Preparing for government spite
I was worried how much of a bubble I was in and now I know. He won the popular vote, so we can't even blame it on our stupid election rules.
His previous policy was based on spite and I suspect the next one will be based on revenge. I anticipate the stuff I value, a clean environment, protected wildlife, a social safety net, and bodily autonomy will be crushed not because there is a different way, they will be crushed because I value them.
There will be naked corruption, and policies encouraging brutalization and death for outsiders and critics. We will lose health and food safety regulations. Data privacy is gone.
As someone put it online:
Take your kids to see the national parks, before they are sold off to developers.
New policies will exacerbate the problems people thought this election would fix. The rich will get richer and everyone will suffer. There's a theory that everyone goes crazy every 100 years and wants to have a big war. Sure seems like everyone has gone crazy.
Kurdyuk
The weight of this part of a sheep's anatomy (for example, the sheep of the Hissar breed) may be up to 60 kg (130 lb).
Wikipedia also adds:
When being rendered, kurdyuk emits a strong odour, described as "acidy-poisonous". However, it has a rich flavor when ready to eat.
Update: This fantastic post on fat tailed sheep:
https://bogleech.tumblr.com/post/767264269961166848/arsanatomica-arsanatomica-dreamingdeeper
vdso
I've been messing around with nix because I like the idea of having declarative and reproducible dev environments. Running ldd on a simple app in a nix shell listed the following dynamic links:
[nix-shell:~]$ ldd $(which bash)
linux-vdso.so.1 (0x00007ffc4809e000)
libreadline.so.8 => /nix/store/xxcf5gwyn5pldv4b4wa2jw6vqg7v55y6-readline-8.2p10/lib/libreadline.so.8 (0x00007f6255a37000)
libhistory.so.8 => /nix/store/xxcf5gwyn5pldv4b4wa2jw6vqg7v55y6-readline-8.2p10/lib/libhistory.so.8 (0x00007f6255a29000)
libncursesw.so.6 => /nix/store/z7nr6aqlzv51pk5ar8bgzg2alfqvi8fd-ncurses-6.4.20221231/lib/libncursesw.so.6 (0x00007f62559b3000)
libdl.so.2 => /nix/store/3dyw8dzj9ab4m8hv5dpyx7zii8d0w6fi-glibc-2.39-52/lib/libdl.so.2 (0x00007f62559ae000)
libc.so.6 => /nix/store/3dyw8dzj9ab4m8hv5dpyx7zii8d0w6fi-glibc-2.39-52/lib/libc.so.6 (0x00007f62557b7000)
/nix/store/3dyw8dzj9ab4m8hv5dpyx7zii8d0w6fi-glibc-2.39-52/lib/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 => /nix/store/3dyw8dzj9ab4m8hv5dpyx7zii8d0w6fi-glibc-2.39-52/lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x00007f6255a93000)
These mostly refer to nix store objects, but I was curious about:
linux-vdso.so
vdso is a method the kernel uses to speed up system calls from user space by linking a library of system calls into every user space app, but I didn't know this.
To investigate this unknown library I typed 'linux-vdso.so' into my browser forgetting my tridactyl plugin treats any search string that sounds like a URL into a destination address and my browser took me here:
I'm not sure why someone thought this was necessary, but I like it.
m's kitchen
I wanted to find some new sourdough recipes, both to wake up my starter and to use some of the ingredients crowding my freezer and cupboards. Specifically I wanted to use the old can of pumpkin puree we bought last November, the frozen blueberries Suzanne gave us when she left for Sweden, and the overpriced little bin of candied ginger I bought in duress which is now in the way of everything else (including the big bag of candied ginger I found later for a much more reasonable price at gross out)
After going through a bunch of shitty SEO recipe sites, I found a few of interest and I somehow stumbled on a youtube channel which sent me down a rabbit hole.
Let me introduce you to M's kitchen. featuring a collection of savory and sweet bread recipes.
These videos have a kind of Japanese craftsman vibe to them. There's a word in Japanese, shokunin that describes the kind of careful striving towards perfection. I've featured these sorts of videos on my webpage before, highlighting the ritualistic Japanese process of making charcoal, paper, chalk, ink pens, and pottery. I went through my feed to link to these videos here but discovered they had all been taken down, consumed in the internet dumpster fire.
I don't know much about the person behind M's kitchen. All the videos are marked as 3 years old. She has an instagram link in the description, but I can't view any facebook owned links, so I don't know if it's active.
She makes each of her breads by hand with a standard method. The melon bread is folded in a particular way and the top is scored with six lines just like you'd see in a shop. The ham and cheese rolls are rolled, folded, cut, and inverted in a way which suggests that she learned it working at a bakery.
The videos don't have a soundtrack and aren't condensed in a way that hides the effort required. You never see her face, only her plump hands, the hands of a baker that loves baked goods. I can recommend these videos if you're looking at excuses to try some baking.
I made a note of the URL so I could return to it later and when it came time to bake I decided to load up the channel on my phone. A search for "m's kitchen" returned this a different Japanese baker - with recipes that seemed OK but weren't as good as the channel I was looking for. If you look at those links, the only difference is the tag: 'mskitchen9332' vs 'mskitchen4740'.
Curious, I did a youtube search for "m's kitchen" and quickly backed away because the internet is a dumpster fire and youtube in particular, is a horror show. But after deciding to do a write-up, I went back and picked through all the ads, shorts, and suggestions to join the Nazi party to investigate all the "m's kitchen" channels.
- This m's kitchen channel covers Indian food. It looks good, it's just not what I'm looking for.
- This m's kitchen channel has 10 videos of Japanese recipes with a cutesy xylophone heavy soundtrack (a big red flag).
- This m's kitchen channel has 5 videos of greasy American food with cutesy soundtracks
- Each video in this m's kitchen channel shows dozens of household and kitchen gadgets, unboxing, and food(?). It uses cutesy soundtracks. I think I'm either too old or not enough of a capitalist to understand the appeal.
- This m's kitchen channel has short Japanese recipes interspersed with political council meetings(?). The recipes are aggressively short and feature cutsey soundtracks.
All the channels with soundtracks are bad. It's almost as if these people know their content is otherwise too weak to invoke the appropriate emotional response. I have similarly strong opinions about the way reality television is edited.
I don't know what the phrase "m's kitchen" means to an Asian person. A search for "m's kitchen" on duck duck go brought up several local Chinese restaurants. When I searched for "m's kitchen Tokyo" it brought up several facebook links I was unable to follow.
On a whim I did a search for "n's kitchen" and it brought up a bunch of Thai food with some Japanese and Chinese recipe channels.
"o's kitchen" brings up African and American food channels.
"p's kitchen" was inconclusive, but I was growing tired.
By the time I reached "q's kitchen" I was too irritated by youtube's SEO bullshit to continue.
So in conclusion:
- Never browse youtube. It is a mostly horrible cesspool.
- Never put anything of value on youtube. Copyright no longer serves to motivate people to produce things - only for rentseekers to steal from the public domain.
- Videos with background music are almost certainly awful
- Videos titled "X's kitchen" where X is a letter of the western alphabet are racially segregated(?)
- Shokunin is delightful to watch.
Here's what I made:
The Butter Incident
I suspect everyone has an Apollo 13 moment where a serious problem arises requiring ingenuity, courage, and a cool demeanor, but not everyone is able to rise to the challenge. I faced my own personal apollo 13 with bravery, and dare I say heroism?
The Incident
My mom had a surgery, so I drove out to the valley to visit for a few days. In early September California was experiencing a heat wave, so I spent most of my time indoors baking bread. I'd already baked two loaves of banana bread with raspberry and almonds and a much less sweet, sourdough loaf with cranberries, the rest of the raspberries, and almond-chocolate toffee. On the morning of the incident I started two more batches of sourdough; a plain white loaf for sandwiches, and a double batch of sourdough english muffins.
By 7pm it looked like the english muffin mix was ready to be cooked, and I decided I had enough time to finish them before bed. To minimize the time I spent waiting for the muffins to cook, I loaded my mom's giant industrial gas stove with all three of her cast iron skillets, turned on the fume hood, and lit the burners.
The final step of preparing english muffins is to fry them in a skillet with butter like a pancake. In the interest of speed, instead of cutting a slice of butter into the pan I just picked up the lump and rubbed it into the hot pan.
Cooking commenced and english muffins were lining up on the cooling rack beside the stove. I went to butter the furthest skillet and the lump of butter, about half the size of my fist, squirted from between my fingers, bounced off the back of the oven, and fell into the inexplicably wide gap between the oven and the back wall.
Perhaps my reaction to this calamity wasn't as cool as Jack Swigert's on Apollo 13 when he reported the explosion that blew a hole in the side of their ship with:
"Houston we have a problem."
My reaction was a deep, mournful,
"OH NOOOOOO!"
Shamara came in to see what was wrong and left cackling.
The Problem
The butter was nearly as wide as the gap through which it fell. It was in the corner beneath a mounting plate for the electrical supply, and behind the rear foot plate, which made it inaccessible from beneath and nearly inaccessible from above.
The oven was hot, I'd been baking and nearly all the burners were burning under hot iron skillets.
The oven was too heavy to shift. My mom said it took two men to line it up and slide it into position. I just needed to shift it a few inches to get my arm back there, but even that was impossible.
Just like the apollo engineers I had to find a creative solution.
"Does mom have a trash grabber?!"
Shamara left while I hurried to finish the rest of the muffins and reappeared with a grabber. It was too short to reach the floor behind the oven and the grabby end was too wide to fit between the cabinet and the electrical socket plate.
"Where are your yardsticks?!"
I'd hoped to push the butter into a more advantageous position or reach it from beneath the oven, but this only revealed the existence of the invisible plate covering the rear foot and illustrated how the lump of butter was too large to slide underneath.
My mom came in and saw all the equipment on the counter.
"Just leave it and try to get it in the morning."
I couldn't. For all I knew it would be a puddle in the morning or too soft to grip.
The Solution
"Where's your masking tape?!"
My mom was already going to bed. I was working with a deadline.
"It's in the pantry near the sewing stuff."
I took that and the two longest dowels from her closet. My first thought was to tape a fork with some bent tines to her yardstick, but I remembered my mom has some weirdly specific utensils for picking up barbecue meat. They probably have a name among barbecue aficionados, but I don't know what it is or why my mom owns them.
Update: I looked it up, they're called 'meat hooks'.
The handle on the meat hook was thick, so I had to tape them to a narrow dowel to ensure I could rotate it in the tight space. I used a lot of tape because I didn't want to lose something else in that gap.
Then, leaning over the hot oven wearing a headlamp, with my face pressed against the back wall, I lowered the dowel contraption and carefully spun the skewer until it pierced the butter. Thankfully the core of the lump of butter was still cool enough to retain some integrity, and I was able to lift it out of the narrow space.
My mom came in and laughed when she saw me holding the makeshift spear with a cube of dusty butter on the end.
"Just throw it away and go to bed.
"No! I need to document this!"
Now this account has been published I expect movie executives to start lining up for the opportunity to make my heroic adventure into a feature film, possibly with Keanu Reeves or Dwayne the Rock Johnson as me, Dame Judy Dench as my mom, Danny Devito as the lump of butter, and Steve Buscemi in drag as my sister.
The infrequently updated blog.