What I Want
I did a post on this a while back.. The thesis of that post was that we can't progress without making our desires clear.
I'd always meant to recapitulate later. Here's a shorter list.
- I want to work less
It's a drag I'm forced to sell my time for necessities like food and shelter. I wish I could work half as much for half my current pay. It's stupid that if I chose to spend half as much time doing my current job, I would be paid 0.
- I want a home with a little more space and a yard for gardening
This just crazy talk in coastal Monterey. I could make this happen elsewhere but I like Monterey and would prefer to stay.
- I don't want to have to worry that a health emergency could bankrupt me
I'd like universal health care like the rest of the world.
- I want to ban cars
More an more I think the automotive industry is our chief evil. I hate traffic. I hate exhaust fumes. I hate the microplastics from their wheels. I hate the space taken up for parking. I hate that they kill trillions of people, animals, and insects a year. I hate the fossil fuel industry and their lies about climate change. I hate the noise of engines and tires. I hate the fact you can't do anything but drive when travelling from point A to point B. I hate that roads isolate our communities and cost trillions each year to maintain. I hate driving licenses, car insurance, toll roads, speed cameras, and the highway patrol. I hate car maintainence. I hate pumping gas. I hate driving.
- I want bike infrastructure
(see banning cars)
- I want local light rail and high speed rail
(see banning cars)
- I want a more walkable community
(see banning cars)
June oven
I hesitated to make this post because I knew it would sound like a commercial and because the company now pays my salary. Still, this oven has made an unusually large impact on my life and it has some crazy features which, if nothing else, have been a conversation starter.
But first I need to explain. The reason I've been so busy these last few months is because I got a new job. This has been more stressful than I anticipated but so far it seems to be working out. I had a vacation planned months before the opportunity arose so I was in San Diego while I tried to arrange my I-9 forms and satisfy HR's onboarding process while also doing my best to document all the work I was exclusively responsible for at my old company.
We had a house sitter taking care of our cat while we were away and when we returned the front hallway was heaped with boxes. Amanda had a few orders and I'd received more than I expected from my new employer, electronics, swag, a giant box containing a june oven, and another box of oven accessories.
I didn't know anything about the new oven. I didn't even know they were going to send one. The June oven is a luxury appliance about size of a large toaster, priced at $850 on amazon - significantly more than I would have considered paying for a toaster. The reason it costs so much is it's a lot more than a toaster.
The first prototypes were a toaster with an iphone taped to the front and the first shipping version had all sorts of unconventional sensors like digital scales to weigh the water content of your food.
Setting up the oven requires a connection to your wifi network. I particularly avoid these types of appliances but so far the connectivity has been unobtrusive and I'm reasonably sure my marketing information isn't being abused.
The oven has a camera and 5 different neural networks to identify food. Remarkably, it can determine what you put inside it in 200ms (practically instantaneous).
It's a fun party trick to toss a few corn tortillas or a couple eggs into the oven, close the door and see that it recognized both the type of food (corn and not white tortillas) and the number (6 eggs). It uses this recognition to know how to cook what you put into it. The oven currently recognizes around a 150 different types of food, certainly more than I've explored, but it's still nice to put a bagel in the oven, confirm that this is a bagel, and have it run a cook program designed to produce the perfect toasted bagel.
Another thing that is surprisingly nice is the companion app and cook programs. Recipes are featured in the app, along with videos showing the preparation process, and it's all connected to the oven so it will step you through the recipe, turn on the oven to pre-heat, or notify you when the food needs to be turned or moved.
The few recipes I've tried from this cooking app have turned out fantastic. I've made the crispy cauliflower tacos five times now and I just made cast iron grilled soy and miso marinated chicken kebobs that were astounding. I've roasted lamb shanks and made air fried sweet potato fries. I've dehydrated fruit, air boiled dozens of eggs, and I use it to proof dough. I have yet to explore any of the dessert recipes, I haven't tried to make bacon (though it's supposedly really good at this and will offer you a choice of how you want it to come out), and I haven't tried to make popcorn - apparently you have to sandwich two air fry baskets together.
When it arrived I was upset because it wasn't expected and it meant I would have to get rid of my old toaster. It turns out I don't miss my old toaster at all. I'm even coming around to the idea that if I lived in an apartment so small I couldn't have a full sized oven, a June oven would be a reasonable replacement. Despite the price, required network connection, and the phone app integration, I really like it. It seems like something that hasn't taken off only because more people don't know about it.
I encourage every one of my readers to come over to my house this Saturday with some eggs, a bagel, and some potatoes, and I will convince you.
Boxing
Over the past few years I've developed an appreciation for boxing. I can respect the skill, strength, toughness, and bravery of people who participate in a sport that's essentially competitive brain damage but I would never pursue it as a hobby, I depend on my brain for a living.
My dad told me that there was a time when all boxing matches were free on the television and then someone had the bright idea to invent pay-per-view. In that moment if the general public had collectively decided to boycott the idea of paying for sports, the promoters would have abandoned the attempt and gone back to free fights. My disappointment with the outcome of this experiment has colored my entire philosophy. It's one of the fundamental reasons I use free software and it influences my approach to money. That we still have pay-per-view fights tells me there are markets out there which I will never understand.
To me, boxing seems more effective and graceful than other martial arts. I grew up in the 80's when karate was the rage but I was always disappointed when I saw real fights and discovered they were nothing like the kung fu movies on the TV.1 The grace and precision promised by karate to 12 year old na was a fantasy. In every non-exhibition karate fight, fighters reverted to brute force and the smooth back and forth exchanges seen on kung-fu theater were replaced by awkward feints, cringing recoils, sloppy punches, and unbalanced kicks.
Now we have ultimate fighting where fighters are allowed to do everything but gouge eyes and strike groins and we're finally seeing the development of effective martial arts though bouts usually devolve into two men rolling around on the ground attempting to dislocate limbs, punch without reprisal, or choke their opponent into submission.
I find the restrictions in boxing makes the sport more entertaining. Boxers are only allowed to use the front of their fists, are not allowed to hit below the belt or strike the back of the head, are not allowed to cling to the other fighter for too long, and fights can be stopped if the referee feels a fighter is too injured or is not participating.
The referee is often as valued as the fighters. He's expected to know when to stop the fight and is often expected to have the reflexes to catch a fighter that is knocked out and falling to the canvas. I idle in the boxing subreddit and the discussion among the amateur boxers and enthusiasts often centers around the referee's skills. They argue whether he should have stopped a fight earlier and they applaud moments of good judgement when he interceded before a fighter got seriously hurt.
My interest in boxing was kindled by a manga I read called 'Hajime no Ippo' which is a standard-template Japanese sports manga with outlandish characters loosely based on real world fighters. You can read this manga online and I encourage you to do so despite it being 1900 chapters and still unfinished. After following this series I subscribed to the obnoxious r/boxing subreddit. Participants in this reddit spend 80% of their time discussing the manufactured hype around fights and speculating about how legendary fighters would fare against modern day fighters. The only reason I've stuck around is they often include short clips of fights highlighting slick moves or longer videos breaking down the tactics happening at impossibly high speeds.
In boxing I've finally found the promise of kung-fu movies. In slow motion it's possible to see people exchanging blows, with pinpoint accuracy, drawing blows only to slip and counter them with other blows, or you can see them react to a blow with another, more direct blow designed to arrive first. Some blows are only there to obscure the vision and some punches are thrown in a way that makes them less visible to their opponent. The restrictive rules seems to encourage finesse.
It's also interesting to see the physiological freaks. These fighters are ever present in modern day manga but there really are people out there with strange talents who choose to skip the conventional boxing wisdom and go their own way.
Prince Naseem used a bizarre baiting and counterpunching stance with some freakish natural skill to win the local belt only to fail when he fought a solid Mexican boxer. Watching him jump up and down and flop around like a fish to avoid punches is just bizarre. It also helped that he was an asshole in real life so a lot of people watched his fights to see him go down.
Tommy the Hitman Hearns had a tall lanky frame with freakishly long arms which he used to throw whipping jabs from an impossible distance. His most interesting fight might have been against another champion and a different freak of nature, the Argentinian Robert Duran who specialized in close fighting, pressing his head against his opponents chest and using body blows and uppercuts to grind them down. Hearns eventually went up against another beloved fighter (Marvin Hagler - a more conventional freak) and lost.
Mike Tyson is well known and his history is almost as interesting as his domination of the sport. As an 180lb 11 year old hooligan he was beating up grown men and breaking and entering until he was found by a trainer named Cus D'Amato who had some peculiar theories on boxing. Cus adopted the troubled boy, trained him in his weird style, and he came to dominate the sport. As an emotionally damaged youth Tyson would cry before matches. His downfall when Cus died was interesting in the same way as watching a train crash.
Mohammed Ali developed the trash talking hype that overshadows the sport today. Fighters often fake a rivalry, start fights during press conferences, or the ritualistic process of weigh-in. Ali was charismatic with a well-honed sense of humor which irritated his opponents and delighted fans. His fight against George Foreman (another freak of nature) in Zaire was so crazy there have been several documentaries made about it.
More recently we have Tyson Fury a man described as a walking bag of milk and his trilogy of fights against Detonay wilder a lanky man with what was hyped as the most powerful right hand in the game. Their fights were interesting.
Boxing is divided into a huge list of organizations and each organization divides their boxers by weight using this complicated table This means is it's in a boxer's best interest to cut weight so he can fight against smaller opponents, but not to cut so much weight he damages his strength and endurance. This is the reason many professional fighters (with the exception of the heavy weight classes) have very little body fat and the extreme measures boxers take to bleed off water weight before the official weigh-in is crazy: running wearing sweat suits, spitting constantly, or chewing dried mushrooms and spitting them out when they've been hydrated with spit. It sounds miserable. Boxers could gain as much as 15-20 pounds of (mostly water) weight gain between the official weigh-in and the time of the fight.
I'm also impressed of stories of boxers fighting with broken hands. Or Inuoe a Japanese champion that won a fight after he broke his skull in the second 3min long round and won the fight in the 12th. His face is still lopsided. It's also common for fighters to pee blood from kidney damage and I've watched documentaries about what boxing can do to the brains of some people.. The doctors in that film say we basically don't know why some people are more susceptible to brain injury.
So I'm still subscribed to the boxing subreddit and I enjoy the occasional fight breakdowns and highlights but at the same time I'm turned off by all the manufactured hype and what-if discussions. If you take anything away from this post, go read hajime no ippo. It's freely available online and it covers all the weird and interesting aspects of the sport.
| [1] | These days I view kung fu movies as musicals with fighting replacing the dance numbers. It's weird I still enjoy them because watching people dance makes me super uncomfortable. |
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