Thinking of Running. . . Stuck at Home Coughing

Earlier this week, I received a very early birthday present. A friend registered my name in for a half-marathon race coming up sometime in August of this year. I’m sure other people would question the status of their friendship with someone if such a friend’s ‘gift’ was an entry fee/registration for doing a 13.1 kilometre long run in the middle of the hottest days of summer. However, racing in a half-marathon competitively was something that I was going to dare myself to do anyway sometime this year. This friend just provided that extra push to make me commit to that goal. All I have to do is the training for a few months, and then show up for the race and do it. I’m thankful. I have six months to train for it; I could feasibly do it in three. My training research link.

However, my plans and ambitions to do some preliminary training for long stretch running this weekend have been dashed by lousy weather and goop-filled lungs.  The bronchitis seems even more worse today than yesterday , and even just thinking of the effort I’ll need to get out of here just to get some groceries is tiring enough for me, never mind thinking of the discipline I’ll need in the future for this race. Right now, breathing in the below -25°C air outside instantly makes me double over, putting me into a furious fit of coughing, as I found out the hard way when I tried to walk the dog outside yesterday.

So, I’m sick again, irritable, bored at home, having no bodily energy and stiffness throughout; a restless, yet headache-clouded mind.  A situation like this usually never works out well for me. I’ve given thought about relieving myself with symptom suppressing sedation, but I favour lucidity, and really have no desire to ride into Looneyville on the crazy train that is Neo Citron. Not when I look around and see all the desk work, bills, and other correspondence I have to catch up on now that I have a fully functioning computer. That will only take an hour and a half to do at most, I’m almost half finished that stuff now as I drift between that and writing paragraphs here. I’ve re-considered heading out for groceries now: it’s pointless to waste energy to shop for food, or to cook, when I have no appetite anyway.

I thought I’d try and cure myself by using some thermotherapy in the sauna downstairs in the recreation room, but then I saw a notice that the rec room has been booked for the day for someone’s private function.  I suppose I’ll continue reading the last of Stieg Larsson’s novel of the Millennium trilogy, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest. If I can’t use a Scandinavian spa utility to sweat this bug out of me, then I’ll try sweating it out using Scandinavian suspense literature. With the suspension of my television service coming soon for spring and summer, it’s probably a good time to figure out some more options to put on my reading list as well.

The Thing That's Too Well Built

I’m ending my week in a grouchy mood. Right now, I am spending the first day of my three days off trying to battle what appear to be symptoms of bronchitis.  Before that, I have been storming around to eight different centres in town, and even more online, for the past four days searching for and trying to get a printer and/or computer parts, which even by the advice of so called ‘experts’ has been an enormous feat of trial and error. I finally have working results, but I shouldn’t have had this much difficulty. This is sort of the endgame to my ranting on Techno Scrap.

Weary of all these hassles just for simple tech repairs, and considering the rate of obsolescence and usage life of today’s typical consumer products, my mind began to drift around wondering what is out there on the opposite end of the spectrum. That is, I'm talking about a powerful piece of technology, of any product, that has been around during my lifetime, that has had a huge global impact, and was manufactured perfectly right off the mark with little or no revision, and has a proven to be high in the standards of durability, ease of maintenance, and ease of use by even the stupidest of people. I recalled some past articles I’ve read, and one glaring and disturbing example came to my mind of something that was made just too well.  That would be an AK47 assault rifle.

Thinking aside from its ability to crudely blast bodily organs out of people, it pretty much fits those criteria I just mentioned. It was made back in the good old days when Stalin was trying to make communism universal. So, competitions came about to satisfy the goal of developing a powerful, utilitarian, cheaply manufactured, and super-durable weapon that functions in all climates and which even the most dim-witted soldier could operate and maintain with minimal effort. A Russian gunsmith, Mikail Kalashnikov, won out by designing and developing the AK47. Amazingly, he has no patent on this thing; so its design has been copied into several derivatives without the red tape of patent infringement and licensing issues in the world of arms manufacturing. Of all assault rifles, this one survives the greatest of extremes of cold, heat, dryness, moisture, and exposure to environmental contaminants. It’s been field tested by being immersed in sand, dirty water, and even drove over by vehicles, and still has a high likelihood of being able to be fired after such abuse. It's a highly effective relic of low-tech, Soviet/Iron Curtain mass production; ironically, that’s its success of defying obsolescence, because of the common and standardized interchangeable machine parts made in a system didn't make huge leaps in progressive change, thus its specs haven’t changed much since it was first made in 1947. Someone could probably take one model of this gun made in Russia in 1947, another from China made in 1954, another from Romania made in 1968, and one made in North Korea in 1996; take them all apart, shake up all their components in a gunny sack, dump them all in a muddy ditch, and then recover all those pieces and re-assemble them into four different chimera rifles made from each others’ parts, and there would still very likely be four fully-operational AK47s. By comparison, on the stupid side of computer peripheral technology, I needed one stupid simple print head for my printer, which was one of several kinds made by the same manufacturer, but which seemed to be phased out of production, and wasn’t conveniently available, or feasible to acquire cost-wise if it was used. I was replacing the fan for my desktop tower, and I had to go through the trouble of finding three different models, each of them claiming to be allegedly “universal” before I got the right one that worked. That’s odd, because my old fan was removed with simply turning four screws; one of the new “universal” replacements I got (exchange number one)would have required me to completely disassemble my tower to extract my motherboard to change things to mount the damn thing properly to have contact with the CPU. That doesn’t sound universal to me. Another “universal” fan didn’t even fit into my tower casing at all, despite the insistence from one shaggy tech-head prick that it would. Between my old printer, my replacement fan, and the assault rifle competing for the category of having “universal” manufactured parts compliance, sadly the AK47 wins.

And cheap . . . Cripes! At first, I thought I was getting a reasonable deal (after a lot of time doing exchanges) spending $16.50 for a fan, and then a hell of a deal after finding a replacement printer for under $50.00 . . . that is until after I did a bit of fact finding on this subject and found out that the AK47 wins again. I discovered that in some Third World nations, an AK47 assault rifle can be purchased for as little as $6.00, or traded for a couple of chickens or a sack of grain. In the tech world, I can’t even buy a decent length of simple HDMI cable for six bucks, and I sure as hell can't get one for a bag of grain or poultry! How can a fully automatic weapon cost cheaper than a bag of groceries?* But seriously, it’s sickening to know that, either unwittingly or unscrupulously, poorly monitored or unsecured shipments of humanitarian supplies going to such places as Africa are occassionally intercepted and seized by warlords, who in turn barter or sell this stuff through the black market to acquire weapons; chiefly, the most favoured and coveted ones being sought are AK47s. In cases like this, especially in Africa, it’s a sound guess that the majority of these guns are then distributed and going into the hands of guerrilla fighters or soldiers who are very likely in some regions there to be under the age of fifteen.

That’s the other issue. As far as assault rifles go, an AK47's design has been made so practical and simple that an illiterate child can take it apart, re-assemble it, and operate it. And that’s when you know that there is such a thing as too much bloody simplicity: when the most powerful and devastating kinds of weapons start becoming too readily capable of being handled and made accessible to people who are either too young, or ignorant/stupid to know how to read. Sure, it is disturbing to watch some periodic news story about the Taliban, or some other radical terrorist group members running around with cheap, yet powerful weapons like Kalashnikov rifles, but what is a hundred times more disturbing to me is knowing that there are entire generations of people in countries like Liberia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, or Sierra Leone, regardless of religion or politics, who have been trained to kill, or have killed others since their childhood with the most powerful weapons available that they can physically handle. Sadly, this is the stuff that doesn’t make it to the news too often. Too many people seem to be ignorant about this.

The AK47 is the most mass-produced automatic firearm on Earth, so it is a pretty established format in terms of weapon arsenals. More than 75 million AK 47s and 100 million AK derivatives and variants have been manufactured worldwide, totalling about 175 million: approximately one AK rifle per 40 people on Earth. I’m guessing they are most popularly used in nations where there is less than one TV set per 300 of its citizens, like Mozambique, whose flag actually has an image of an AK47 machine gun on it as an emblem.** I was thinking of another example of a real politically anarchical shit spot on the face of this globe, and for some reason I instantly thought of Somalia. In the city of Mogadishu alone, according to UN reports, there are estimated to be about 1.3 million AK47, or AK type assault rifles in possession of its citizens. That’s double the number of cell phones in use in all of Somalia.*** When machine guns are more than twice as likely to be available than a normally common form of communication technology, then you know you’re really in a fucked up place.

It’s shameful that devastatingly low-tech/low brow methods of carnage and destruction seem to be more universal and consumer "friendly" than products that are supposedly educational, creative, and constructive high-tech/high brow solutions to things. It shouldn’t be easier and cheaper to buy an assault rifle in the Third World than it is to get an education or medical aid there; nor should it be easier to get a gun there than it is to get one's computer fixed here****.

*- Simple answer. . . if you were starving to death and were desperately becoming indifferent or ignorant to the value of things, you might sell your assets, including weapons, for dirt cheap too. 
**-Travel advice: if you see a weapon of any kind proudly stamped on a nation’s flag, it would probably be in your best interest to STAY THE HELL AWAY FROM THERE!
***-Statistics compiled from NationMaster.com
****-Addendum, Feb 11, 2012: Discovered that the scanning utility on my cheap new 3-in-1 doesn't work. Another goddamned trip to return/exchange shit. . . GRRRRR! I think I'm ready to get my own AK47.

Techno Scrap

After coffee with my friend yesterday morning, and listening to all the activity she is doing, and realizing how badly I’ve been slacking off, I felt obliged to get my rear in gear. It’s hard to stick into words the unique aches I’ve been having since I worked out yesterday, but I survived. Today is a good day to just relax. If I get ambitious, I’ll start acknowledging and doing something to rectify the new warning messages when I turn my computer on. Apparently, the CPU cooling fan in my desktop unit is not working; I have to add that to my growing list of tech repairs. The fan repair gets primacy. Realistically, it's a rapidly moving part that is subject to wear. It's easy enough to repair by myself, and I reckon it will cost only 20 to 40 dollars, plus it will probably extend my tower's life for couple more years. At least for now I can still use my laptop. However, a few days ago, I discovered that the print head on my 3-in-1 printer quit working. I know what’s wrong with it. I left one of the empty cartridges out of it too long, and the residue ink dried inside the print head and botched it . . . stupid me.

The printer issue really flares up anger in me. Before, I was able to be totally MacGyver in the past with this same issue I once had, using a bit of isopropyl alcohol, a coffee filter, and maybe a clean toothpick to fix such a problem, but now systems are too intricate for that kind of jury-rigged repair job. I tried to, but failed. After researching online, a replacement print head is more expensive than the cost of a new printer. I shopped Ebay and other sites for used models of my printer to salvage the print head from it. The used printers themselves were far cheaper than the new print head, but the shipping costs were outrageous. I had no luck locally on Kijiji. It looks like I’m screwed into shopping for a new model. I really hate this kind of waste. Sure, I could try to sell this old one on online myself as a parts only unit to recoup losses, but again, it still pressures me to consume more than I want to; pushing an exorbitant and unrealistic shipping cost onto someone else for a near obsolete machine, which only a real idiot would do. Realistically, for the lack of one small piece, an otherwise perfectly functional printer goes to a garbage dump*. I love technology, and some of the reasons why I love it are for saving time, space, energy, and money. I start to dislike it when I see instances where somehow it fails to systematically do any of that. This is one case where that is so.

The only other reason I would even bother to get a new 3-in-1 is that I may have a little eagerness to see what kind of technical enhancements have been made since this last model, which I don’t believe have been very significant in the world of printer technology. People aren’t so eager to create waste of room and resources by slapping things down onto a hardcopy anymore. For a world trying to use technology to get on the greener side of the environmental fence, printers are the absolute antithesis to this means of progress. They use paper after all. With the world ditching paper on an increasingly broader scale, one would think that R & D for printer technology would be ironically to cut down on paper-use itself a bit. My lack of printing actual paper pages was probably part of the problem as to why the ink dried up in my print head. The only thing I think would be of any interest to me in a newer printer would be streamlining content and power efficiency: to have one that could be networked such that it can pull stuff directly off the Cloud, eliminating the use of another power-sucking unit to process a printout. To be able to crop web pages instantly so that you aren’t wasting extra ink printing the superfluous material that you don’t want on a page would be a great feature to see as well. I see HP has Smart Print that can do some of this stuff.

*- Even, when taken to a recycling centre, like SARCAN here in Saskatchewan, only a small volume of the weight percentage of an average electronic appliance is collected for reuse. The remainder is still a lot of toxic plastics that are destined for landfill. The itch to replace obsolescence really affects us negatively.

A Longer February This Year. . . Blargh!!!

How quickly a month goes by. I am grateful that I slid through this first twelfth of the year without too many hassles.  Incidents of bad news improved to become something better; other good discoveries enhanced themselves to become something awesome. There is still a lot yet to be done in getting some other affairs in order. I’m also thankful that I’m only at work for four hours today, because there is so much I’m trying to burn through in terms of catching up with steps of things I initially wanted to accomplish before last month’s end. And now I've let things lapse into February, the worst stinking month of the year for me. I'm quite discontent that it's another day longer for this year.

My scheduling spreadsheets aren’t even started yet for this year. This is one thing I can’t fall behind on. I may need to swap shifts just to get free time to get it all sorted out. I wish it were as simple as copying and pasting from an old template. However, with 2012 being a leap year, that one extra stupid day has complicated the whole process. My mind is being tossed around between bothering to upkeep this old system, or to dare myself to revamp the whole damn thing altogether. Maybe I’ll fluke out, and manage to get the thing to sync with my iTouch calendar apps.

The ambitious changes in my life I’m trying to make now are actually things that I’m trying to cut out of my life. Those things are mindless wastes of: my time, my space, my energy, and my money, because I sure as hell will need every scrap of those four things in the months ahead. The wild paradox is that it seems I have to use more time, space, energy, and money to regain any of these things back.

The space reclamation project has been pretty successful so far. My office/studio area has had a bit of an overhaul.  The to-do list on my whiteboard in there seems perpetual. It’s just the kitchen, my other major household work centre, which still has to be organized better.

My annual cable service cut off time seems to be advancing month by month each year. Last year, it was in March; this year it will happen in mid February, and then get switched back on in mid October. The only things meaningful to watch that I’ll miss at home during that time might be some highlights from the Summer Olympics in London. That’s eight months of some sort of yet indeterminable quantity of savings of time, energy, and money.

Languages, Langues, Idiomas, Sprachen, Мови

I just came back home a while ago with my really groggy doggy. She was a jittery little spazz and wouldn’t cooperate with the vet at all to make the removal of her stitches an easy task for her, so she had to be sedated. That robbed me of an extra hour out of my day, but I’m happy she’s finally rid of that damn cone collar and a zippered up snout; she undoubtedly is even more so. Once she stops wandering around in circles, all stoned and dazed, life for the both of us will become a little more normal. Hobbies and pastimes are just going to have to be cheap or free for a good long while after I saw her bill.

I don’t know what prompted me to think of this topic, perhaps it was after seeing the shop signs of some of the ethnic grocery stores along the route I drove through today, or the titles of some foreign books I caught a glimpse of in the library, but I began reflecting about a conversation that I had with some others at work during a past coffee break. I was trying to figure out cumulatively how many different languages were spoken (or were understood) by all the different staff members that ever worked, or still continue to work at my place of employment, since I started working there. The list I came up with as I was tallying this is: English, Tagalong, Spanish, Cree, Amharic, Punjabi, Bengali, Turkish, Danish, Serbian, German, Mandarin, Romanian, Ukrainian, Tswana, Tamil, Somali, Fulani, some pidgin dialect from Sierra Leone, plus perhaps a couple of others I’m sure I missed. It’s truly amazing that with all these different languages, plus all the different mindsets that come with them, that there aren’t any more instances of miscommunication than the ones we perhaps already sometimes have.

I then tried to think about the reality of the tendencies of how I process language. These questions are important, especially now, as I’m now put in a position of assisting someone who uses a unique communication modality.  For myself, I look at languages formulaically, like some computer nerd who is trying to decompile a program. I treat foreign languages as puzzles; it’s kind of shameful to admit that I don’t really learn or research them purely as another means of self-expression. It was the way I taught myself how to read languages written in Cyrillic when I was twelve. Tearing apart and recombining sentences I saw in a phrasebook was how I taught myself Spanish. One of those cheap/free hobbies I then thought of doing was boning up on the languages that I have some working knowledge about.

 I’ve heard it mentioned that a high percentage of acquisition of a language can be attained by learning a vocabulary base of around 2000 words. I’d like to believe that, but that seems a little farfetched to me.  Another reason to learn more about the realm of linguistics is that I have been giving more serious thought to getting my certificate to teach ESL. Just for practice, here are a few things I composed. I’ll check them later through an online translator to see how accurate they are, and what I’d need to work on.

Probablamente, comprendo un nivel intermedio del castellano (para leyendo y escribiendo), pero yo he olvidado mucho ya. Todavía tengo problemas unas veces para recordar cómo utilizar los verbos “ser” y “estar”. Unas maneras de la gramatica, y las conjugaciónes correctas de muchos otros verbos son muy difíciles para mí también. Quisiera aprender más del vocabulario practico.

Il était plus de 30 ans depuis j’ai appris le français à l’êcole.  Je me souviens beaucoup des essentiels de français, mais je n’ai jamais besoin de parler. Je ne peux pas à suivre une conversation en français. Pour moi, chaque fois quand je l’ecoute, elle sonne comme un tres longue mot seulmente; pas une sentence.

Ich spreche Deutsche nicht so gut, aber ich kann deutsch lesen und schreiben nicht so schlecht, also ich glaube dass ich könne leichter zu lernen mehr.

Моє знання українського словника є досить обмеженим. Я якось соромно, тому що це мова половини мого спадщини.Я можу читати по-російськи, тому я можу принаймні використовувати словник досить добре, і транспонувати слова в перекладі програми. Тим не менш, неспокій, тому що я не сумісної клавіатури набирати українською перекладати слова на англійську мову.

Getting Back into the Holistic Groove

I couldn't resist. . . it appealed to my warped sense of humour.

From mid-November of last year until now, my efforts to maintain a better dietary regimen have really backslided. It's coming close to the time where I cycle into taking some measure to do some form of bodily detoxication. However, I'm going to make a point of not doing some method where fasting is involved. Whatever steps ahead I made health-wise compared to the one to two weeks of misery I experienced in the past within that duration of fasting wasn't worth it. The best way to go is approach things like I did early last year: eliminating as much excess simple starches and sugars as possible, and substituting them with complex ones, opting for more lean protein, and more raw, whole, "living" and unprocessed food. This time around, after researching several articles about the benefits of live culture fermented foods, either by yeast or lacto-bacillus cultures, I've decided to add more of those things as "living" foods to my lifestyle, more to see if they will act as alternative energy primers, and systemic cleansers. What I'm really interested in is experimenting with foods that have enzymes and nutrients that are classified as adaptogens. The idea is a more in-depth following from what I already learned and gleaned from Tim Ferriss' book, The Four Hour Body. After last year's big cancer scare, I thought I should take a more active interest into what these things can potentially do. Here is a run down of the things I'm looking into.

• Kefir - The diet I composed for myself last year was highly protein based, and since I couldn't afford to eat meat all the time, my protein intake was very egg and dairy intensive. However, I never was one to favour drinking a lot of milk. I don't know if it's just part of the aging process, but I seem have a harder time digesting it than I used to. Yogurt and cheese are OK, but expensive. I find buttermilk to be digestable, as well as delicious, but it too is so costly by a litre to litre comparison to regular milk. Soy milk has a gross chalky taste I don't care for; plus soy is a source of phytoestrogens, which can screw up male hormones. Almond milk is more tasty than soy, but. . .cha-ching. . . also expensive. The best option I've found so far is kefir, or rather the culture to make the stuff at home. Kefir is a drink that originates from Eastern Europe/Central Asia. Kefir 'grains' are colonies of organisms that are added to ferment milk, pre-digesting the lactose. It's just a more drinkable form of yogurt. My plan is to use kefir in my protein smoothies instead of milk. Not only does this culture ferment milk, but it will also ferment milk substitutes as well, like almond, soy, and coconut milk. The added advantage to this stuff is that it can be used for making sourdough, my next subject.
• Sourdough - If there is one starchy thing I know I couldn't live without, it would probably be bread. As a bachelor, sandwiches are a standard feature for quick and easy lunches. I especially love rye bread. Sourdough bread is better nutritionally because it doesn't require extra sweeteners to be added for leavening the loaf, and has more beneficial enzymes. Even though sourdough bread is readily available around here, the purely organic stuff is really expensive, and the fresh stuff in the bakery doesn't have a list of ingredients with it that mentions whether or not it was made with HFCS (high fructose corn syrup). HFCS was another thing I made an effort to avoid consuming last year, and that made a noticeable and profound difference in my daily energy and stamina. I got experimental, and thought I'd try making my own sourdough starter for my own custom rye bread, and use it at least until I rid myself of the extra junk flour I have in my pantry. I could have just pitched it out, but the frugal farmboy in me can't abide wasting stuff. I'll just choose to try to make it healthier. A jar, some rye flour, water, and a coffee filter to cover it and allow it to breathe is all I need to produce it. If I feel really adventurous, I may dare myself to make my own kvass (mentioned last entry) with any surplus of stale rye bread, my own healthier pop substitute to rid myself of the extra sugar here. Let the yeast convert it first to something more beneficial and healthful.



Rye Sourdough Starter.

• Kombucha - I associate this stuff with Rudolf, one of our old neighbours who emigrated from Germany with his family and settled on an acreage near the area where I grew up. He was also the same guy who initiated me into tasting and liking homebrewed beer. He was an interesting character, with interesting stories to tell, who had an equally interesting collection of home remedies. Kombucha tea was one of them. I remember the introductory sample he gave me as being very tart, but also very effervescent and refreshing. It's basically black or green tea that has been fermented with a symbiotic yeast/bacterial culture. The result is a drink loaded with probiotic enzymes and adaptogens. This stuff is reputed to: be a detoxifier, allow better digestion of gluten loaded food, counter joint inflamation, improve eyesight, improve skin tone and elasticity, serve as an anti-cancer agent, benefit gastro-intestinal health, as well have other benefits too numerous to mention. It's even supposed to stop and prevent greying of hair. How then could I not be interested? The name for this concoction is Japanese, but my research on this panacea shows a lot of different cultures throughout all of Asia and Eastern Europe using this stuff as a medicine and life elixir. Back then, Rudolf commented that there were people in the Caucasus mountains who drank this stuff on a regular basis, and were living well past a century; then again, I heard the same thing about the same alleged people who lived there; who were that long-lived and healthy because they ate their own version of homemade yogurt.

The alleged fountain of youth

I don't yet know how intensive, or especially taxing it will be to try to produce and maintain these weird things by growing them in cultural mediums. I presume that it won't be any harder to do than nurturing any other yeast culture, like I've already done on countless beer and wine making projects.

One top of what I mentioned here, the other indulgences that fit the bill that I already enjoy are foods like: raw nuts, sauerkraut, lacto-bacillus brewed pickles, kim chee, yogurt, unpasteurized cottage cheese, pickled herrings, ceviche, whey protein smoothies, lentils and other pulses, olives, collards/beet greens, bok choy, spinach, berries, eggs, rolled oats, chicken, curries. . .the list is really endless. There really is no way I could ever feel that I'm being deprived of anything.

Toasting My Dog's Health with Kvass

Today is my only whole day off this week, and my chance to catch up with projects I told myself I would do and complete since the New Year arrived, but the urgency to re-engage with them has waned a lot with the plummeting wind chill factor. Instinct is drawing me into slipping into winter torpor instead. Charging around in sub -40° C weather to get stuff done is somehow failing to appeal to me, despite the need to do so. This recent spell of cold weather has really sapped me of energy, and I still have so much to do. The only reason I’ve sat down to write is that I feel like I have so many knots to loosen in my head first before I can focus on mindfully approaching or tackling any one of them. Writing has proved to be somewhat therapeutic for me in the past; sometimes it has been a helpful way of re-motivating me. Maybe my instincts are the right things to guide me now, and staying in bed and resting is what I really do indeed need; I fear the boredom of it though.

Good news came yesterday in regards to Ella. The lab test results showed that the tumour that was removed from her turned out to be benign. I’m greatly relieved in that respect. However, that big ugly bump, and the new unforeseen expenses that it incurred, really threw a monkey wrench into some of the planning I’ve already done for some things. It’s tempting to just throw up my hands and say that there is nothing I can do about it; yet doing nothing about it feels like it’s not the answer. I’m trying to be tenacious enough to not let this bit of misfortune control me, or knock me off target.

Drevlyansky Classic Style
Ukrainian Kvas. . . Yum

I took a break between paragraphs. During that time I bottled my beer from my New Year's brewing project and then went out shopping to fill the huge void in my fridge. I made an effort not to drag home junk food despite the great cravings for it I’ve had as of late. I got experimental again, and bought more stuff at the Ukrainian food store on the east end of 8^th Street. I found the perfect thing to substitute and satiate my odd craving for pop. I bought a bottle of kvass to sample. I heard of this stuff a while ago while working for one of the Ukrainian cultural centres. I found recipes, but I never got brave or interested enough to make it for myself. The homemade stuff is quite perishable, and I’m only equipped for large volume production of more potent potables; plus since it is rye based, there is a real risk of some accidental contamination or culturing of ergot spores* in my kitchen, or on my brewing equipment. For those who don’t know what kvass is, the best description I can give for it is that it’s a fizzy cola-coloured, fermented drink, made out of rye malt or traditional sourdough rye bread. It’s sort of tangy and not too sweet. Technically, it’s a low alcohol form of beer without any hops; it’s sometimes flavoured with spices, raisins, or other fruits and berries. It’s a healthier drink than pop because it’s naturally fermented with living yeast, and thus rich with the B complex of vitamins. It has no preservatives, plus it’s loaded with same kind of probiotics like yogurt has, so it’s good for your immunity and digestive system as well.** I was told that traditionally in Ukraine and Russia, it’s quite often used as a hangover cure. I found it to be quite delicious. I think I'm hooked and actually prefer this stuff over Coke.

*- Ergot: a fungus that grows on rye and related cereal grasses. The spores of ergot produce toxic residues akin to lysergic acid (LSD). Poisoning from it (ergotism) results in some extreme neurological effects, including cognitive impairment, seizures, and hallucinations. There is a theory in cultural anthropology that ergot tainted bread consumed in the early years of Christianity produced "divine and mystical" experiences after the Eucharist ritual, thus attracting more "believers". In medieval Europe, the flour/meal made from grain of ergot infected rye crops, caused whole villages to be afflicted with St. Antony's Fire, and bad trips on this stuff may have unsuspectedly fueled and influenced negative perceptions and experiences of the "supernatural" which may have resulted in witchhunts and the Inquisition. Think about it: millions tortured, and killed by hanging and burning at the stake because of some snot-like organism growing on rotting kernels of grain. Fungus, yeast, mold, smut, germs, and other parasitic microbes and creatures don't get nearly enough credit for making such radical and lasting impacts on human cultural revolutions, history, and civilization in general.

**- An interesting historical note to add. In the 1800's, during the Napoleonic Wars, kvass may have been a critical key element in saving Russia from Bonaparte's armies. Napoleon's soldiers were frequently cut off from their supply lines while they were advancing toward Moscow, and were forced to drink the local untreated water in Russia which was, at that time, loaded full of water-born diseases. The Russian imperial soldiers had rations of kvass to protect them from these epidemics, and hence were healthier, and could spend more time fighting French battalions who were already starving, sick, and shitting themselves to death from cholera. One could assume that this was probably another factor that led Napolean himself to believe and conclude that, "an army marches on its stomach."