Milky thinking

I don't like milk unless it's in the form of ice cream or whipped cream. Up until 7,000 years ago adult humans could not tolerate milk. About that long ago a gene mutation disabled the enzyme that kicked in at about puberty time and rendered milk no longer digestible. I think I did not inherit this gene mutation. I don't remember seeing my father drink milk, ever. My mother always demanded we drink it, but she never did herself. She was a gin fancier.

So I don't drink milk.

Lately I have been feeling a touch of wanderlust and have been doing research, like you do. A particular set of travel books has been enriching my life immeasurably. I am referring, of course, to the jetlag travel guide series, "for the undiscerning traveler." Their most recent travel guide is an in-depth look at Phaic Tan, "Sunstroke on a Shoestring." Listen to this description of the weaning process as practiced by the Phaic Tanese:
"... Phaic Tanese children are not actually named until they are one year old (although at three years of age they may legally take charge of a motor vehicle.) Most chidren are not weaned until the age of 14 and for some visitors the sight of a teenage boy attached to a middle aged woman's breast can be a little off-putting, especially when the two of them are not actually related." Interesting.

Some milk myths that are completely untrue, according to the dairy coucil of California:
Myth: Soymilk is just as nutritious as regular milk.
Myth: If you are lactose intolerant, you should avoid dairy foods.
Myth: Dairy foods cause weight gain.
Myth: Drinking milk causes early puberty.
Myth: Drinking milk when you have a cold causes mucus.
Myth: Organic milk is safer than regular milk.

Who would spread such lies? Notice in particular the third Myth, that dairy foods cause weight gain. This is especially untrue in the case of ice cream and whipped cream. The research has proven again and again that you consume more calories chewing than you ingest by swallowing either of these products. What's doing you in is the walnut pieces.

Venomous thinking

I have been looking for good recipes that include scorpions as an ingredient. Most scorpion recipes have lots of rum and grenadine but no scorpions. But I found two recipes that look pretty good to me.

The first is from the Liverpool Museum. I am confused by this as I don't think of Liverpool as having enough scorpions to make a recipe of much use. Beatles maybe. Scorpions, I dunno.

Here are the first two ingredients, after which the rest are anticlimactic:

1/2 cup vegetable oil

30 - 40 live scorpions, washed

Hold up a moment. So I have this grocery bag with 40 live scorpions in it. Okay so far.

Washed?

"Honey? Let's cook together tonight? Like we used to? I'll heat the oil? Why don't you wash... the ummm... the stuff in the grocery bag...? Honey? Honey? "

So now the cooking directions: Heat the oil in a large wok. Stir-fry the scorpions for 20 seconds....

Hold on a moment.

There's an instruction missing somewhere. How do you get 40 live (clean) scorpions into a searing hot wok?

"Honey? I need a hand here...? Hmmmm... Okay guys, is everybody clean? Good... so now I need you just to hop in here to dry off.. Okay, think of it like it's a sauna... Nobody speaks Swedish?... It'll feel really good... Ouch! Ouch! Ouch!"

The second recipe is a little more helpful. Again, only the first two ingredients need be mentioned:
1 pint low-fat milk
8 frozen desert hairy scorpions, thawed

I am not making this up.

Among the cooking directions:

Dredge the scorpions through the cornmeal... place the scorpions in the hot butter and cook until they are golden brown, about 2 minutes. Then turn the scorpions over and cook until done.

Okay...

This recipe comes with some warnings, under the heading

Scorpion Cooking Tips: Handle With Care.
"Handle any live scorpion regardless of its size with the utmost care. All specimens that are destined for culinary use should go immediately into the freezer. After they are frozen solid, each scorpion should have its terminal tail segment, the one that contains the paired venom glands and the hollow, curved barb, removed with a sharp knife. This tidbit should go straight into the trash receptacle to prevent any accidental impailments during cleanup of the workspace."

That sounds like very sage advice to me.

I'm wondering, as long as you're frying them in hot buttter, why use low-fat milk?

Gentle thinking

The man on the left, now deceased, was as Admiral. When I think of Admirals and others of general staff rank I think of warriors, men of steel, men able to make the tough choices. Rommel. Patton. Montgomery. Nelson. I don't necessarily think of gentle men.

But the more of them I have known, the more I have admired them for something quite different than toughness. It turns out that you don't get to that rank merely by being tough. You have to be wise as well and to care about people. It turns out that people don't do stuff just because you told them to - they do stuff because they know it's the right thing to do, and they know that because they know you, they trust you, maybe they even love you.

So by the time you tell them to do stuff that puts them in danger, they know you've done it, can do it, will do it, wish they didn't have to do it, trust them to do it well. There is a surprising amount of gentleness involved in that relationship.

When I was very young I admired strength. Then I grew older and brasher and I admired intelligence. Now I'm really old, and about the only thing that means a damn to me anymore is gentleness. The lesson he taught by example sank in eventually. He was one of the really good ones.

Sedentary thinking

I confess that I am overly fond of a sedentary life. It is not an entirely desirable addiction , having perils of its own.

I notice that the less I do the less I want to do, and the closer to death I feel. This wonderful chair is a pretty good metaphor.

I think I will do something different tomorrow.

Tomorrow I will attempt to have an affair.... No, I won't. I don't want to have an affair. It would trouble my wife, which I don't want to do, and it would be far too much work. The reward no longer seems worth the labor. My wife, on the other hand, is worth the labor.

Tomorrow I will quit my job... No, I won't. I love my job and I have never been happier working anywhere. The people are interesting, smart, funny and I care about them a lot. And they care about me.

Tomorrow I will eat something I've never eaten before. Hmmm... let me think about that. What haven't I eaten... I've done duck's tongues, fish ovaries, snake, jellyfish... I haven't eaten scorpions but I don't know anywhere in Honolulu that serves them. Does anybody anywhere eat scorpions? Note to self - look for a menu with scorpions on it, tomorrow.

Tomorrow I will take up long-distance running again. Shouldn't be too hard, I used to do it a lot... Maybe I won't. A guy my age could have a heart attack.... But I'm going to drive four miles every day!

Tomorrow I'll join a cult religion and give my entire being over to Divine Mother... but Divine Mother spent her formative years as one of the toughest divorce lawyers in town, embracing sanctity only when the previous Divine Mother had the grace to kick the bucket and leave a VACANCY. My cycnicism might prevent my attaining nirvana. Poop.

Note to self: tomorrow, do some serious research about things to do.

Structural thinking

Kurt Vonnegut Junior is dead. He was... he wrote stories that were filled with ideas that gave me a structure when I was approaching and in my early teens. It wasn't a rigid structure and I embraced its fluidity. It was almost a non-structure, like the space you see between two buildings. The buildings are structures, and they make the space between them look structured, but in that space everything is possible. Like the spaces between the strings of a cat's cradle.

Vonnegut wrote of the spaces in between.

Ice-9 captivated me and terrified me. It foreshadowed a scare that subsequently occured in the 1960's, when a number of scientists claimed to have found another form of water-ice that froze at a different temperature than regular ice. They called it polywater and the idea spread through portions of the scientific community (primarily in the Soviet Union) and is now used as an example of "pathological science." It seems ironic that the idea of polywater spread much the same way as ice-9 spread.

The book that most captured me was The Sirens of Titan. I think it was a combination of many things, not the least of which was my age, that made the book so iconic in my mind. Vonnegut wrote of the chrono-synclastic infundibulum, "those places ... where all the different kinds of truths fit together." For someone just old enough to be questioning a strict Catholic upbringing, such a thought was more than amazing, it was like breathing for the first time. I was never the same again.

God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater brought rafts of new ideas to my mind, and Slaughterhouse 5 moved me. I don't remember why it did, I don't remember much about it, but I remember being very moved by it. Perhaps it was the co-mingling of Tralfamadorian fatalism as a philosophy and the the lusty promise of Montana Wildhack, the porn actress.

Maybe it was more the Montana Wildhack than the philosophy. I'm not sure.

I'll miss him.

Hi ho.

Intrepid thinking

This photograph is of the USS Intrepid. Intrepid gained fame recently when she went aground in New York Harbour, not under her own power but while being moved by tugs.

I met the Intrepid in 1971. She was long in the tooth then, having been commissioned in 1943. She was the biggest target in a Hunter-Killer group that the submarine Ojibwa sometimes played with, me a young sub-lieutenant very excited by all this.

To get at her we had to slip through her screen of destroyers, evade sonar-dipping helicopters, and elude aircraft using Magnetic Anomaly Detection gear. On those occasions when we succeeded in all this we fired green flares to indicate that we had enough information for a "firing solution" and had we wanted to, we could have torpedoed her. In fact we went through the drill completely each time, firing what are called water-shots from the torpedo tubes. Usually the captain fired a spread of three or four of these virtual torpedoes before we fired the green flare.

When we fired the flare all hell would break loose. Because, of course, people saw the green flare so they knew exactly where we were. The Intrepid would agreeably play dead for an hour but everybody else went to town on us. Destroyers everywhere, pinging away, dropping teeny-tiny depth charges, two pounds of explosives each, to let us know that we were in big trouble now. From time to time they'd nail us really well. Even if it's only two pounds, a two pound bomb going off underwater just the other side of a pressure hull makes a really big noise.

Usually they didn't get us, though. Nowadays I think we'd be in a lot more trouble, but in those days we could get beneath a temperaure layer and suddenly become invisible to their sonar. Or, if we couldn't do that we could fire a cannister of lithium hydride into the water. This created a huge cloud of hydrogen gas which ships would a) think was us and bomb hell out it while we slipped away, or b) not think was us but not be able to hear us through it, and so off we went.

But the Intrepid was a great deal more than a target for the Ojibwa. During WWII she saw active service in the Pacific Theatre including the Marshall Islands, Truk, Leyte Gulf and Okinawa.

In February of 1944 she was approaching Truk, and a Japanese torpedo plane hit her off the starboard quarter (about 4:30 on a clock face, noon being dead ahead.) The torpedo struck 15 feet below the waterline, flooded several compartments and jammed the rudder hard to port. By using the engines to steer (a very rough-and-ready approach to steering) Intrepid made it to Truk and carried out operations for two days of almost steady combat.

She was a key player in the Battle of Leyte Gulf. Desperately hoping to keep control of the Phillipines, the Japanese war command sent its navy into Leyte Gulf from three different directions. There were four major naval engagements that took place, which are collectively known as the Battle of Leyte Gulf.

Intrepid was heroic and her aircraft were up and at'em with huge impact. Then she was struck by a kamikaze with the loss of ten men. She kept going. Some while later she was struck by two kamikazes within five minutes of one another. She never left her station.

Before she was finished in the Pacific she was struck again by a Japanase aircraft, this time without loss of life, nor of grit.

This ship earned her name the hard way. I am glad to have met her.

I didn't truly realize in those days that when we torpedoed her and she played dead for an hour, she was only playing. In real life she'd have fought like a tiger and won.

Scrappy thinking

I meet often with teachers who wish to develop curricula, some of it academic in a traditional way, some of it much more adventurous, whimsical even, the sort of thing that creates an intellectual Disneyland for children to play in.

I just came from such a meeting, where the topic was manners. What are the social conventions that allow us all to function well together, and how might you impart some of those conventions to middle school kids in a way that is engaging and effective?

Inevitably the conversation turned to games. Inevitably because I was part of the conversation, and to whatever extent I have any power in a curricular conversation I force it towards games, simulations and real-life experiences, and away from "what I want kids to learn is..." The two are not incompatible, but once you have a sense of what you want them to learn, you gotta go to how they will learn it. Doing is good, listening usually isn't. Besides, the medium is the message. Good manners are not limited to listening well and they need to be done, not recited.

Let me admit it was a mistake to equate collaboration with good manners, and cooperation with bad manners. But I found myself thinking along those lines unconsciously.

We talked about games. The Prisoner's Dilemma is a good one to "teach" collaboration in a dynamic, exciting way. I found myself trying to think of other games that promote collaboration and cooperation, and not competition.

And then I got to thinking about the "humanistic games" and the "new games" that came out in the 60's and 70's. These games don't have winners and losers, just participants. And I found myself thinking, "Yukko!" As a steady diet such games are... let me think of a metaphor here... the metamucil of adolescent life.

I tried to list all the Olympic sports that have collaboration as the main outcome. Didn't take long. You could make a case that team sports are collaborative efforts, but you couldn't claim they were built first and foremost on cooperation. Even something as clearly collaborative as synchronized swimming is built on the premise that, okay girls, you're gonna get out there and kick some serious butt!

I like scrappiness. I particularly like it in young women because it's rarer (I think) in that demographic and quite possibly more important, given the way things are these days. I value their being scrappy more than I value their politesse.

It's not a this-or-that thing. At heart what I value most is directness, honesty and self-confidence. Good manners are good, but not if they interfere with directness, honesty and self-confidence.

To use games will be good, but the games must come in both flavors. New games should be taught every day and the kids should not be told, "This is a co-op game, guys'" nor "Okay, butt-kickers, here's a great one..." The game should simply be presented, and kids over time will learn to think a moment before beginning... which approach will lead to the most positive results, given the rules of the game? And, of course, how do I kick butt politely?

I think such a course could be great fun. Anybody wanna argue the point?

Surreal thinking

See this book cover? Wierd, is it not?

Until my niece Kirsten, who edited the book, introduced me to the genre, I hadn't given pop surrealism a moment's thought. Surrealism, that I associated with what's his name, the guy with the mustache... Salvador Dali. Hip maybe, pop never.

Kirsten, who is a leader in the pop-surrealism field, wrestled for a long time about what title to assign to this type of art. "Lowbrow" is a name that has been associated with certain subsets of the art. I think I am correct in saying the picture of the cars (top center panel of the book cover) would be lowbrow. But much of the rest isn't lowbrow. Imaginative, maybe a bit punky, a little bit of 'tude, but assembled together it ain't lowbrow. It ain't highbrow either.

But it's good bloody fun.

I have taken an interest in the genre. Can't say I've raced out and bought a lot of it. It wouldn't fit in with my house which... actually that's not true. It would fit in with parts of my house. The part that has the delft hand-grenade in it. (If you want to see it, click on the preceding link. Mine is the one without the bunny attached.) Delft fragmentation grenades are part of the pop-surrealist movement. And part of my house.

If you are interested in the genre, check out Roq la Rue, Kirsten's gallery in Seattle.

But here's why I'm writing this. I'm boasting about it. Inside Kirsten's book is a table of acknowledgements to "contributing artists." My name is in there. I helped her a little bit and she put my name into this most unusual book.

I've made it into the the pop-surrealism scene. How surreal.

Wishful thinking

If wishes were horses then beggars would ride.

I googled "I wish..." and got 278 million hits.

" I was I was..." got 180 million.

"I wish I had..." got 138 million.

"I wish she loved me..." 15 million hits.

"....... I loved her..." 11 million.

"I wish he loved me..." 78 million.

" .......I loved him..." 10 million.

"I wish my mother loved me..." 19 million.

" .......I loved my mother..." 22 million.

"I wish my father loved me..." 17 million.

" .......I loved my father..." 19 million.

"I wish my wife loved me..." 12 million.

" .......I loved my wife..." 14 million.

"I wish my husband loved me..." 7 million.

" .......I loved my husband..." 8 million.

"I wish God loved me..." 28 million.

" .......I loved God..." 3 million.

"I wish somebody loved me..." 1.5 million.

" .......I loved somebody..." 1.3 million.

"I wish you were still alive..." 6 million.

" .......you were dead..." 16 million.

"I wishI had a horse..." 3 million.

"I wish kings did not ride..." 1 million.

Honesty in advertising - I did not use quotes when I googled, so the results here are incredibly large and don't reflect the poignancy of the moment. Googling with quotes gives a much cheerier picture of life, cheerier but also more poignant. The subject of a different blog perhaps.