Liam's write-only LJ

Goulash, or guláš as it's called around here, is a popular local dish. But the "real thing" is made with beef, so I can't eat it.

Now, I cook quite a bit -- I normally prepare at least 1 big dish a week from fresh ingredients then eat it for a few days -- but I tend to cheat & use pre-made sauces or concentrates as a base. I've yet to find a vegetarian goulash sauce, so I Googled 4 or 5 recipes and them improvised something from all of them put together. I avoided any fake meat or meat substitutes, but I did use a sachet of guláš spice mix. I think it was mainly paprika, to be honest.
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1. Don't pick on the weak. It's immoral. Don't antagonize the strong without cause, it's stupid.

2. Don't hate women. It's a waste of time.

3. Invest in yourself. Material things come to those that have self-actualized.

4. Get in a fistfight, even if you are going to lose.

5. As a former Marine, take it from me. Don't join the military, unless you want to risk getting your balls blown off to secure other people's economic or political interests.

6. If something has a direct benefit to an individual or a class of people, and a theoretical, abstract, or amorphous benefit to everybody else, realize that the proponent's intentions are to benefit the former, not the latter, no matter what bullshit they try to feed you.

7. Don't be a Republican. They are self-dealing crooks with no sense of honor or patriotism to their fellow citizens. If you must be a Republican, don't be a 'conservative.' They are whining, bitching, complaining, simple-minded self-righteous idiots who think they're perpetual victims. Listen to talk radio for a while, you'll see what I mean.

8. Don't take proffered advice without a critical analysis. 90% of all advice is intended to benefit the proponent, not the recipient. Actually, the number is probably closer to 97%, but I don't want to come off as cynical.

9. You'll spend your entire life listening to people tell you how much you owe them. You don't owe the vast majority of people shit.

10. Don't undermine your fellow young men. Mentor the young men that come after you. Society recognizes that you have the potential to be the most powerful force in society. It scares them. Society does not find young men sympathetic. They are afraid of you, both individually and collectively. Law enforcement's primary purpose is to suppress you.

11. As a young man, you're on your own. Society divides and conquers. Unlike women who have advocates looking out for them (NOW, Women's Study Departments, government, non-profit organizations, political advocacy groups) almost no one is looking out for you.

12. Young men provide the genius and muscle by which our society thrives. Look at the Silicon Valley. By in large, it was not old men or women that created the revolution we live. Realize that society steals your contributions, secures it with our intellectual property laws, and then takes credit and the rewards where none is due.

13. Know that few people have your best interests at heart. Your mother does. Your father probably does (if he stuck around). Your siblings are on your side. Everybody else worries about themselves.

14. Don't be afraid to tell people to 'fuck off' when need be. It is an important skill to acquire. As they say, speak your piece, even if your voice shakes.

15. Acquire empathy, good interpersonal skills, and confidence. Learn to read body language and non-verbal communication. Don't just concentrate on your vocational or technical skills, or you'll find your wife fucking somebody else.

16. Keep fit.

17. Don't speak ill of your wife/girlfriend. Back her up against the world, even if she's wrong. She should know that you have her back. When she needs your help, give it. She should know that you'll take her part.

18. Don't cheat on your wife/girlfriend. If you must cheat, don't humiliate her. Don't risk having your transgressions come back to her or her friends. Don't do it where you live. Don't do it with people in your social circle. Don't shit in your own back yard.

19. If your girlfriend doesn't make you feel good about yourself and bring joy to your life, fire her. That's what girlfriends are for.

20. Don't bother with 'emotional affairs.' They are just a vehicle for women to flirt and have someone make them feel good about themselves. That's the part of a relationship they want. For you it is a lot of work and investment in time. If they are having an emotional affair with you, they're probably fucking someone else.

21. Becoming a woman's friend and confidant is not going to get you into an intimate relationship. If you haven't gotten the girl within a reasonably short period of time, chances are you won't ever get her. She'll end up confiding to you about the sexual adventures she's having with someone else.

22. Have and nurture friendships with women.

23. Realize that love is a numbers game. Guys fall in love easily. You're going to see some girl and feel like you'll die if you don't get her. If she rejects you, move on to the next one. It's her loss.

24. Don't be an Internet troll. Got out and live life. There is not a cadre of beautiful women advertising on Craigslist to have NSA sex with you. Beautiful women don't need to advertise. The websites that advertise with attractive women's photos and claims of loneliness are baloney. All they want is your money and your personal information so that they can market to you. The posts on Craigslist by young 'women' seeking NSA sex, and asking for a picture are just a bunch of gay troll pic collectors. This is especially true if the post uses common gay lexicon like 'hole' as in 'fuck my hole' or seeks 'masculine' men, or uses the word 'cock' (except in the context of 'Don't send a cock shot.') There are women on Craigslist. They are easily recognizable by their 2-5 paragraph postings. Most are in their 30's or older.

25. When you become a man in full, know that people will get in your way. People who are attracted to you will somehow manage to step in your path. Gay guys will give you 'the look.' Old people will somehow stumble in front of you at the worst time. Don't get frustrated. Just step aside and go about your business. Know that these are passive aggressive methods to get you to acknowledge their existence.

26. Don't gay-bash. Don't mentally or physically abuse people because of who they are, or how they present themselves. It's none of your business to try to intimidate people into conformity.

27. If you're gay, admit it to yourself, your parents, your friends and society at large. Be prepared to get harassed. See rule 14. If someone threatens you or assaults you, call the cops. Have them arrested. You have no obligation to self sacrifice because of who you are. As a gay person, you'll have more social freedom than straight men. Use it to protect yourself. Be prepared to get out of Dodge if your orientation makes your life unbearable. Move to San Francisco, New York, Atlanta, or New Orleans. You'll find a welcoming community there.

28. Don't be a poser. Avoid being one of those dudes who puts a surfboard on top of their car, but never surfs, or a dude with a powder coated fixed gear bike and a messenger bag, but was never a messenger. Live the life. Earn your bona fides.

29. Don't believe the crap about the patriarchy. More women are accepted and attend college. More degrees are awarded to women than men. Women outlive men. More men commit suicide. Men are twice as likely to be victims of violence, including murder. If you consider sexual assaults in prisons, twice as many men are raped as women (society thinks prison rape is funny). The streets are littered with homeless men, sprinkled with a few homeless women. Statically, women are happier than men. The myth that girls are being cheated by are educational system is belied by the fact that schools are bastions of femininity, mostly run by and taught by women. Girls outperform boys in school. It is the boys in school getting fucked over, and prescribed Ritalin for being boys. Real wages for men are falling, while real wages for women are rising. Just because someone says something enough times, doesn't make it true. You have nothing to feel guilty about.

30. Remember, 97% of all advice is worthless. Take what you can use, and trash the rest.

vicioustwist
san francisco
02-15-07

Taken from here, copyedited and cleaned-up a bit.

This is part of an email I wrote to a friend. Some of it is out of context, but there are bits of it I quite liked, so I thought I'd post it.

The friend is an English Literature graduate who has a very vague interest in science, but regards it as an amusing game and delights in stories that appear to poke holes in it, such as the faster-than-light neutrinos one. I sent him a couple of links I thought would possibly interest him - first, the Bad Astronomy blog's take on the FTL-neutrino result and then Jean Baptiste Queru's lovely little piece on the complexity of modern computing.

Read the second one first.

It's totally irrelevant, but it explains why such subjects are really hard and difficult to explain without a very VERY large amount of background knowledge.

To the point that in the modern world, there is almost no single thing that can be understood in a single lifetime. Collectively, we know so much about the world that no one human mind and brain can hold everything there is to know about, say, a grain of sand.

But if you have a little bit of the right kind of education, you know where to start, where to get a toe in a crack, and you can climb up the rock-face.

The snag is that if you don't have that specific special kind of education - if you have, say, a liberal-arts education - then you don't have that first tiny opening to put a toe into. And without that, there is no way up the wall at all. The only way is to walk away and spend several whole years doing nothing but solidly reading to educate yourself, and then you have the tiny crack and can start to climb. Several years of work to begin a climb that will take the rest of your life.

And I think that is tragic. That is why I think that pure arts education is, ultimately, a waste of time and effort. It doesn't equip you to understand the real world. It just shows you pretty pictures.

The best arts education, one that results from decades of work and a professorship or two, generally gives someone an excellent and unsurpassed understanding of the view of the other people standing on the ground. Some of them are very beautiful. It's a very nice view. It tells you what the other people standing on the ground think. It's not the real world, it's just an artificial, created thing which is not one millionth of a millionth of the mind-shattering real world.

A good understanding of the arts is something lovely and arguably well worth having, but it is to stand in a single small room admiring a handful of paintings on the walls and never to look out of the window and realise that you are in an airship, sailing along over the most astoundingly beautiful landscapes, over seas and mountains and forests and lakes and mighty cities filled with museums and universities and films and concerts - over all the knowledge and the beauty that the whole universe contains.

You seem to think that between us we could, as some sort of Socratic dialogue, write a book that would explain all of science to an arts graduate. Not so. One book, even one a thousand pages long, could not begin to provide a needle to scratch the surface of the rock-face.

You need to spend about a decade of your youth studying science to even be able to see the crack to put your toe into to start to climb the rock-face.

I gave up formally studying science nearly 25y ago. I am such a short distance up the rockface that my waist or knees are still level with your head, and I will probably never get any higher.

But from up here, I can see a view crammed with wonders and marvels that you and every other arts graduate, sitting or standing on the ground, cannot even begin to imagine. If I try to tell you, you will simply not believe me, it is so vast, so amazing, so wonderful, so beautiful.

The shortest, clearest description of a tiny part of it that I have ever seen was Carl Sagan's Cosmos TV series. It is dated but it is wonderful, as in, filled with wonders and it will fill you with wonders. But it will take you some 13 hours to watch it, and that is like peering through a pinhole for an instant at the most beautiful sight that anyone could ever see - it is an eyeblink.

It's like the Venerable Bede's famous quote:

"O King, the present life of men on earth is like the flight of a single sparrow through the hall where, in winter, you sit with your captains and ministers. Entering at one door and leaving by another, while it is inside it is untouched by the wintry storm; but this brief interval of calm is over in a moment, and it returns to the winter whence it came, vanishing from your sight."

You can watch it for free here, in lo-res Youtube glory:
Episode 1 - The Shores Of The Cosmic Ocean
Episode 2 - One Voice In The Cosmic Fugue
Episode 3 - The Harmony Of The Worlds
Episode 4 - Heaven & Hell
Episode 5 - Blues for a Red Planet
Episode 6 - Traveller's Tales
Episode 7 - The Backbone of the Night
Episode 8 - Journeys in Space & Time
Episode 9 - The Lives of the Stars
Episode 10 - The Edge of Forever
Episode 11 - The Persistence of Memory
Episode 12 - Encyclopædia Galactica
Episode 13 - Who Speaks for Earth?

I wonder if you could even spare the time - one hour of each workday evening for two weeks - to watch Cosmos right through?

The sum total of the demonstrable truths of what we can tell about the world is called "science". It isn't a thing, it's not a worldview or a state of mind or a process. It's just a very big list of facts, carefully worked out and tested.

But our modern educational system says that all this is just an alternative and that it's perfectly OK to sail through secondary school and university, choosing to completely ignore the whole thing and just learn about, say, one type of music or one type of poetry.

This is an injustice, a mistake, so vast that I can't find the words to describe it.

It is one that you can undo, but to do so will require dedicating a significant portion of the rest of your life to it.

It is not something one can acquire from a few chats in the pub and writing them down.

Meanwhile, back to the one-room art gallery in the airship for a moment.

The religious mindset is to say that the paintings in the room are the whole world and that you must completely ignore the view out of the window, that everything else you can see is all lies. It is, ultimately, nothing more than hate and fear of the truth. The different religions can't even agree on a set of paintings, but all agree that the truth is to be ignored and denied. They say that what is most important is not observation, but the magic property of belief in the images in the paintings.

I do not care how beautiful the paintings are. I do not care if the paintings offer the greatest source of reassurance against fear, that they tell one that one's life has meaning and matters and is important when one needs that feeling of safety more than ever.

No. What matters is that they deny the truth. They tell their faithful not to believe in experience, in reality, but in myths that cannot be shown to be real. They say that seeking to show them as real or not is evil, and extended all the way to the ultimate, they teach, without exception, that to test the truth is wrong and evil and that you must accept the stories instead.

To deny the view from the window, to tell people not even to look, is a hateful, wretched and evil thing, and this is why I have no respect for any faith, individual or institutionally collective.

It is a destroyer of minds and lives. I hate it and I would like to see it extirpated from the world. The real world is infinitely more beautiful and majestic and moving than any of the lies of any religion, so vastly greater than the miserable myths of ancient primitives that those "prophets" could not even begin to conceive of the greater truths they were denying. It doesn't matter if they thought they were gaining power and prestige or if they really thought they were saving some alleged magical parts of the people they ordered around.

The truth will make you free, and the only way to tell if something is true is to test it. Don't take people's word for it. Ask for the evidence. If it's real, they will happily oblige. If they don't - if they say, no, read this book, listen to this man's words, THIS is the REAL truth, this is all you need - then they are fakers and liars. It's really simple.

If I have been a bit quiet on here this month, it's because someone has been paying me to write, which always makes a pleasant change. I spent last week in-house at The Register, one of the UK's top IT news sites, famed for its sarcastic irreverence.

I did mention this on The Other LJ and I've plugged each piece on Twitter and Facebook, but if you don't read such things, you can get a quick list of the articles - nine last week and one from last year - right here.

Enjoy.

There's some techie ramblings about accessibility, customisabilty and a fairly serious crappy experience from the Apple Store over in The Other LJ, if you don't follow it but might be interested.

Just had to dig this out for a mate of mine and thought I'd share it.

One of my favourite webcomics from what were (for me) the early days, around 2000-2002.

Flem Comics: the site that brought you the immortal Hank, The Dancing Abortion.

Specifically, Flem on Mormon-hunting:


(From http://www.flemcomics.com/d/20020108.html)
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How I Met My Wife

It had been a rough day, so when I walked into the party I was very chalant, despite my efforts to appear gruntled and consolate. I was furling my wieldy umbrella for the coat check when I saw her standing alone in a corner. She was a descript person, a woman in a state of total array. Her hair was kempt, her clothing shevelled, and she moved in a gainly way. I wanted desperately to meet her, but I knew I'd have to make bones about it, since I was travelling cognito. Beknownst to me, the hostess, whom I could see both hide and hair of, was very proper, so it would be skin off my nose if anything bad happened. And even though I had only swerving loyalty to her, my manners couldn't be peccable. Only toward and heard-of behavior would do. Fortunately, the embarrassment that my maculate appearance might cause was evitable. There were two ways about it, but the chances that someone as flappable as I would be ept enough to become persona grata or sung hero were slim. I was, after all, something to sneeze at, someone you could easily hold a candle to, someone who usually aroused bridled passion. So I decided not to rush it. But then, all at once, for some apparent reason, she looked in my direction and smiled in a way that I could make heads or tails of. So, after a terminable delay, I acted with mitigated gall and made my way through the ruly crowd with strong givings. Nevertheless, since this was all new hat to me and I had no time to prepare a promptu speech, I was petuous. She responded well, and I was mayed that she considered me a savory char- acter who was up to some good. She told me who she was. "What a perfect nomer," I said, advertently. The conversation became more and more choate, and we spoke at length to much avail. But I was defatigable, so I had to leave at a godly hour. I asked if she wanted to come with me. To my delight, she was committal. We left the party together and have been together ever since. I have given her my love, and she has requited it.

- Jack Winter, Shouts & Murmurs

---

A Very Descript Man

I am such a dolent man,
I eptly work each day;
My acts are all becilic,
I've just ane things to say.

My nerves are strung, my hair is kempt,
I'm gusting and I'm span:
I look with dain on everyone
And am a pudent man.

I travel cognito and make
A delible impression:
I overcome a slight chalance,
With gruntled self-possession.

My dignation would be great
If I should digent be:
I trust my vagance will bring
An astrous life for me.

- J H Parker

---

Both from the A Word A Day newsletter

Not Always Right

A brief example:

Me: “**** Library, how can I help you?”

Caller: “Yes, I have some books that are due tomorrow, but I need to keep them longer.”

Me: “Okay, ma’am. I’ll need your name so I can renew the books.”

Caller: *scandalized* “You need my what?”

Me: “Your name, ma’am. So I can call up your account on my computer.”

Caller: “You have my account?! How did you get that? Do you have my Social Security number?”

Me: “No, ma’am. I mean your library account. When you came in to get your library card, you filled out a form with your name, address, phone number, and email, so that we can contact you if you ever have overdue books. We don’t have your social security number.”

Caller: “Well, I’m not giving out my name to a complete stranger over the phone!”

Me: “Okay, ma’am. Perhaps you could give me the titles of the books?”

Caller: “Why do you need to know what I’m reading?! The books are due tomorrow! Just renew them!”

Me: “I’m sorry, ma’am, but there’s no way I can look up books by the due date. Without your name or the titles of the books, I can’t help you.”

Caller: “You’re trying to steal my identity! I’m calling the cops.”

Me: *giving up* “You do that, ma’am.” *hangs up*

Co-worker: “You should have told her we put cameras in the books.”

You have two cows.

John Paulson borrows one cow so he can sell it for $100. He gives you $10 as collateral.

You buy your neighbors cow for $100, which you finance by taking out a $90 loan from the bank and use John's $10 to make up the rest.

You brag to everyone about your financial health. You have assets--two cows you own, plus one Paulson owes you--worth $300, and liabilities of just $100.

A third of the country goes vegetarian.

You thought your two cows were worth $200 and now they are worth $140.

You express confidence in your financial health. Your assets are now worth only $200--your two cows plus the one John owes you--but your liabilities are still only $100. If necessary, you could sell the assets at this distressed price and pay off all your loans.

You hold onto your cows because you are sure the market is "dislocated." Some day someone will want to eat beef again.

The rest of the country goes vegetarian. Your two cows are now worth $2 each to guys who want to make dog food.

John Paulson buys a cow in the market for $2 and he gives it to you as repayment of the loan. You now have three cows worth six bucks.

John wants his $10 back.

The bank calls. It wants its $90 back.

You call the Federal Reserve and ask for a bailout.

Nicked from here.

Read from the bottom upwards...

Graham Linehan (Glinner)
By 'pick up', I mean 'collect'.
about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck

Jon Ronson (jonronson)
Got picked up. Was grumpy. Feel contrite.
about 2 hours ago from mobile web

Graham Linehan (Glinner)
Right, off to pick up a frazzled, partied-out three year old.
about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck