It has been a wonderful and freakishly warm day off today. Warm enough to allow me to open up all the windows for the afternoon, and let the fresher outside air decontaminate the place of several months of accumulated stagnant indoor particulates. It's rare to have temperatures climb above 0°C around this time of the year around these parts. It has sparked me with happy thoughts and music to play in my head of places that are fun and warm. After seeing some of the exploits posted on Facebook of a friend who is enjoying her visit out of the country, in L.A., I can't get the song California Sun out of my head. Because she is a bit of a wilder sort of spirit for her years, and because one of her nicknames is Dee Dee, the hard-driving punk rock cover of that song by the Ramones has been looping itself in my mind repeatedly, not that sappier original 60's doo-wop pop version by the Rivieras. High energy music, combined with the warmer weather, has been the carrot for motivating me to use some of the day off to haul my ass back into the gym after this several month long hiatus. The stick part of the motivation equation was some news of a relative, several years younger than me, who was recently hospitalized for some severe cardiac problems. It was a significant enough prompt to tell myself to use this day as a stepping stone, and declare it as one to improve myself physically beyond this current state of recovery. I vowed to not allow myself to risk becoming that buggered up, or to become softer and weaker any further with my cardio-pulmonary health.
I realized that a trip to any fitness facility now was going to be a sobering slap upside the head: facing up to the facts of just how far I've deteriorated in physical conditioning over the past while. My regular mindset of the priming 007 attitude wasn't working well enough for me then when I went in and out those doors of the Field House today. All that happened was that I was reminded how much of a change I went through. In the context of 007, I went from being the parkour-running-terrorist-chaser, Neptune-rising-from-the-waves, beach-nymph-shagging, balls-of-solid-rock, able-to-recover-from-being-poisoned-in-minutes specimen of James Bond in Casino Royale, to being the bedraggled, plummeting-off-a-train-bridge, uranium-bullet-riddled, burnt-out, can't-shoot-worth-a-shit, washed-up, booze-sponging bastard version of James Bond in the beginning of Skyfall . . . except maybe three times worse than that.
My objectives for today were simply to check over and compare what I could do before having the embolisms, and what I can do now in terms of cardio and strength exercises. I didn't even bother to time myself when I did the track work. The target was just to be on that track for 15 minutes, moving as briskly as my body would allow me to: by running, walking, crawling, or slithering along by my lips if I had to. It was by far the most disappointing comparison in how much I declined. I did a slow jog for the first two laps before I became too winded, and then after that I alternated between one lap doing some quick walking, and the next slow jogging each time around. I managed to last the whole fifteen minutes. What I must note and be thankful for is that even though it felt tough, at no time through the exertion did my vision start to blur and tunnel; nor did I start seeing any dark or flickering dots swirling into a dizzying vortex: the tell-tale signs of coming close to blacking out and fainting. Five weeks ago, this was what was happening frequently after doing something like a simple brisk walk through a big room, or a large store space, within just a couple minutes. I suppose in that sense, I have recovered a lot; yet I'm far from my optimal self to allow me to start running hard core again.
Strength training exercises were a bit better, but not by much. I set my objective to have a full-body workout with 1 – 2 sets per activity. I tried the leg press machine first, since my legs are the strongest part of me. In my fitter running days, I used to be able to do at least one set of 8-10 presses on the maximum setting (173 kg, or over 380 lbs) on this one machine. Now, I was struggling with 133 kg (300 lbs). That's a huge drop, something like over 20% in power. The decrease in my arm strength is even worse, I would reckon closer to 30% for them. My upper body/back declined the least. The vertical presses and rows showed that I only decreased about 8%. My chest was probably kept stronger through all the extra effort I had to use to breathe. I also did some core work, and swung a 35 lb kettlebell for a bit, and then called it a day. Again, it's all relative: knowing that back around Christmas, hauling a medium sized TV up a flight of stairs weakened me drastically for a couple days; so being able to commit to the rigours of today actually seemed like a real victory.
I had a nap when I came home, the best I've had in ages. Afterward, I felt like a totally different person. Maybe my metabolism finally got re-ignited. I feel like I instantly dropped a pants size. Perhaps the muscle work is getting some detox action happening. Maybe enough testosterone was released to make me feel like a bad-ass. I don't know, but right now, even as cramped-up and sore as I am, I finally feel like I shed a wound-up cocoon of depression that was three months thick. It's a little too ambitious to get into this habit three times a week, but using one day off per week for the next month seems reasonable.
Thursday, January 22, 2015
Sunday, January 18, 2015
On Small Things of Decadence
I've finally made it back to a state of health that is allowing me to return to work, although I must say that the cold I had last week kind of threw me down on the mat harder than I thought. Re-adapting to the rigours of a typical work day after it has been a bit of a trial. Recovery from the sinus thing was made more troublesome because I can't use my conventional arsenal of over-the-counter cold medications to combat such things anymore.
Consequently, I got into exploring the uses of more benign alternative tonics and bitters with aromatic properties to use as special elixirs. In other words, I was experimenting with the art of making cocktails. I blew the dust off of my long neglected stainless steel shaker and started to use it again. Thankfully, having alcohol in moderation isn't (yet) a problem for me1. It has at least helped me to sleep a little better. At the risk of taking what may sound like a new adventure in snobbery, I've been exploring other avenues of bartending beyond the relatively low-brow dumping together of pop and a spirit, and having it recklessly chugged down, as it is most commonly done around this region (no offense to those who prefer to do it this way). The cost of what it would have taken for the required dosages of Neo Citron and other remedies was diverted to purchasing some special ingredients for fashioning the somewhat more obscure and unusual libations I've been curious to try out. Mixology and making cocktails kind of fascinates me now. There is a definite skill and finesse required to do it, or at the very least one could say: you still can't train a monkey to make you a decent martini. It's both scientific and sensual: in getting proportions, temperatures, aeration; the interplays of sweetness, dryness, acidity, astringency, and other flavourful notes, and getting the blending and timing of it all right to make something aromatically exciting and truly pleasing to the taste buds. With knowing the statistical popularity/prevalence of ingredients and combinatorial measures and substitutions, even a limited number and variety of bottles of spirits and aperitifs, like I have, can make hundreds of different cocktails. It's as at least as interesting to me, on a mathematical basis, as playing around with the varieties of possible pizza topping combinations, or kinds of sandwich fillings in the culinary sphere. I proudly tackle this endeavour in the name of science!
However, around these parts, getting some of the more exotic bar stock, like Kina Lillet, necessarily needed some dabbling with darker forces to procure; but now I can mix together a Vesper2. Some Žubrówka (bison grass infused vodka from Poland) was also acquired by the same wretched means. Of the only two options I was given to use, I at least chose the lesser of the two evils3. Speaking of evil: while in this one liquor store, I found more things to ridicule, as I usual do when I go shopping, about how crazy our conspicuous consumption is getting to be for some of the things on which we use our disposable income. Maybe I'm just a rural bumpkin at heart, maybe my palate is yet unrefined, or perhaps I still lack some cultural wherewithal to be cognisant of that marginal line that divides the goods that are considered luxurious and those which are for the rest of the vulgar masses. Forgive me for what may seem like ignorance, but I would call it being sensible enough to drop the pretentious bullshit. I fail to see much difference in taste and aroma between a so-called cheap wine and a more expensive one, or why there is such an astronomical variation in the range of prices between certain scotches and other whiskeys. From this last time liquor shopping however, some bewilderment really made my jaw drop, and hyper-activated the ridicule circuits in my brain.
I encountered the most expensive bottle of liquor I have ever seen in physical form in my lifetime. It was something crazy that one would expect to find being gavelled off at a Sotheby's auction in London, but instead it was right there in the relatively unsophisticated boonies of the West side of Saskatoon. It was a bottle of French cognac of some special reserve that was listed at $3099.99. That was not a misprint, that's over . . . THREE THOUSAND <long stream of expletives here> DOLLARS CANADIAN!!! The sticker shock was enough to do a total memory wipe on me as to what particular brand it was. It doesn't much matter because I certainly won't be buying any no matter how rich I'd ever become. No liquor in a 750 mL bottle, even if it came from Mars never mind France, should ever cost that much. My surprise actually doesn't really come from discovering that there is cognac out there that is this expensive, and I seriously doubt that the price of this bottle even comes close to that of the actual most expensive cognac that's for retail sale, because I surely and truly doubt very much that human stupidity for the sake of being pompous has a set price limit. Those bottles more expensive than this one would be found in luxury hotels, or in the secret meeting rooms of the Illuminati or some other such place. I'd really rather not research it. However, what did surprise me was this detail that left me wondering: What the hell was it doing there! . . . in an area where a large percentage of the typical cars in the surrounding neighbourhood have a red book value equal to or cheaper than that particular bottle of brandy? Also: what special, mysterious, bizarre, or perverse qualities or properties, either through its historical significance or in its production, could have inspired a person to have so much audacity and gall, to mark up a bottle of this French stuff so outrageously high? Is it infused with cocaine? Did Rodin himself sculpt the mold that made the bottle? Was the juice fermented in a Fabergé Easter egg? Was the final distillation of that brandy filtered through the basket that collected King Louis XVI's freshly guillotined head? Were the grapes picked by virgins and placed in the solid gold chamber pot once belonging to Marie Antoinette, and then lovingly crushed by the hooves of unicorns to the rhythm and beat of La Marseillaise? Were the staves of the oak barrel it was aged in made from the repurposed wood stripped off of Napoleon's private battlefield latrine? What makes this priced more like an artifact and less like regular liquor? What is the bullshit story that makes this somehow better than any other brandy? It is either through the workings of the grand poohbah of all sales reps, or the dumbest of dumb wholesale purchasers for that store with this demographic that this bottle was there in the first place. All I can say is if one is paying three grand plus for a bottle of liquor, that stuff had better damn well be able to cure cancer or something. I would expect it to give me all the good things far beyond the satisfaction of merely being just pleasantly pissed like what regular liquor can already do. This potion should be like a whole weekend of entertainment in a single snifter: drinking it should be like being under the influence of cannabis, Ecstasy, and Viagra simultaneously, or else it should biochemically supercharge a body to exude some sort of pheromones to give one an aura to be like the most attractive creature on the planet (kind of like creating a reversed beer-goggles effect). As for now, I don't believe the difference between that stuff and something like Courvoisier, the last most expensive brandy I've actually sampled (under $50 a bottle), is worth an extra $3000. Frankly, it's like a criminal act to hyper-inflate a price like that. However, we don't really challenge this because we certainly don't feel sorry for the filthy rich asshole who has that kind money to carelessly throw around, and is idiotically conceited enough to buy such a thing just to put on airs and to show off affluence . . . or at least I don't anyway.
I had no intention of poking jest specifically at the French, or to mock them about any reputed pomposity and over-extravagance, although after reading through my last paragraph it might look that way. An apology to those who thought so, as I know I have a few readers from France. Lord knows they are going through enough right now with the recent Charlie Hebdo incident. I don't want to kick them when they're down. I stand in solidarity with them in being against those sort of treacherous, barbaric acts. I'm thankful to have and share the same kind of freedom of expression that enables me to write this blog. I do, however, find it ironic that in a society that proclaims and prides itself to be on the side of equality, liberty, and fraternity, that there still is this glaring example of a holdover of the days when despotism, tyranny by elitism, and segregation of the classes in that country was institutional. They, of all people, should find this to be as outrageous as anyone else. There is no equality with marketing a commodity with an exaggerated price that no one can acquire except the extremely wealthy. Maybe it's not even their fault, maybe it's the purchasers, marketers, and wholesale vendors right here in North America who should be guillotined for such blatant and audacious greed.
I do have to commend the French for at least a couple of other things (besides the Lillet) that I did indulge in as frugal, yet decadent, treats this weekend: cheese and pâté. It swings my thoughts over to the stupid things we do in North America in our own way with the abomination that is called fast food, while there are available alternatives that are so much more pleasantly decadent that are more affordable. On Friday evening, strayed away from home, famished from not having any supper, and I felt a need to pick my spirits up after feeling bad about a foolish mistake I made. I went to my favourite pub, but it was full; the next place I wanted to try was closed down. I was thankful that my favourite cheese and deli shop was still open. I got some Saint-Paulin cheese ($8.00, but ate only a quarter of it, so really $2.00), and a marvelous pork and duck liver pâté blended with pistachios ($3.50). Though the cheese was from Québec, and the pâté was made locally, both were descended from French tradition. Adding some pickles and olives and crackers to that with a glass of wine (less than $2.00) at home, I had what I thought was an amazing little feast. Accounting for the portions I ate, chewing slowly and savouring it, I was eating better and cheaper than if I had scarfed down a stupid burger and fries with a pop from elsewhere, even friggin' McDonalds. I never felt that I ever had a richer experience by eating fast food, just indigestion.
Taking away the more snobbish elements of them, I concede that things like cocktails and deli food, in their own way, are very important things to have now and again. Small, yet affordable bits of luxury and decadence, where quality, and not quantity, matters. Bits of razzle-dazzle to remind us that life should never be boring, even with the smaller things and morsels of it. They are a reminder that for the good things to happen, It's best to be patient, and take things slowly, through sipping, sampling, and savouring; not through mindless and hurried gluttonous gobbling and guzzling, like there will be no tomorrow, and veering off into a whole other realm of over-indulgent sinning. They are reminders to balance out our lives. Not so much for the tastes and flavours themselves, but also to value some ritualized time to use to enjoy them.
That's what ultimately I think makes a person feel richer and blessed through food and drink.
1. Given my medications, I can only consume a maximum of 2-3 alcoholic drinks within a given day I choose to do it, which is not every day. Therefore, now when I'm in the mood to drink, the onus has shifted a little more towards making something that is kind of visually appealing, can be sipped slowly, and savored for an extended period. So, I can't binge drink even if I wanted to, not that it was ever my habit to begin with. Despite having some Slavic heritage, I actually find the manner and amount of hard liquor like many Russians and Ukrainians (in the old country) can dump down at one sitting to be quite distasteful, even when there is the guise of sophistication of the tradition of zakushki (a table full of appetizers and delicacies) present to take the edge off all that straight vodka (horilka).
2. The cocktail in the Bond film Casino Royale. It is a damn fine and tasty one too I find. Of course, I make mine without the digitalis poison. My Žubrówka will be used for making something nice I learned about from Top of the Hops a few years back.
3. I sullied myself finding these two ingredients in one of the private stores here, only because I couldn't find them in the public stores. It was in the Co-op owned one, and I am a member/share holder, so that is a forgivable sin to some extent. At least I didn't use Sobeys. I'm happy to say that all other potent potables I need for my personal liquor cabinet can be collected from the public liquor board store.
Consequently, I got into exploring the uses of more benign alternative tonics and bitters with aromatic properties to use as special elixirs. In other words, I was experimenting with the art of making cocktails. I blew the dust off of my long neglected stainless steel shaker and started to use it again. Thankfully, having alcohol in moderation isn't (yet) a problem for me1. It has at least helped me to sleep a little better. At the risk of taking what may sound like a new adventure in snobbery, I've been exploring other avenues of bartending beyond the relatively low-brow dumping together of pop and a spirit, and having it recklessly chugged down, as it is most commonly done around this region (no offense to those who prefer to do it this way). The cost of what it would have taken for the required dosages of Neo Citron and other remedies was diverted to purchasing some special ingredients for fashioning the somewhat more obscure and unusual libations I've been curious to try out. Mixology and making cocktails kind of fascinates me now. There is a definite skill and finesse required to do it, or at the very least one could say: you still can't train a monkey to make you a decent martini. It's both scientific and sensual: in getting proportions, temperatures, aeration; the interplays of sweetness, dryness, acidity, astringency, and other flavourful notes, and getting the blending and timing of it all right to make something aromatically exciting and truly pleasing to the taste buds. With knowing the statistical popularity/prevalence of ingredients and combinatorial measures and substitutions, even a limited number and variety of bottles of spirits and aperitifs, like I have, can make hundreds of different cocktails. It's as at least as interesting to me, on a mathematical basis, as playing around with the varieties of possible pizza topping combinations, or kinds of sandwich fillings in the culinary sphere. I proudly tackle this endeavour in the name of science!
However, around these parts, getting some of the more exotic bar stock, like Kina Lillet, necessarily needed some dabbling with darker forces to procure; but now I can mix together a Vesper2. Some Žubrówka (bison grass infused vodka from Poland) was also acquired by the same wretched means. Of the only two options I was given to use, I at least chose the lesser of the two evils3. Speaking of evil: while in this one liquor store, I found more things to ridicule, as I usual do when I go shopping, about how crazy our conspicuous consumption is getting to be for some of the things on which we use our disposable income. Maybe I'm just a rural bumpkin at heart, maybe my palate is yet unrefined, or perhaps I still lack some cultural wherewithal to be cognisant of that marginal line that divides the goods that are considered luxurious and those which are for the rest of the vulgar masses. Forgive me for what may seem like ignorance, but I would call it being sensible enough to drop the pretentious bullshit. I fail to see much difference in taste and aroma between a so-called cheap wine and a more expensive one, or why there is such an astronomical variation in the range of prices between certain scotches and other whiskeys. From this last time liquor shopping however, some bewilderment really made my jaw drop, and hyper-activated the ridicule circuits in my brain.
I encountered the most expensive bottle of liquor I have ever seen in physical form in my lifetime. It was something crazy that one would expect to find being gavelled off at a Sotheby's auction in London, but instead it was right there in the relatively unsophisticated boonies of the West side of Saskatoon. It was a bottle of French cognac of some special reserve that was listed at $3099.99. That was not a misprint, that's over . . . THREE THOUSAND <long stream of expletives here> DOLLARS CANADIAN!!! The sticker shock was enough to do a total memory wipe on me as to what particular brand it was. It doesn't much matter because I certainly won't be buying any no matter how rich I'd ever become. No liquor in a 750 mL bottle, even if it came from Mars never mind France, should ever cost that much. My surprise actually doesn't really come from discovering that there is cognac out there that is this expensive, and I seriously doubt that the price of this bottle even comes close to that of the actual most expensive cognac that's for retail sale, because I surely and truly doubt very much that human stupidity for the sake of being pompous has a set price limit. Those bottles more expensive than this one would be found in luxury hotels, or in the secret meeting rooms of the Illuminati or some other such place. I'd really rather not research it. However, what did surprise me was this detail that left me wondering: What the hell was it doing there! . . . in an area where a large percentage of the typical cars in the surrounding neighbourhood have a red book value equal to or cheaper than that particular bottle of brandy? Also: what special, mysterious, bizarre, or perverse qualities or properties, either through its historical significance or in its production, could have inspired a person to have so much audacity and gall, to mark up a bottle of this French stuff so outrageously high? Is it infused with cocaine? Did Rodin himself sculpt the mold that made the bottle? Was the juice fermented in a Fabergé Easter egg? Was the final distillation of that brandy filtered through the basket that collected King Louis XVI's freshly guillotined head? Were the grapes picked by virgins and placed in the solid gold chamber pot once belonging to Marie Antoinette, and then lovingly crushed by the hooves of unicorns to the rhythm and beat of La Marseillaise? Were the staves of the oak barrel it was aged in made from the repurposed wood stripped off of Napoleon's private battlefield latrine? What makes this priced more like an artifact and less like regular liquor? What is the bullshit story that makes this somehow better than any other brandy? It is either through the workings of the grand poohbah of all sales reps, or the dumbest of dumb wholesale purchasers for that store with this demographic that this bottle was there in the first place. All I can say is if one is paying three grand plus for a bottle of liquor, that stuff had better damn well be able to cure cancer or something. I would expect it to give me all the good things far beyond the satisfaction of merely being just pleasantly pissed like what regular liquor can already do. This potion should be like a whole weekend of entertainment in a single snifter: drinking it should be like being under the influence of cannabis, Ecstasy, and Viagra simultaneously, or else it should biochemically supercharge a body to exude some sort of pheromones to give one an aura to be like the most attractive creature on the planet (kind of like creating a reversed beer-goggles effect). As for now, I don't believe the difference between that stuff and something like Courvoisier, the last most expensive brandy I've actually sampled (under $50 a bottle), is worth an extra $3000. Frankly, it's like a criminal act to hyper-inflate a price like that. However, we don't really challenge this because we certainly don't feel sorry for the filthy rich asshole who has that kind money to carelessly throw around, and is idiotically conceited enough to buy such a thing just to put on airs and to show off affluence . . . or at least I don't anyway.
I had no intention of poking jest specifically at the French, or to mock them about any reputed pomposity and over-extravagance, although after reading through my last paragraph it might look that way. An apology to those who thought so, as I know I have a few readers from France. Lord knows they are going through enough right now with the recent Charlie Hebdo incident. I don't want to kick them when they're down. I stand in solidarity with them in being against those sort of treacherous, barbaric acts. I'm thankful to have and share the same kind of freedom of expression that enables me to write this blog. I do, however, find it ironic that in a society that proclaims and prides itself to be on the side of equality, liberty, and fraternity, that there still is this glaring example of a holdover of the days when despotism, tyranny by elitism, and segregation of the classes in that country was institutional. They, of all people, should find this to be as outrageous as anyone else. There is no equality with marketing a commodity with an exaggerated price that no one can acquire except the extremely wealthy. Maybe it's not even their fault, maybe it's the purchasers, marketers, and wholesale vendors right here in North America who should be guillotined for such blatant and audacious greed.
I do have to commend the French for at least a couple of other things (besides the Lillet) that I did indulge in as frugal, yet decadent, treats this weekend: cheese and pâté. It swings my thoughts over to the stupid things we do in North America in our own way with the abomination that is called fast food, while there are available alternatives that are so much more pleasantly decadent that are more affordable. On Friday evening, strayed away from home, famished from not having any supper, and I felt a need to pick my spirits up after feeling bad about a foolish mistake I made. I went to my favourite pub, but it was full; the next place I wanted to try was closed down. I was thankful that my favourite cheese and deli shop was still open. I got some Saint-Paulin cheese ($8.00, but ate only a quarter of it, so really $2.00), and a marvelous pork and duck liver pâté blended with pistachios ($3.50). Though the cheese was from Québec, and the pâté was made locally, both were descended from French tradition. Adding some pickles and olives and crackers to that with a glass of wine (less than $2.00) at home, I had what I thought was an amazing little feast. Accounting for the portions I ate, chewing slowly and savouring it, I was eating better and cheaper than if I had scarfed down a stupid burger and fries with a pop from elsewhere, even friggin' McDonalds. I never felt that I ever had a richer experience by eating fast food, just indigestion.
Taking away the more snobbish elements of them, I concede that things like cocktails and deli food, in their own way, are very important things to have now and again. Small, yet affordable bits of luxury and decadence, where quality, and not quantity, matters. Bits of razzle-dazzle to remind us that life should never be boring, even with the smaller things and morsels of it. They are a reminder that for the good things to happen, It's best to be patient, and take things slowly, through sipping, sampling, and savouring; not through mindless and hurried gluttonous gobbling and guzzling, like there will be no tomorrow, and veering off into a whole other realm of over-indulgent sinning. They are reminders to balance out our lives. Not so much for the tastes and flavours themselves, but also to value some ritualized time to use to enjoy them.
That's what ultimately I think makes a person feel richer and blessed through food and drink.
1. Given my medications, I can only consume a maximum of 2-3 alcoholic drinks within a given day I choose to do it, which is not every day. Therefore, now when I'm in the mood to drink, the onus has shifted a little more towards making something that is kind of visually appealing, can be sipped slowly, and savored for an extended period. So, I can't binge drink even if I wanted to, not that it was ever my habit to begin with. Despite having some Slavic heritage, I actually find the manner and amount of hard liquor like many Russians and Ukrainians (in the old country) can dump down at one sitting to be quite distasteful, even when there is the guise of sophistication of the tradition of zakushki (a table full of appetizers and delicacies) present to take the edge off all that straight vodka (horilka).
2. The cocktail in the Bond film Casino Royale. It is a damn fine and tasty one too I find. Of course, I make mine without the digitalis poison. My Žubrówka will be used for making something nice I learned about from Top of the Hops a few years back.
3. I sullied myself finding these two ingredients in one of the private stores here, only because I couldn't find them in the public stores. It was in the Co-op owned one, and I am a member/share holder, so that is a forgivable sin to some extent. At least I didn't use Sobeys. I'm happy to say that all other potent potables I need for my personal liquor cabinet can be collected from the public liquor board store.
Thursday, January 8, 2015
The Future of This Year and Beyond
I'm kind of down in the dumps again. I was actually looking forward to returning to work this past Monday to keep from stagnating anymore inside. I welcomed it as a definite mark of reaching near recovery. I suppose I was a bit delusional about it. More than one person observing me commented that I'm probably not ready to return yet. A recent sinus infection has been stifling me, and has set me a few squares backward in the recovery game. With this current cold snap, straining myself to breathe the super-chilled -30 to -45 degree air while doing some trips outside has been doing no favours for me either. It has been difficult, and I'm back to gasping for breath, and tiring very easily. This morning, I could barely crawl out of bed; not that there was anything pressing to crawl to and attend to. It was -30 °C this morning with an even more ridiculous wind chill: same as it has been for the past while since the day after New Year's Day.
As last year has been a period of pronounced frustrations, stress, and hardships, I haven't bothered to fashion an entry about the year in review of 2014 as I have with other years. It's nothing I want to regale here now. I reviewed back to the beginnings of last year, and the year before that, and noted that there sure hasn't been a good start to any of them. The notable thing that was happening after reviewing those times was a pattern straining myself to be active when I was indeed ailing, or ill with some damn thing. This year I'm going to make it point not to be that stupid again. There was nothing heroic in doing so, and all it has seemed to do was incur and beget more trouble and misery.
The one sensible thing I did at the beginning of the year was to hoard a huge stack of my favourite magazines* from my nearest library. I made a point to list and note all the things of science and technical innovation that I will be hoping and wishing for in the near future. If these things actually come to fruition, it will actually give me some optimism for us a human species.
Let's say that it is -35° C, like it was on the day of my last entry. You are strongly disinclined to tax yourself and your vehicle to make a shopping trip, so you slip on your VR goggles (#6). Even in -35, the power to run the computer and VR peripherals is banked solar energy stored in the home battery (# 2). You now walk through the virtual showroom, of let's say, IKEA. You find some object, and can you can get a better sense of function and dimensions of objects when you now explore through online shopping. Maybe you'll chat a bit with the fellow consumers/avatars as you shop. If you don't speak each other's language in real life, the VR will compensate and translate the dialogues between you and others simultaneously. As you shop, you could then simply import a sample copy of a virtual object temporarily and place into an exact virtual augmented reproduction of your real living space for a comparison and "feel" before you make up your mind to buy it (the real object to occupy your real space). You even have the option to scale the object larger or smaller, or change the patterns and colours as you see fit. The (real) object's material composition, dimensions, and weight are such that when you decide to buy it, you have the options of A.) to use a drone(#8) to deliver your purchase to you (or to the nearest distribution center with a dronepad at its shipping depot, where then a regular delivery truck service may relay it to you within a day), or B.) have the form plan downloaded directly to your own 3D printer, and for a reduced price that excludes material and shipping, having the object made there at your home, also within a day. You select option B. The plastic filament loaded in your 3D printer to make your salt and pepper shakers, or whatever, is locally produced from a bioreactor stationed at a manure lagoon (#1) at a dairy farm. Speaking of dairy farms, I need in both this scenario and in real life.
Your electric (or hybrid) car, or possibly the vehicle that may deliver your milk to you, was being charged by #5, and even though it's -35 outside, the roads are clear and de-iced. The battery in the electric car is a lithium-manganese composite. The manganese was harvested from nodules gathered from the depths of the Pacific Ocean, harvested by Robo-Crabs (#3), and thus have been made much cheaper to manufacture. The operational platform for this mining project was a ship that produced its own fuel (#4). Another such ship that re-supplies it is a modular cargo vessel, a concept by Jacque Fresco, where one module exchanges the manganese nodules for sustenance, meanwhile the other separate and modulated cargo units split off from the "mother ship" which is anchored or stationed at the most logistically ideal launch point for maximum efficiency and economy, and they scatter to deliver, exchange, and return with their particular consignments nearly simultaneously to Manila, Jakarta, Seoul, wherever they are conveniently needed within that region, rather than having that one ship slowly and serially visit and waste precious time loading/unloading and refueling at each separate destination port, spending less time at sea. Each reloaded modular pod ship would then rendezvous and reattach to the mother ship before it collectively returns to its home port.***
It is fun to imagine and speculate how developments like the ones I listed, how combined together and made to work synergistically, and paint a whole picture of what living on this globe could look like. In these few paragraphs alone, I think I just theoretically reduced the world's reliance on petroleum through alternative energy, and reduced and rectified shipping by a grand percentage, as well as cleaned up some greenhouse gas to boot. I hope I live long enough to see such improvements happen.
*- As nice and easy as it is to download things on an e-reader or laptop, I still like and appreciate the old-fashioned method of reading and turning of physical pages. Plus, using the public library is a free pleasure we should never take for granted. The magazines I chose were: Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, and Make: magazine.
**- Because this is being developed by the US Navy, its first deployment will most likely be destined and claimed for some insidious and low-brow barbaric military utilization, all guised in the name of defense. The proof of how wasteful military spending gets is pretty much self-evident as indicated in this one point here.
*** - It shows how stupid we are in allowing our governments, military, and policy makers to get with destructive power when we've sort of already developed a model for a multiple simultaneous delivery system like this for the function of laser-guided bombs and nuclear warheads (MIRVs), but failed to orchestrate such a system that benefits us as a model for more efficient commercial shipping.
As last year has been a period of pronounced frustrations, stress, and hardships, I haven't bothered to fashion an entry about the year in review of 2014 as I have with other years. It's nothing I want to regale here now. I reviewed back to the beginnings of last year, and the year before that, and noted that there sure hasn't been a good start to any of them. The notable thing that was happening after reviewing those times was a pattern straining myself to be active when I was indeed ailing, or ill with some damn thing. This year I'm going to make it point not to be that stupid again. There was nothing heroic in doing so, and all it has seemed to do was incur and beget more trouble and misery.
The one sensible thing I did at the beginning of the year was to hoard a huge stack of my favourite magazines* from my nearest library. I made a point to list and note all the things of science and technical innovation that I will be hoping and wishing for in the near future. If these things actually come to fruition, it will actually give me some optimism for us a human species.
- Plastic from Thin Air: It basically involves taking captured industrial/agricultural gases like waste methane and other hydrocarbons, and processing them through a bioreactor, using enzymes to create plastic polymers rather than relying on petroleum by-products to produce them. The petroleum-based plastic productions create pollution; the making of plastics from methane capture reduces greenhouse gas and reduces pollution. Stick that up your ass, Big Oil!
- Cleaner and Cheaper Energy Storage: One of the bigger hurdles there is to sell green and renewable energy as viable alternatives to the paradigm we have now is the fact that energy storage of wind/solar energy requires piles and batteries that themselves are made of toxic substances, and are just as taxing to the environment for their production. There is now the Aqueous Hybrid Ion (AHI) battery than relies on salt water based electrolytes to use for that. On top of being non-toxic, it is also relatively cheap and can be set up in a scalable modular fashion, and doesn't risk overheating. It is versatile enough to be used within a home or on the grid.
- Robo-Crabs: This sounds like some sort of exotic super-mutated affliction you might get after visiting in a brothel in Tokyo. Actually, it is a robotic development in Korea where they've made six-legged, ¾ tonne, walking robots that can crawl along the sea bottom of previously unexplored places. They are equipped with such features as 11 cameras, sonar, and a Doppler array that can accurately chart the sea floor and monitor currents. Exploration is all fine and good, but what I would like to see them outfitted for is the ability to do deep sea salvage, and to be able to have some role in cleaning up some of the millions of metric tonnes of toxic junk and contaminants we've already thrown in this world's oceans.
- Self-Fueling Ships: One factor of the expense of a shipped product is always the fuel used to transport the car, computer, or other thing-a-ma-doodle from their production centres, like for example in Asia, across the Pacific, and to the ports here. If you checked your globe or atlas lately, the Pacific Ocean is a pretty friggin' huge expanse, and getting stuff across it from point to point gulps up a lot of oil per shipment. What if then something else amazing can happen, like a ship that has its own power generation plant on it that can produce its own fuel right from the seawater itself, not needing to carry along any dirty petroleum? This research and development is happening right now with the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, known as it is right now as Electro-chemical Acidification Carbon Capture, and they are making commercial grade fuel this way. The process involves, like making plastic from air as I mentioned earlier, taking carbon dioxide (a greenhouse gas) and hydrogen, and with a catalytic process, the ship makes its own fuel from that stuff found in the seawater. What I don't know is how the rate of production to the rate of consumption ratio is within such a system. If it allows for a completely self-sufficient system, and can even produce more fuel than it consumes, this would be a revolutionary thing. The potential for this as I see it is:
- Less dependence on foreign-oil from unfriendly nations if there is no longer a need to dock at these places halfway around the world to refuel.
- A greatly reduced need for military spending, because as it is now with the U.S. Navy at least, the military cost of securing corridors to import oil from regions from the Middle East greatly surpasses the actual value of the oil tanked and shipped through these shipping lanes.**
- If the model of this sort of cargo ship is such that there a constantly running plant for making fuel, and a reduced need for actual fuel storage, more space on the ship can be utilized for loading on more cargo, thus there is more logistical efficiency. If the ship somehow has maritime accident where the hull is breached, there is then less stored fuel being dumped back into the sea, thus a lessened risk of an environmental disaster.
- The use of harvesting ships/plants with this technology to mass-produce surplus fuel (if possible), so that there is a less energy consumption (more passive way) to glean (renewable) fuel directly from the ocean, instead of environmentally destructive exploration, water diversion/contamination through processes like fracking, and reduced drilling through land and seafloor to get at it.
- This technology actually absorbs CO2 and thus helps to prevent global warming, or at least reduces the carbon footprint.
- The Solar Roadway: It's incredible to think of how much actual space we have dedicated just to drive on and reserve for parking our vehicles, and all the rest of that time that a road surface isn't used it just lies there being exposed to the sun, growing and producing nothing. Why can't we multi-use these roadways and parking lots to serve us with harvesting energy? Think about how many square meters of roadway there is in your general area alone. Well someone has already thought of that and is working on a solution. There is development going on right now for the implementation of photovoltaic cells that collectively act as an actual road surface, that not only collect and covert solar energy, but these cells networked together can potentially do to the following things:
- De-icing roads and reducing the need for deploying and powering snow-removal equipment, and less fuel to be used for surface maintenance and applying salt and grit.
- You could actually recharge an electric vehicle with passive solar power in the very spot you park, extending the range of your E-car within and throughout the city you are using it in where these are equipped.
- Powering Signage, and through a traffic computer network, power LEDs to create messages to apprise motorists of adverse road conditions ahead using the road surface itself.
- Animated markings and road warnings that are triggered with foot traffic and the crossing of cattle and larger wildlife like deer. It would protect both the motorist and the wildlife, saving countless lives and many millions of dollars, and spares us all irreparable damage to the natural habitant from the loss of many creatures. The downside is that this might have some Hill-Billy Rednecks being upset and disappointed that there is less road kill to scoop up off the highways for some vittles.
- Since the road itself is already based on a network, it can be used as a default pre-existing conduit to conduct and transmit power and use fibre-optics to boost communications/internet connectivity, without extra cost or needing to claim more land to build separate infra-structures for such things.
- Improved Virtual Reality Platforms: I've been long hoping for the day that VR technology will become more sophisticated and dynamically interactive, so integrative and vivid to the senses, and most importantly affordable that it will become more practical on a household. I think the amount of unnecessary travel time and costs it will save, there will be no risk of lost luggage when you want to tour the Louvre. I can't even find the right words to pluck the ideas from my imagination as to what will happen with online shopping, architectural design, fully-immersive game experiences, and other alternative virtual lifestyle scenarios. The technology that will help enable this is the new 360fly Camera, which records video in a 360 degree space, and 240 degree up and down field which will make for a completely immersive video experience. I think Facebook will really amp up R&D and make huge strides with this technology this year after settling in with their acquisition of Oculus Rift. Google and Samsung is really. I think I'll be buying stock in this stuff, plus investing in Depends adult diapers, because you'll indeed be needing them after playing around in the more dramatic and vivid scenes with this stuff.
- 3D Printing: It's becoming more than just some fad now for model makers and geeky hobbyists fashioning chess sets. A functional electric car has now been 3D printed. For now on a domestic level, if there is anything that isn't strictly material composition dependent around the home, this is going to be a huge game-changer. Homes themselves may soon become 3D printed, as predicted by futurist and social engineer, Jacque Fresco. Using organic matrices, collagen, and living stem cells, the prospect of printing replacement organs is coming closer to a reality.
- Aerial Drones (UAVs): It is interesting seeing these develop, but they are last on this list because I see them being mostly on the bad side of the double-edged sword of technology if placed in the hands of the common public. For law enforcement, I see them as being valuable tools for surveying accident scenes, and maybe tracking/pursuit of marked criminals, as they are a lot cheaper than helicopters. However, I can also see them being used in questionable and wrongful purposes by law-enforcement, like equipping them with teargas or pepper spray canisters to intimidate or discharge on peaceful protesters. For commercial use, it may be an instantaneous, and as-the-crow-flies way to transport smaller objects, but for now their relatively short range, glitch-fill guidance systems, and their vulnerability to bad weather still makes them a questionable choice to use for a quick and reliable delivery service. I certainly don't see them as being cost effective enough yet for an average company to deploy them. I haven't yet heard of any overwhelming positive feedback about Amazon's trial use of them. They are, however, making big steps into having these things more maneuverable, simplified, and function more autonomously for civilian use, and that's what scares me about them. The ones with the cameras mounted on them make my cringe when I think about all the different ways they could be used intrusively and to violate others' privacy. In the wrong hands, I see them being more dangerous than handguns. They aren't regulated, and there is nothing to stop some terrorist or some other demented, Unibomber-esque type of psycho-bozo out there to equip one with an incendiary or explosive device, or to use it as some other kind of weaponized platform and fly it into God-knows-where. Then again, that already happens with conventional vehicles, however this way though seems just a little more treacherous and insidious because it is capable of an extra vertical axis for destruction, and capable of being maneuvered into previously hard to access places.
Let's say that it is -35° C, like it was on the day of my last entry. You are strongly disinclined to tax yourself and your vehicle to make a shopping trip, so you slip on your VR goggles (#6). Even in -35, the power to run the computer and VR peripherals is banked solar energy stored in the home battery (# 2). You now walk through the virtual showroom, of let's say, IKEA. You find some object, and can you can get a better sense of function and dimensions of objects when you now explore through online shopping. Maybe you'll chat a bit with the fellow consumers/avatars as you shop. If you don't speak each other's language in real life, the VR will compensate and translate the dialogues between you and others simultaneously. As you shop, you could then simply import a sample copy of a virtual object temporarily and place into an exact virtual augmented reproduction of your real living space for a comparison and "feel" before you make up your mind to buy it (the real object to occupy your real space). You even have the option to scale the object larger or smaller, or change the patterns and colours as you see fit. The (real) object's material composition, dimensions, and weight are such that when you decide to buy it, you have the options of A.) to use a drone(#8) to deliver your purchase to you (or to the nearest distribution center with a dronepad at its shipping depot, where then a regular delivery truck service may relay it to you within a day), or B.) have the form plan downloaded directly to your own 3D printer, and for a reduced price that excludes material and shipping, having the object made there at your home, also within a day. You select option B. The plastic filament loaded in your 3D printer to make your salt and pepper shakers, or whatever, is locally produced from a bioreactor stationed at a manure lagoon (#1) at a dairy farm. Speaking of dairy farms, I need in both this scenario and in real life.
Your electric (or hybrid) car, or possibly the vehicle that may deliver your milk to you, was being charged by #5, and even though it's -35 outside, the roads are clear and de-iced. The battery in the electric car is a lithium-manganese composite. The manganese was harvested from nodules gathered from the depths of the Pacific Ocean, harvested by Robo-Crabs (#3), and thus have been made much cheaper to manufacture. The operational platform for this mining project was a ship that produced its own fuel (#4). Another such ship that re-supplies it is a modular cargo vessel, a concept by Jacque Fresco, where one module exchanges the manganese nodules for sustenance, meanwhile the other separate and modulated cargo units split off from the "mother ship" which is anchored or stationed at the most logistically ideal launch point for maximum efficiency and economy, and they scatter to deliver, exchange, and return with their particular consignments nearly simultaneously to Manila, Jakarta, Seoul, wherever they are conveniently needed within that region, rather than having that one ship slowly and serially visit and waste precious time loading/unloading and refueling at each separate destination port, spending less time at sea. Each reloaded modular pod ship would then rendezvous and reattach to the mother ship before it collectively returns to its home port.***
It is fun to imagine and speculate how developments like the ones I listed, how combined together and made to work synergistically, and paint a whole picture of what living on this globe could look like. In these few paragraphs alone, I think I just theoretically reduced the world's reliance on petroleum through alternative energy, and reduced and rectified shipping by a grand percentage, as well as cleaned up some greenhouse gas to boot. I hope I live long enough to see such improvements happen.
*- As nice and easy as it is to download things on an e-reader or laptop, I still like and appreciate the old-fashioned method of reading and turning of physical pages. Plus, using the public library is a free pleasure we should never take for granted. The magazines I chose were: Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, and Make: magazine.
**- Because this is being developed by the US Navy, its first deployment will most likely be destined and claimed for some insidious and low-brow barbaric military utilization, all guised in the name of defense. The proof of how wasteful military spending gets is pretty much self-evident as indicated in this one point here.
*** - It shows how stupid we are in allowing our governments, military, and policy makers to get with destructive power when we've sort of already developed a model for a multiple simultaneous delivery system like this for the function of laser-guided bombs and nuclear warheads (MIRVs), but failed to orchestrate such a system that benefits us as a model for more efficient commercial shipping.
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