It's a real world, after all.

Here we are, a few days on, and Gabby has been wiped off the front pages by Tunisia, which has been wiped off the front pages by Egypt.

I was proud of my blog and my readers in your responses to the last post. Thinking people, sane discussions; in spite of what is often an inflammatory topic.

Events like all of these are serving as a Rorschach blot test for our cultures. People and pundits interpret them in the light of their own interests first. I was amused at the number of columnists pointing out that the real failures in Tucson were in the health services department. Why, if only they'd had better funding, surely this poor sick man would have been helped, and all this prevented.

Which is not impossible; but what is also incandescently true is that no matter how well you fund and run any program, some human or other will slide through the remaining tiny cracks, and bad things will happen, regardless. Less often. But you cannot ever reach zero.

Surely we know this.

Then what is required of those of us who think is - some provision for the exceptions.

And what a tangled can of worms we have there. I cannot provide "answers" to the two excellent conundrums posed in the comments to the last post: "should common citizens be armed", and from Steve Salmony: "is there any hope for our species."

But I can, I think, provide a bit of useful insight.

This world of ours is what it is; and we live in it.

Discussions and opinions about what it should be are useful. But they should not be mistaken for realities waiting to pop into place.

Perspective on arming of citizens comes from Egypt, right now. Their police have been rejected by the people, declared and made illegitimate. Leaving the streets open to any and all criminals, who, be assured, were right on their toes waiting for the very first opportunity.

So far, the result in Egypt seems to be that neighbors are arming themselves with anything available, and openly showing that they will resist looters. Often these neighbor-police only have sticks to show. Often the criminal element has an illegal gun or two.

None of which is any answer to whether the situation would be improved by better gun control, or everyone being armed. It's just worth knowing; seeing; you could find yourself in this situation; anywhere in the world.

That's reality.

And it's not easy to come up with pat answers and positions. I'm on the fence myself. We own guns, being way out in the country, and using them for hunting sometimes. At the same time, I think there is some point to trying to decrease the number of guns floating around in cities; and I am fiercely opposed to the idiotic new ruling here in the US allowing people to carry concealed weapons in our National Parks. The Park reality includes the fact that they do have a highly trusted police, who can keep those places as safe as the world is ever likely to be anywhere. We should keep it that way. (rant, rant.)

All of this, and similar stuff, adds up to a response to your question, Steve- likely the only one you'll ever be able to find.

Does our so-promising species have any chance at a future?

Reality:

There are quite a few of us species members who are going to fight for some kind of future, until we die, no matter what.

We already are.

The real world sucks. It always has; read Charles Dickens if you doubt it.

Incredibly bad things happen. Horrors happen. More of them are ahead of us.

But in all the past horrors, some of our species have struggled to make things better, just a little, whenever possible.

It can be crippling to look at our real world and bemoan what it is not. We could be so much more; so much better. You can freeze yourself into immobile depression by contemplating too long what we don't do.

Better, I think, to just keep in mind: It's a Real, Real, World.

One good response that can help keep you sane; find your iceberg, and push on it.

Dear NY Times: Just So You Know:

Dear NY Times: Just So You Know:

Once again today, you've sunk to the quite slimy level of parading the leering grin of a mass murderer on your electronic front page.

You purport to provide useful insight into the murderer's mind; something we should all crave.

But in fact, you're just selling advertising.

I'll tell you exactly what's behind the grin- he's smirking at YOU; very specifically; because he's won. You're giving him everything he ever dreamed about.

Immortality. His picture on the front of the New York Times. You are his puppets. You are, in reality, the reason for his insanity, and the deaths he caused.

I, however, am not his pawn, or yours; and this is to inform you that each time I find his photo on your pages, or any other snuff porn pandering to all of humanity's worst sides; I turn you right off.

I close your website-and any others that do the same- and do not visit again for the next 2 days. You're going to lose several fractions of a penny from your advertisers; which should horrify you.

Oh, and, I'm passing this on.

Wow. Super-Mind-Boggle Time.

Where do I begin? I promise, you'll be amazed, and amused, and terrified, before many more paragraphs have gone by.

I'm seriously still trying to get a grip on this one. I just moments ago found it buried on the BBC "Science" page. Researchers at Cornell (NY) have announced great progress, and wonderful goals, on the "3D Food Printer" they have constructed, and are perfecting. Yup, the idea is to get really great recipes; feed them into the computer- and then print the food out. They've done it; you can print cookies.

The Total Brain Freeze Mind Boggle comes not from the cookie printing; but from what the people working on it are saying:

"And it would have the added benefit of cutting out some of the waste of current food production methods, says Homaro Cantu, chef and owner of the Moto Restaurant in Chicago, Illinois, who has printed sushi using an ink jet printer.

"Imagine being able to essentially 'grow', 'cook' or prepare foods without the negative industrial impact - everything from fertilizers to saute pans and even packaging," he says.

"The production chain requirements for food would nearly be eliminated."

Local food, could really mean local.

"You can imagine a 3D printer making homemade apple pie without the need for farming the apples, fertilizing, transporting, refrigerating, packaging, fabricating, cooking, serving and the need for all of the materials in these processes like cars, trucks, pans, coolers, etc," he adds."

Are you boggled yet?

I have to take a little break, and eat some outmoded plain old food; more writing here after lunch. I just couldn't put off getting this much launched into the ether.

Ok. Back after lunch; but slight change in my plans; have to go move some stuff for chicken nest boxes...

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Back again; chickens happy. Now, just to clarify; the guy saying "production chain requirements would be nearly eliminated" is a chef, not a PhD. Whew. So, it's only a chef they work with who has no idea whatsoever where eggs, or apples, come from.

The chef also says:

"What if you could have mom's homemade apple pie sent via e-mail and printed up at home? Her apple pie becomes as close as an instant message on Facebook."

Which would pretty much indicate he also has no idea what "mom's homemade apple pie" either is, or means.

The BBC website links to the Cornell group's site; where confidence in the scientists is not entirely inspired by finding this:

"Recruitting

posted Jan 20, 2010 12:41 PM by Jeffrey Lipton [ updated Jan 25, 2010 3:12 PM ]

The Fab@Home Project Team is recruiting students from any and all majors in Cornell Univeristy who want to help shape the future of personal manufacturing. Look under "Joining the Team" and "Upcoming Events" for more information" That little gem has been up for a year- and updated once - without anyone at Cornell noticing that "recruit" is not spelled with 2 T's. Details, details. :-) So perhaps the scientists are not quite as clueless as the article seems to paint them; but they do surely seem to be somewhat communications challenged- if their chef-partners are thinking what the quotes indicate..

Jack London would have loved it-

We're working through a real blizzard here. I'm getting a few pics, but it's tricky; it's very dang cold, and taking a camera out, from the warm house, into the cold (+2°F, currently, with a 30 mph wind, no kidding) - can mean condensation inside the camera, and its lenses, that can take forever to clean up. So, you have to keep the camera inside your coat. Then take gloves off, take the pic quick, get it back inside before it gets to cold, and don't sweat inside the coat in the meantime...

Which is just too hard. So far I've been out twice today; once to feed and water poultry, once to get water from the windmill; both times I've wound up over-dressed and sweating like crazy before I got back into the house.

Not a problem if you've got a house, and a fire, to dry off in- but sweating like that in weather this cold is death, if you can't dry off. Literally. Hypothermia real quick.

Standing, all comfy, in the -40°F wind chill, while I waited for my water jugs to fill, it was making me think about this, and about "margins" for survival. And about what you have to know, to actually survive, outside of "civilization".

You have to know plenty. And extreme weather, like this blizzard, will quickly eliminate non-survivors.

A couple weeks ago during Thanksgiving at Middle Child's, I found myself reading an "Outdoor!" type magazine; lots of extreme rockclimbers, waterfall kayakers, that kind of thing. One of them had tried "growing his own food" the year previously, and come to the adamant opinion, after one season, that it was essentially impossible. Can't be done.

What was obvious to me, was that he'd dived into gardening quite certain that his well established coolness would certainly include knowing how to grow simpleminded stuff, like, tomatoes, for crying out loud. But it didn't. His garden was a total flop.

And his conclusion was not "hm, I guess I'm not as smart as I thought"; but - "nobody can possibly grow food in a garden, since I can't."

Jack London knew this guy very well; and wrote a perfect portrait of him in To Build A Fire.

If you've never read it; now is the time. If you have; re-reading is well worth it.

Be careful who you follow. Self confidence sells well. But may not save your neck.

sledding

For the winter deprived; Smidgen and snow.

Yes, sledding means you gotta pull your sled up the hill.

That Aermotor in the background is indeed our house water source.

We do have other kinds of sleds, including a classic Flexible Flyer; but this was the choice today. "The snow is pretty fluffy still, the flatbottom sleds will be faster..." "Hu'uh. This one!" Boy, nobody listens.

:-)

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ok, so the second photo is "clickable", and gets to the full size pic, where you can actually see her face. The first photo- won't. I uploaded them at the same time; exact same procedures. Anybody able to clue me in on why one works and the other doesn't?

-------------------

etbnc- how do you see those anchor tags? I use Safari- and at this point, can't see any differences.

I DID, though; take your hint; and look at the hypertext language in Edit mode; and was able to copy the stuff from the working one, subbing the numbers from the first; and - it works! Many thanks! Right here:

Ah, winter.

Sorry to be so quiet- this is a crazy busy time of year for us; one of our crops is chestnuts, and guess when you sell them?

The sales window for traditional markets is small, and it can't be done "later"; only "now". Just for extra fun, of course, two of our vehicles, the farm truck and the family car, have decided that now is the time for them to die; or almost die. So lots of extra monkey business there.

And, last night winter finally, really, closed down on us; 8 inches of snow, overnight. On icy hard-frozen ground. The John Deere 4WD was slipping sideways quite a bit as I plowed out.

Supposed to be a time of rest for farmers. Ho ho ho.

Murphy, and his laws, keeps hanging around, too, lest we become complacent. One of the things you have to do to market your chestnuts is, wash them. That takes water. We're off the grid, so, having reliable supplies is something that takes a bit of forethought.

We just thought fore to the extent of installing a new 2,500 gallon cistern. Polystyrene, alas, but concrete pre-fab was way more expensive, and any custom concrete possibilities even more so. If I had my druthers, I'da dug the hole and laid up fieldstone for a cistern myself; but I don't have the luxury of doing work that slowly, at the moment.

The well pump is a plain Shurflo 9300, a pretty reliable, though slow machine with a good track record. We actually own 3, via the weirdnesses of off-grid living, 2 currently dead but rebuildable as backups.

And, we just purchased a new solar panel, to directly drive the pump; no batteries to be connected; sun shines, pump pumps, into the huge cistern. Theoretically.

You DO need a "pump controller", a little solid state thingy, to prevent the odd chance that your panels may suddenly put out more electricity than your pump can handle, which will burn out your pump. That's a real concern for us, since exactly that can happen on very cold sunny days. Unbeknownst to many, solar panels will put out 1% more current for every 3° C colder it gets. Since panels are "rated" at hot normal temperatures like you'd expect them to be in Florida in full sun in the summer- on a cold day in February in Minnesota; when the air temperature is 25° below 0 F, and the wind is blowing at 30 mph, so the panel is really that cold; and the sun is shining full blast- on a snow field that's bouncing even more light onto the panel- you can suddenly find yourself with WAY more power coming out of the panel than it's rated at.

I found that out by boiling my batteries, the first year I had solar panels. Sure, the information was available - deeeeeeeply buried where nobody ever sees it. Gosh, why is there acid bubbling out of the top of my batteries?

And our spiffy Shurflo pump controller; just purchased with the new panel- has lots of cool facts about it available on the web; except all the technical specifications (or at least, I couldn't find them).

So reading them, now that I've got it in my hands... yeah, yeah, x volts in, y amps in, etc, etc... oh, look "Operating Temperatures: +14°F to + 135°F."

Excuse me?

Unwritten subtext: "We designed your spiffy gizmo to work in Florida; don't try using it anywhere you have actual winters."

They left that part out of the sales brochures.

Sigh.

Ok, my point.

There's a LOT of our world that now works this way; machines, devices, and processes- are designed to work beautifully, within specific parameters.

But, they don't tell you up front what those parameters are. And finding a person, a live one, who truly knows what they are, and how much they can, or can't, be stretched- is often incredibly difficult.

My water system is currently going "pocketa pocketa queep".

And my major response is; I get to wait until Monday, when at 9 AM Pacific time, somebody may, possibly, get my phone message. And may, possibly, pass it on to someone who knows something.

Perhaps.

So, I'm going sledding, with Smidgen. Spice is off to check the electric fence for the horses; on snowshoes.

Baked squash tonight; the woodstove is cranking out the heat.

Complex systems may have lots of collapsible pathways; but fire is hot, and squash is good food.

pocketa pocketa queep

That's a well known literary allusion, in case you didn't know.

Ah, well, it was well known in that world now fading fast behind us; the one where children learned to read early, and learned to love exploring books.

It's from James Thurber's "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty", a celebrated very short story about the large fantasy life of a nebbish. I became acquainted with it by reading my big brother's English textbook a few years ahead of time.

"A huge, complicated machine, connected to the operating table, with many tubes and wires, began at this moment to go pocketa-pocketa-pocketa. "The new anesthetizer is giving away!" shouted an intern. "There is no one in the East who knows how to fix it!" "Quiet, man!" said Mitty, in a low, cool voice. He sprang to the machine, which was now going pocketa-pocketa-queep-pocketa-queep . He began fingering delicately a row of glistening dials. "Give me a fountain pen!" he snapped."

Thurber found the "pocketa" sound highly useful, and applied it in quite a few situations.

"It's forty kilometers through hell, sir," said the sergeant. Mitty finished one last brandy. "After all," he said softly, "what isn't?" The pounding of the cannon increased; there was the rat-tat-tatting of machine guns, and from somewhere came the menacing pocketa-pocketa-pocketa of the new flame-throwers. Walter Mitty walked to the door of the dugout humming "Aupres de Ma Blonde." He turned and waved to the sergeant. "Cheerio!" he said. . . . "

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It struck me yesterday, observing our elections here in the US, that noise seems to be the most certain aspect of our politics and discussions these days, and the most certain outcome.

And that our entire civilization has shifted, from going "pocketa-pocketa-pocketa", to going "pocketa-pocketa-queep".

My prediction, alas, is that pocketa-pocketa-queep is going to be the chief sound, and the sum total of our achievements, for some years ahead.

And, if you have a fountain pen, I don't think anyone has any idea what to do with it.