There is only sadness and bile from the L.A. Times today. First, we discover that the sale of glow-in-the-dark zebra fish will be banned in California because the Fish and Game Commissioners think genetic engineering is yucky (though they make an exception for "non-frivolous" purposes such as medicine and fattening Monsanto's pocketbook). No, seriously, that's the reason; they weren't concerned about safety at all, if the article has it right.

Imagine what an awful place California would be if these people had jurisdiction over boob jobs and doggie prozac. Tinkering with nature for frivolous purposes makes the capitalism go round! And if you believe the GloFish web site, the fishes (they glow!) were developed for legitimate scientific purposes. But let's return to the topic sentence: why are five guys (for they are all men!), appointed for their specialized skills in wildlife management, allowed to pass binding judgment on matters of bioethics?

Answer: we can't hold a plebiscite on the issue until March. Until then, I'm'a write my elected representatives, and maybe my appointed ones as well. I don't wants me some fishies, but I wants me the theoretical ability to purchas fishies. Also, Calpundit's coverage of the issue will attract a larger audience and more commenters, if you're into that sort of thing.

The second sad and bilious thing was actually two things: phone calls from the L.A. Times trying to interest me in some sort of "offer", spaced about an hour apart. The second one was some guy who had obviously not been telemarketing very long, because he couldn't keep his aplomb when I cut him off and asked to be added to the do-not-call list. He insisted that he was just calling all the new entries to the phone book, and therefore there was no list, and anyway this "offer" was not a sales pitch, it was too fantastic! I hung up.

In retrospect, this is as irritating as a gross failure to get the hint when you're being flirted with, only to retroactively catch on when you've gone home and are lonely. I wish they'd call a third time so I could collect all the necessary information to get a free $500 if they ever offer me an "offer" ever again. Any ideas I may once have had concerning a Sunday subscription to the L.A. Times have been ground to dust under the heel of an aggressive marketing campaign.

I'm still not sure if the turkeys marinated in MSG were enough to make up for the lack of turducken. MSG is a superlatively delicious taste enhancement, but in comparing deep-fried MSG turkeys and oven-roasted turducken, one is led down this seductive path of MSG-enhanced turducken stuffed into a pig and pit roasted for three days as the next step in ultimate gratitude. There are obvious logistical obstacles.

Acquiring a kitchen with multiple ovens and a pit roast is the most compelling argument yet for a) working to become wealthy or b) going to chef school. But this is not about unfulfilled aspirations, it is about belatedly listing some trivial items that make me happy, as per tradition:

• Hanging pots
• Mugs with handles large enough to put all for fingers through to the knuckle
• Socks that are technically dirty, but not too dirty to wear again if you don't need to feel respectable on a Sunday afternoon
• All-purpose sewing machine needles
• Clouds

"Respect the art of pie" wrote Susan Bright. I wonder what she'd think of the diner in Iowa City I read about in the paper that tosses pie in a blender and calls it a "pie shake." No time to bake pie. No time to sit down and eat it properly with a cold glass of milk.
--Pascale le Draoulec, American Pie

Eighteen years I lived in that town. Eighteen years, and it takes some uppity woman from Santa Monica to tell me about pie shakes at the Hamburg Inn. An uppity woman on a pie quest to assimilate her French heritage and sort out her relationships. Who visits Iowa and fails to have pie, and then tosses off the Hamburg Inn as an example of the world going to hell in a handbasket, with no pie.

The Hamburg Inn is a motherfucking bastion of tradition. It is the hometown diner of Iowa City, and one does not waltz into a paragraph, insult someone's hometown diner, and waltz out again with a twirl about "pie pace" and modern life. It's just not done, particularly if one has not actually visited the diner in question. It is not a frantic juice-bar nutrient shake type of diner (though they do hurry you a bit on weekends, when there's a line).

It's like insulting someone's Mom's pie. Worse, for me, as my own mother's pies are not particularly old-fashioned or authentic (Ms. le Draoulec writes 368 pages on pie, and not once does she mention the graham cracker crust!). Though I am embarassed to say that I've never actually had a pie shake at the Hamburg Inn, I have had drinks disappeared from my tab, probably before this woman bought her first-ever mixing bowl.

My culture's sacraments have been carelessly mocked by an outsider, and I'm not sure what to do about it. Obviously, pie shakes will be on the agenda for Twinkletree. From there, I'll play the xenophobic belligerence by ear; maybe rustle up a posse of disgruntled Writer's Workshop dropouts. We'll bake a pie to end all pies, and put it in a blender for democracy, and write poetry about it. We'll take the publishers by storm (with meringue disguising our faces) and show them through slow force-feeding that the true meaning of "pie pace" can be felt even after the pie is chopped to bits.

Or we'll have a pie shake, drive home, and fall asleep on the couch while our posse bellies digest.

So there's another theory of asteroid-induced Super Ecosystem Death, this time at the Permian-Triassic boundary (which is unquestionably the coolest and most dramatic of all Super Ecosystem Deaths known to paleontology). Ho-hum. Asteroid-induced death has been massively trendy since 2020, and people have been finding ingenious "evidence" of "impact scenarios" for years.
So fuck the unusual petrology of the month; I'm not qualified to mock it anyway.

What I want to know is why do these guys insist that the K("C")retaceous-Tertiary event was the second-greatest of all time? Sure, the ammonites died at the K-T, and all right-thinking individuals will forever mourn their loss. And dinosaurs blah blah blah. But the K-T doesn't hold a candle to the late Ordovician in any criteria but sexiness and lucrative edutainment potential. There are no attractive young tetrapods or land plants in the Ordovician, and even the coolest trilobites with the compound eyes don't evolve until the Devonian, so this is understandable. But geologists should know better than to obsess over such superficial concerns as lungs and compound eyes. We're talking half the world's brachiopods after all.

When I am King of the Planet, the relative merits of various extinctions shall be fixed by royal decree, and artists will glorify the tragic deaths of rugose coral reefs in spectacularly costumed and choreographed circuses. Authors who insist on making off-handed comparisons to the K-T boundary in order to attract the public's attention shall play the bottommost rugosids.

The thing about my job is that just when it gets all full of complicated juicy gossip, it also gets covered by layers and layers of attorney-client privilege. If I occasionally whine because I am unable to blog about work, this is why.

I've been reading legal documents. Some of these documents will eventually become part of the public record, and when that happens they will make excellent dialogue for a bitter comic strip or surrealist radio play. Meanwhile, they are super-confidential and my creative urges are stifled. Bah.

Fortunately I have a fantastic, compelling and potentially obsessive new hobby: quilting. It feels dirty and shameful to stay up late quilting, in a way that drinking alcohol and dancing to lewd music can never top. I am partaking of a classic old person's domestic hobby in a culture that values youth and mobility! Rebellion at last! So now I'll kick back and celebrate Friday with some Glenn Miller and a glass of tap water, and you can't stop me or tell me what to do, so there!

1. Shirky: The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview - a vivid vituperation of something I would have been vituperating for years, if I hadn't been ignoring it entirely. On the other hand, it's probably better to just ignore the vituperating, too, as Computer Socialized Pretentiousness may be catching. I was bored halfway down the page.
2. The Art and Science of Feng Shui - it appears that decorating is a zero-sum game for Peter and I; we have exactly opposite sets of astrologically determined auspicious directions. Pictures of pine trees may or may not help with this (pine trees are wily Chi-eaters!) but is a picture of a joshua tree the same as a picture of a pine tree? Also, I can't figure out whether Mt. Wilson is shaped like a dragon, or a person putting on his clothes, or an upside-down boat.
3. Photographing Your Flowers, by John Patrick Roche - Billing his work as a "practical guide for indoor and outdoor use", M. Roche begins with reference to Aristotle and goes on to insist that amateur garden photographers must develop a firm handle on botany, as well as basic composition in black and white, before mucking about with toys. There follow a very many rules, nearly enough to build a photo-judging Roche-bot, which I think would be a fun project.

L.A. kids are big wussies - the slightest hint of rain, and not even FREE CANDY will lure them outside. Which means I am stuck with a bag full of mysterious Chinese candies labelled "Nutrition Delicious" - as far as I can tell, they are both unhealthful and disgusting, so the description makes sense.

So actually a few trick or treaters have come by, but none since I realized that offloading Nutrition Delicious should have been top priority all along.

Our pumpkins, however, are awesome.




The one is continuously vomiting fluorescent water... my picture doesn't do it justice. The other isn't doing much, and in retrospect I think the eyes were a bit bright, as they distract from the spirally coat hanger antenna (which is mine, and very cute). But awesome nonetheless.

Happy All Saints' Day, then, and let's all try very hard not to gorge ourselves on pumpkin pancakes made from super-cheap surplus jack-o-lantern wannabes.

1. Went out to Joshua Tree Friday night, and so the photoblog has been updated for the first time in months.
2. Saturday, Peter and I went to investigate a dry lake - where "investigate a dry lake" actually meant "get the car stuck in sand three miles from anywhere". We passed a couple of hours jacking the car up, putting rocks and rugs under the wheels, revving and repeating to obtain about half the necessary car-length of progress before a couple of women on their way to Palm Springs decided that they also wanted to investigate the dry lake.
   
   They had an SUV with extra gas-guzzling car-unsticking cylinders in the engine, but no rope. So we borrowed their cell phone, called a truck, and waved goodbye feeling generally pleased with those parts of humanity that don't charge $300 to send a winch out to the middle of the desert.
   
   Ten minutes later, a cop comes by. My pleasure quickly evaporates as he mentions that he could just pull us out of the sand, if we hadn't already called for a tow. Instead, he notes that Peter's registration stickers are out of date, and asks us if we've ever been arrested. And if he can search the car. And if we have any pipes or pot, and what we're going to do with the two empty beer bottles in the trunk. And if we're sure we don't have any pot. And if we're really, really sure we don't have any pot.
   
   Long Haired Man + Tie-Dye + Expired Plates + Confessed to Enjoying Nature Without Simultaneously Destroying It = BIG MARIJUANA BUST!
   
   Finding neither pot nor any excuse to search the car again, he left us to wait for the tow truck, which came by in another ten minutes and winched us back onto the road.
3. Maps don't adequately convey the true scale of the burning. For forty miles as we drove back home, I thought each fire-covered hillside would be the last; and each curve brought a new fire-covered hillside into view. Satellite photos are better, though I wish they wouldn't draw yucky red boxes over the burning areas.
4. I didn't do laundry this weekend. Major manufacturers do not produce campfire scented laundry products, why should I buck the trend with my hippie smokehouse clothesline?
5. Re-evaluating one's attachment to stuff is always a fun game; we've been playing it at work. Most of my coworkers live much closer to the fire than I do, and some spent the weekend playing the game for real, after various amounts of their stuff was destroyed. So yeah, poor me, having to breathe stinky air.

Neal Stephenson jumped the shark on page 277. Over the moon and into some stable orbit, where a group of hasty sketches in an imitation Baroque tin can go round and round with the Bludgeon of Science History Hindsight. One wonders how many revolutions they can handle before the main character (whose thoughts and feelings are told at a slowly-increasing remove) is completely squished, leaving only a Foil for Progress.

Stilted dialogue on the philosophical standing of computing-machines has its place, in the opening scenes of historical-crossover Alan Turing / Captain Kirk homoerotic fan fiction. If Isaac Newton and Mary Sue Daniel Waterhouse aren't having sex in 50 pages, though, I will attempt to hollow out the rest of the book for use as a very nerdy drug'n'gun cache.

Joe Jonah Euclid was (and possibly still is) an endearing type of delusional nutter, who posted his flyers around the Caltech campus my freshman and sophomore years. I haven't seen any fresh material in quite some time; but whilst cleaning out my file-box I came upon this one. Spelling is preserved, formatting is attempted. It seems to speak to important issues of our time, as well as the tail end of the dot-com boom when it was written.

Joe Jonah Euclid                  2020 2020
	
Please Consider the hypothetical possibality that
the Internet is better than the Cosmic Consciousness.
Both provide communications at a distance and
any number of people can join in at any time.
	
It does not matter IF we Debate this.
It does not matter IF people have the wrong opinion.
	
It ONLY matters IF it is TRUE.     Long Term.
	
The younger generation will mostly Learn the Internet.
When they Hear Of   the Cosmic Consciousness, it is not better.
Because the Internet Equally Well provides the Communications.
	
Thru some Years, there is a smaller and smaller number of people
Practicing the Cosmic Consciousness.
One Day   they let up a little bit, and then
Society has Fewer Bizarre Disastors & Senseless Crimes.
There are research programs to Monitor this fine grain.