A Thanksgiving Poem

Today is the day when we gather together

And digest as much as we can.

We eat way too much and we drink even more

With our friends and our family clan.

We celebrate something of pilgrims and Indians

Sharing their meat and their bread,

Taking a break from gathering harvest and

Beating each other till dead.

But mostly we gorge ourselves over and over

On everything we see before us,

Like turkey, potatoes, and stuffing and gravy;

A greasy, masticating chorus.

So I wish you a Happy Thanksgiving today;

May you eat till your stomach is puffed.

Inhale all you can of the food that you see.

In short, I wish you’d get stuffed.

Things I Believe: Thoughts for Friday

All journeys begin with a single step, as do falls from great heights.

All things come to he who waits, except the time wasted waiting around for things.

Don't burn your bridges behind you. But if you have to choose, it's probably better than burning them in front of you.

Don't change your horse in midstream, unless it's drowned. Then it's probably a pretty good time to find a different ride.

For Goodness Sake

As is probably obvious by now, this blog is all about educating you, the innocent bystander that just happened to click on a link that took you here instead of to that site with cat videos that you were actually searching for.

In pursuit of that higher goal of learning, today's article is about the ancient Japanese art of making Sake, the rice wine traditionally consumed when you're in a Japanese restaurant feeling culturally open and guilty about the micro brew you really wanted instead.

I visited the Takara Sake plant in Berkeley yesterday, in an effort to understand more about this important element of alcoholism, and because it seemed like something to do on a Saturday afternoon. I highly recommend the visit as well as the tasting. But in case you can't make it there yourself, I thought I'd teach you a little about how Sake is made, gleaned from long minutes spent in the Museum of Wooden Things and from the video they showed (a very professional affair, interleaving scenes of serious artisans carrying bags of rice and windswept ponds).

First, it's important to realize that Sake is a true wine. You can tell this in the illustration on the right, from a diagram showing the steps of traditional sake making. In this step, we see the men stirring the rice with their feet. Despite access to the abundant wooden stirring implements that we'll see below and these things called "hands" (which the men in the picture clearly own), they chose to use their feet, realizing that this is what makes a real wine.

The next thing that struck me as I wandered through the large Room of Wooden Things was how many different types of buckets and sticks Sake making entails. There were placards and different names for all of them, but although my knowledge of Japanese is somewhat minimal (I can pronounce the word "Japanese", but after that it gets a bit sketchy), I'm fairly certain the translations of the placards would have said things like "large stick", "small bucket", "stick with handle", and "large, misshapen bucket".




Of course, the previous display was just an initial sampling of the vast array of sticks and buckets they used. To the right was another set of sticks leaning casually up against another wall, as if after a long day of stirring.






There were also smaller sticks used, as seen to the left.






There were also sticks seen mingling with buckets,  foreshadowing the more complex tools seen below.







At this point, the tools got far more interesting as they started combining functions. For example, in this piece we see the powerful discovery of putting a stick into a bucket.







And in this exhibit, we see a fundamental leap in thinking as sticks and buckets got combined into wholly new stick-bucket tools.




The advances seen in the stick-bucket prototypes above were refined into these more advanced, and quite substantially longer production versions.



Perhaps the most important advancement in sake tooling came when another stick/bucket combination resulted in this triple combination of a long stick and two buckets.

The final, and quite startling, piece on display was this altogether new tool, neither a stick, nor a bucket, nor a stick-bucket combination. You can see it next to the flat sticks to the left. It is, obviously, a hedgehog.



 That's all for today's lesson about sake making. I hope you learned as much as I did.

Tricker Treat

Things I Believe: Little Thoughts for Friday

Those who live in glass houses shouldn't.

Time waits for no man. It waits, instead, for a woman named Irene, who's very, very late.

Absinthe makes the hearth grow flounder.

Beauty is only skin deep, which explains why someone's so ugly when you cut their skin away.

Sunday Comics: Sound Logic

I've always wondered at the difference between people like me ("music snobs", according to my wife), and people who care deeply not about the music itself, but rather the quality with which the music is reproduced (heretofore referred to as "audio snobs"). 

I've done some research and have created the following Venn Diagram to help others understand the important distinctions in these demographics.

When I am King: Buy the Way

When I am King...

We will buy only what we can actually use.

What is our fascination with Costco? Do we really need that much of anything?

I was there the other day, pacing the aisles, and came across some scissors. “Great!,” I thought, because we had only one pair at home and they were broken. Clearly we needed new scissors. Perfect timing.

I ignored the fact that I was buying a pack of scissors - not a pair. And not just two of the things - this pack had three pairs. But I was fine with that, happy in fact, because this meant we’d have back up pairs. So when one breaks, you can just reach in the drawer and pull out another one. No need to rush to the drug store in the middle of the night to replace the scissors - just root around in the junk drawer and pull out the next pair. And I had proof at home that the things do break, so this was obviously a good thing.

This rationalization completely ignored the fact that we’ve had that broken pair at home for the last two years. At no point did the situation escalate into a scissors emergency. The only time it ever occurred to me to replace them was in that aisle in Costco. There is no “emergency” with scissors - just situations that might require a bit more time and care in cutting. Or the use of, say, a knife. Or teeth.

But somehow, we’re brainwashed in that massive store into thinking that we need these huge things. And lots of them. Potato chips? Love ‘em - gimme that 10 pound bag. That taquito tasted pretty good - I’ll have a bushel. And my, isn’t that a great deal on a steamer trunk full of car batteries?

One of the reasons for the overabundance of things in each package is the currency that Costco uses. It’s based on the U.S. system, but works a bit differently. In the U.S., we’re debating whether the penny should still be in circulation; it costs more to produce than it’s actually worth, and rounding off to the nearest nickle seems like a fine workaround (tragically unfair to President Lincoln, but then he probably won’t know). But in the sovereign state of Costco, they have done away with the penny entirely. And the nickel, and the dime, and all coinage for that matter. They’ve also eliminated the one and the five dollar bills. They have made the ten dollar bill the minimum denomination; everything in that store costs at least $10.

They obviously want to sell items that actually cost less than $10 in the real world, so they make it work by just throwing as many of them in as it takes to get to that minimum price and then shrink-wrapping the whole ugly bundle together. That’s why I have enough disposable razors and Q-tips to last me until the zombie apocalypse. I’ll have the cleanest brains those zombies will ever slurp.

Meanwhile, we all need larger and larger cars and houses just to transport and store these items. SUV owners might claim that they buy their cars for their wild, off-roading lifestyles, but we know better. I’ve seen Expeditions slow to a crawl just to cross a speed bump in the grocery store parking lot, truly an exciting expedition for that family.

No, we all need these monster vehicles just to fit our purchases from Costco. We also need bigger houses to keep the stuff. This explains why in California, where we don’t have basements, nobody parks their car in their garage. Instead, it’s where we keep the stacks of napkins, and boxes of diced tomato cans, and pasta packs that cannot fit in the house.

It shouldn’t be called Costco, it should be called Bomb Shelter Depot. Why else would we need so much damned toilet paper? Only when the Big One hits are we going to justify all our stockpiling efforts. Of course, that’s when we’ll realize that we were really good at storing shipping containers full of ramen noodles, but didn’t happen to set aside any drinking water.

When I am King, we’ll all buy just what we need. More like the Native Americans. When they hunted, they killed just what they needed and they consumed it all. They didn’t buy a herd of buffalo and stick them in the bench freezer. Heck, they didn’t have basements either, or even garages; where would they have put the things?

We need to return to that model: figure out what we need, and buy that. Simplify, scale it down: purchase, consume, repeat. Except for those potato chips, because they look really good. And I know I might to need a second stapler one day, so I’ll just get that two-pack now.

When I am King: Age-Old Solutions

When I am King...

There will be no more mid-life crises.

The mid-life crisis is one of the most significant moments of our lives. It is the turning point where we go from thinking that anything could happen to knowing that nothing did.

It’s the out-of-fuel part of the journey, that time on the highway where the gas tank Empty light goes on, and you see nothing but prairie and tumbleweeds for miles around. All you can do is to ease off the accelerator, turn off the air conditioning, and turn up the hope as you coast toward your fate.

It’s also a time to take up new hobbies, like heavy drinking and visiting the doctor. It is the time of life for which television shows like Jerry Springer were invented, to help you realize that no matter how bad things are for you, they could be a lot worse.

But all of this is such a waste of energy and drain on our society. There are so many other things that we could not quite achieve in our lives, if only we could continue to make the pointless effort.

When I am King, the mid-life crisis will be a thing of the past. Or, rather, it will be a thing of the future. Medical advances will greatly extend the human lifespan, using everything from robotics to formaldehyde. Mid-life will, necessarily, be extended by years as well, allowing us decades more of productivity before we recognize our inherent uselessness and insignificance.

The best part is that medical advances will extend how long we live, but not the aging process, so we will still be getting senile in our 80s and 90s. This means that if we can manage to hold off our mid-life crisis until the same time, then we’ll have the added advantage of combining these maladies. So while a mid-life crisis may be just as torturous and meaningless as it always was, our senility will ensure that nobody will notice, remember, or care.

When I am King: Filling You In

When I am King...

We won't need dentists.

I went to the dentist recently and was told I’d need fillings. That’s pretty normal - my teeth attract cavities like nerds attract bullies. It’s just the natural order of things.

The annoying part was that I needed fillings … to replace my fillings. The dentist said, “You have some older silver fillings. We have to replace those because you can get cavities under them.”

Hold on - they want to fill teeth that have already been filled? Why is that fair? I’m pretty sure the dentist manual says that they’re supposed to fill cavities. Moreover, once those cavities are filled they’re supposed to go rooting around to find more cavities to fill. They are definitely not allowed to go looking back at filled teeth to see about re-filling them. They’ve been there, done that - my filled teeth have done their part and sacrificed themselves for the greater good of my mouth. Now get the hell away from them and go find something real to charge me for.

The problem could be that there’s not much enamel left in my mouth for them to poke and prod. My set of teeth simply don’t provide a fertile soil upon which the dentist can plant future profits. So she’s looking for other ways to ply her trade. If your only tool is a little metal pointy thing, everything looks like a cavity. Even a filling.

When I am King, everyone will have artificial teeth. I’m pretty sure it’s the only way to keep the dentists and their sadistic ways away from our mouths. People think that Jaws, the James Bond villain, had those metal teeth for some nefarious purpose. Not true; he just hated dentists. And if they tried to fill his teeth anyway, he’d bite them.

Things I Believe: Little Thoughts for Friday

 Life: If it's so great, why are people dying to leave it?

Ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. So answer your damn phone and put it on vibrate already.

Beware of Greeks bearing gifts. And massive debt.

A picture is worth a thousand words. Words like, "Is that oatmeal on her chin?" and "Does your camera know how to focus?" and "Was this picture really worth the cost of the frame?"