Nancy and Jane

Voodoo Doughnut

Nancy and Jane, childhood friends of the boss, arrived in Portland Monday after a week-long cruise down the Columbia River from Lewiston, Idaho. We picked up Jane at her hotel near the airport and headed into town. We stopped at Voodoo Doughnut, the east side location, and then went down to Powell's City of Books in downtown Portland. 

I picked out a couple of science fiction novels, Nemesis by Isaac Asimov and Shipbreaker by Paolo Bacigalupi. I haven't read anything by Asimov in like a zillion years. I read pretty much all of his stuff when I was younger. Nemesis interests me because it involves a large self-contained spaceship with a population of people that has gone to a nearby star. There's all kinds of technical problems with making that kind of voyage but technicians can figure that kind of thing out. The part that's a complete mystery to me is how are you going to get a group of people to live in a confined space for an indefinitely long time without killing each other or going crazy. Is it possible? Anyway we'll see how Isaac sorts it out. Maybe I'll learn something. 

I read another of Bacigalupi's books a while back, The Windup Girl, and it was pretty great. As I recall it involved a girl with some kind of cybernetic-biomechanical enhancements that gave her, I don't know, high-speed ability or something, but it was problematic because if she used it very much she would overheat and she was already living in the tropics so staying cool was already a problem. Seems to me there was also a big shop that employed elephants turning big turnstiles or something. I also remember there being the remains of giant animals like skeletons or exoskeletons that were part of the landscape. 

Since I found these two books and the girls weren't done browsing I headed down to the coffee shop and got myself a $4 cup of coffee in a ceramic cup. The coffee shop used to be run by Powell's but they've turned it over to some other outfit and now the coffee shop area is for coffee shop customers only. It's okay, I can afford $4 for a cup of coffee. I walked over to the corner of the room to find a seat. 

There's a bench against the wall and some small two-person tables in front of the bench and then chairs facing the opposite side of the tables. I picked out a place to sit and at first I was going to sit with my back to the window looking back at the room which is kind of my go-to orientation but then I thought, you know, I'd like to watch what's going on outside. I have a good view here and it's raining outside and inside it's nice and dry so I sat at the other side of the table and then I thought this is the kind of position somebody doing, you know, surveillance would choose. 'Oh look there's a man's in a coffee shop looking out the window. Is he looking at anything in particular? No, he's just in the coffee shop looking out the window.' But a person with a suspicious turn of mind would wonder what he's watching. Is he watching that building across the street waiting for the bad guys to show up? But if they saw me hesitate when I sat down they might think well no he's not looking for anything he's just looking out the window. On the other hand someone might think that would be deliberate ruse to make you think that he's not doing surveillance, he's just looking out the window. You could argue either way.

The girls wanted to do some shopping so we headed over to Northwest 23rd. I took a nap in the car. While I am dozing there, a little box appeared in my vision. It was just big enough for two or three letters. They looked like letters that were printed in the books I had been reading. The letters were sliding by, right to left, too fast for me to make out if they were actually words or not. I was a little short of sleep, which is why I was napping, but in any case it was very strange.

We had lunch at Fireside. I got a cheeseburger, it was delicious. 

On my way there (two blocks from the car) I was accosted by two people asking for spare change and passed one guy, flailing his arms, gyrating and cursing loudly, next to another guy curled up in a ball by the wall. Just typical downtown Portland. I had to use the restroom several times while we were out and about. Three of those restrooms required a passcode to unlock the door. The only one that didn't was the one at IKEA, which is its own little empire.

Note - I originally dictated this to my phone and when I said 'deliberate ruse', the phone transcribed it as 'deliberate rouse'. Now when I am editing this for the blog I saw the word rouse is wrong but I couldn't think of what the right word was, so I asked Webster for synonyms for deceive and it did not list ruse. Took me a while, but I eventually remembered ruse.

Word of the Day

fissiparous refers to the tendency or quality of breaking, splitting, or dividing into smaller parts, groups, or factions. Derived from biology (where single-celled organisms reproduce by splitting into two), the term is primarily used today to describe political, social, or organizational splintering.

Came across this word in a Jamestown story about Moscow and Muslims.

King Crab

My niece with king crab

From Wikipedia:

King crabs or stone crabs . . . are found chiefly in deep waters and are adapted to cold environments. They are composed of two subfamilies: Lithodinae, which tend to inhabit deep waters, are globally distributed, and comprise the majority of the family's species diversity; and Hapalogastrinae, which are endemic to the North Pacific and inhabit exclusively shallow waters. 

King crabs superficially resemble true crabs but are generally understood to be closest to the pagurid hermit crabs. This placement of king crabs among the hermit crabs is supported by several anatomical peculiarities which are present only in king crabs and hermit crabs, making them a prominent example of carcinisation among decapods. Several species of king crabs, especially in Alaskan and southern South American waters, are targeted by commercial fisheries and have been subject to overfishing.

I liked this explanation of carcinisation:

Carcinisation is a form of convergent evolution in which non-crab crustaceans evolve a crab-like body plan. The term was introduced into evolutionary biology by Lancelot Alexander Borradaile, who described it in 1916 as "the many attempts of Nature to evolve a crab"

Overfishing can be a problem. From Google:

Alaska's commercial king crab harvest for the 2025/2026 season has a Total Allowable Catch (TAC) of 2.68 million pounds for Bristol Bay red king crab. For the Aleutian Islands golden king crab, the total quota is set at 4.19 million pounds.

Hostage - Netflix Series

Suranne Jones as UK Prime Minister Abigail Dalton (left)
Julie Delpy as French President Vivienne Toussaint (right)

We watched two episodes before we bailed. It was just awful. Seems like the shows creators wanted to show how people react to a horrific situation, but the situation they constructed to enable this was put together by a two year old. With a little more intelligence they might have been able to make something of it, but, I dunno, were they stupid? Or lazy? Or just didn't care. I don't care.

Did cause me to realize that there are two French colonies with near identical names. French Guiana is in South America and French Guinea is, or was, in Africa. French Guinea is now just Guinea. Problem, for me anyway, is that they sound almost alike. Guiana is pronounced gee-ana, and the African one is pronounced ginny.

Word of the Day

Orwell's crimestop - In George Orwell’s 1984, crimestop is a Newspeak term defined as the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It is a form of protective stupidity or self-censorship, allowing citizens to avoid thoughtcrime (thoughtcontrol) by automatically halting independent, critical, or rebellious thoughts before they fully form.

Ran into this word, crimestop, in an excellent post on Yard Sale of the Mind about Darwin, survival, tribe membership and politics.

Word of the Day

Sam Houston - Mathew Brady, c. 1848–1850

Uxorious - Uxorious (/ʌkˈsɔːriəs/) describes a husband excessively fond of, doting upon, or submissively devoted to his wife. Often used with a negative connotation, it implies a man is foolishly submissive or "controlled". 

JMSmith uses it to describe General Sam Houston, hero of San Jacinto, in a post about baptism.

The City Who Fought - Anne McCaffrey & S. M. Stirling

The City Who Fought - Anne McCaffrey & S. M. Stirling

Goodreads

Google summary:

. . . a 1993 science fiction novel, part of the "Brainships" series, about a "shellperson" (a disembodied brain) named Simeon who runs a space station and must use his hobby of wargaming to defend it and refugees from brutal pirates. The story follows Simeon and his new, strong-willed human partner, Channa Hap, as they work together to save the station and its inhabitants from the invading Kolnari.

Not the greatest book, but the exploration of the psychological aspects of the characters in the middle section was pretty good. There is a weak attempt at fitting Faster-Than-Light (FTL) travel with local space travel, but why do you need cold-sleep if you have FTL? Yeah, and when you start looking at tactics, you really need details on how this flavor of FTL works, and that is pretty much completely missing. Never mind, all the important characters and important action are going on on the space station.

Some items that caught my eye:

Page 164 paragraph 3 new-to-me word: sicatooth - "... and I want you to start pulling together those tasty goods we're going to use to tempt the ... sicatooth ." Google can't find it. I suspect it means something like a wolf-like attacker, a pirate, for instance.

Page 184 new-to-me word: antiphonally - in a manner characterized by the alternation of musical parts in a responsive manner between two groups of singers or musicians

Page 184 also a sex scene without using any sexual terms. Clever.

Page 202 paragraph 6 - a new-to-me term: stranger'n - contraction of 'stranger than' I expect.

Page 203 paragraph 9 - new-to-me word: chatelaine - the mistress of a household or of a large establishment

Page 234 "lost her rag" - all the good people say it means she has lost her temper, but I like this explanation I found on English Language & Usage Stack Exchange

Men have always dismissed women who have lost their temper as losing their rags meaning they were only in a bad mood/short tempered because of their period.

Page 237 paragraph 3 - Another unknown word: precocity - it is just the noun version of the adjective 'precocious' which means 'exceptionally early in development or occurrence'.

Page 249 paragraph 10 - In the last sentence we get some clever invented slang from Joat, a renegade girl, describing crawling around in the station's maintenance access tunnels:  "Some of the places pinch grudly but they're in-able if you're sveltsome."

Page 276 paragraph 2 - Hebrides Suite. Hmm, there is The Hebrides, a concert overture that was composed by Felix Mendelssohn in 1830, but there is also Clare Grundman's Hebrides Suite (1962), a popular four-movement concert band work based on Scottish folk songs from the Hebrides Islands. 

Page 276 last paragraph - whipped Jersey - Jersey cow cream is so rich that you can thicken it with a few good shakes (as used on an Irish Coffee), and whip it in no time at all. - Foodie Pilgrim

Page 287 and Page 288 fragments of three poems

• Ode to Duty By William Wordsworth
• Ode on Solitude By Alexander Pope
• The Waste Places by James Stephens

Page 293 paragraph 8 - Carmina Burana could be a medieval collection of poetry or it might be the a cantata composed in 1935 and 1936 by Carl Orff. Video. Includes O Fortuna. I suspect the cantata is the correct one here.

Page 313 top, fragment of a poem - The Quest by Rudyard Kipling

Quote of the Day

Jefferson High School

Portland is talking about what to do about Jefferson High School. Last week's story stirred up people enough to write letters to the editor, which Willamette Week dutifully published. I like this one from Janice Archer:

Way to bury the lede, Oregon Journalism Project [“Schooled by Mississippi,” Dec. 10]! Mississippi fourth grade reading scores are best in the nation because any student not reading at a fourth grade reading level is held back for another year of third grade! (As mentioned in paragraph 24.) If all states did that, wouldn’t we all score 100%? And their eighth grade reading scores aren’t so hot. How do their eighth grade scores compare with ours?

Nothing wrong with phonics. And, by the way, what system, or systems, of reading instruction do Oregon schools use? If we’re going to praise and shame, let’s take a statistics class and compare like to like, not apples to rhinoceroses. 

P. S. Blogger doesn't like 'lede' but Google assures me it's just fine.

Dullbozer

Bulldozer

Curious tale of the origin of the word:

The Shrouded, Sinister History Of The Bulldozer by Joe Zadeh

According to an 1881 obituary in a Louisiana newspaper, the word “bulldozer” was coined by a German immigrant named Louis Albert Wagner, who later committed suicide by taking a hefty dose of opium dissolved in alcohol. Little else is recorded about Wagner, but his term became a viral sensation in late 1800s America, going from street slang to dictionary entry in just one year. It likely originated from a shortening of “bullwhip,” the braided tool used to intimidate and control cattle, combined with “dose,” as in quantity, with a “z” thrown in for good measure. To bulldoze was to unleash a dose of coercive violence.

If, like gods, we aspire to create machines in our own image, then it’s fitting that the original bulldozers were humans. Leading up to the corrupted U.S. election of 1876, as the Southern states were being reconstructed following the Civil War, terrorist gangs of predominantly white Democrats roamed about, threatening or attacking Black men who they thought might vote for the Republican Party. The men were the bulldozers, and the acts they carried out were bulldozing.

The story goes on to tell of some of the crimes committed and the eventual application of the word to the machine.

Title was coined by one of my kids many moons ago.

Via Bayou Renaissance Man

Quote of the Day

When religion and politics travel in the same cart, the riders believe nothing can stand in their way. Their movements become headlong - faster and faster and faster. They put aside all thoughts of obstacles and forget the precipice does not show itself to the man in a blind rush until it's too late. - Frank Herbert, Dune

Zugzwang

Chess

Word of the day: Zugzwang 

Zugzwang is a situation in games like chess where a player is forced to make a move that harms their position, because they cannot pass their turn. This German term, meaning "compulsion to move," is often seen in the endgame, but can occur in any phase of the game. The disadvantage comes from the fact that having to move is worse than being able to skip a turn. - Google

From Vladimir Putin’s Philosophy of Complexity by Alexander Shchipkov

Funny Quote of the Day

Nigerian Foreign Minister Yusuf Tuggar. ©  Christian Marquardt/Getty Images

From RT: 

The country’s foreign minister has said religious persecution is “impossible,” given constitutional guarantees on freedom of faith - Nigerian Foreign Minister Yusuf Tuggar

Bullshit

John Maier has an amusing post on UnHerd. He opens with this:

Twenty years ago this year, the philosopher Harry Frankfurt published his influential book On Bullshit. According to Frankfurt, the bullshitter, a well-known social menace, is an individual who, unlike the liar, holds forth with complete indifference as to whether he is speaking truly or falsely. He just speaks: in a manner recklessly detached from the facts. As other philosophers quickly noticed, however, bullshit is a diverse category, one with many prototypes. In his own contribution to the blossoming field of bullshit studies, the Oxford philosopher G.A. Cohen suggested that much 20th-century French critical theory should be thought of as a different species of bullshit in virtue of its “unclarifiable unclarity”. David Graeber famously speculated that, within the modern economy, entire professions and activities constituted a kind of “bullshit”. If these manifestations of bullshit have anything in common it is perhaps that in each some clearly functional ideal — truthful communication, clear writing, meaningful employment — is flagrantly undermined, while the appearance that it isn’t is deceptively sustained.

He goes on at some length. I didn't read it all. This paragraph was enough for me.

 

Quote of the Day

Roubo Workbench

Did you know, things in the real world are not like the internet? Shocking but true! - Adaptive Curmudgeon

The picture is here because Curmudgeon mentions the Roubo Workbench and I had never heard of it.

Quote of the Day

Rachel Marsden is talking about Britain's immigrant problem and their solution:

Why the U-turn? Maybe it has something to do with Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party currently polling at 35% – a record 15-point lead over Starmer’s Labour. Self-preservation always trumps virtue signaling. 

And nothing shifts a politician’s priorities like the sound of voters measuring you for a political coffin.

 

Curses

My open letter to Cadillac
Jerry Wayne Live

Give 'em heck Jerry.

Pics

Reuben

New mural by Banksy

MIKOYAN MiG-27 Bahadur

Indian on the King Cruise 2025 at Louwman's, Raamsdonksveer

1978 Mom walking with her family in Salisbury, Rhodesia, carrying an Uzi

Heat

Electric bill in the south
Jerry Wayne Live

I know of what he speaks. It got up to 95 here today, and yes, we turned the AC on. Truth be told, 95 here feels a tad warm, but it sure ain't like Houston. I spent a couple years there and I have no desire to go back. Also spent a couple of years in Arizona where it gets frying pan hot, but you don't melt like you do in Houston. My oldest son was born in July in Phoenix and Grandma came to visit. We had the AC cranked on to keep mama cool. Grandma cooks up a storm in the all electric kitchen and I got a $400 electric bill, back in 1990. That's like what, $4,000 now? Suffice it to say I was not able to rhapsodize about it like Jerry Wayne here.

Note - I was almost able to spell rhapsodize without looking it up. Forgot the h. Surprised myself, since I don't think I have ever used that word before, at least not on this here blog.

Via Bustednuckles

Guns by Oldsmobile

Oldsmobile P-38 Poster

Click the image to embiggenate and read the prose for a look into the different mindset that prevailed during WW2.

CederQ posted a similar poster on Gunday Monday, XCVIII, but the text was illegible. Google found this very similar poster in a PDF file on the P-38 Association website.

Is the Pope Catholic?

The Return of the Prodigal Son - Rembrandt

Just so you know where I am coming from, I'll tell you that I am nominally a Christian, but I'm not Catholic. I do follow a couple of Catholic bloggers, mostly because they write good posts. Anyway, I came across this post by Prof. Dr. Kai-Alexander Schlevogt on RT today and it is pretty amazing. I'm very short on sleep today, so most of what passes for news holds no interest, but the way this guy writes just sucked me in. I read about half of it before my eyes failed me. He uses some fancy words, but Google is at your beck and call, so just ask for an explanation.