Days go by, endlessly, pulling you, pulling you into the future.

As is typical of me on "vacation," I'm not getting much writing done. I'm not sure why. Yesterday was a day off for both kids from school, so I had them all day, running around the house, basically making a nuisance of themselves. The only real breaks we had all day were when Kouryou-chan had to go to dance class; she said that only half the kids showed up anyway because apparently some parents thought that if school was out dance class would be cancelled also. If only it worked that way.

Proscuitto and vegetable risotto

I made risotto for dinner and invited lisakit over. Her roommate was supposed to come with, but apparently had something come up. The recipe, from left to right: 1/2 cup white wine, a bowl with 1 onion (chopped), 2 celery sticks (minced), and 1 parsnip (minced), two tbs olive oil, 1.5 cups risotto rice, and 2 oz proscuitto. You can't see the 6 cups of home-made turkey stock simmering on the stove, or the fresh French bread boule cooking in the oven. 1/2 cup of shredded Parmesan cheese is optional. The red wine is for the cook. Anyway, after heating the stock to a very low simmer, heat the olive oil at medium-high heat in a large, deep pan. Saute the vegetable for about 6 minutes, tossing in the proscuitto (if you're using it; you can emit it from the recipe without harm) about halfway through. Add the rice and stir for about a minute until it's completely coated in oil. Add the white wine and stir until it's completely gone, then begin adding the stock, about a half-cup at a time. Stir frequently (constantly is not necessary). Add more stock as the last half-cup is absorbed or boiled off. It'll take about 20 to 25 attentive minutes; the risotto should never be dry or soupy. Add salt and pepper to taste, always taking into account how salty your stock is (mine isn't very). After the rice has softened (but still has a tiny, al-dente core) and released much of its starch (which gives risotto that wonderful creamy texture), turn off the heat, stir in the cheese if you're using it, and serve immediately.

The bread was pretty good too. It was a straight-up French recipe, no preferment. It lacked the fine flavor of overnight bread, and it was very moist with little remarkable crust (I did a poor job of preheating the oven) but it was still lots better than store-bought, preservative-laden bread.

Lisa and I stayed up late after the kids went to bed, just generally talking and being friendly. It's a nice, low-key kind of friendship, although like most of my friendships it sometimes feel laden with landmines, hopefully I'm just not in the habit of seeding the ground with them out of my own neuroses. The girls were, as they always are, pains in the neck about getting to bed. This time their trick was "But I'm not done!" every time I knocked on the door to the bathroom and told them it was time to get out of the shower and into pyjamas. Nuisance creatures.

Headphone repair job

Headphone repair job

Well, I managed to fix my headphones. I'm not terribly good with a soldering iron, but this job seems to be holding very well. It took a while to scrape the paint off the tips of the coated wires (that's what the box knife is for), and tinning the wires before putting them through the tiny holes in the replacement 1/8" stereo jack was just an exercise in "Arrrgh!" I had to wear my reading glasses (that's them in the upper left), which makes Omaha swoon because I look so "distinguished" (c'mon, really: that's just another word for being old, isn't it?) but everything fell into place quite nicely, the retaining crimp crimped solid, and hopefully this won't tear apart on its first day out. And if it does, at least this time I know how to fix it.

Oh, that little clampy thing (under the wire tangle, next to the nail clipper) works great as a heat sink to keep the plastic shield around the whole of the wire mass from melting.

Ideas are cheap. Writing time is priceless. Introspection is expensive.

Last night, while I was taking care of the cat and doing all the usual things I have to do with my pre-bed routine, I had an idea for a story and immediately began sketching it out in my head. I'm not sure where it's going, but then again, I tend not to care too much about the ending of a story until it's time to get to it.

What bugged me most, though, was that the story was clearly set in my Bastet universe, a collection of stories I've never posted. The entire point behind the Bastet series is to explore uncomfortable subjects: racism, sexism, non-consensual sex and power relationships, and so forth.

The setting for the Bastet series is an alternative reality. The first episode is set around 1890, and episodes proceed from there. Mor than two millennia ago, magic worked, but it was fading and was almost entirely gone by the time of Jesus. (There's a side-line to the series that Jesus is remembered because years after the last magic had faded, he could still do it powerfully and well.) Rome, which depended upon magic, collapsed without it, and ever since them humanity has had to deal with the consequences of that ancient past: monumental scars on the terrain caused by great ancient magical battles, and simply the memory that there were great empires predicated upon undeniable powers.

One of the other consequences were the Bastet, a cat/human hybrid species originally bred by the Egyptian Kings as supersoldiers. It didn't work out-- hey, they were cats-- but the Bastet have been horribly mistreated ever since. The Bastet don't get human diseases, and humans can't catch what the Bastet carry. Bastet are very rare; there are less than a million of them by the 1890s, that's .05% of the world's population of 1.6 billion at the time. Bastet tend to remain youthful-looking with a precipitous decline late in their lifespan, although their lifespan is shorter than humans.

All of this combined to make Bastet incredibly valuable as courteseans. Long after slavery had been abolished in Europe, laws covering the Bastet continued to leave them more or less indentured. The U.S. is remarkable in 1890 in that Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation granted de jure freedom to the Bastet alongside everyone else, but de facto enslavement continued, and courts continued to claim that Bastet needed "special protections due their primitive natures."

Okay, so far, so good. I've hit just the right note: I can write tongue-clucking stories with themes addressing racism and so forth and so on, disapproving of everything while still writing sex scenes, some of which will titillate people I wouldn't want to meet, and the triumphal scenes hopefully bringing smiles to people I would.

My problem is that I keep thinking of this not as "The Bastet series," but as "The yowlerverse." The problem is that "yowler" is a pejorative term, there. How pejorative? There's a scene in the largest story where the young hero, a teenager who is about to be the first Bastet to go to an upper class school, except in his second week there he is brutally beaten by five boys, one of whom shouts that this is their school and "We don't welcome no kikes, no wops, no niggers, and no fucking yowlers."

I can't tell what my brain is trying to signal me by preferring the pejorative over the ordinary term; I wouldn't use any of those other pejoratives in routine conversation, after all.

Jane Jacobs vs. Ben Stein.

Jane Jacobs is an economist with a simple observation with profound implications: regional manufacturing processes ultimately decline in value and must be replaced with newer, different manufacturing processes.

The reason for the declines are varied. The process may be cheaper elsewhere, due to labor costs, or the availability of raw materials. Even if a region has the ideal siting for manfacturing a certain good, other sites will probably be just as suitable, and competition drives down prices and narrows margins. Ultimately, for any region to thrive, it must find newer sources of wealth generation in order to just maintain its standard of living, or it must fail. Failure drives down local prices, which hurts in the short term, but leaves the region fallow for the future as transportation and information access technologies drop the cost of moving into the region and exploiting the depressed land and labor markets.

Regional and global economies grow only as new goods-- new categories of goods-- enter the marketplace. Regional economies shrink as they are incapable of producing new categories of goods and instead continue to rely on existing categories that are rapidly becoming commoditized and marginalized. The global economy suffers if not enough new goods categories enter the market fast enough to supercede the marginalization of existing goods.

In the United States, regional markets are already under pressure. We are rapidly turning toward a time when we will be unable to compete in the global marketplace, and the reasons should be obvious.

We have allowed vested interests to stack regulatory processes in their favor. The vested interests wish to maintain the status quo and existing cash flows, and only enormous pressure gets them to move. Our government is not responsive to the needs of citizens. I'm not in favor of big government, but where we have it, it should be responsive to its duties.

But more than that, we have replaced science education in this country with a paltry shadow of real science. I rail a lot about biology education in this country, and this is the biggie. If Jacobs is correct (and intuitively, what she writes seems to be so), then the next three decades are going to be about biology: the wealthiest nation on Earth™ is going to see a huge increase in the medical needs of its aging population, and pharmcies should be rushing to fill that need. More to the point, to the extent that corporations can maintain its workforce longer and older and still more vibrant and positively contributory to the economy as a whole, the entire marketplace ought to be doing what it can to extend the grey matter of the greying population. Only the biological sciences can do that.

And yet, biology is such a contentious issue that science teachers don't mention the "E" word in class. Entire generations-- three now-- have been subject to unending pressure to not teach biology as anything other than stamp collecting. And what brings my blood to an almost deep-space boil is the way that the yahoos are lying to the yahoos: Ben "former Nixon speechwriter" "former eyedrop shill" "former gameshow host" Stein gave an interview with a Christian newpaper where he claimed that "big science" "is killing the 1st Amendment and inhibiting sound science. He says he's "alarmed" by the way pro-ID scientists have been the target of reprisals and sanction. Well, yeah. When the "pro-ID scientists" can show that Intelligent Design in anyway improves our knowledge, makes verifiable predictions, and extends our ability to cure disease, improve agriculture, stave off antibiotic resistance, and so on, we'll stop laughing at them.

He's telling these people that science needs his kind of questioning: the kind that ends when all questioning has stopped.

So, fine, Ben Stein. Go ahead and wreck this country's future.

Because ID cannot, by definition, create promising avenues of research. It's entire point is to give up when the knowing gets rough. Meanwhile, keep kids from having the education needed to produce a decent future.

I hope that when Ben Stein ends up in a nursing home, his entire staff is made up of pro-ID zealots convinced that his illness, decay, and death are deliberate, intelligently chosen design decisions.

Manfood Extreme: Steak Sous-Vide

( Raw meat. Cut to avoid offending the delicate sensibilities of vegetarians. )

I promised myself at least one meal this week where I went completely nuts, cooked absolutely for myself, and enjoyed the fruits of my labor. My experiment was to try and create the perfect environment for the Maillard reaction in steak, a chemical reaction in which the surface of the steak is covered in the caramelized sugars that give steak its characteristic smell and taste, but the core of the steak is heated just enough to kill any bacteria, and no hotter, thus giving my primitive man-brain as close a sensation to eating the raw flesh of the animal as possible and still be safe. This technique is known as Steak Sous-Vide. I bought, for this experiment, the best NY cut I could get from a local butcher.

( Many more pictures! )