Talk me some Knowledge
We took the train into London for a guitar gig tonight, which was nice. We treated ourselves to a cab from Victoria Station, which was very nice. A cab here is an expensive treat.
The black cabs of London are famous. Only licensed black cabs (which aren’t always black, but are always blocky square things — notably Fairways) may legally pick up passengers in the street in London (notice boards encourage you to narc on cheaters). And getting a license here is more difficult than in any other city in the world. Drivers are required to have an intimate familiarity with roads throughout the city and be able to route around traffic hotspots on the fly. This is called The Knowledge. Google it! A driver will typically study for several years before he first attempts the oral exam, and it usually takes it a dozen tries before he aces it.
The Knowledge has been a requirement since the hackney cabs of the middle 19th Century. Seems a little superfluous in the GPS era, but the cabs are clean spacious and have cool stuff like TVs and credit card swiper dinguses. And, traditionally, talkative drivers. Ours chattered through an intercom at us about the difficulty of making a living where rich people prefer their own drivers. London is a real class envy sort of town.
No, the Colgate ad is not a Photoshop job.
Anyhoo, it’s almost 2 in the am here and I’m on the sleepy side of a bottle of fizz. Still haven’t got the wifi going. Tomorrow we head for the coast, so now for a sammich and bed and better luck with that tomorrow.
May 16, 2007 — 7:57 pm
Comments: 11
Incoming!
Hi! It’s me! Unless things have changed, Logan airport charges for wifi access, so I wrote this Saturday and I’m timeshifting it forward. WordPress software has this neat feature where you can publish a post with a future date and it won’t appear until the timestamp is good. I don’t use it much; it isn’t often I have anything prepared ahead of time.
I’ve thought about using this function to play a cruel trick on myself. Like future post, “you people suck and my phone number is 401-331-XXXX!!!” to go live at, say, three in the morning. Then stumble off to bed drunkenly and see if my paranoia is sufficient to wake me out of a comfortable stupor in time to stop it. I guess this is what happens when you have sadistic and masochistic tendencies: you are amused at the idea of pwning yourself.
Anyhoo, I thought it would be cool to date this for 9am Tuesday, when my plane is supposed to take off. Then if we have engine trouble and go down in Boston Harbor, y’all can be, like, “oh my god! Stoaty’s last post ever appeared at the very moment the plane went down!”
If I survive, catch you tomorrow from Londinium. If not, feel free to phone in to the networks and claim to be my best friends ever. Somebody might as well enjoy my screaming arc of death.
May 15, 2007 — 9:00 am
Comments: 22
Londinium or bust
What does the “or bust” construction mean, exactly? “If I do not reach my intended destination, I will physically explode in some way”? I don’t know. I’ve never known. Forget I said it.
I had hoped work would be a leisurely stretch before my holiday, but some stupid piece of shit job blew up in my face this morning and I chased it the rest of the day. Oh, well. A quick note before I retire, then.
Most Boston-to-London flights are overnighters, arriving right in the teeth of the London morning commute. That sort of flight is easier to catch on the Boston end, but hell on the London end. I don’t sleep well on planes; I showed up punchy and fizzy and spent the whole first day hoping that more than usually tactless things don’t come out of my mouth. Tactlessness is, as you might imagine, a problem for me.
Finally, we found a flight that leaves in the morning and arrives at Heathrow around nine at night. Perfect — just enough time to drive home, settle in, drink a bottle of fizz, eat a meal (toad in the hole. My favorite!) and fall into a deep, weaselicious dream.
But the Boston end? Not so nice.
Still, I prefer to front-load my pain. Who was it said that drunkenness would be moral if you could endure the hangover first? It wasn’t me, but I fundamentally agree: payment first. Then pleasure.
My flight leaves at nine. Not bad. But I have to get a bus to the airport, per their schedule. And I have to get a cab to the bus. And the cab company won’t let me pre-book because it’s a short trip, but they won’t guarantee me a cab because I don’t pre-book. (Yes, I have friends. I wouldn’t dream of waking them in the wee hours to drive me, which is partly why they’re still my friends. Despite that whole tactlessness thing).
So here’s how it goes down: alarm goes off at three in the morning. I get dressed, pack my toothbrush and call a cab for 4:30. The cats begin acting especially cute but very sad, the knowing little bastards, so me and my luggage move out onto the lawn to wait. The cab is late. It is always late. They didn’t take my number, so there’s no way I can know if the cabby is lost and I’m screwed. This is — this ALWAYS is — the low point of the day. I treat myself to a dram of stomach acid. And possibly half a milligram of Xanax.
The cab arrives and drives the short hop to the bus station. (A cab ride all the way in to Logan would add several hundred bucks to the round trip. I could do it, but it would hurt). The bus station is dark. There’s usually a moon. And a pair of young lovers, or a very old lady, or scruffy college students, or all of these things waiting for the Logan bus. It feels poetical. I miss my stupid cats.
The bus ride into Boston is dark but sparkly. I feel like That Girl. I take a lot of artsy, blurry photos out the window. The line at the ticket counter…well, this isn’t Christmas, so maybe not so bad this time. I’m starting to enjoy myself, but I miss my stupid cats.
I saunter around the Gate 33 area. Have a nasty cup of Starbucks airport blend. Borrow a cup of electricity from Massport to charge up all my shit, if I can find an empty outlet. Start to get excited. Miss stupid cats.
The flight East is magic: you fly into the planet’s rotation. The flight is six hours, but the clock says twelve. So the whole day is compressed into cartoon time. They feed us a lot; keeps us quiet. So we go from the rosy fingers of dawn to the scarlet imprint of twilight in less time than it takes to work the morning shift.
Get me! I’m a jet setter!
Miss my stupid cats already.
This is going to be great!
May 14, 2007 — 6:45 pm
Comments: 7
Friday, May 11
Next week, Weasel goes back to Angle-land for a couple of weeks. But it’s okay. They have the Internet there now. You know, that thing is getting to be like…some kind of … international network or something.
May 11, 2007 — 4:31 pm
Comments: 23
Number three
Hey, check it out. I drove in behind Number Three this morning. In fact, I nearly drove right up Number Three’s backside trying to snap this picture. Cadillac deVille. Living well on my dime. I wonder who it is? I suppose Number One is the governor, and Number Two is the lieutenant governor, so Number Three is…the governor’s best friend? The head of the Registry of Motor Vehicles? Boy, I bet this guy can blow through all the red lights he likes.
— 7:17 am
Comments: 11
http://www.carboncreditkillers.com/
The commenter Entropy posted this OT gem in a thread over at Ace’s, and it totally deserves a thread of its own, so here goes. Looks like they’ve registered both CarbonDeductions.com and CarbonCreditKillers.com. Wouldn’t want anyone horning in on the lucrative carbon credit nullifying market, I reckon.
Why We Do It
The reason we sell Carbon Debits is simple – we want to take away the pathetic excuse of Carbon Credits from those liberals who hide their shame filled lives behind money-bought lunacy. Carbon Credits are simply a way for the rich (Al Gore) to continue to hypocritically live lives that look nothing like what they try to enforce on everyone else in society. We want to take away those excuses.
Our goal is to completely wipe out every Carbon Credit ever bought by selling their nullifying opposite – the Carbon Debit. The guilt and shame that caused people to buy Carbon Credits in the first place will be placed back on them as we let them know that their actions caused us to nullify their credits. They are the cause of us killing trees; they need to face up to their guilt.
This message is important for one reason – Far Left Liberals are lunatics that operate solely on shame of themselves, their success, their country, and their wealth. It is time to expose their ideas and self-defeating idiocy – and selling Carbon Debits is the best way to do that.
Oh, man. I’m in.
— 7:03 am
Comments: 2
‘Tard offsets
Lest anyone think I throw around the “R” word with unduly casual alacrity, I beg exception under the universal “you’re allowed to make fun of your own” rule. See, I rode the short bus for three years.
Ha ha! You guys are minions of a Special Needs Weasel!
Here’s how it went down. After several years of precocious juvenile delinquency, I earned myself a trip to boarding school. It wasn’t military school; more of a finishing school for wayward dumbasses. I put up with about six weeks of that before I went AWOL. Idiots. I was an habitual rule breaker. What made them think the cure for that was more and tougher rules?
After The Man caught up with me and sent me home, no-one was quite sure what to do with me. The term was well under way at respectable schools, and I wasn’t exactly respectable school material at that point in my career. It was the early seventies, and society was just beginning to recast eternal human conditions such as “obnoxious” and “stupid” as mental disorders, thereby tapping into rich sources of federal funding. “Special schools” of dubious legitimacy were springing up all over. I got sent to an extra-specially dubious one for evaluation.
After three days of tests, I was declared sooper genius level in English, a year behind my grade level in math and an apparent congenital sufferer of “minimal cerebral dysfunction.” I always thought that was a wastebasket diagnosis for “something bad wrong, but we don’t know what.” But I recently mentioned it in conversation to a friend who’s a psych nurse, and she was like, “Oh, no…that’s what they originally called ADD.”
And I’m like, “Get! Out! ADD?! Moi?! I’m the least ADD person I know. I can amuse myself for hours staring at a particularly interesting maple leaf.”
And she’s like, “oh, ADD isn’t just hyperactive. It also covers daydreamers and chronic procrastinators.”
And I’m like, “Oh.”
So there you have it. Fair cop. I went to ‘Tard Academy for three years. It was actually pretty sweet. I did a lot of sitting in the corner with a text book. For some classes, they clustered a varying number of us of roughly similar intellectual level. It amounted to tutoring, pretty much. For meals and recess, we were all mixed together. That was the most painful part; getting my ass handed to me at kickball by people who had difficulty speaking in complete sentences and adding small sums.
I don’t think there were ever more than twenty of us, and no two with exactly the same label. The intellectual range was from above average to quite low, but nobody was snobby about it and we looked after each other pretty well. It was, all in all, not a bad memory.
And, as a result of the experience, I own the word “retarded” and its charming contemporary contractions “retard” and “tard”. I bought and paid for them.
The last three years I spent in a regular High School; decent GPA, aced my SAT’s. No harm, no foul. And the best part is telling tales around my family. All my stories start with, “when I was in Retarded School…”
My parents flinch and cry out, “Oh, you were not!”
Oh, but I was.
May 10, 2007 — 5:45 pm
Comments: 18
Notable by its absinthe
Hey, somebody in New York worked out how to make a street legal absinthe. Per their website (warning: tinkly piano music) they expect to ship the first bottles to New York City and the Hamptons at the end of this month.
Absinthe is made with wormwood, one constituent of which — thujone — is what makes the drink illegal in the US. Thujone is a GABA receptor antagonist; it causes convulsions at high levels and is regulated in most places. Absinthe with thujone levels below 10 parts per million is still legal in many European countries, and is imported pretty freely. This new manufacturer made absinthe per several 19th Century recipes and discovered that the thujone levels in the traditional article were really quite small. Once eliminated entirely the FDA permitted them to go ahead.
A lot of crap is talked about absinthe in general, and thujone in particular. The latter has roughly the molecular shape of THC and was thought to act similarly. It does not. Absinthe is supposed to cause drunkenness with clarity; visual saturation; hallucinations, even. I always heard it burnt out your optic nerves and you went bliiind. As near as I can tell, it’s all booollshit. Absinthe was just the Reefer Madness of la Belle Epoch.
I had to have some. I bought a big pyramidal bottle of the stuff for stupid money in England one year. I was like, “get me! I’m the world’s tallest Toulouse-Lautrec!”
The absinthe ritual is very particular: an ounce of vile green liqueur is poured into a glass. A slotted spoon is balanced across the top of the glass with a sugar cube poised in the middle. Slowly, drop by drop, ice water is dripped over the sugarcube and into the glass until the contents go from green to swirly, opalescent white.
Screw that. It’s just liquor and sugarwater. I drank mine on the rocks.
Despite having ingested my fair share of illicit chemicals, I have the same reaction every time. The moment I swallow, it’s like, “Oh my god you stupid fucking monkey, what have you done? It’s inside you now!!!”
After a couple of ounces, I thought, “Heyyyy…I know this sensation. It’s…alcohol!”
Feels like booze, looks like mouthwash, tastes like licorice. Jesus, how I hate licorice.
Further reading: the Virtual Absinthe Museum is fun. Apparently, old bottles of pre-ban absinthe are forever turning up in Europe, and they will sell you an ounce or two. They don’t tell you what it costs, which tells you what it costs. These people are good, too. They run another pricetag free site that sells nothing but bottles of assorted hooch older than fifty years.
May 9, 2007 — 5:09 am
Comments: 11
Stupid capitalist tricks
My fridge light blew awhile back. After spending days opening the refrigerator and thinking “<gasp!> The fridge is dead!” I finally got around to buying a new bulb today.
Either the profit margin on these things is very small, or GE is just messing with me. The smallest number of bulbs you can buy is two. They also sold a four pack.
Let’s see. This fridge is about ten years old, and this is my first bulb replacement. Yes, I’m sure a decade from now when the next one goes, I’ll know right where I put that spare. Especially if I put it in a drawer I use a lot and bat it out of my way for ten years.
May 8, 2007 — 4:37 pm
Comments: 17
Elderly Aussies build clandestine drug labs
They’re making Nembutal for euthanasia purposes.
Nembutal is a venerable barbiturate with a variety of uses, from sleeping aid to seizure control. It’s used to euthanize animals. Also people in Australia until ten years ago when, I gather, their assisted suicide law was struck off the books.
That latter fact is significant here, I suspect. Per the article, twenty Aussies chipped in $2,000 each and spent two years of painful trial and error learning to make the stuff. They have plans for four labs. They name the people involved and the location of the proposed labs. Why, after all this toil and sweat, would you nark your operation out the moment you achieve your goal? It smells of publicity stunt.
And that’s a shame. Because this is a significant conversation the West needs to have with itself, and we need to do it without posturing, bullshit or book burnings.
When I was younger, I was strongly pro-euthanasia. It was entirely selfish. I am a coward. I wanted to be sure there would be an easy way out if I ever needed it. Something that didn’t involve leaving behind a really icky tableau for somebody else to clean up. I still think the only moral dimension to self-murder is the mess you leave behind. If you don’t have ultimate ownership of your own life, what rights can you possibly have?
But I have changed my thinking about what constitutes a life worth living. I don’t have much experience of death, thank the whatevers, but I have seen a little. More than once, I have watched, amazed, as someone turned and fought keenly to hold onto a life I would have thought nothing but misery. My faith in the welcomeness of death has been somewhat shaken.
I once thought the only moral delimma surrounding euthanasia would be crafting the law controlling how we choose death for someone else. You know, “yeah, oh sure…Grandma always said she’d rather die than be an inconvenience. Trust me.” But there’s something else in this article that’s a real craw-sticker.
One of the illegal manufacturers, Bron Norman, said the drug should be available for those who wish to commit suicide when they have outlived their useful life.
Useful life. I fucking hate that expression, and not merely because I am, personally, useless. It’s like “giving back to the community” — it implies that a human being is a net negative until he proves otherwise. I cannot tell you how violently offensive and wrong I think this idea is. I’m an atheist; I’m not arguing from some traditional notion of what a God thinks life is worth. It’s entirely possible to develop a belief in human exceptionalism entirely by way of being one and observing others.
I might even go so far as to measure the worth of a society by how it treats its useless. Haven’t we dug up Neanderthals who were clearly so crippled they were in the care of others for years?
If we’re developing a climate in which people are encouraged to value their lives by the contribution they make, then I don’t think we’re ready for legalized euthanasia. We’ll have to wait until we level up to Neanderthals.
— 12:07 pm
Comments: 23