(We aren’t dead, or even brains that wouldn’t die. But we are doing science and we’re still alive.)

Oh well. I wouldn’t want to share heaven with a bunch of arachnophobes* anyway.

*Spellcheck felt this should be Anglophobes. I don’t know why that tickled my funnybone so hard but I’ve been snickering for five minutes straight.

Suffice to say I am not (yet) the slickest ninja on the track, but I am improving at a steady pace. I’ve gone from barely being able to stand up without severe danger to my tailbone to… well, to last night’s practice.

Bampf! is by any objective measure one of the top three skaters, skills-wise, on the team. Who takes the top honors depends on the phase of the moon and the alignment of the stars, but her name comes from Nightcrawler and the signature onomatopoeia he makes as he teleports around. Bampf! similarly appears to teleport, hence… right, you get the jist. She’s also maybe 100lbs soaking wet, so it’s not like there’s a lot of mass to get up to speed when she opts to floor it.

Anyway. Last night, derby girls being addicts they are, decided on ONE LAST JAM! to end the practice. And since it was the last one, let’s do it going around the track the wrong way, or as they termed it, Australian Style. We had just enough skaters to keep an even number of blockers and a jammer per team, except one skater had already started gearing down in the process of addressing a problem with a skate.

There was a brief period of “Aww, c’mon!” and “Ok, who’s gonna jam for blue?” and so forth. No solution was presenting itself, so in the spirit of shits n’ giggles, I handed my whistle to one of the other refs and asked for the jammer panty.

Some of you are at this point thinking “Well there’s your first mistake.” Patience, Grasshopper.

So Bampf! and I lined up as jammers. We made sure everybody was on the same page that, no, he’s not a ref anymore, yes you can hit him, yes he’s going to try to score. I did not have high expectations, but I figured for a last what-the-hell jam, it should at least be fun.

The jam timer/pack ref called the 5 second warning, and looking forward through the pack, not only were the blue blockers lined up to do their job optimally and shut Bampf! down, but the green team seemed to be suffering a bit of confusion at the notion of a ref jamming and were way over with the blue team on the track. The whistle blew, and I swear it looked like the whole damn interstate was wide open in front of me and marked off specifically for my use.

One of my problems as a ref has been acceleration, when the pack suddenly decides that they need to be moving about 90mph after crawling along at a near-stop for a half lap. As it turns out, the same technique of “Oh shit they’re going to ditch me” acceleration I had been practicing at length for a couple weeks is remarkably similar to the “GO GO GO GO” plan jammers tend to employ. Nobody even touched me as I shot through what couldn’t even be called a hole so much as a gaping chasm, and two blasts off the jammer whistle were the sweetest sound I’d heard all night.

I got a decent lead out before my brain kicked over and said “Hey, just ’cause you’re lead, um, she’s still coming around y’know.”

Well, shit.

Poured the gas back on right as Bampf! came out of the pack, and took an inertia-pushed line through the curve, which happily put me smack in her way and shoved her out.

I’d like to say that all the time studying the rules and watching for what goes wrong with skaters made me all sorts of ninja-awesome, but there may have been a few elbows that could have been called. On the flip side of the coin, her being used to skating against girls, who have a naturally lower center of balance, Bampf! was throwing more than a few low blocks trying to get around.

This is where it stopped being a jam and turned into a Roman chariot race. Wheels grew spikes, horses were turned carnivorous, the opposing charioteer was whipped… but through it my ass stayed a problem for her the whole way.

At this point, my team had better situational awareness than I did, the red flag being firmly waved in “CHASE! WIN! RACE! GET HER!” mode. “CALL OFF THE JAM!” penetrated my consciousness.

Now, I’ve been reffing long enough that I can recognize the distinctive “hands repeatedly on hips” signal to end the jam any time I see it, even if I’m half asleep.

Damndest thing, I could not for the life of me remember how to actually perform the signal for about a good 30 feet of skating.

So that’s how my Sunday went from average to awesome as I got lead jammer over one of the best jammers in the league, and started contemplating starting a men’s league. How was your weekend?

I know there have been some** requests for dog pictures as easy filler content. Good news! I have dog pictures! And you can just wait patiently for them because today’s story is about a pie.

See, during the Rama-mas-zwa-inox-ukah-years down time, longtime friend and part time dogsitter Indy was spending a good chunk of her grad student winter break here at Nerd Ranch. This meant that I had Help available in the kitchen. I know it’s odd, but LabRat and I mostly just get in each other’s way, despite many years of marriage, but Indy and I dance like Fred and Ginger*** in the kitchen for reasons unknown. So with little to do and help available, a recipe was floated before me leading to the phrase “Why not? It’s not like there’s anything else going on.”

If you ever hear me say that about a recipe again, just shoot a tranq dart in my neck right then and there and be done with it, mkay?

Now the actual recipe comes from the ambitious but excellent A Girl And Her Pig. The fact that the cover of the book pisses so many crybabies off is reason enough to buy it, but despite the aftermath of this particular misadventure there’s a bunch of stuff in there that still looks awesome and will be tried later. The culprit today, however, was “Beef and Bayley Hazen Pie,” a concoction of rib meat, blue cheese, and some other strong flavors.

Cutting to the chase, this is a multi-day cook project, involving a from-scratch crust and a couple hours of stove time and still a long bake. This is not a fire-from-the-hip recipe. Regardless, Indy and I set about it and made steady progress. Right up until the final step of putting the shell together. See, in the book the final product is supposed to look like this:

I’m sorry, no. I am not making a giant asshole pie. I don’t care that the woman uses the whole pig or if she gives to charity or what, I simply will not serve a giant sphincter. But you all know what a classy motherfucker I am. And it’s pie dough, not marble, so I’m pretty sure I can figure something out. And I did.
Slightly nsfw below the jump.

Classy. Motherfucker. The picture I wish I’d gotten was Indy with her face hovering scant inches above the pie inhaling the delicious aroma…. then realizing the position she was in. That moment of dawning awareness, my kingdom for a kodak.

Unfortunately, despite all the work and effort that went into the pussy-pie, it was more or less for naught. The flavors were strong, but overall tasty, but sadly too strong. LabRat ate her portion with no ill effects, but Indy and I were laid severely low. The sphincter pie would’ve been much more representative. The leftovers were submitted to a priest for exorcism, burned, and the earth where the fire was salted. LabRat, in her usual spirit of love for humanity, of course was sympathetic and loving while we suffered.****

The first part of the year: apparent food poisoning and some sort of death plague. Tomorrow: dog pictures.

*That’s a lie.
**Lots
***Not like that. Pervert.
****She cackled like a witch and wouldn’t let us throw it out immediately in case she wanted leftovers.

Merry “fuck you planet, you’re not going to kill us this year”.

….wanker.

Here we go.

Like most people, I’ve been thinking and thinking about the Sandy Hook massacre. I’ve even pored over a map of the school and its killing sites — and studied a timeline of the incident, which appears to have unfolded over about 20 minutes. I have three observations:

These observations do not include “once somebody who’s never done anything to get themself locked up decides they’re going to kill a whole bunch of soft targets, generally it’s very easy for that person to do so for purely logistic reasons”. Neither is “elementary aged children are really easy to kill if you have no moral or empathetic objection to doing so”.

There was not a single adult male on the school premises when the shooting occurred. In this school of 450 students, a sizeable number of whom were undoubtedly 11- and 12-year-old boys (it was a K–6 school), all the personnel — the teachers, the principal, the assistant principal, the school psychologist, the “reading specialist” — were female. There didn’t even seem to be a male janitor to heave his bucket at [redacted- scumbag's] knees.

Actually, there was. He did something more useful than throwing buckets, i.e. shouting warnings.

Women and small children are sitting ducks for mass-murderers.

This reads as a strange dispatch from an alternate universe where mass murders in schools (and malls, and other “safe” places) have never happened before, or where all the others were stopped by random men on the scene. In the universe I inhabit, at Columbine, Virginia Tech, Aurora, the University of Texas, and other mass murder scenes with mixed genders, the same thing happens to the unarmed men as the unarmed women and children: they get shot and maybe die. (Sometimes armed ones get shot too.)

The principal, Dawn Hochsprung, seemed to have performed bravely. According to reports, she activated the school’s public-address system and also lunged at [scumbag], before he shot her to death. Some of the teachers managed to save all or some of their charges by rushing them into closets or bathrooms.

A fuller accounting is in the article linked above re the custodian. The school psychologist died challenging the shooter too. One of the teachers died standing between the shooter and her class locked in the closet. (The article does not mention, but she did indeed manage to save some.)

The thing of it is, again in the universe where school shootings have happened before, the people who survive DO tend to be the ones that managed to successfully hide or escape, and the heroes in the wake DO tend to be those who help others do so, like Liviu Lebrescu. I’ve never heard anyone question his masculinity for doing exactly what the Newtown teachers tried to do, with varying degrees of success.

But in general, a feminized setting is a setting in which helpless passivity is the norm.

So we’re going to ignore all the women we just mentioned who displayed great courage trying the best way at hand to save their charges and sometimes gave their lives doing it in favor of a general where women are helpless and passive. Check.

Male aggression can be a good thing, as in protecting the weak — but it has been forced out of the culture of elementary schools and the education schools that train their personnel. Think of what Sandy Hook might have been like if a couple of male teachers who had played high-school football, or even some of the huskier 12-year-old boys, had converged on [scumbag].

…I’m going to snort at the apparent alternative to what the Newtown teachers did in “protecting the weak”, facepalm at the idea of a husky twelve year old boy being the savior of the day if only they weren’t so feminized, and note that again, this imaginary alternate scenario isn’t hypothetical and has already been run here on Earth. What happened was: they got shot and died, or they got lucky and hid or escaped. The only teacher killed at the Columbine massacre was an athletic coach. He was shot doing exactly what every other teacher we’ve mentioned did, or tried, to do: get their students to safety.

People, even unarmed people, need to fight back against criminals — because usually, no one else will. It took the police 20 minutes to arrive at Sandy Hook. By the time they got there, it was over. Cops and everybody else encourage civilians not to try to defend themselves when they are criminally assaulted. This is stupid advice. There are things you can do. Run is one of them, because most shooters can’t hit a moving target. The other, if you are in a confined space, is throw things at the killer, or try a tackle. Remember United Flight 93 on 9/11. It was a “flight of heroes” because a bunch of guys on that plane did what they could with what they had. They probably prevented the destruction of the White House or the Capitol.

The big difference between Flight 93 and any given mass shooting is that the passengers of 93 knew for a fact that they were dead no matter what happened. Either they were going to die in a plane crash, or they were going to die at the hands of the terrorists, and either way things were going to end for all of them in “plane crash”. It IS possible to survive a mass shooting, and the best way to do it if you aren’t armed (and training would help too), is… hide, or escape. If you want to save others: help them hide, or escape.

Look, I agree with the broad position that resistance is preferable to passivity, and especially that it would be great if a few teachers with the gumption for it and some solid extra training were allowed to carry, in the position the Newtown faculty were actually in at that moment? I would have done EXACTLY the same thing- because it was the likeliest way to actually save some children rather than distract the shooter and use up a few rounds, which would be the probable outcome of rushing him. Maybe if I could convince as many others to rush too… but that’s a pretty hard sell in that moment, to people who want to live and know they might.

There’s also a big difference, when you yourself are unarmed, between a box cutter and a firearm.

Parents of sick children need to be realistic about them. I know at least two sets of fine and devoted parents who have had the misfortune to raise sons who were troubled for genetic reasons beyond anyone’s control. Either of those boys could have been an [scumbag]. You simply can’t give a non-working, non-school-enrolled 20-year-old man free range of your home, much less your cache of weapons.

While I generally agree that if you’re aware your child is mentally ill and also aware that offspring is actually dangerous and merely hasn’t been arrested or committed yet, you should probably not have firearms in the house, the structure of this paragraph is really damn odd.

You have to set boundaries. You have to say, “You can’t live here anymore — you’re an adult, and it’s time for you to be a man. We’ll give you all the support you need, but we won’t be enablers.” Unfortunately, the idea of being an “adult” and a “man” once one has reached physical maturity seems to have faded out of our coddling culture.

…Yeah, sure, okay. The problem here wasn’t that he was that rare slice of mentally ill that was actually legitimately dangerous, the problem was that he lived with his mother. Because being told to man up would have fixed his problems, no mass murderer has ever lived on his own, and the most responsible thing to do if you KNOW your adult offspring is dangerous is to boot him from the house and turn him loose on society.

And with that bit of insanity, this exercise in “my worldview will fit every tragedy if I just shove it through hard enough” is at an end.

*My own position is that it was Colonel Mustard in the hall with the lead pipe. I do have a serious position, but it’s a fairly dull one that provides no useful answers or courses of action.