Here's To You, Pong-Ball.

Confession: I'm a huge video game nerd. I was raised by a pack of wild Atari 2600's and their NES alpha-male. So, it's no suprise I got a kick out of this CNET article on forgotten game characters. While I'm unfamiliar with a few of them (never owned a playstation, myself), most of them are great. Even if you're not a game buff, it's worth checking out for the brilliant exposition of the pong ball's heroic angst. Plus, apparently there's a bikini-clad robot destroying chick in one of the PS Final Fantasy games. Gonna have to check that one out. And my vote for best forgoten video game character? The old man from the original Legend of Zelda. Yeah - the bald dude who hides under rocks in the middle of nowhere and speaks in broken English. My theory? The guy's Yoda's pale little brother. How CNET left out that dude is beyond me.

Oh, and if you're feeling a little nostalgic, check out this site for tons of classic games in free flash format.

Real Plastic Feelings

Feeling volatile and posed lately. From the Kelvingrove in Glasgow.

BoW - Sierra Nevada Wet-Hopped Harvest Ale 12th Release

Been outta town, so no BOW last week. This one is a new favorite (a wonderful friend gave me a case as a wedding gift). Wet-hopped ales are made with fresh hops, so they're truly seasonal. Their character is utterly unlike the standard "hoppy" beer, as dried hops offer up a much different character. This is a much more mellow bitterness, with far softer floral notes. I loves me a good IPA, but this is surely more "drinkable" - at least in the sense a session beer is more drinkable than an IPA (and note how quickly the case is disappearing...). From SN's website:

Created in 1996, Harvest Ale features Cascade and Centennial hops from the Yakima Valley in Eastern Washington. These hops are harvested and shipped as “wet” un-dried hops—the same day they are picked—to our brewery in Chico where our brewers eagerly wait to get them into the brew kettle while their oils and resins are still at their peak.

Apparently there are two others in the series - Southern Hemisphere, made with hops from New Zealand, and Chico Estate, with hops grown onsite at the brewery. I haven't seen either of those, but the standard Harvest Ale has the best reviews from what I saw. Get it while you can, if you can.

Eisenhowered

In the news today, Microsoft is offering $250,000 to find out who created the Conficker worm. Apparently they already paid out $250k for info on the creater of another worm (Sasser), who was subsequently jailed by the German authorities. Now, I loathe these little virus creating twerps as much as the next guy - I'm not kidding when I say the death penalty is appropriate - but I wonder what it says about the State Capitalism and the world today when private companies are using their leverage to get law enforcement moving. For once I don't think Microsoft is being totally evil - they're just offering some public encouragement for justice - but it does make one wonder what effects billion dollar corporations could have on everyday life if they wanted to. Makes one recal that other evil empire, the RIA, and their legalized lawer-tossing extortion tactics against those awful, civilization threatening music pirates....Maybe next they'll offer rewards for turning in your friends...

Okay, okay - paranoia mode off. Still, those sci-fi dystopian futures ruled by corporate governments scare the shit outta me.

Unsafetiness

From the necropolis in Glasgow, Scotland. Actual sign - not photoshoped. Bear it in mind.

Going Bablefish

So, I just wrote an entry about how someone's found the blog here, and how my knowing that introduces self-consciousness and hesitance. Then I read said entry, decided it was longwinded masterbatory babel and revised it (by which I mean deleted it) into what you see here. I think that act makes my point better than any verbal wanking. So, the hell with it, here's a poem about privacy instead - I always liked the theme but never felt I got it quite write.

As You Sleep Comfortably

With the gold of silence and fall leaves
I am wealthy. I picture you upstairs,
wrapped in bed sheets and red-brick walls
still wearing your blouse, cocooned
and safe, with privacy enough to stretch
fingertips against skin.
And meanwhile, deck-boards creak
beneath me, loud, as sound can be
in the stillness of October air. Here
in my city sanctuary, where pollution
keeps even the stars from spying down,
I put myself to work – writing, chasing
down my thoughts, making good time

until I hear your dog bark. Realizing
another presence shatters
my confidence, and I lift the pen
to watch him lunge at the fence.
There’s a stick dancing through it,
a laughing child on the other side, and now
I understand what Carrie is saying.
Intruder. Intruder. She tears at the twig
while I try to resume my work.

But the wood creaks again, uncomfortable.
I shift my weight against the paper,
and my hand hesitates. There’s smoke
and laughter pouring from the barbeque pit
next door. There’s a butterfly
staring with wide-open spots on its wings.
And I wonder if you’ve risen to stare
down from our room, watching this page,
watching my words dwindle from it.

Should I share this with you?
I could raise myself up
on the window-ledge, peering in
to whisper that privacy is gilded silence
and it falls away like autumn leaves.

I suppose if I can imagine an audience, I can equally imagine their non-existance. *Poof* to you, says the babelfish. Privacy is a silly notion anywho.

Beverage of the Week

Here's a thought - I'll give myself an excuse to drink something new every week by reviewing it into the blog-void. Brilliant.

This week's beverage is Goose Island's Imperial IPA. From GI's website:

With our Imperial IPA, we pushed the hop limit to the extreme. We took three of our favorite hops, Tettnang, Simcoe and Cascade and balanced their spiciness with tons of malt… then we added more hops and more malt until this beer was exploding with flavor… you’ll smell the hops from a yard away. What will surprise you is how drinkable it is. Pair it with the saltiest blue cheese you can find.

They're doing a mini-double IPA fest over at The Black Sparrow and offering flights (why don't more places do flights?), so Courtney and I ran the samples last night and this was my favorite. I think their notion of the "hop limit" is different than mine -it's definately not as hop-forward your normal DIPA - but it is hoppy and also has alot of fruity, malty smoothness. Actually, it reminded me of a cross between an IPA and a wheat - suprisingly successful, since I don't care for wheat in the first place. Definately interesting and worth a try if you can find it

Sea Legs

Recently, I came across this article on CNET. I highly recommend perussing it yourself, but in sum it's about a bunch of silicon hippies who want to build floating cities on the high seas, tucked away from repressive governments in international waters. Seasteading, they call it. Never mind all the technological reasons this seems implausible (or the fact the group's executive director is a ringer for Seth Green) - the article intruiged me for a variety of reasons.

First of all, it reminded me of The Many-Headed Hydra, a history of the revolutionary and politically dissembodied sailors of the Atlantic (the authors aruge - convincingly - of their role in the American Revolution, among other events). Escaping social and political dogma on at sea is nothing new - but it does seem to have disappeared since the industrial revolution.* I'd wager that has to do with expanding industry weaving itself more firmly into the transport trades, both culturaly and economically, leaving far less room for autonomy. So, maybe nowadays life at sea would need to be totally autonomous from life on land in order to afford more freedoms...

Of course, another question is why folk (american folk, specifically) suddenly start feeling all repressed and looking to the sea again...The bush administration's fascit policy leanings aside, I don't think any of us can really argue we're more politically repressed than we were 10, 20, or 50 years ago. But then, what is really intruiging is that the folks plotting this escape from government oppression are silicon hippies. The prime proponents are technology savants pulling down more 0's than 1's in places like Palo Alto...Places that are financially restrictive for those of us who aren't Googlionare's, but are otherwise pretty liberal. What gives? Political escapism is supposed to be for the little guy, the proles, or at least for the middle class who bear the weight of keeping all the oppressive machinery running....

One thing's for sure - I'll never be able to afford a house on a floating platform. Which is just as well, because there's not much use in being all free and stuff, if I'm just hanging my sea-sick head over the toliet all the time.


*Somalia of course seems a recent exception...but then there isn't even a landlocked government to escape, so that's probably a different phenomenon.

Verbose Snow

So, after nearly three years of being shown radiographs, I'm finally in a course that (supposedly) is going to de-mystify interpreting all that anatomic snow. Not exactly going according to plan as of yet. We spent an hour today staring at lung lesions, which are (again, supposedly) easily classified into four main "patterns." So far, I seem to be improving on the system, easily classifying them into just one "pattern" - anatomic snow. Unfortunately, none of the expert radiologists on staff here are impressed with my greatly streamlined approach.

My personal inadequacies aside, it turns me back to a question I've pondered several times since starting vet school. How do we learn to see meaning in unfamiliar patterns? Or, less prosaically - how do we learn to see what we are seeing?

Way back then I was encountering a more colorful anatomic snow - histology - for the first time. Histology is the study of tissues and their cellular composition - essentially microanatomy - and involves looking at specially stained tissues under high magnification. At first, just separating one (red, blurry) cell from another (red, blurry) cell seems a monumental task. Eventually, though, you start to see the meaning of faint lines and variations in shading, organized patterns become apparent, and suddenly you are translating all this into larger structures and seeing meaningful relationships between different cell types and groups. Two groups of cells layered next to each other, which originally seemed indiscernible from each other, are now quite conspicuously unique, and moreover their differences and relationship to each other have become filled with meaning. Before you know it, you are learning histopathology - the study of diseased tissue - and suddenly slight variations from what you've come to see as "normal" colorful anatomic snow are even more meaningful, and they clue you in to specific disease.

I was acutely aware that this process was happening to me, but I couldn't for the life of me pin down exactly what I was doing (or having done to me) that precipitated such new understanding. I think it's a very commonplace learning experience, but it was the first time I experienced it as a relatively self-aware adult. Children discover new 'theaters of meaning' and learn their secrets all the time - imagine deciphering the meaning of faces for the first time, or decoding 2D photos to 3D realism, or moreover, learning to interpret drawn representations of reality with varying levels of abstraction (DaVinci to Monet to Picasso, say). I think that abstraction is the center of the mystery, too - how do we develop the rules for making loose, imperfect equations?