Observations and Impressions

Just a blog about things I've seen and wondered about

[staff]

A better, more positive Tumblr

Since its founding in 2007, Tumblr has always been a place for wide open, creative self-expression at the heart of community and culture. To borrow from our founder David Karp, we’re proud to have inspired a generation of artists, writers, creators, curators, and crusaders to redefine our culture and to help empower individuality.

Over the past several months, and inspired by our storied past, we’ve given serious thought to who we want to be to our community moving forward and have been hard at work laying the foundation for a better Tumblr. We’ve realized that in order to continue to fulfill our promise and place in culture, especially as it evolves, we must change. Some of that change began with fostering more constructive dialogue among our community members. Today, we’re taking another step by no longer allowing adult content, including explicit sexual content and nudity (with some exceptions).  

Let’s first be unequivocal about something that should not be confused with today’s policy change: posting anything that is harmful to minors, including child pornography, is abhorrent and has no place in our community. We’ve always had and always will have a zero tolerance policy for this type of content. To this end, we continuously invest in the enforcement of this policy, including industry-standard machine monitoring, a growing team of human moderators, and user tools that make it easy to report abuse. We also closely partner with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the Internet Watch Foundation, two invaluable organizations at the forefront of protecting our children from abuse, and through these partnerships we report violations of this policy to law enforcement authorities. We can never prevent all bad actors from attempting to abuse our platform, but we make it our highest priority to keep the community as safe as possible.

So what is changing?

Posts that contain adult content will no longer be allowed on Tumblr, and we’ve updated our Community Guidelines to reflect this policy change. We recognize Tumblr is also a place to speak freely about topics like art, sex positivity, your relationships, your sexuality, and your personal journey. We want to make sure that we continue to foster this type of diversity of expression in the community, so our new policy strives to strike a balance.

Why are we doing this?

It is our continued, humble aspiration that Tumblr be a safe place for creative expression, self-discovery, and a deep sense of community. As Tumblr continues to grow and evolve, and our understanding of our impact on our world becomes clearer, we have a responsibility to consider that impact across different age groups, demographics, cultures, and mindsets. We spent considerable time weighing the pros and cons of expression in the community that includes adult content. In doing so, it became clear that without this content we have the opportunity to create a place where more people feel comfortable expressing themselves.

Bottom line: There are no shortage of sites on the internet that feature adult content. We will leave it to them and focus our efforts on creating the most welcoming environment possible for our community.

So what’s next?

Starting December 17, 2018, we will begin enforcing this new policy. Community members with content that is no longer permitted on Tumblr will get a heads up from us in advance and steps they can take to appeal or preserve their content outside the community if they so choose. All changes won’t happen overnight as something of this complexity takes time.

Another thing, filtering this type of content versus say, a political protest with nudity or the statue of David, is not simple at scale. We’re relying on automated tools to identify adult content and humans to help train and keep our systems in check. We know there will be mistakes, but we’ve done our best to create and enforce a policy that acknowledges the breadth of expression we see in the community.

Most importantly, we’re going to be as transparent as possible with you about the decisions we’re making and resources available to you, including more detailed information, product enhancements, and more content moderators to interface directly with the community and content.

Like you, we love Tumblr and what it’s come to mean for millions of people around the world. Our actions are out of love and hope for our community. We won’t always get this right, especially in the beginning, but we are determined to make your experience a positive one.

Jeff D’Onofrio CEO

[kam13chomo-deactivated20181217]

Constructive Critisim: You’ve failed. Not only yourselves @staff but the whole community of tumblr. You say “freedom of expression” and yet take away that freedom from fanartists, positivity blogs, and others all in the name of making it a “safe place” for those who’re underage. You have done the complete opposite, you aren’t making it safer, you’ve made a war zone by your own hand on your own doorstep. Sadly, I will probably delete my blog, there’s no point to be in a place where “freedom” has chains.

I would have maybe gotten it if you had did an all round sweep of every tag there was. However only nuking one and completely ignoring the others (aggressive hate groups hiding behind “freedom of expression”) is not equitable in any way.

Unless you do something - You will not see me after December.

[girlgirloveandreams]

Tumblr should not ban fanart or even pictures simply because there are 2 women kissing! That’s what’s appening in my tumblr

[therealgoldenzebra]

Everyone, if you are a creator go to this website and sign up for their email course on how to grow & keep your fanbase and monetize your content. Currently lots of traffic so the website is a bit slow to load. Seriously, do it.

[drawing-prompt-s]

#SIGNAL BOOST!!!

[yellow-sandwich]

It’s a 7-day email course. Sandra (blog owner) recommend having your own website and to be self-hosted so that when things like this happen it doesn’t affect you, and to start working on an email list rather than only focussing on the # of followers on social media. With email there is no algorithm that hides your content. So if you have 300 subscribers, all 300 subscribers receive your email instead of having 300 followers and only 10 people seeing your content. 

So basically you gonna need things like Wordpress self-hosted using, for example, BlueHost that costs around $4 a month and Mailchimp (free). 

If you don’t have any money, I still highly recommend Sandra’s course because the information she gives out is amazing and also work without a website 80% of the time. Definitely worth checking out. 

[observationsandimpressions-blog]

Goodbye tumblr. I’m out. Your acquiescence to sterility norms pushes me out.

[observationsandimpressions-blog]

[observationsandimpressions-blog]

Imagine

Imagine there’s no heaven, it’s easy is you try. No hell below us, above us only sky.  Imagine all the people, living for today…  

Imagine there’s no countries, it isn’t hard to do.  Nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too.  Imagine all the people, living life in peace…  

Imagine no possessions, I wonder if you can.  No need for greed or hunger, a brotherhood of man.  Imagine all the people, sharing all the world…

You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.  I hope someday you’ll join us, and the world will live as one.

I’ve always thought that was a beautiful song, but never really absorbed the meaning and intent behind the words.  John Lennon must have had a vision to write these words, because he’s describing a world that Christ told us to live.  Imagine the world Christ talks about- if your brother needs a coat, give him yours. Don’t save for tomorrow- your life can end at any time.  Love your neighbor, your brother.  Share what you have, live in peace and love.

Sadly, he WAS a dreamer- man doesn't have it in him to live without greed, war, possessions, barriers and boundaries.  It is a beautiful dream though, and if we all espoused it we’d live in a much more beautiful world.  Think globally, act locally.  Give these concepts a try.  Let’s see what happens.  Imagine.

[observationsandimpressions-blog]

Economy and Growth

We Americans pride ourselves on Finance and our financial acumen, but we’re actually very bad at looking at the BIG picture when we do cost accounting.  In fairness, most other countries are pretty poor at it too, though Germany has made huge strides in this area in recent years.  What I’m talking about is how we value our natural resources, especially those non-renewable ones, but also the renewable ones that serve more than one purpose.  Let’s talk about Gold mines, for instance.  In the U.S., a person can claim Federal land and work it as a mining operation for the sum of $150 per year.  Imagine hitting the mother lode, and it only costing $150 to extract it!  Large corporations are doing this extremely well- bad pun, because I’m talking about oil drilling and coal mining on public lands. It wasn’t until Obama took office that he put a moratorium on oil drilling on public land- and only because some of that public land is the most scenic land in the United States, bordering National Parks.  

Once you’re done with the mining operation, do you need to clean it up?  Nope.  Look at the Gold King Mine in Colorado, which was the most richly producing mine in the U.S. It’s now a superfund site, but the owners and operators of the mine are long gone and no longer have responsibility. The Government is on the hook because they took $150 per year from the miners.  The mine tailings are toxic and have polluted the local streams for years to the point that the Government moved to stem the leakage.  Going after the owners who made so much money from this operation is not even a consideration.

We have a rape and run philosophy when it comes to our natural resources- get as much as you can as quickly and economically as you can, then leave.  Individuals get rich, the Government gets $150.  

The same is true for Timber leases.  Timber is generally used to make paper, though some is actually used for lumber, which is much more profitable.  But for timber, the Government goes WAY out of their way to facilitate extraction on public lands- they carve timber roads, ignore watersheds and streams, and generally try to give the trees away.  I don’t understand the rationale- of course timber is a renewable resource, and lumber companies will be happy to tell you that they replant 3 trees for every one they cut down.  The difference is this:  They cut down dozens of different species of trees in any given virgin forest, clear cutting to the forest floor and removing anything of commercial value, but also trampling anything not of commercial value.  Then they replant with one species of tree, creating a monoculture forest that’s perfectly suited for the lumber companies, but very poor for the natural environment.  

Now that I’ve given a couple of examples, let’s take a step back and look at the world rather than just the U.S.  The whole world, country by country, does not value their natural resources properly. It’s always viewed as an immediate extractable resource, when in reality it should be looked at as a long-term investment in the planet, the country, the future.  Yes, extract what you need now, but carefully, and with an eye toward your grandchildren’s needs.  This is true for fishing, forests, minerals, petroleum, or any natural resource upon which we humans place value.  We don’t need more huge scars upon the land.  In the cases of less developed nations, who sell or “lease” their mineral rights to some multinational megacorporation, they are selling out their heritage in the name of quick money.  The indigenous peoples in these lands have lived there for as long as we know, yet we displace them and uproot their heritage to give some foreign company more money.  It’s tragic.

If we were to properly apply an “extraction cost” that includes the cost of environmental repair once that resource has been depleted, a “maintenance cost” for those that are renewable but require maintenance and support (think fisheries and forests), a “future use loss” cost for those resources for whose extraction and sale prevents future generations from reaping the benefits, natural resources would jump dramatically in price.  I’m not sure that’s a bad thing, because we’re putting that money away for future generations, which is a good thing.  Unless of course you don’t believe there’ll BE future generations.  But that’s another topic.

Even the first one, “extraction cost” is being abused by large corporations, especially coal mining operations in the US West.  They’re self-insured and self-bonded, meaning that they promise the Federal Government that they have enough money so that they don’t need to buy a big insurance policy or big bond to perform environmental cleanup once the coal has been extracted.  But, when the coal has been extracted, where does the money come from?  All of a sudden they don’t have enough, and they strong-arm and twist arms with state governments to get exemptions from the Federal law.  It’s criminal, but they’re getting away with it.  

[observationsandimpressions-blog]

Congress and Guns

If the attitude in Congress is “More Guns make for a safer environment”, why don’t they remove the metal detectors from the entryways into the House and Senate?  In fact, with that attitude they should give each visitor an AR-15 rifle with a large clip and a bump stock.  That would fit the NRA’s vision of: No background checks, No age limit, No waiting period, No restrictions on magazine size nor fast-fire capability, and everyone has a gun.  

[just-shower-thoughts]

Let’s rename bullying to “assholing,” so instead of teaching kids not to bully we would just teach them not to be assholes.

[observationsandimpressions-blog]

Similarly, rename “troll” to “asshole”

[observationsandimpressions-blog]

Things that suck

Gravity                                 Bigotry                                  Dry air                                   Poorly written programs

Vacuum cleaners             Guilt                                      Space                                    Computer viruses            

Angry people                     Sponges                               Hatred                                  Stupid laws                                        

Cheap goods                      Ignorance                            Paper towels                     Greed                                  

Chinese instruction manuals                                       Octopus arms                    Babies

Mean people                     Hookers                               Suction cups                       Ignorance

[observationsandimpressions-blog]

The death of discourse

I was reading an online review of a particular song the other day, and some guy expressed his opinion that it was “the greatest song ever”.  Immediately after that posting was a vicious attack by some ignorant asshole on the guy’s intelligence, heritage, and musical taste.  It made me realize that we are in a time when expressing your own opinion will be met with vituperative, vitriolic attacks FOR YOUR OWN OPINION.

And that’s wrong.  If you have a personal opinion, it’s yours to keep- having an ignorant asshole tell you your parents made a mistake in bearing you because you may happen to like Barry Manilow (or Tom Jones, or Celine Dion, or you name it) is the equivalent of hating someone because they like apples.  It’s plain stupid, and the attacker displays his ignorance in the attack.  By the way, all the singers I’ve noted above are below the bottom of my “favorites” list.  I personally think that “Barry Manilow’s Greatest Hits” would feature 74 minutes of silence.  But I won’t attack someone’s character because they like Barry Manilow!  

Sadly, politics today is like that- if you can’t come up with a cohesive counter position to someone’s stated view, you attack his character instead, or in this most recent campaign their physical attributes or lack thereof.  Personal attacks do nothing to foster a mutually satisfying compromise, it just hardens both positions.  And once again, the attacker is the ignorant asshole.  

Another tactic I’ve noticed is when an interviewer invites someone with an opposing view onto their show, then talks right over any point they’re trying to make, shutting them up with volume rather than content.  Both parties are guilty of it, and I dislike the whole genre of attack journalism.  If you’re going to give someone air time to voice their views, then give them air time. Otherwise, just give a monologue of your own opinions and don’t belittle or demean someone with a rational, opposing view.  And if they happen to have an irrational opposing view, point that out, don’t shout over them!  Discourse and dialogue are to expand peoples’ horizons; if you’re happy sitting in your ignorant little box then don’t ask for someone’s opinion!  And don’t give yours unless asked!

[observationsandimpressions-blog]

China Population

Here’s a topic that people just cannot grasp.  China has an ENORMOUS population.  At 1.6 billion people, it’s 5 times the size of the U.S. population.  Think of it this way:  If China has the same percentage of millionaires as the United States, 4%, then there are 64 million millionaires living in China, or 1/3 of the U.S. population. If every Chinese person spent $10 per day, their daily spending is $16 Billion dollars.  To get that same spending in the U.S., each of us would have to spend $53.

Imagine 1.6 billion craps per day.  In many places, those craps go straight into a field (and I mean straight in- the farmers squat and crap on the ground), but in many others the infrastructure is straining to maintain some semblance of hygiene.  Imagine 1.6 billion flushes.  

The concept of 1.6 billion people is staggering.  Imagine trying to feed that many people.  Imagine trying to provide drinkable water to that many.  Imagine a democracy with a population like that.  How long would it take to count that many votes?  You’d be well into the next term before you determined the winner.  How would you represent that many people?  As it is, their ‘communist’ dictatorship, where the power blatantly lies with the money and vice versa (unlike the U.S., where it’s thinly concealed) has a difficult time balancing bringing their world into the 21st century and maintaining a grip on leadership.  

And here’s the scary part of this to me:  Imagine that many people waking up and realizing that their life sucks and they want more from it, more from the world.  When these people become consumers, the earth’s resources, strained already, will rapidly deplete.  The Chinese government is trying mightily to wake the Chinese consumer lion.  

[observationsandimpressions-blog]

Apps

I’ve been putting this one off for a while, because every time I sit down to do research on them I discover another thousand have been developed.  There are now apps for EVERYTHING!  I’m simply astounded at the proliferation, and some of them are truly cool. I cannot even begin to categorize them except in extremely large buckets:  Games, Social Media, and Convenience.  In each are thousands of different apps, from Angry Birds to traffic apps, from an app that lets you tell anonymous followers the color and texture of your shit to a medical app that tells you what that signifies.  

Apps have proliferated in ways I’m sure Apple had no vision of or they’d have charged to develop them. And the amazing thing to me is that every time you think you have a cool concept for an app, you discover that not only has somebody else come up with that concept, dozens of other people have developed similar, better ones in ways you couldn’t have imagined.  

The weird thing is that some apps are tremendously popular that I wouldn’t have thought to be so: Why would SnapChat be so popular? The image/video sticks around for a whole 5 seconds before disappearing forever.  Who’d want that except maybe drug dealers or pimps?  Everyone, it turns out.  

One App group that I love is the Cat Games group.  These goofy things occupy a cat in hilarious, interesting ways, and because our cats are both indoor cats, their fascination for  an app that features fish swimming to the surface of the iPad and disappearing again intrigues me- is there a genetic thing that causes cats to be interested in fish?  Our cats have never seen fish before, where did they learn that behavior?

[observationsandimpressions-blog]

Vocabulary

We live in an interesting era.  On one hand, our technological developments are proceeding faster than we can accommodate.  On the other, ignorance is growing alarmingly.  It’s known that average speakers of a language have about 1000 words that they use in everyday speech though have a lexicon in the 4000-5000 word range. What I’ve noticed though is that those extra 3000- 4000 words are featured less and less frequently in everyday conversation, less and less in the written word, less and less and LESS on Television.  Yet it is the richness of a language, its vocabulary, its thousands upon thousands of words that greatly enhance the content of a discussion.  What’s better to hear: “He laughed hard”, or “His laughter was uproarious”? Which gives you a better mental image?  You don’t need to sound like a Harvard professor to bust out some decent vocabulary- simply expand your repertoire to those poor underutilized words waiting in the wings of your consciousness.  And if you ain’t got ‘em, go out and learn ‘em. K?

[observationsandimpressions-blog]

Basketball

Let’s start out on the left foot here.  I hate basketball.  If you love basketball, skip this section, or read it to get an insight into why I think it’s such a shitty sport.  I’ve learned in watching basketball that the last 3 minutes (which actually lasts closer to 30) is the only interesting part of the game, and the word interesting is only used here to differentiate those three minutes from the preceding 3-3/4 periods. All of basketball can be summed up in two sentences:  Big guys run down the court and put the ball in the basket.  Repeat.  Sure, there are minor variations- free throws, missed shots, and so on, but in general big guys run down the court and put the ball in the basket.  Then the other big guys do the same thing the other way. It’s on an interest level with watching bowling or golf, with modifications on the same two sentences. In golf: Fat guy hits the ball. Repeat.  In bowling: Geeky guy rolls a ball down the alley, knocking down all the pins.  Repeat.

Basketball might be more interesting if the court were larger, the net higher, smaller or moving, there were fewer stoppages in play, SOMETHING different! As it is, it’s excruciatingly boring. The superstars of the game are truly talented individuals, no question.  There’s no way I could match their athleticism, nor sink baskets the way they do.  Unfortunately, apart from superstars and their fantastic gyrations, the game remains the same.  Boring. You could watch a highlight reel of great basketball plays made throughout an entire season and it would only be a few minutes long.  Give me that.

[observationsandimpressions-blog]

Water wars

I’ve actually touched on this topic, but only from a “Water is valuable” perspective.  We haven’t come to the point yet in global warming where water will be not only valuable but critical.  In California, we’re getting close- or at least seeing a bit of the future as our annual precipitation comes down now as rain instead of snow, filling and then draining dams and storage basins because we’re not set up to handle massive amounts of water in short periods of time.  In the future, as the climate zones move north (or south if you’re south of the Equator), water will become a precious commodity.  As I’ve said in the past, you can live without oil, but you cannot live without water. Given the choice of preserving one or the other, or abandoning one versus the other, I’ll take water thank you.

Another aspect of California water is the whole notion of “Water rights”.  Because a rancher was given “water rights” 100 years ago, they believe that those rights are theirs, unchangeable and non-negotiable.  These individuals typically own large, thirsty farms that grow such water-hog crops as rice (which we ship to China, figuratively exporting water), alfalfa (same as rice), sweet corn, and cotton.  These four crops are, along with almonds, some of the most water intensive crops around.  But you know the MOST water intensive crop?  Trick question:  It’s BEEF. It takes roughly 15,000 liters of water to grow one kilo of beef.  Let me translate that to Avdp. so you get a feel for it:  It takes 1770 gallons of water for a POUND of cow!  But I digress.  To have ranchers with “Water Rights” growing beef in California and expecting to continue as their parents have should have their thinking changed, and dramatically.

Water should be declared a National Strategic Resource and treated as such.  Being able to willy-nilly pump water from the ground beneath you, or worse inject contaminated water BACK into the ground beneath you (see Fracking) should be a crime, or at least closely controlled.  

Imagine this future: The ocean water level has risen 3 meters (OK, 10 feet for you avoirdupois people).  That forces the ocean into all coastal areas that are at or lower than 3 meters above sea level. That may not sound like a lot, but the average elevation of Florida is 3 meters.  Major cities across the world will be inundated- Hong Kong, Shanghai, Sydney, Ho Chi Minh city (Saigon), Venice, London, New York, Los Angeles.  It’s a fact that 80% of the world’s population lives within 100km (60 miles; this is getting tiring) of an ocean.  Imagine that ocean pushing those people inland. Rivers become brackish far upstream from the coast as the ocean tides push the water inland- California’s Central Valley water becomes salty.  Drinking water in coastal areas becomes scarce.  Coastal farmland becomes unproductive as the salinity rises above what plants can tolerate.  

As the climate changes, drought becomes normal in areas fringing deserts.  Again, that may not sound like a big issue, but the American plains are right next to the Sonora desert.  Dust bowl conditions will become commonplace as these areas dry up.  Africa will experience more crushing drought, followed by famine and further political instability as these people struggle to survive.  China’s Gobi desert will push into areas in China that are currently intensively cultivated, further diminishing arable land.  Farmers, accustomed to pumping water from deep wells to irrigate otherwise dry croplands will discover that there’s no more water to extract.  

And then people start arguing about water.  The Great Lakes become valuable gems, and Big Business has their eye on them as great sources of water for industrial uses (fracking included).  The U.S. and Canada argue about whose water it really is. Farmers, desperate to keep their crops alive, city dwellers dependent upon those crops, politicians, dependent upon the dollars from those city dwellers, all are affected.  Sooner or later, the “haves” and the “have nots” will fight.  And it’ll be about water.  

So raise a glass everyone!  Enjoy it while you can!  Drink it from the front seat of your GasHog SUV and get the best of both worlds. 

[observationsandimpressions-blog]

Fracking

I read the other day that it takes 9 gallons of water to frack one gallon of oil.  Are we being stupid, or what?  First we poison the water so that we cannot ever use it again, then we pump it way underground, forcing oil out of the well head.  Then whatever water comes back out we pump into a different well, poisoning not only the water we started with, but also the water this returned water encounters.  Are we being stoooopid or what?  

The worst part are the vehement protests by the oil industry against revealing what exactly they put into the water in the first place.  Regulators have to use analytical methods to figure out some of it, and so far they’ve not found anything good.  So why are we using 9 gallons of something we cannot live without to pull out one gallon of something we can?  Because preventing it is BAD FOR BUSINESS.  

When will we understand that bad for business sometimes means Good for Life?  In the meantime, oil companies can legally pull a tanker truck up to a fire hydrant and fill up, drive to a well site and poison the water, then pump it into the ground.  When water comes back up, they can legally pump it into holding ponds (they don’t know what else to do with it), or pump it back into an aquifer to get rid of it. Now the aquifer is fucked up too.

In our amazing state, some growers are experimenting with putting this water on FOOD CROPS.  What the hell?  We don’t even know what’s IN this water, and we’re growing grapes with it? Really?  I’m much more concerned with foods grown with fracked water than I am with Genetically Modified foods.  Put a label on the fracked foods, please.  Jesus.  

You notice that I didn’t even touch on the hydrology of fracking?  The close tie that fracking has to earthquakes?  The issue with fracking wells (because they’re deep, they of course go through several different layers of aquifers, from which many millions of people get their water) leaking (100% of fracking wells leak in a 20 year period) into the water layers above them?  The most dramatic ones are the pumped water than burns with dissolved methane.  It’s not a unique event.  People in Texas and in Australia have the same problem with burning water.  Why don’t I discuss this?  Because it’s become a political issue- Democrats cite these instances, Republicans deny them.  Even those Republicans in Stillwater Oklahoma, who’ve experienced 500 earthquakes over 3.0 magnitude in the past year will deny the tie to the fracking that’s going on underfoot.  

But regulate it?  Hell no!  It’s Bad for Business!    

And that’s something that frustrates me about our current society.  If a salient study comes out tying one activity to a negative outcome, the first thing to do is deny the link.  The next thing to do is study it forever, trying to “find” the link.  And continually, ALWAYS say it’s “Controversial”. Think of the link between smoking and lung cancer or heart disease.  EVERYONE now knows that link.  But do you know how long ago that link was first discovered?  In the early 1950’s!  When did the government actually file suit against the tobacco companies? More than 30 years later.  Why? First, scientists employed by tobacco companies denied the link, putting out poorly performed and not peer-reviewed research.  Then they “Studied” it, burying any data that looked bad and highlighting any data that showed a lower risk.  Then, as the mountain of evidence tying smoking to cancer continued to grow, they settled into the “controversial” attitude- don’t do anything about it because we haven’t proven it definitively.  

I cite tobacco smoking because it’s the model for all other topics in that vein. Global warming?  It’s “Controversial”.  The deniers are having a more and more difficult time, as the ice caps melt and the weather patterns change, denying it’s occurring.  Now it’s Controversial, because one or two scientists don’t believe it.  The vast preponderance of science and scientists acknowledge the reality of it, but all it takes is one guy with a big mouth and rich friends and it becomes ‘controversial’.  That’s where fracking is now- in the Denial stage.  A decade from now, when the body of evidence is too strong to deny, it’ll become ‘controversial’.  And nothing will be done about it until all our water is poisoned and poured into undrinkable aquifers.

[observationsandimpressions-blog]

Bizarre foods

I’ve touched on bizarre foods before, in naming some of the weird stuff I’ve eaten in my life.  The bigger question is this: what on earth prompted people to start eating some of this stuff?  Take tomatoes, for instance.  The stems, leaves and roots of this plant are poisonous.  What would make the fruits not only non-poisonous, but delicious?  What about rhubarb?  The leaves? Leave them alone.  They’ll kill you.  The stalks?  Delicious when prepared properly. Truffles?  Who on earth discovered that if you follow behind a pig and eat what it’s eating that it’d be good?  Or mushrooms? I read that 10% of mushrooms are edible; the remaining 90% are poisonous.  So who in their right mind would try to discern the one good one in the 10 in front of you?  Artichokes represent an interesting one too.  They’re literally big thistles.  Who figured out that boiling them in water for a long time then stripping off everything but the heart (and even the furry stuff that’s on that) made something not only edible but delicious?  

I can understand stuff like Fugu- the blowfish whose liver is toxic if prepared improperly.  People have been eating fish since they found a lake/ocean with them in it.  Every now and again you’re bound to find something that’ll kill you.  Same with bugs- they’re not bad, and certainly acceptable fare if you have no other options.  Snakes too.  But the Chinese eat eggs that have been fermented in cow shit for 100 days (they’re called 100-day eggs).  You’ve got to be HUNGRY to eat something like that!  

Then there’s the food that’s awful (or deadly) unless prepared properly.  Olives come quickly to mind.  Apart from olive oil, olives themselves need extensive treatment before they’re palatable.  They have to be soaked in lye first, or at least a strong salt solution.  Who figured that out?  One of the most common food tubers in the tropics, manioc, emits hydrogen cyanide when cut, enough in some varieties to kill a person.  Who figured out that mashing and soaking them in water would eliminate the toxicity?  Consider another tuber, the potato.  The eyes of a potato are poisonous, so any sprouted spud should be discarded.  Raw Peanuts that have been improperly stored have one of the deadliest chemicals around in them:  a thing called aflatoxin.  Uncooked peanuts that have a light musty odor should be given to someone you don’t like. The same is true with raw almonds (cyanide), raw cashews (the same toxin that’s in poison ivy) and cherry pits (back to cyanide).  Apple seeds are toxic (cyanide AGAIN) as well.  In other words, it’s a jungle out there- it’s amazing we don’t just plain keel over!  

There’s also the weird food that people consider a delicacy.  Snails come immediately to mind.  I’ve had snails (escargot) several times; each time, I’m reminded of garlicky pencil erasers.  Delicacy? Nope.  On the other hand, I had something called Blood Snails in Ningbo, China. They were delicious.  Maybe eating them raw is the answer?  And caviar?  To me they’re fishy, grainy, salty eggs.  Salmon eggs have better flavor.  The very first sea urchin I had as sushi was bad, and that tainted my impression of sea urchins until I had a good one.  Up until that good one, my impression was that of eating the mud at the bottom of a lake. Fishy, slimy, muddy tasting (hmmm- kind of like pig ass!).  Then I had a fresh and properly prepared one.  Delicious.  I no longer steer away from it.  

The next time you see tomatoes in your salad, potatoes on your plate, and a rhubarb crisp for dessert, think about the narrow skirting of life-threatening foods you’ve just consumed! 

[observationsandimpressions-blog]

Beer part 4- brewing

OK, I’ll admit to being what could be called an “advanced beginner”- so far, all 20 of the batches I’ve made (not bad for 11 months work!) have started with either LME or DME, otherwise known as Liquid Malt Extract and Dry Malt Extract.  This differs from how the REAL guys make it in that I skip the whole front-end part of brewing, both out of laziness and ignorance. That being said, let me describe the ENTIRE brewing process:

It begins with barley. It’s a nice compact grain, and people over the millennia have discovered that roasting sprouted barley to different degrees imparts different flavors to the end result.  A light roast (10-20L) gives a light color and crisp, grainy flavor, medium roasts (30-60L) impart a golden color and caramel flavor, darker roasts (80+L) impart progressively more burnt flavors and darker colors- from chocolate on the lighter end to burnt coffee on the darker end.  

I’ve ignored other grains, but should not.  Asian brewers (and Budweiser) use rice instead of barley; wheat is similarly used for a category of beers known as Weiss or Wit beers.  Both impart characteristics unique to the grain, but the end result is the same.

A savvy brewmeister will be able to mix the grains in such a way as to impart a bright first flavor, a full mouth in the middle, and a lingering aftertaste of whatever he desires. Often, several different grains are used- from light to dark, depending on the desired outcome.

The grain (being more generic) needs to have its complex sugars in the cotyledon broken down to simple sugars for yeast to work on them.  Fortunately, all the grains I’ve mentioned have all the necessary enzymes built into them to do this work.  All they need is the proper temperature, water, and time.  

Step one of brewing is called the mash.  It’s that mixture of grains added to a kettle into which is poured hot water. Depending on the type of mashing you want to do (and there are several different ones), it’s either all poured in at one time and temperature or added in different temperature ranges to activate different enzymes and improve the conversion percentage.  A great conversion percentage is around 80%; most home brewers are happy with a 70-75% conversion.  But I digress.  For home brewers, this mash kettle (officially called a mash tun) is a cooler, to better keep the temperature where you want it.  You see, the water has to inundate the grains for an hour or more at 150 degrees before the conversion from complex sugars to simple sugars is complete.  

Step two of brewing is called the sparge.  After the mash is done, it’s slowly drained off the grain bed.  The grain bed itself acts as a filter, keeping the mash liquid clear.  Hot water is added at the top of the tun to equalize the mash liquid being withdrawn from the bottom; it is done to rinse the grains of their sugars and improve the efficiency of the conversion.  

Step three of brewing is where I come in- the brewing process itself.  This mash and sparge water are boiled, hops and whatever else you want to add is added, and then cooled as quickly as possible (to minimize the likelihood of bacterial infection) to the happy temperature for yeasts.  For Ale yeasts, that’s between 65-75 F; for Lager yeasts it’s between 45-50 F.  When I buy DME or LME, I’ve given the grain mixing and mashing control over to someone else.  What I gain in convenience, I lose in control of grain selection.  

Yeast- lager vs. ale: Lagers are brewed at lower temperatures than ales.  In general, an ale brews at room temperature, lagers require refrigeration unless you live in a cold climate that you can semi-control.  Lagers take longer to brew as well- the cooler temperatures mean that the yeast doesn’t work as fast, so instead of a week of fermenting, it can take 2-3 weeks.  “Lager” in German means “stored”, which is what you have to do with these.  Again I digress.  The Lager yeast is also a different strain of yeast than its ale yeast cousin; this one works at the bottom of the fermenter, while ale yeasts work at the top.  

What is the flavor difference?  A lager beer will be lighter and crisper than its ale cousin.  That’s partly due to the grain selection, but also due to the lower temperature used in fermentation.  Ales are generally heartier fare all the way around.  

OK, so now we’ve boiled the mash, added the hops and whatever else you wanted to add, chilled it and added the yeast.  Now what? Now it’s time to wait.  The beer is moved to a sealed container that lets CO2 out but nothing else in.  It’s called a fermenter, and comes in many different shapes and sizes.  I use plastic carboys, slightly different than what 90% of beginner brewers use.   Depending on the beer formula, the fermentation can be extremely vigorous, blowing up a standard air lock with the krauesen generated during the first part of the fermentation.  That’s a scummy, frothy mess that sits on top of the beer (but is really necessary to remove bitter proteins from the end result).  I use a blow-off hose instead of an air lock; it’s a big fat tube that works as an airlock without the problem of it blowing up.  

Fermentation takes about a week.  In the summer months and colder winter months, it’s a good idea to control the temperature.  I use a tub of water, which tends to stabilize the temperature.  In the winter, I’ll have to use a heater to keep my beer at the “right” temp, but in the summer, I do it through evaporative cooling and it seems to work out well.  Getting fermenting beer too hot is bad.  The yeast can die and the resulting death chemicals are reportedly very foul-tasting.  Conversely, an ale that’s too cold just won’t ferment.  You can leave it there for a small eternity, and sooner or later the bacteria that you’ve battled for so long will win.  Result: yuck.  

Then, most ales get what’s called a secondary fermentation.  The beer is drained from one fermenter to another, leaving most of the yeast and sediment at the bottom of the first fermenter; it’s called trub. Sometimes, especially with IPA’s and APA’s, hops are added to this secondary fermentation in a method known as dry-hopping.  Adding hops at this stage imparts a very bright, strong hop flavor that goes over and above what’s done when hops are added in the boil.  If you love hops, you’re probably drinking dry-hopped beers.

The beer sits in secondary 1-2 weeks.  Then it’s bottled or kegged.  But the story doesn’t end there!  

Bottling beer as-is would result in a flat alcoholic beverage that tastes like beer but with no fizz.  While that’s admirable, it’s not really beer.  Sugar is added to the beer before it’s bottled- just enough to kick the yeast into gear one last time, this time to capture the CO2 (it dissolves in the beer) and ignore the little bit of alcohol produced.  When you open a beer, the CO2 comes out of solution, generating a nice fizzy feel to your mouth and a creamy head on the beer.  Kegged beer cheats- they add CO2 to the keg from an outside source.  “Nitro” beers have a mix of CO2 and Nitrogen as the dissolved gas.  The Nitrogen is less soluble than CO2 in water, so makes a cool cascading effect in the glass as it comes out of solution.  

Almost done!  Most beers benefit greatly from a thing called “conditioning”.  That means that the yeast, though greatly reduced in numbers, still has some work to do. Now that they’ve eaten all the easy stuff to eat, now they go to work eating some of the other stuff- oligosaccharides, proteins, secondary waste products.  The beer benefits from their efforts by becoming more clear and flavorful- oligosaccharides contribute to cloudiness, proteins and secondary waste products contribute to bitterness and a slightly fishy flavor.  This “conditioning” can take a month or more; if you’re impatient you can still sample your final product, but know that it’ll be better with a little time.  Some beers, especially Belgian lambics, are stored for a YEAR or more. To be honest, I don’t have the patience!

And now, go to your local brewery with an appreciation of the hours of work that went into the glass you’re enjoying!  If you’re familiar with the bartender, ask what mix of grains and hops he’s used, and whether it’s been dry-hopped (unless you’re drinking an IPA, because then FOR SURE it’s been dry-hopped) and what kinds of hops have been used.  Over enough time, you’ll learn what hop flavors you like and which you don’t- do you like the grapefruit aromas and citrusy flavors of Citra hops, or an in-your-face pine flavor from Centennial?  Ask your brewer!

[observationsandimpressions-blog]

Hell

I’ve got a friend I like a lot.  He once told me that he doesn’t believe there’s a “Hell”.  He believes that God is everywhere, so there would not be a place where God wasn’t.  He also believes that God is all-loving; that all that comes from love on this earth is from God.  Because God is all-loving, God forgives us even as we screw up.  

I’ve pondered that a lot. It seems so starkly at odds with the teachings of organized religion that I have to believe there’s a spark of truth to it.  So let’s compound this thought:   If there’s no hell, then where do we go when we’ve been the Hitlers, Stalins, John Wayne Gacys or Richard Mansons of the world?  Do they, as we, go to heaven (Here’s another concept that I’ll wrestle with.  Give me a minute)?  

Open your mind to the fact that God can do ANYTHING.  Then think about this:  Perhaps we are placed on this earth to learn something, teach something, and increase the amount of love in the world.  If we fail in these things, we come back, and we keep coming back until we’ve completed them.

Have you ever met someone who’s been here a long time?  I mean an “old soul”.  I have a few friends like that- they don’t seem ruffled by the everyday stresses that others trip over, they live their lives richly, filled with friends, family, peace, love and joy.  They do indeed teach something, even when they don’t intend to, and they learn all the time, from books, movies, other people.  My grandparents, especially my grandpa, was an old soul of rare vintage. He taught me tons of things that I live daily, and I’ll credit him with a lot of this perspective, even though he was an old-school Italian Catholic and wouldn’t believe a word of what I’ve written.  

And once you’ve lived a life that increases the amount of love in the world, live a life in which you’ve taught something and learned something, what then?  Well, here’s the other part of God being everywhere: There is no heaven.  God is with us every day, within us, surrounding us. What separates us from God is our own mortal selves- our eyes, our ears, our meat.  When we die, after we’ve completed our tasks on earth, our souls come into the full presence of God, and THAT is heaven.  

So maybe there IS a hell: It’s here on earth, as we inhabit these electrically powered meat machines.  Hell is being separated from God, and it’s while we’re in these meat machines that we’re truly disconnected from God.  The only way to reconnect with God is to learn, teach, love.  

Have you noticed that I’ve not once used a gender pronoun (him, her, it) when referring to God? How can God have genitalia?  When we were made in God’s image, that image is our SOULS.  The meat that surrounds our souls is what we’re connected with; as with God, who’s connected with everything, we’re connected to billions of cells, billions of bacteria, etc.  With our souls, our minds, we drive this meat machine in the way that God drives the Universe.  We’re just really, really puny versions.  

And now I’m done with philosophy.