 cents
Petroleum= 10.26 cents
Wind/Biomass= 7.5 cents
Gas= 6.78 cents
Hydro= 4.4 cents
Coal= 2.47 cents
Nuclear= 1.76 cents


Worldwide, the US has the most plants in operation – 104. We get about 23% of our electricity from them. With the obvious advantage in production costs, reduced pollution, and the reduced reliance on foreign oil, you’d think we’d be scrambling to build more plants, right? Know how many nuclear plants are currently being built in the U.S.?

One.

One? What the fuck? Why aren’t we throwing every bulldozer we can find at building these things? We should be stamping them out like Legos. But no, some people have decided that exposing the public to even a blueprint for a nuclear plant will lead to smoking wastelands populated by mutants, so they have pitched fits, blocked sites, protested plans, and generally acted like assholes whenever one has been proposed.

Know how many nuclear plant accidents the U.S has had?

One.

Yep. Good ol’ Three Mile Island almost melted down forty years ago, pissing a small amount of radioactivity into the atmosphere, and ever since then, people have been skittish over nuclear power. But have you ever looked at how the accident happened?

1. A fairly routine blockage occurred in one of the plant’s water filters.
2. Moisture leaked into the air system, inadvertently tripping two valves, which shut off the flow of cold water into the steam generator.
3. Someone had also closed the valves on the backup system. Nobody knows who or why.
4. The indicator in the control room showing that the backup valves were closed was blocked by a tag hanging from the switch above it.
5. The second backup system – a pressure-relief valve – stuck open instead of closing.
6. The gauge in the control room that monitored the status of the relief valve malfunctioned.

What do you think the odds are of this sort of sequence happening again? Six minor (in and of themselves) events stacking up in just that way. Several million-to-one? Keep in mind the state of computer monitoring systems today, the engineering changes precipitated specifically by this occurrence, and the fact that we’ve all seen the opening sequence to The Simpsons.

But you can’t talk about odds with people who have adopted a cause. They won’t settle for anything less than a 100% guarantee that there will never be an accident, which just isn’t feasible. It’s that reason it takes twenty-five years to get a new plant built. An entire generation between proposal and ribbon-cutting.

What are the odds of that changing any time soon? Obama has stated that nuclear power is “not a panacea for US energy woes,” but is worth considering. He wants safer ways of using it first, though.

Forty years. 104 plants. One accident. How much safer does he want it?

Even Mr. Global Warming himself, Al Gore, isn’t completely opposed to nuclear power. However, he does think "[t]hey're so expensive, and they take so long to build, and at present they only come in one size: extra large…And people don't want to make that kind of investment in an uncertain market for energy demand."

“Uncertain market for energy demand”? Have you even looked at the amount of juice your little bungalow in Tennessee sucks down, Al? Multiply that by the world.

Then there are the environmentalists that insist carbon emissions from nuclear plants are “significant.” Uhhh…the fuel contains no carbon, the water used as a coolant contains no carbon, and the byproduct – really hot water (steam) – contains no carbon. What fucking carbon emissions?

The biggest problem with nuclear power is waste disposal. According to people much smarter than me, Yucca Mountain in Nevada is a perfect site for disposal, but wouldn’t you know it, ol’ Harry Reid keeps blocking them.

I would have expected a state that elects Reid to be used to hazardous fallout.

It's Obvious

I took the pride out today to enjoy the nice weather and noticed many buildings for sale around town. One of these was a church.

“Hey,” I said to Mrs. Cat, “wanna start a church?”

“What kind?” she asked warily. She’s seen too many Lifetime movies about creepy cult leaders that prey (ha!) on young women.

“The tax-exempt kind,” I replied. “You gutterbrain.”

I’ve been kicking it around, and I think I’ll start the Church of the Bleeding Obvious. People make things too complicated anymore. Some of them are so busy trying to make sure that nobody gets excluded from anything that nobody gets the full benefit from anything, others are actively trying to exclude folks from the benefits and power they themselves enjoy, and everyone gets pissed when their beliefs aren’t universally echoed.

(You’d think after bitching about complications I would’ve made that sentence simpler, wouldn’t you?)

No wonder everyone carps and snipes at each other. All of them insist theirs is the One True Way.

The C.B.O. would be organized around the idea that different people have different strengths and aptitudes, and would require people to use their particular talents to better their community. Not their opinions, their skills. Good at accounting? Teach your neighbors how to set up budgets. Can’t balance a checkbook but got a green thumb? Help people with their gardens. Computer geek? Get the older people off of AOL.

I know this is bordering on “stinking hippie commune” territory, but it’s not about divorcing yourself from society’s rules as a whole; it’s striking a balance between expecting the government to provide everything and trying to be completely self-sufficient.

It’s all well and good to give everyone credit for trying. That’s fine; people should be encouraged. But you can’t mandate that everyone be given the same rewards no matter their contribution and expect to get the same results as when you allow people to play to their strengths and excel.

It’s been said the last man that possessed all the skills necessary to produce a simple pencil was Leonardo da Vinci – i.e. growing the wood; producing the paint; making the graphite/lead composite; refining gum for the eraser; metalworking for the band; stamping a “2” on it. Each of these requires a large, specific body of knowledge. Our modern society has gotten even more specialized, with many different disciplines. No one can master them all. No one can even master all of the basics anymore. The more successful corporations cross-train their employees in order to create a larger skill pool. Why shouldn’t we do that in our families and social circles?

If nothing else, it will make it easier to survive the coming zombie apocalypse. People will have food, strong shelters, clean water, weapons, sniper skills, a communications network, and down-to-earth advice from the C.B.O.

Look for the neon exclamation point.

Monkeyshines

So Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson have found employment for the next few months, protesting the New York Post’s recent editorial cartoon. As near as I can tell, there was a local story about a rabid monkey that had had to be shot at a zoo. The cartoonist depicted the animal control officers standing over the hole-y corpse and saying “Looks like they’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill.”

Of course, the professionally offended are all up in arms about the implication that Obama is a monkey, because they don’t know:

a. The President didn’t write the bill; Congress did.
b. There is an old theory about monkeys at typewriters turning out the works of Shakespeare.
c. It’s not uncommon to refer to a colossal cock-up as having been engineered by monkeys.

I found this quote at DemocraticUnderground:

“The cartoonist should be fired! The office of the president deserves our respect.”

Coming from a group that referred to Bush as “Chimpy” for eight years, that’s fucking rich.

***

Quite possibly the best line on television this week:

Man hands gun to girl: “You know how to use one of these?”
Girl takes gun: “Four brothers.”
Girl cocks gun with attitude: “None of them Democrats.”

Dollhouse

***

I saw where Obama wants to nationalize the banks. Since it was Congress that mandated the lending rules that started this big ol’ ball rolling in the first place, why would we do that?

***

A local job fair charged applicants $20 per person to attend. Talk about a recession-proof business.

Time is on my side (yes it is).

There’s a button on my microwave labeled “Stop Time.” The thing that intrigues me is there’s no corresponding “Start Time” button, which you would expect if its function was to run the cooking cycle over a particular time period.

The microwave was here in the house when we moved in, and we don’t have the manual, so I’m not sure how Kenmore engineered the oven. Does it stop subjective time or actual time? Is it just for the person that presses the button, or for everyone? Is it an instant effect, or is there a gradual slowing down while inertia is compensated for?

Now, it wouldn’t make sense to stop time for everyone, because then it could never be started again, (which would negatively impact Kenmore’s profit margin), so I’m assuming that it stops time relative to the person pressing the button. The fact that there is no “Start Time” implies some built-in limit to the event – perhaps the LED screen runs a countdown – which further implies the microwave itself is immune to the effects, or else it wouldn’t be able to measure the elapsed time. If this is the case, we must be missing some parts, because there is no obvious way to ground the static electricity and dissipate the friction heat you’d build up moving around in a stopped-time world. If such a device was never included, I’m really surprised they got the thing UL-listed, because that’s very dangerous.

Knowing that engineers look for the easiest way to achieve the desired results, I’m assuming the microwave just speeds up the person pressing the button, rather than attempting to stop every other piece of matter in the universe. If that’s the case, I would hope the effect has a generous time limit, because you’d have to walk everywhere you wanted to go. On the other hand, it runs off a plain old 120 outlet (impressive!), so I guess you could take it wherever you wanted to use it. My car has a 120 outlet built in, so I could theoretically create a time machine as long as the effect can be extended to non-living matter. If not, the chemical reactions that power the car would be too slow for me to realistically use it for travelling. I don’t want to just sit there waiting for the fuel to combust under the pistons.

I’d like to think I’d use this power responsibly, if only because it would be tough to use it for crime. Even if I wanted to clean out the local banks, I’d have to wait until every door was open – front door, the hall door that leads to the vault, and the vault door itself. What are the odds of that? And the typical loser geek fantasy of finally having your way with the head cheerleader is right out. If you build up dangerous amounts of friction just by walking around, you’d definitely combust during any sort of sexual act. Even mugging people on the street wouldn’t be worth the effort. The way the economy is these days, no one is carrying any serious cash. I suppose I could take whatever I wanted from the local stores, but again, the static buildup would destroy any expensive electronics when the time flow was restored.

Maybe I won’t push the button after all. Doesn’t seem worth it.

Maybe I’m just really overthinking this.

Conspiracy, Corporations, and catty remarks

Barack Obama Hates White People

I’m not going to echo the Right’s “outrage” over the lag time in FEMA’s response to those in Kentucky who recently lost power due to the ice storm. I think we all know that it doesn’t matter who the president is, FEMA is just another bloated government agency that takes a little while to build up any sort of inertia. Especially when they’re hampered by, you know…ice.

No, I’m referring to the fact that Obama secretly arranged for FEMA to distribute salmonella-tainted peanut butter in the emergency rations. (http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/02/04/fema.peanut.butter/index.html )

This is understandable, actually. Kentucky voted mostly for McCain, so Obama’s not losing a lot of followers, and he’ll be wiping out a coal state, which should make his environmentalist supporters happy.

It’s every bit as realistic as the “dam-blowing” scenario spun by the tinfoil brigade regarding Katrina. The president is a powerful man, true, but not in the way most people seem to think. The New York Times apparently bugged the Oval Office, and took great delight in reporting every conversation, strategy, and confidential plan Bush had for eight years, and Obama has the watchdogs at PolitiFact eyeballing him. (http://politifact.com/truth-o-meter/) The notion that a president could do anything in secret is laughable, which is why the more successful TV shows and movies always portray a shadow government organization or rogue agent intent on causing chaos, rather than the guy who lives in a fishbowl.


A/S/L?

So MySpace deleted the accounts of 90,000 registered sex offenders this week (in totally unrelated news, Facebook reported almost 100,000 new users). North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper demanded the site should do more. "Technology moves forward quickly, and it's important for these companies to stay ahead of the technology," he said. "And they're not moving fast enough for us."

How much you want to bet that the AG’s office still has Windows2000 loaded on their Acer computers?

What do you want them to do, Roy? Their technology enables people to converse online and decorate a home page, not provide real-time GPS tracking. Can you guarantee you know every e-mail address these criminals are using? Know each site they visit? Do you even know where they all are right now?

Personally, I’m not worried about the registered offenders that are stupid enough to use their real names on a social networking site; Darwin will take care of them in time.


This is a round-trip ticket, right?

IBM ups the ante for big corporations that are considering outsourcing. Not only are they outsourcing the jobs, they are offering the employees who used to do those jobs the opportunities to outsource themselves to the country that’s getting those jobs and keep doing the same job, but “under local terms and conditions.” They are graciously offering to help with relocation costs, travel arrangements, and visas. (http://money.cnn.com/2009/02/05/news/companies/ibm_jobs/index.htm)

“So…Frank. We’re relocating your department to our call center in India. You can keep your job if you’re willing to move to Bhopal and work for a few rupees a day.”


Man…accountability sucks

Goldman Sachs CFO David Viniar announced today that the financial institution is looking for ways to repay the $10 billion the government gave the group. In totally unrelated news, Obama proposed capping the salaries of officers of any institution that accepted bailout money at $500,000/year. Carly Fiorina opines that Obama has no business capping salaries. In totally unrelated news, Ms. Fiorina earned $8,000,000/year as CEO of Hewlitt-Packard, and received a $21,000,000 payoff when she was fired.


But I’m not a little person

If Obama really wants to revitalize the economy, he could start by insisting that all of his cabinet appointees pay their taxes.


Let’s make a (book) deal

Elizabeth Edwards is writing a book about facing adversity. The book, Resilience, is due in stores May 12.

Yeah...like she knows anything about adversity.

And if you can find them

Kitten is involved with the Upward program at our church. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s part of the church’s community outreach program, where they sponsor sports leagues for the kids. When we went in for orientation, the organizer explained they were not going to keep score this year, since out of all the complaints they’ve received over the years, 50% were from parents, and 100% of those were about unfavorable scoring “mistakes.” That’s probably a good decision, as I’ve seen several parents storming out of the bleachers to have a word with the coaches – angry gesturing and pouting included. They’re 3rd and 4th graders, people, not the Globetrotters. If the coach lets some traveling or double-dribbling slide, it’s because it just isn’t that important in the face of the lessons on teamwork and good sportsmanship. On the other hand, I did see one kid that had one of the few ref calls go against him. He slammed the ball down to show how pissed off he was, and his mom teleported onto the court to smack his butt and make him apologize to the ref. I bet that sticks with him longer than having Mommy bawl out the coach on his behalf.

I’m finding that the crappy economy can be a bargain-hunter’s dream if you’re willing to put in a little work and have at least a minimal income. As a for-instance, a local video store is going out of business, so we were able to pick up seven DVDs – including two newly-released titles – for a little more than the cost of one new one. I’m hoping the local office supply store will tank so I can pick up a bunch of whiteboards. I like to brainstorm on them: storyboards, plot arcs, a list of supplies to survive the coming zombie apocalypse. You know…stuff.

Speaking of minimal incomes, I was speaking with a former Marketing femme I know (formerly in Marketing, still a femme), and she clued me into the enormous earning potential of doing corporate logos. I did some research, and it’s not unusual for these things to cost $1000-$3000. Figure it takes you 10 hours total to dash out a few choices, wrangle the VPs into agreeing on one, and finishing touches. If you get the max on that, you’re making the equivalent of $624,000 a year. Guess which cat is hitting the Graphic Design section at Amazon this week (for someone that excels at visual thinking, I have the GD skills of a sea sponge).

I have several friends that are also unemployed, and we’ve all said at one point or another “We should start a company together.” The problem is that, while we are all very skilled in our chosen areas and would make a great A-Team for someone, our collective brain trust lacks a unifying corporate focus. If we could find one person with the capital and credulity to hire us all, that would be awesome.

I want to be Murdock.

What right do you have?

Like the majority of parents, we have a number of DVDs that the kids thoroughly love, but threaten to send us into spasms of twitching and drooling, followed by diabetic comas. My particular kryptonite is the Kidsongs series. The setup is that a plucky, pan-ethnic group of “adorable” kids descend on a television studio, asking to be allowed to put on their own show. Sort of a modern version of “We’ll put the play on right here in the barn!” Not happy with the amount of sap per serving, the producers added in two magical furry critters that interact with the kids and provide marketing tie-in opportunities.

I keep one of these discs with me at all times in case I accidentally ingest something poisonous.

As with every other video production, each dreadful DVD in this series is preceded by an overly-stern Copyright Protection notice. It admonishes that the disc is licensed for home use only, then advises us that the definition of home excludes clubs, churches, schools, oil rigs and prisons.

I understand why you’d maybe want to keep these discs out of prisons, but I kind of doubt the crew of Baltic rig No. 72B is shattered that they can’t watch badly-choreographed music videos of popular songs as performed by pre-teens.

At what point does the right of the consumer to control the products they’ve purchased outweigh the right of the producers to receive fair market value? That’s the question underlying the fight against the RIAA’s efforts to squeeze every last blood-soaked penny out of the people that would occasionally like to buy a piece of music that can be played on every medium they own without compatibility issues or anti-piracy safeguards locking them out.

If I want to buy a song, the RIAA would prefer that I pay for each version separately – a cda version for disc, an mp3 version for my portable, and a version that would play on my computer. Each of these versions would be engineered so I couldn’t copy them, and each would have its own license tied in to my players so they couldn’t run on someone else’s systems.

However, I don’t want to pay for each song three times. Once I’ve purchased it, I want to be able to put that song wherever I may want to listen to it. Technically, according to the RIAA, playing a disc I’ve purchased in the car when I have passengers breaches their copyright unless my passengers have also purchased their own copies of the disc. At that point, technically, the RIAA can kiss my ass.

As much as I geek on Hardware/Human interfaces, I fear that the first neural shunt will allow the RIAA to inventory the songs I carry in my head and charge me accordingly.

At a different spot on the rights spectrum is the Disclaimer. Unfortunately, our society has gotten so litigious, manufacturers and distributors have been reduced to putting obvious-to the-point-of-absurdity disclaimers on their products. That’s why we end up with warnings like “Not for internal use” on curling irons, and “Caution: Product is flammable” on matchboxes.

Then there are the folks that go so overboard, you can’t help but admire their total unwillingness to accept any responsibility whatsoever, as with the folks at Nelson Rocks Preserve (who I am sure have had to deal with many tourists complaining about these very things):

WARNING

Nature is unpredictable and unsafe. Mountains are dangerous. Many books have been written about these dangers, and there's no way we can list them all here. Read the books…

[lots of other funny stuff here]

By entering the Preserve, you are agreeing that we owe you no duty of care or any other duty. We promise you nothing. We do not and will not even try to keep the premises safe for any purpose. The premises are not safe for any purpose. This is no joke. We won't even try to warn you about any dangerous or hazardous condition, whether we know about it or not. If we do decide to warn you about something, that doesn't mean we will try to warn you about anything else. If we do make an effort to fix an unsafe condition, we may not try to correct any others, and we may make matters worse! We and our employees or agents may do things that are unwise and dangerous. Sorry, we're not responsible. We may give you bad advice. Don't listen to us. In short, ENTER AND USE THE PRESERVE AT YOUR OWN RISK. And have fun!

It is well worth going to http://www.nelsonrocks.org/disclaimer.html and reading the whole thing.

And one of my favorite e-mail disclaimers:

IMPORTANT: This email is intended for the use of the individual addressee(s) named above and may contain information that is confidential, privileged or unsuitable for overly sensitive persons with low self-esteem, no sense of humour or irrational religious beliefs. If you are not the intended recipient, any dissemination, distribution or copying of this email is not authorised (either explicitly or implicitly) and constitutes an irritating social faux pas. Unless the word absquatulation has been used in its correct context somewhere other than in this warning, it does not have any legal or grammatical use and may be ignored. No animals were harmed in the transmission of this email, although the yorkshire terrier next door is living on borrowed time, let me tell you. Those of you with an over whelming fear of the unknown will be gratified to learn that there is no hidden message revealed by reading this warning backwards, so just ignore that Alert Notice from Microsoft: However, by pouring a complete circle of salt around yourself and your computer you can ensure that no harm befalls you and your pets. If you have received this email in error, please add some nutmeg and eggwhites and place it in a warm oven for 40 minutes. Whisk briefly and let it stand for 2 hours before icing.

Scrabble Champion – or – Let’s make it complicated – or – If you keep playing with the language, you’ll go blind.

I have an amateur interest in Linguistics (insert obligatory “cunning” joke here), and recently ran across a nifty new term: “Tmesis.” This is the act of dropping a word in the middle of another word, as in “abso-fuckin’-lutely.” Tmesis is a form of another fun word: “infixation,” and the example I used is defined specifically as an “expletive infixation.”

There are other examples. Hip Hop culture provides “hizzouse” and “shiznit,” while many people joke about being “edumacated.”

What’s interesting to me is the fact that linguists, who actually get paid for things like this, have argued over what determines where the insertion is placed. Many seem to subscribe to the theory that the insertion occurs before the primary stressed syllable, while others insist a morpheme boundary takes precedence. Yet another camp swears up and down that it’s all a matter of prosody, where “the metrical stress tree of the host is minimally restructured to accommodate the stress tree of the infix."

For what it’s worth, the third is the theory I subscribe to. As was pointed out, “unbelievable” and “irresponsible” have the same stress patterns, and the first syllable of each is a separate morpheme, but the infixation occurs in two different places, i.e. “un-fucking-believable” and “irre-fucking-sponsible.” The resulting rhythms just sound more natural, which is what prosody is all about.

Prosody is the rhythms, stresses, and intonations of spoken language. It can indicate if a sentence is a statement or question, the emotional state of the speaker, or – most important to me – sarcasm. Users of sign language have their own form of prosody, using length of gesture, tension of limbs, and of course, facial expressions to achieve the same effect. I think that’s cool. Emoticons are an orthographic convention (writin’) used to convey prosody, as are boring old punctuation marks such as commas, ellipses, and the wonderfully-named “scare quotes” – the quotation marks that are used specifically to cause doubt about the truthfulness of a specific word or phrase, as in: We’ve heard all we need to about your “solution.”

And since I can’t think of a clever way to end this post, I’ll just quote an expletive infixation from one of my all-time favorite movies, Boondock Saints: “I’d say that makes him a lia-fuckin’-bility.”