MrG's Weblog (original) (raw)

nov 2011 / greg goebel / public domain

* This weblog provides an "online diary" to provide notes on current events, interesting items I run across, and the occasional musing. It promotes no particular ideology. For update notifications, follow "gvgoebel" on Twitter.

[TUE 01 NOV 11] ANOTHER MONTH

* ANOTHER MONTH: For Halloween, I have to give a nod to the cleverest, if one of the geekiest, Halloween costumes for dogs ever made. Katie Mello of Portland, Oregon, rigged up Bones, her pet greyhound, as a STAR WARS "All-Terrain Armored Transport (AT-AT)", one of the elephantine walking war machines from the classic movie THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK. The detail's not too surprising since Mello works at a Portland animation studio named "Laika House" that does some model stop-action work. WIRED Online warned that Bones better watch out, however: "All it would take is one rogue kitten to tangle a ball of wool around his legs and Bones will be a heap on the floor."

Bones geared for war

* I've been paying more attention to THE ECONOMIST's online blog section, and one posting -- from "Prospero", the arts and culture commentator -- caught my eye. It began with a description of a food market in Milan, where items offered for sale included calves' feet, pig's tongue, pig's head, and so on. The Italians still have an appetite for parts of animals that end up as dog food in the UK and the USA. Prospero pointed out there was a certain imperative in "total body eating": "After taking an animal's life, the least you can do is use all of it." There are some in the English-speaking world who are embracing the idea: Fergus Henderson has been offering foods like pig's head at his London restaurant St. John since the 1990s.

That brought back some long-buried memories of how my mom used to feed us beef tongue every now and then. It had a funny sort of texture, tending towards the rubbery and chewy, in a good sort of way; taste was bland and untroubling, it went well with catsup. Of course, most of the meats I'm inclined to eat go well with catsup as far as I'm concerned, an attitude that flatly shocks some people, don't understand why. I also vaguely recall eating bull's testicles one time, cut into strips and, I think, batter fried as an appetizer.

The most unusual meat I ever ate was kangaroo. On a corporate business event a group of us went to a fancy little restaurant, and one of the women ordered a kangaroo steak. She gave me a bite of it and it was pleasant enough. However, kangaroo is extremely lean meat, all that can be done to cook it is sear it on both sides. Cook it above "rare" and apparently it's like trying to eat shoe leather.

* It had been sunny here is northeast Colorado through October, but weather report for the last Wednesday in the month said it would be snowing for the day. I figured it would be just the usual early-season light snowfall; it started snowing as predicted on Tuesday evening, and I went to bed thinking there would be a modest frosting of snow on the ground when I woke up the next morning.

I got to suspecting I was underestimating the weather when the power went down in the dark hours of the morning; the electromechanical clock on my stove said it was at 0320 AM. With nothing working in the house, I decided to sleep in until it was light. I never otherwise sleep in, and I must say it was nice for once not to get out of bed feeling grumpy. However, the landscape was a mess, covered with wet snow up to the boot-tops.

Not good -- given the warm Fall up to then, only a minority of the trees had lost their leaves. The two young ash trees in my back yard were bowed down and I went out to shake them off. A branch on one had partially cracked, so I took some cord and slinged it back upright against the tree. I won't know if I'll have to amputate until spring. Even if I do, I was luckier than others, there being tree branches down all over the neighborhood. I went for a walk and shook off branches from some of the neighbors' trees, getting frosted with snow in the process. I should have worn my rain jacket, but it was still sort of fun.

Lacking anything better to do, I spent the morning reading through my pile of books, lying dressed in sweats under a sleeping bag -- the heat was off. I think I'll see if I can find one of those **woodgas**cookstoves and stockpile a container of dry twigs, so I can at least warm up a can of chili the next time this happens. Hey, those things even have a USB charger, I could top off my MP3 players with one.

I was thinking it would take 8 to 12 hours to get power back on, but it was on after just a bit under 8 hours, which I figured was good time. I've never been through a power failure that went into a second day; I was hoping this wouldn't be the time, I didn't want my freezer to thaw out: "Oh no! My ice cream bars will all melt!" Hmm, maybe I should get a little cheap styrofoam cooler, too, so I could load it up and set it out in the snow. As long as it's freezing out, I might as well take advantage of it.

I made a point of emailing a thank-you to the city utility, and got an appreciative response. I had to think the utilities people were generating a lot of foul language that morning.

early snow in Loveland

The next day I went to the gym at the Loveland city center. The park in the middle of the center looked like it had been the scene of a riot, with parts of trees strewn all over the grounds. Even by the weekend, there was still wreckage of trees all around, and when I drove past the city recycling center, not far from my house, there was a traffic jam of pickup trucks and the like loaded up with branches backed up to the arterial, an unprecedented sight. On Monday I drove past a city park and noticed the entrances to the parking lot were blocked off; on inspection of why, the lot was mostly occupied by a long hill of piled-up broken branches. I have rarely seen a more destructive snowstorm.

* Over the summer I somehow managed to pile up articles to write up for the blog -- to the extent that when I looked in my web browser at the list of hyperlinks I'd collected, it ran off the screen. I decided to focus on getting rid of them. I finally did so, though it took me about two months of concentration on the task. I threw out about half, but when I was done I still had over a hundred entries written for future blog postings. That was enough material for 20 weeks -- an absurdity, since articles can go stale if I don't post them in a timely fashion. The pileup in the output queue did give me added incentive to toss things off the list.

I've still got downloaded PDFs to mine for personal notes and update details for existing documents, but I should have all the junk cleaned up soon. Hopefully, once I do I can stay ahead of the devil in the future. The odd thing is that I get down to the bottom of the barrel, I start feeling at loose ends. But that never lasts for long.

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