I took a long while to hack at this problem and then I decided to be cheeky and post it to my door at work. If you know the answer, please keep it to yourself. If you don’t know the answer, don’t feel really bad that you can’t figure it out – it took smarter people than I a long time to get the answer. If you want to know if you are right, feel free to email me or iMessage me with your answer and I’ll let you know if you are right or not.
“If you could read a book containing all that has happened and will ever happen in your life, would you? If you choose to read it, you must read it cover to cover.”
The answer for me is quite simple. I would leave that particular book on the shelf and I would leave it be for years and years while I lived, moved, loved, got sick, got well, and enjoyed a nice long life. Then when I am very old and very tired I will sit back with an obnoxiously expensive drink, put on some Mozart, sit back, pull it off the shelf and make it a page-a-day until I got to the end. Then I would put the book back and enjoy a life well-lived and the serenity that comes with robbing death of his surprise ending.
“Vanilla, chocolate, or something else entirely?”
Context is full of hidden landmines. This prompt could be for anything ranging from ice cream to sex. The entertainment value alone for a discussion on my sex life won’t be happening on this blog, so you can safe yourself the clutched pearls and faux shock. The only other option is a culinary question about ice cream preferences. I wouldn’t dare let even that subject be plain as that. I prefer to make my own ice cream, and when I do that I prefer to make it with dark chocolate, lots of vanilla for body, and crushed up Altoid mints for the flavor spike of mint that I really love when making my own ice creams. I am quite surprised that more ice cream manufacturers haven’t attempted to crush and incorporate Altoid mint flavors into their ice creams, but as it may be, I sometimes peek around corners and do things unexpected.
When it comes to commercial ice creams, I have to admit to a preference for Strawberry. About a year ago my partner, Scott introduced me to his favorite ice cream flavor that one of our local fast-food joints makes. Culvers sometimes makes what’s called Butter Brickle and I have to admit that it’s sometimes edging out my preferences for Strawberry.
As funny as innuendo goes, and as far as it’s applicable, what started out as a clear discussion of a topic not related to sex will almost always find it’s way right back into that sense wether you like it or not.
The best video I saw in reference to hilarious innuendo is the Star Trek Sexed Generation YouTube video. Here it is:
I wrote about this years ago when I first started reading Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series of books. One of the main characters of the story is Matrim Cauthon and he plays a central role throughout the entire story. I’m currently reading “Memory of Light” and just finished a rather well-written section early in this book featuring Mat.
That section got me to thinking about an old LiveJournal post I wrote all those years ago. Thanks to Spotify I can embed the music right in this post:
After reading the lyrics and thinking about Mat I really think this track from Coldplay has Mat nailed down pretty well. I thought everyone else might enjoy it as well.
Today the city of Kalamazoo will be turning off the water to a series of properties that includes my workplace. The general statement is that the water will be off from 9am to 4pm today, although of course, they will endeavor to not let it be off for any longer than it really has to be.
This event got me thinking about the topic of infrastructure. How much of the first world lifestyle is possible because of things none of us see or notice until they are gone. It’s a curse of ubiquity and constancy, everywhere you go there is running water, there has rarely ever been situations where running water was not available, so then, what happens when it’s gone? There are so many pieces to modern living that we all take for granted and in doing so we have become functionally dependent on these things. This is a savage dependency, without running water, electricity, fuel, and information services how can the average of us cope? That’s both fascinating and terrifying. To see how average folk would respond to the sudden loss of first-world fundamental services, to the failure of first-world infrastructure is a possibility to see how we can cope and the terror that will descend upon us when we find we cannot cope.
Politics touches on so much of our lives, and even here in terms of infrastructure it lumbers along. How much time and energy have we invested in our roads, in our electrical systems, our fuel delivery systems and our water systems? We used to before we spent all our money on wars, but now? Ever since the I-35W Bridge failed the nation turned at least one wary eye to the conditions of our infrastructure. How much of it is rotting away, needs maintenance, needs money. How can we function without it? Can we?
The government, through their primary readiness website ready.gov has resources a-plenty, but really, how many of us are ready for any of it? At work we have fire drills and tornado-readiness drills, but what about other sorts of disasters? What about infrastructure failure drills? What do we do when we have to span a day at work without some fundamental service, such as electricity, information services, fuel, or water? That’s what has captured my attention currently.
Getting back to the topic of infrastructure, if there is failure, do the systems we have have enough robust redundancy to cope with failure and can we quickly recover function from the gaping maw of failure if it should strike? It’s clear and present, when it comes to water supply that we may be running too close to just-in-time delivery for comforts sake? What about having a large container of potable water in a gravity-fed system just in case we need it? There rarely is such a thing because the system has rarely failed and we don’t feel the need for the extra design or cost. Just because something has rarely failed does not necessarily mean it is proofed against failure.
So when will the water go out? Nobody knows. Maybe at 9, but it’s still running so I doubt that. What is our plan to cope with this loss of one part of the infrastructure? We don’t have one. We don’t need one, or do we? Nobody is really clear and instead of asking, we’re just sitting around warily looking at the sinks and wondering if it will work, and if it doesn’t, where are we going to go when we need to use the bathrooms? Good questions, all.
I’ve lived my life under a really useful expression. “Do not invite Vampires or Policemen into your home.” mostly because you just cannot trust a cop. They are supposed to protect and serve, at least that’s what it says on paper but everyone has seen instance after instance where the police abuse their powers granted to them by the people to do everything from simple infractions or derelictions of duty all the way up to what could be argued as murder. It runs the gamut, between the cop who turns on his sirens and lights to zoom through an intersection just so he can get to the donut shop because he’s got a dire craving to the cop that beats a retarded man nearly to death with a baton.
We don’t get that kind of action so much here in the delightful little town of Kalamazoo. By and large I’d say the cops are more an ever-present miasma than they are a downright menace. It’s a little town with a lot of police. You’ve got Michigan State Cops, you have Kalamazoo City Cops, you have County Sheriffs, and you have Kalamazoo Township Cops. Their spheres of influence are a messy geographic venn diagram and so because you don’t really get who does what, you just shrug and go about living your life.
Everything is just fine until you witness a cop breaking the law. Now I have to say that there are some situations where the law bends for a cop, like in an emergency the speed limit doesn’t matter and this post isn’t about that sort of thing. This post is about what happens when a cop, probably without thought, does something that is patently illegal – and you catch him at it.
Video says so much… so here we go. Officer Friendly driving 082 X 046 did something wrong:
[jwplayer mediaid=”2272″]
Yes, this is a very small infraction and lots of people do it all the time, I get that. But what irks me is when those who are set above us to “enforce the law” do not do so themselves. After looking up this particular naughty I came across this, which I sort of want to put on a ticket and attach to the cops car:
Negligent use of a motor vehicle – Prosecutable
Unattended – engine running or brake not set
Driver not in proper control of vehicle
Anyhow, I just took the video principally for lulz, but still, it is worth talking about. Who is above the law and who isn’t, and what those who aren’t do when they find out that the ones who are, aren’t.
“You’re locked in a room with your greatest fear. Describe what’s in the room.”
Golly, this is an easy one. It’s actually a feature in some of my more deeper and more meaningful dreams. I’ve blogged before about a regular setting that usually happens in my dreaming life – the big house. Sometimes it changes shape and place, but I know it’s the same structure. Almost always in these dreams I end up at the end boarding an elevator. What starts out as a normal elevator ride becomes way more nightmarish when the walls fall away and it’s just me standing on a rising metal platform with a broken knife-switch control. Either the elevator rises or I pull the knife-switch and it falls.
No real big surprise that my biggest phobia is that of heights. So, the room itself is sort of the fear, at least until when it rises and then the walls fall away.
“Tell us about a teacher who had a real impact on your life, either for the better or the worse. How is your life different today because of him or her?”
Mrs. Fitch. She taught high school chemistry at one of the high schools l attended. In fact I took New York Regents Chemistry class from her and I remember her fondly to this very day. She treated the kids with a no-nonsense style that I appreciated. She wasn’t alone, as she was the middle between biology and physics teachers who were also very memorable. The most entertaining thing I remember was when she used denatured alcohol to surprise a sleepy student. We all watched as she snuck up to him, prepared the surprise and then set it off. He never fell asleep again, at least during her class. As for what I learned? The material from the chemistry class is pretty much gone. If you don’t use a tool eventually it rusts, and for me, what I learned in high school, for the most part, has rusted away. I do remember some lessons, especially on significant figures when doing calculations and all the many botched experiments. Funny what stands out in your memory, but I distinctly remember hearing a story about how one student who I knew was tearing down an experiment and didn’t consider that a metal stand holding a bunsen burner rig may have had some residual heat stored in it’s stand-ring. I wasn’t there to witness it, but I heard that she grabbed the ring thoughtlessly and the metal wasn’t cool to the touch.
As it is, the town that high school served was wiped off the face of the map by a once-in-a-lifetime flood of the Susquehanna River. I don’t know if it still stands or if Mrs. Fitch is still alive. It’s been many years. If so, or if not, I’ll always have those memories and smile when I remember them.
“Helplessness: that dull, sick feeling of not being the one at the reins. When did you last feel like that –- and what did you do about it?”
I rarely have this feeling. Almost always I can either acquire control or I can find some way to escape the situation. There is one time, not really a matter of helplessness, but one of catastrophic failure that recently happened to me that I can write about. Several months ago I had a server, a Dell uber-tower that was 9 years old and suffered a total systems failure while I was actively trying to backup files on that server because I just didn’t trust the tape system to work properly. Turns out I was just a little bit psychic I guess, because half-way through my attempt to backup the machine, there was a catastrophic fault on the servers motherboard which pretty much hosed the entire machine.
I needed to get the data off the tapes and get a new server set up as quickly as I could. The realization of the failure hit me right in my gut. It’s where cancers always feel stress, like a knot in your stomach. Not nausea, but it felt just like I had been punched right in my gut and was short on air. I arranged to get a new server up and running and got the system back on its feet but needed some of those files on the tapes in order to rescue everything. I called all around and nobody had that old technology still, so I had no choice but to resort to data rescue services. They got the tapes, and after a protracted back and forth regarding them I received the files that were written to the tapes on several DVD’s. Turns out that Backup Exec lied about making successful backups all along and that all my tapes had filenames and directory structures, but no actual data to any of the files. They were all zero kb. In many regards I had spent a lot of money for DVD’s with just the headstones of the files I needed, and no bodies.
Thankfully I had mirrored the system to another server a few months back and I was able to rescue a majority of the data that I really needed and only lost about two months of my coworkers work. It was bad, but it wasn’t heart-attack bad.
Since then, I resolved that I would never again trust any data to tapes, and thankfully when that server died it took the last tape drive with it, so there are no more tape drives in use in my office. Tapes are very 20th century things and there are better ways to store and backup data now.
I will never forget that feeling of being punched in the gut. Thankfully now the relevant systems are under contracts and warranties and letters of agreement and whatever else we could find to properly cover-my-ass and ensure that this would never again happen to me. It might happen to someone else here, but it won’t be my fault, ever again.
Here’s a better hot toddy recipe. Arguably it’s a variation on a theme, but this is quite good.
1) A mug that can take at least eight ounces.
2) Cover the bottom of the glass with honey.
3) Add two ounces of rum or whiskey.
4) Add a tablespoon of brown sugar.
5) Add 1/4 tsp of cinnamon.
6) Add 1/4 tsp of nutmeg.
7) Add four whole cloves.
8) Fill to brim with boiling water
9) Stir well and leave for five minutes.
10) Enjoy.