Atomic Nerds

So, the hacked e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia have been news for awhile now and I haven’t said a damn thing about it. Partly it’s because I don’t like talking about the subject very much because it’s a big complicated ball of snakes, of scientific, cultural, economic, and political varieties and it gives me a headache, and partly it was because I wanted to see how reactions went and what would emerge as people more industrious than me dug into the data; either way I didn’t want to comment at the time.

There was a Vicious Circle on the subject (yes, I know, a finer panel of expertise has never been assembled), in which Unix-Jedi mentioned that I had been wrong about one thing, which was that at the time we talked about it, I thought it would amount to roughly nothing. I figured it didn’t really fit well into the media’s narrative- and while various media outlets are definitely biased in their respective partisan ways, nothing can get one to ignore a story faster and more thoroughly than not fitting well into established narrative- and scientists would shrug it off, because detractors would pick up on all the wrong things in the e-mails and make stupid points. As it turned out, I was about half right, but definitely wrong about it turning out to be a nonevent. So since I don’t have much of a narrative myself beyond, a few bits and pieces.

1. The damning thing in the e-mails isn’t the language, like “trick”- it doesn’t really mean the same thing within that kind of scientific circles as it does in, say, running the con game. And it isn’t that it catches a bunch of senior scientists behaving like catty sorority sisters, either; despite the white idealistic edifice of Science, there are a lot of rivalries and bitter enmities within disciplines, and people defintely have their own agendas. If anything, this prevents huge conspiracies from being formed; nobody would be able to resist the temptation of showing up that bastard Doctor Brandx well enough to maintain them. And the peer-review process is sadly political, though it usually doesn’t go to quite the lengths described. I say this not to defend that sad reality, but to say it’s not really that extraordinary. The lengths gone to in the e-mails are unusual, they’re just not fantastical.

2. The damning thing *is* the deletion of the raw data. The space-saving excuse is just unfiltered bullshit; you just don’t dump your raw data like that. Especially not when it’s as critical to the other people working in your field as it is.

3. The damning thing is also the code for the modelling and the data it was based on found, which is a complete spaghetti mess. The now-infamous in programming circles HARRY_READ_ME file is a rather poignant account of a programmer faced with producing project-dependent results from buggy, poorly documented code with sometimes-missing and sometimes-invalid data. If you’re going to rely heavily on computer modeling.. it should fucking well be a well-constructed model.

4. The general response from the scientific community as a whole has been a giant scoff, pointing out that just because this one dataset (though it was a dataset from which a great deal of work has been done) is compromised doesn’t mean the earth isn’t warming. And the thing that a lot of skeptics are missing is, they are absolutely right. Recent warming over the past century HAS been corroborated by a vast number of other data sources, both direct and proxies like melting ice. Saying that global warming is a sham based on Climategate is like saying evolution is bullshit because of Piltdown man. (Which doesn’t stop a ton of creationists from doing just this, but never mind.)

But here’s the other thing: that’s not the issue. If I were continuing to use evolution as an analogy, let’s say that I was a scientist in an alternate universe where Charles Darwin went into the clergy and Alfred Russel Wallace was fatally bitten by a viper and no naturalist with any real observational skill to speak of had ever followed them. Say I were a naturalist who had observed what I believed to evidence of species changing over time, and that ever since my mother was raped during an itinerant carnival when I was small, I had a tendency to relate everything surprising or bad in my life to clowns in some fashion. I develop a complex theory statistically relating the practice of dressing up in makeup for entertainment over the course of history to change in species over time and show their relationship, and arguing that societies being able to afford more luxuries to support more full-time clowning as they became richer would lead to catastrophic and grotesque mutation in the species.

At that point, if you were seeking to support or refute the Theory of Clown Corruption of The Kinds, you would have deep and multiple wells of data supporting the idea that species changed over time, and you would probably also be able to find a higher rate of mutants near sources of industrial (rich-society) waste- but the actual relevant point you would need to attack or defend would be their link to clowns and the strength of the statistics supporting a direct causal relationship between clowns and change in species.

The argument between serious people isn’t about whether the world is warming or whether climate modellers tried to “hide” the recent slowdown in warming- which climate scientists themselves readily accept is due to solar activity at this point. It’s not even about whether human-generated CO2 causes warming; both of these things are, in fact, “settled science”. What it’s about is how much warming it can cause, and what drives natural variations in climate, and whether the current warming trend is being *dominated* by human sources or natural variation. That’s what makes the models important: they help us tease out the variables involved in something that doesn’t offer historical data as nicely as the fossil record does for vertebrate evolution. And that’s what makes the integrity of the modelers- and how well they’re looking after that historical data that we do have- important, and why this IS a big deal, even if a lot of people who should really know much better are playing see-no-evil, speak-no-evil.

5. On that last point: again, they’re not doing it because there’s a conspiracy. Some climate researchers have a lot to gain in grants from the catastrophic anthropogenic scenario, but a lot of others could make an insta-reputation tearing it apart, and a lot more than that work in some other physical science altogether. They act like they do because virtually to a man, CAGW opponents act like just about every other variety of anti-science loon there is. In a great many cases they’re even the same people. They use the same kind of arguments, the same kind of paranoia-mongering, the same kind of ignorance of basic facts well-known within physical science, and generally look, act, flap, and quack just crackpot ducks. Shrugging off this breed is reflex at this point.

6. I should reiterate: “the establishment” of whitecoats is right in that this doesn’t actually invalidate anything or prove any kind of conspiracy; what it DOES is suggest that the various organizations and major researchers involved need to voluntarily commit to transparency at all levels if we want to get data we can trust to both demonstrate what is happening and plausibly demonstrate why. And so far they seem more interested in denial games.

I’d finish this off and say THAT’S the damning part, but I can’t feel any sense of triumph or vindication over this. Because there’s still the chance they might be right anyway, as a thousand jackasses before them were right for the wrong reasons or behaved badly with their information. That’s the tragic part.

Turkey day went fine, including the actual turkey, which was deliciously tender and flavorful. That “BB” ale, for those who remember it from Blogorado, may not be much to drink but makes one hell of an addition to a brine.

We ourselves are generally thankful for family, friends, and the metric ton of leftovers about the house, on which we graze like particularly plump Eloi.

Actual content when the Thanksgiving Weekend case of extreme laziness wears off, which will happen who knows when?

Continuing the theme of cooking things that I’m generally much more enthusiastic about than Stingray, eating the fabulous cat’s-head biscuits at the Longhorn cafe at Blogorado re-awakened in me a ravening craving for some of the grub I used to breakfast on when I was living in New Orleans. My other half is, as a whole, not nearly as enamored with Cajun-creole fare as I am, but as biscuits and grits are more of a general Southern theme of the overall school of “everything the American Heart Association doesn’t want you to eat”, I figured they would probably get a thumbs-up if prepared well. I felt both things were a bit too simple to get an entire post out of- especially grits, which require about one more order of skill to make than making toast in a toaster- I’d do both at once, stick Stingray with the protein for the evening, and write them both up.

I would have used Farmmom’s recipe, but I am a blushing virgin to the arcane world that is biscuits- which are a short and simple ingredient list whose results are almost entirely up to the maker’s technique- and I figured it was time to put to use the huge DVD library of Good Eats episodes we have on hand. (I gave pretty much every set ever released to Stingray as a Christmas gift one year. They’ve gone to good use.) So after I went back over that episode, here’s the recipe to use: Alton Brown’s southern biscuits.

Ingredients

* 2 cups flour
* 4 teaspoons baking powder
* 1/4 teaspoon baking soda
* 3/4 teaspoon salt
* 2 tablespoons butter
* 2 tablespoons shortening
* 1 cup buttermilk, chilled

Directions

Preheat oven to 450 degrees.

In a large mixing bowl, combine flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt. Using your fingertips, rub butter and shortening into dry ingredients until mixture looks like crumbs. (The faster the better, you don’t want the fats to melt.) Make a well in the center and pour in the chilled buttermilk. Stir just until the dough comes together. The dough will be very sticky.

Turn dough onto floured surface, dust top with flour and gently fold dough over on itself 5 or 6 times. Press into a 1-inch thick round. Cut out biscuits with a 2-inch cutter, being sure to push straight down through the dough. Place biscuits on baking sheet so that they just touch. Reform scrap dough, working it as little as possible and continue cutting. (Biscuits from the second pass will not be quite as light as those from the first, but hey, that’s life.)

Bake until biscuits are tall and light gold on top, 15 to 20 minutes.

For the grits, I went ahead and snagged a recipe for shrimp and grits; since they don’t combine until served, I figured Stingray could handle the seafood and I’d make the grits. Here’s the entire thing, for those of you that actually want to use the recipe rather than laugh at my flailings. Shrimp and Grits:

Ingredients

* 4 cups water
* Salt and pepper
* 1 cup stone-ground grits
* 3 tablespoons butter
* 2 cups shredded sharp cheddar cheese
* 1 pound shrimp, peeled and deveined
* 6 slices bacon, chopped
* 4 teaspoons lemon juice
* 2 tablespoons chopped parsley
* 1 cup thinly sliced scallions
* 1 large clove garlic, minced

Directions

Bring water to a boil. Add salt and pepper. Add grits and cook until water is absorbed, about 20 to 25 minutes. Remove from heat and stir in butter and cheese.

Rinse shrimp and pat dry. Fry the bacon in a large skillet until browned; drain well. In grease, add shrimp. Cook until shrimp turn pink. Add lemon juice, chopped bacon, parsley, scallions and garlic. Saute for 3 minutes.

Spoon grits into a serving bowl. Add shrimp mixture and mix well. Serve immediately.

Since the grits procedure that I’d actually be responsible for amounted to about three steps if you count boiling the water as a separate step, and no one really minds eating room-temperature biscuits as opposed to room-temperature grits, I started with the biscuits.

1. Preheat oven to 450 degrees. This time, double check that this instruction is in degrees Fahrenheit. Then double check that there is nothing in the oven and all the racks are in the correct position to admit a tray of baked goods. Remove the roasting pan from the oven and proceed with your preheating.

2. Assemble your cast of characters. Mixing bowl, baking sheet, cutting board, flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt. Butter and shortening and buttermilk stay in the fridge until needed. Squint worriedly at the “double action” notation on the baking powder can. Does that mean it acts as both baking powder and baking soda? The recipe didn’t say “double action”. Retire to Google to check. You still need both, you may proceed without fear that the biscuits might react like the baking soda volcano you made when you were little.

3. Explain to your chef’s knife that you are very sorry, but you won’t be needing it today, but this doesn’t mean anything, and you’ll get back together real soon. Explain to your Kitchen Bitch that we’re baking, which means no dropped peels or pieces of vegetable or fat scraps.

4. Locate your donut/biscuit cutter and attempt to remove the “hole” portion of the cutter. At this point it’s really not worth wasting time wrestling with recalcitrant kitchen gadgets like a monkey with a puzzle board; hand it to your spouse and let him deal with it with the giant Leatherman that lives on his belt. (Along with enough other hardware to conduct a successful NASA orbital mission.)

In a large mixing bowl, combine flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt. Using your fingertips, rub butter and shortening into dry ingredients until mixture looks like crumbs. (The faster the better, you don’t want the fats to melt.)

5. Dump flour into the mixing bowl. Note that doing anything with a quantity of flour larger than a teaspoon will largely take care of flouring surfaces that need to be floured, as well as all other surfaces, you, and Kitchen Bitch. Add the other white powders. Remove the butter and shortening sticks from the fridge. Slice off about two tablespoon’s worth of butter. That’s a pretty big hunk of butter, and we’re supposed to distribute it among the dry goods until it forms very small balls surrounded by dry good. As your spouse passes you in the process of whittling chips of butter off the hunk and into the bowl with a paring knife, you’re allowed to stab him if he makes a crack about misunderstanding “cut the butter into the dough”.

6. Scoop out two tablespoons of shortening and attempt to distribute them into the dough. Now is a good time to meditate on the strange paradox that while all other fats act as lubricants even when solid, shortening in its unmelted form sticks to everyfuckingthing. Resist the urge to wash your hands again since now you have to give your fats and dry goods a massage.

7. Prod, rub, and fiddle your fats into your dough. Stop sometime in between “oh god it has chunks some of the biscuits won’t have butter and the others’ll be greasy” and “oh fuck I think it might be melting what if it’s melting”.

Make a well in the center and pour in the chilled buttermilk. Stir just until the dough comes together. The dough will be very sticky.

8. Dig a little well. Now at this point you have to reach into your clean refrigerator to get your clean bottle of buttermilk, but… we need floured hands for the step after this, and wasting this thorough coat of flour (with extra fat) would be kind of a waste. Deal with the handprints later and hope you didn’t get too many grains of flour in the buttermilk itself later. Dispense your cup of buttermilk into the well in the center.

9. Stir. Stop at some point in between “it’s mostly just powder” and “so much gluten forms that the dough refuses to give back your spoon”. Try to err on the side of too unmixed and not fret too much about unincorporated flour, because it turns out you’re going to have to cover the whole mess and everything else in about as much flour as you used for the dough just to stop it sticking.

Turn dough onto floured surface, dust top with flour and gently fold dough over on itself 5 or 6 times. Press into a 1-inch thick round.

10. Scrape the sticky-as-advertised dough onto your floured cutting board. Sprinkle the top with flour. Start pressing it into a roughly round, flat shape. Stop pressing when you realize either your right hand or the surface of that side of the dough was inadequately floured and a substantial amount of dough is now stuck to your hand and will stick most vigorously to any further dough you apply that dough to. ABORT, RETRY, FAIL?

11. Sacrifice the dough bonded most thoroughly to your hand and your previous flour coat and wash it. Re-flour your hand. Cover the surface of the dough with more flour. Resume attempting to turn the thing into a roughly one-inch thick round flat shape. Briefly pause and wonder something along the lines of “wasn’t there another step?”* before shrugging and retrieving your biscuit cutter.

Place biscuits on baking sheet so that they just touch. Reform scrap dough, working it as little as possible and continue cutting.

12. Start slicing out rounds of biscuits. As you attempt to remove them from the cutting board and transfer them to the baking sheet, discover that the cutting board, despite being covered in flour, was still somehow inadequately floured. Develop a trick of twisting the biscuit cutter up and out so that the rounds come with the cutter rather than staying on the cutting board. Deposit biscuits directly from cutter to sheet.

13. Reform a dough ball from the scrap material with all and care and delicacy as if you were bathing an infant. Re-smoosh and cut rounds out of the remaining dough. You’ll still have a few stray scraps; you can give at least one to Kitchen Bitch if you like. More would probably have unfortunate digestive consequences. As a side note, if you’re using our cutter, this recipe makes a baker’s dozen of biscuits rather than a dozen.

14. Wash your hands and dump your baking stuff into the sink. Wash the measuring cup and get down a saucepot for the grits. Dispense the water and start that boiling. Dry off the measuring cup and fill with a cup of grits. Get the pepper-and-salt mix out. Finally, stick the biscuits into the oven and set the timer.

Bring water to a boil. Add salt and pepper. Add grits and cook until water is absorbed, about 20 to 25 minutes.

15. Once the water is boiling, throw in three generous pinches of salt mix, then add the grits. Back the heat down from high to somewhere between medium-high and medium after the grits attempt to climb right back out of the pot.

16. We’ve only got the one kitchen timer and you have no idea if the grits are going to attempt another escape, so… it’s time to stand around aimlessly for awhile. Stir the grits every once in awhile and wonder what, exactly, constitutes “done” with grits, since you’ve been served them at almost every consistency from “nearly liquid” to “wallpaper paste” in the past. Optional: do as the radio suggests and “jump, jump, jump to tha rhythm”.

17. Extract the biscuits once twenty minutes have passed and tack another five minutes onto the timer. Occupy yourself for the next five doing dances around your spouse and handing him things as you both attempt to work at the same time. Decide the grits have achieved a sufficient unitary quality after the five minutes and stir in the butter and salt, being sure that all the butter melts. Bugger off for a few minutes so Spouse can finish up with the shrimp and bacon. Let him serve, why not. Add a biscuit to the side of your plate. Nom.

The grits turned out very tasty indeed, and made a rapid convert out of Stingray, though he opined that crab might actually have been a better accompaniment than shrimp. The biscuits mostly turned out curiously flat, and to my puzzlement, the ones from the second pass rose much more than the first row and were lighter. Then it occurred to me as I was sitting down to write this that I’d never given it the initial “5-6 folds” mandated in the recipe; I’d gotten distracted by the dough sticking to my hand and skipped a step unconsciously. The thing about biscuits is that working the dough at all forms gluten; in order to get the big, light, fluffy biscuits that are the best kind, you have to get enough gluten that the dough has some strength and can rise, but not so much that it becomes too dense to rise much, let alone give to tooth. My biscuits were certainly not dense, but they hadn’t been worked enough to be of proper dimension. This is easy to fix next time, fortunately.

*Yes**.
**Yes, TD, my footnotes are still not hyperlinked. I’ll figure it out later. Or NEVER. Muahahahaa so there.

Didn’t manage to come up with anything to say today, so you get the latest thing to make me laugh.

My opinion of the relevant issue at hand doesn’t align with the poster, but the parody was so spot-on perfect that I actually got theme music and visual montages in my head: The Secret Life of Climate Researchers.

Substantial content will have to wait for the removal of the railroad spike that, judging by the feel of things, has been embedded in my temple since noon. Until then, an assortment of things not worth more than a few lines that have run through my head recently.

- I either need to play fewer video games or drive more often. My reaction to several people at once approaching a poorly signed four-way residential intersection was “Crap, this is going to be a nasty pull.” At least now that my current favorites have changed around some I no longer get the urge to roll up vehicles smaller than mine.

- Why don’t more people chicken-fry venison? As a solution to irregularly shaped, tough cuts of meat it’s a classic, yet it sometimes seems that the only possible solutions presented to cuts that aren’t backstrap is to stew it or grind it.

- So supposedly the President is “speechless” over the outrage at him doing a deep lowered-head bow to the Japanese Emperor, since it’s only respectful to follow local custom. Look, our relations with the Japanese won’t suddenly turn hostile because a President screws up protocol and symbolically “submits”, but it’s bad diplomacy because he DIDN’T follow local custom. Rules in Japanese culture covering who bows to whom and how low and for how long are pretty complex, and suffice it to say world leaders do not shoegaze to emperors. Hirohito might have gotten a kick out of it in 1940, but Akihito was embarrassed. Either follow previously established State Department protocol, or actually learn the fucking custom before you start improvising, ‘kay? I’d say he needs to fire his Chief of Protocol, but apparently he doesn’t feel it necessary to bring her and has announced they’ll be creating a new position that travels with the President. Awesome.

- I’m with Holly (apparently so much so that I’m borrowing the format). What the hell is up with guys thinking a dick picture is a fantastic way to advertise themselves to the opposite sex? I’ve got news for guys: this will never, ever get a reaction you want. Puzzlement is most likely. Laughter is next most- I hate to break it to you, but male genitalia look a little bit silly to women when taken out of a context that is not her being already interested in having sex with you. And we WILL be debating with our female friends what your dick most resembles, with options ranging from “baby mouse with eyes not yet open” to “skinned hot dog”. Aside from being tacky and creepy, it’s just a bad plan overall.

More often than not it seems I’m usually taking a swing at “my” side (if one can define a shared absence of a particular sort of belief as any sort of side) and bitching about rude, entitled atheists, but today I’m going to bitch about a meme I’ve gotten really fucking sick of hearing from believers having an attack of smug.

The meme is this: atheists are people that don’t/can’t/don’t want to believe in anything greater than themselves, therefore they can’t/won’t accept God- or, in the most Chickian extreme, that they believe THEMSELVES to be godlike.

And it’s complete fucking bullshit. I’ll grant you that I can definitely come up with certain individuals that have disappeared nearly completely up their own assholes and seem to have found it divinely glorious, but there doesn’t seem to be much of a difference in believer status there- the smarmiest and most ego-tastic of them merely speak as though they were the nearest earthly approximation. (They certainly don’t seem to mind handing out judgments as though they were.)

It’s trivial to anyone who’s advanced beyond the mental age of two to recognize that there are things greater than themselves. Start with family, move on up to community, then we’ve got nation, the world, and the entire sweep of human history, culture, accumulated wisdom (and folly)- and all that’s just a brief little infinitesimal blip compared to the history and diversity of life, or of the earth, or try the universe’s vastness that’s almost impossible for the human mind to even contemplate, before even moving on to “infinity”.

What I don’t believe in is an omnipotent intelligence that is even vaster and more incomprehensible than the universe itself. If you want to get more specific about what I don’t believe in, I don’t believe that such an entity then spent a few thousand years involving itself in tribal politics in the Middle East before redeeming all of humanity via blood sacrifice- or, for that matter, in any of the other accountings of its various deeds that do not happen to be the majority faith in my culture.

I believe that I am little and not remotely godlike and the things I do not know- and my capacity to be vile if I do not consciously exercise the choice not to be- are vast and great and will remain so for my entire life and probably the entire span of our existence as a species. I just don’t believe in God.

The other day I read a lady gamer detailing how her relationship with someone who turned out to be a callow and self-absorbed young man started deteriorating extra-quickly after they started playing a MMORPG together; watching him be a jackass to other players in-game helped highlight for her all the ways in which he was a self-absorbed jackass in other aspects of his life as well, just with greater subtlety.

When I was young, my mother advised me to keep an eye on how anyone I dated behaved toward waiters and waitresses in restaurants, as well as any other service personnel, because that would tell me if he were a decent person period or just capable of putting on the act when I happened to have or be something he wanted at the time.

We hear an awful lot about how easy it is to be functionally anonymous on the internet, in the sense of frequently interacting with people who have no idea who you are and would have little to no chance of ever recognizing you again should you not want them to, and how this brings out all sorts of bad behavior, as though ordinary good people were turned werewolflike into churlish idiots by this factor. I don’t really see it that way; I think there are simply a lot of people whose otherwise civil behavior is driven less by their fundamental decentness than it is by a wish to avoid social punishment. (Or, more charitably, that the civilizing process takes longer for some than for others, and that anonymity allows them to express their immaturity without immediate retribution.)

It occurs to me that in addition to technology having given us a thousand ways to be exposed in ways great and small to human pettiness, vindictiveness, and just plain nastiness, it’s also given us an unprecedented way to see how the people we DO know behave when given the opportunity to truly interact with no risk of social retribution whatsoever. And how they then choose to conduct themselves.

Should I ever change my mind and reproduce- or should my brother happen to produce an heir- rather than telling him or her to get the hell out away from anyone who abuses the waitress, I’ll probably tell them that nothing good ever comes of associating with trolls, loot ninjas, or sockpuppets.

Although it is not any date or occasion on which I’m normally inspired to apply a fresh coat of butter to my other half, I’ve run across just about enough of a certain genre of writing that makes me really, really appreciate something about Stingray that I’m increasingly coming to realize is not sufficiently common a virtue among men.

For as long as I’ve known him, he has always acted as though it were a long-since forgone conclusion that his testicles came factory-equipped and were, are, and ever shall be firmly attached to his body, no matter what happens short of a purely literal castration event.

He doesn’t feel the need to check and see if they are still there, or re-bolt them back on later if he is served an egg pie. The presence of homosexual men within his zip code, or even living room, does not cause him to curl into the fetal position and cradle them lest they scamper off over the horizon. He can wash his face with something gentler and more scented than a bar of lava soap and still rest so secure in the assumption that the testosterone-producing apparatus that will still require him to shave it the next morning is still hanging in there that he needn’t even make a few precautionary laps around the block in a pickup. Likewise he seems entirely capable of trying new and different things without needing to look up their gendered implications in a checklist or guide before deciding whether he enjoyed it or not.

More that that, he also takes it for granted that I don’t have the power to affect the security of that oneness with his nuts, at least with anything more metaphorical than boltcutters. “Allowing” me to use the remote to channel-surf or drive a car with him in the passenger seat or contradict him in public does not seem to cause any state of gender crisis whatsoever. While we’ve had the same conflicts all couples do, the stated problem has never been that I am in any way threatening, undermining, or making off with his masculinity in the middle of the night just by going around having two X chromosomes and a mind and will independent of his.

A great many self-advertised Real Men appear to be quite adamant on the point that Real Men DO worry about these kinds of things and you cross them at your peril (lest they slap the ovaries back into you, or something)- to which I’ll simply note that all the other brands I know of that market themselves as Real Noun- such as Realtree and RealDoll- are explicitly about being the absolute most real-looking fake that can be conjured. Apparently for some, the only possible reason you wouldn’t be vigilantly guarding the integrity of your testicles from any and all existential threat must be that you have given them away.

Thankfully for womankind or at least that slice of it represented by me, there is a third option*.

*Nothing worth linking to specifically set me off. More like the effect of the last retarded little snowflake that sets off the avalanche of all those previous.

One thing that I probably don’t need to explain to most of the people who read this, but sometimes find myself floundering to explain to others, is why I enjoy shooting and why I refer to it as a stress reliever. The people who do shoot are already giving the blank look and the “duh”, but it always feels like, when I try to explain “had a terrible week, but now I’m off to burn some brass at the range” to someone to whom guns are something that exists in the news and fiction but not in a way that really relates to them at all, that they’re getting completely the wrong idea even if they know and like me.

I like to think I’m a good person, but I also know I’m not really what you could fairly call a nice person in a lot of ways. I don’t suffer fools gladly, I’m introverted as hell and I find the company of most other people draining rather than refreshing or desirable, and you won’t find being inoffensive anywhere on any of my priority lists. I play Violent Video Games ™ (scare chord). The only sport I enjoy watching (boxing) could fairly be termed a blood sport.

So, to a person to whom guns and violence are a peanut-butter-and-jelly pairing inside their head, and who know I’m no one’s Mother Theresa, I always get the nagging suspicion that they think that, when I head to the range after a frustrating day/week/whatever, I’m acting out some kind of violent fantasy in a safe environment, or purging violent urges. And nothing could be further from the truth.

Oh, I’m not going to sit here and give you doe eyes and claim I’m above that sort of thing or never do it. It’s just that when I do, I jump into a game and tear the elf ears off somebody, or work it out with free weights, or anything else that allows me to do just that- safely and in a socially acceptable fashion act out aggression until I’m too damn tired or mentally fried to have any anymore.

The thing is, even if I wanted to have a fantasy about shooting people that frustrate me (which, for the record, I have never had and don’t expect to have any time soon, if you’re worried about me flipping out spree-killer style- I heavily favor the imagined slap upside the face over BOOM HEADSHOT), actually shooting at the range would make it very difficult to do that. The mindsets are incompatible.

The truth is, if I’m one the firing line with a pistol, a rifle, or a shotgun, I’m too damn mentally busy to fantasize about anything other than putting the shots in the black or knocking down the steel or busting the clay. What needs to be in my head is my sight picture, my stance and what I could theoretically be doing to improve it, not slapping the trigger, not limp-wristing, and all the rest of the things that go into making a projectile go where I want it to, which is a damn sight harder than the movies make it look. Even if I practiced as much as I should/would like to and all of that were long sunk into muscle memory, the mindset is *still* basically incompatible; the combination of focus and ritual is inherently calming, and just doesn’t let you sustain that adrenalined, aggressive jangle that makes catharsis possible and rewarding. From the Four Rules to the set of range commands that allow for safe conditions and a fast-paced, efficient running of a class or training session or sporting event or whatever, everything involved in shooting is highly ritualized.

Shotgun is even more pronounced in this respect- if rifle and pistol force you to focus just on stance and sight picture and all the rest of it, just about any form of shotgun sport will force you to stop thinking altogether, because you only have a few seconds to react in and if you waste that time on conscious activity rather than swinging your gun, acquiring the target, and firing, you are going to miss. You might not even get around to firing at all before the clay lands. And contrary to what sometimes seems to be the popular belief, firing a gun is not an inherently violent or aggressive act- just an inherently loud one.

That’s why I like shooting when I’m stressed; short of tranquilizing drugs I haven’t yet found a more efficient way to force my mind out of an angry or anxious little rut and my body out of that reinforcing set of stress hormones. It’s especially good for an introvert like me that tends to occasionally need rescuing from my own head, especially in a group where I’m often at a little bit of a loss because socializing isn’t always that natural to me- which is why it was a big part of why I was able to easily relax and joke and chat with a bunch of people I’d never met in person before last weekend. At least one person commented that they didn’t expect me to be like that given my prickly persona, and the truth is- in a lot of situations, I’m not. But range time can be a better social lubricant for me than alcohol, minus the hangover. (But just as expensive if not moreso, sadly.)

Shooter ready.

“Gawd, I love rednecks!”
–LawDog

SUNDAY
Astute readers may have noticed that I just skipped entirely over Saturday. Saturday was awesome, and featured less interruption from that damn train, more appearance of LawDog and Phlegmmy, yet more utterly amazing food from the FarmFam, and more shooty goodness than you can shake a stick at. Seriously, someone shook a stick, then someone else yelled “Throw it down range!” and then the stick had a very bad day. Most folks probably turned more money into smoke and noise in one day than in the last several months to years combined. And it was awesome. But everybody else has covered that, and I figure if I keep dragging this out it’ll be worse than those interminable slide-shows your Aunt Gertrude shows of the time she and Uncle Trappedinalovelessmarriage took a cruise.

So we’re skipping that.

Well, almost. It’d be a shame not to include a quick aside about everybody’s favorite doing it wrong shooter, Breda. See, LawDog and Jim (hey, we’re going shooting in 20 minutes!) opted to add a little to some of the targets. You know, just to keep things interesting.

Breda stepped up to the plate.

And promptly sent all six shots of full-house .44 mag right where they needed to go.

What’s that? That’s only five and one is missing? Well, I suppose you could say one is missing…

Right, moving on.

Sunday was more of the same. Salamander sadly had to depart early to tend a sick newt, but not before we got pictures of his epic kneebeards:

And if that doesn’t sound like an excerpt from a Glen Baxter cartoon to you too, then I’m gonna have to wonder. Matt and his dad Johnny rolled in early in the morning and joined us out at the range for yet more time making Sarah Brady cry and Paul Helmke crap himself with terror. I’m reasonably sure there have been actual war zones that saw less fire than the range we were on. As it tends to, however, the sun sank low and we were forced to gather up, pack in, and call it a day. A little thousand(ish) yard plinking had everyone in fine spirits (even if he did neglect to mention my score in there). The FarmFam had more food ready, and there was still plenty of beer left waiting in town. Being rather hungry at this point, after we finished cleaning up the range and getting everybody’s gear sorted out, I was following hard on the heels of FarmGirl while everybody else took a more sedate pace.

Thus it happened that as we were rolling up to the main highway back to town, we were a mite perplexed when FarmGirl pulled her full-to-overflowing pickup over and rolled down a window. The road being otherwise empty, we pulled up even and likewise lowered the glass.
“Anything wrong?” I called over.
“Kelly hit a deer. Can y’all fit his gear in your truck and give him a tow back to town? Everybody else is full up.”
I was a little dubious about the “back to town” part since we were still more than a few miles away from what could be called “town,” but the gas tank was mostly full and I wasn’t about to leave one of our own up shit creek just because the paddling might be a touch inconvenient. We reversed course and headed back.

Fewer miles back than I was fearing, we saw a collection of flashing hazard lights. Pulling up, we found a whole pack of shooters gathered around one wounded Dodge Dakota and one very nice buck (blood warning) that was having a worse day than the stick someone waved at the range. Matt covers the parts we were driving for here. Since the unnecessary bureaucracy proper authorities informed us that Kelly wouldn’t be able to keep the head (of, by his own admission, the biggest buck he had ever taken) for mounting, we did the next best thing and started acting like a bunch of punchy, cold, hungry jackasses looking for fun instead of just sitting around being glum about the delay. A Sawz-All was produced from the FarmFam truck, the head removed in remarkably short order, and the abundantly horned Ram emblem on the hood of the now crippled Dakota received one hell of an upgrade (decapitated head and ruined Dakota grill warning).

With the now headless deer pointed downhill to drain while we waited, an observation was made. When in the midst of a good number of people walking around openly armed, having a great time at the site of an accident it does not leave the greatest first impression with the responding officer when the first sight is a very nice buck head wearing a blaze orange hat and smoking a cigarette. The impression is further not served by finding one of said armed and happy folk standing over the ass-end of a headless deer, thrusting his hips in the air, and proclaiming loudly “THIS *thrust* IS WHAT *thrust* YOU GET *thrust* FOR NOT *thrust* HAVING *thrust* OPPOSABLE *thrust* THUMBS!”

Kinda makes the officer look askance at things. Honestly, I’m amazed we weren’t all breathalyzed.

As the red tape spooled along, we were finally given permission to quarter out and skin the deer. Since luck was (uh, kinda?) on the gunbloggers’ side, the intestines hadn’t burst, and there was nowhere near as much damaged meat as there could have been. More bad advice, questionable practices, general ribbing, and flat out heartfelt laughter has to my knowledge never before been present at the side of the road dealing with an accident. LabRat suggested that Kelly, ah, “mark” his kill, performing an act of questionable hygiene with the creature’s esophagus. Kelly noted a preference for the trachea, as it would be ribbed for his pleasure, at which point, while pulling one of the hind legs into a better butchering position, LawDog offered the opinion gracing the very top of this post. Then there was the part where we had a recreation of the scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey where the chimp figured out how to use a bone for a club, improvised with the lower chunk of the deer’s leg, but that was just silly.

The meat was all bagged (this being the most perfectly, if accidentally, equipped game harvest ever), and we started moving things from small Dodge to big Dodge, and located a tow strap. MattG approached as LabRat and I arranged cargo under the illumination of the rearward facing light on the cab.
“Do you finally feel validated for having this big a truck?” my ever so loving and never mocking bride inquired.
“Yes. Yes I do.”
“Every truck owner lives for this,” Matt commented. “I did when I had one, I know that much. The day comes when someone has a lot to haul, or needs a tow, and the truck owner can stand proudly and say ‘Yes, I can help.’ It’s a bit like being superman. You’re thrilled about this, aren’t you, towing and hauling in one event?”
“…yeah.”

Cargo transferred, we hooked up the radiator-less Dakota and set off for a FarmFamily storage outpost, thankfully much closer than the main town. Over the course of the weekend, much fun was had by all commenting on the peculiar rail accessory hanging off my AR-15, here wielded by Alan.

Well, walking into the FarmFam garage, Kelly turned out to trump me, and offered to our recalcitrant gourmand a superior set of fuzzy dize to mount to a rail.

And just as one final note, I’ll probably get a rather large boot applied to my posterior the next time we meet up with him, but in the process of all this Kelly threw down and served notice to every plumber in the world. A true challenge has been issued, and the master of roadside charcuterie himself laid down the law about just how some things are done. I’d offer a link, or a jump cut or something to move this out of direct sight, but all of us at the side of the road had it etched into our minds, and it’s scientifically proven that the best thing to do in this sort of situation is to sear the image on as many minds as possible, sort of a shared pain is less pain thing. Enjoy.

As our narrator for the events of the previous weekend is currently transformed into his weaker alter ego Snotman by evil villian Doctor Histamine, a bit of filler to tide you over.

In the department of the funny: Chick Tract Dissections. For those of you who have never come across Chick Publications, it’s the forty-year lunacy ministry of Jack Chick. Many people are convinced he’s a parody, but all serious investigation seems to confirm he’s dead serious about all of it. Apparently, if you want to see truly whacko Fundamentalist Christianity parodied well, you need someone who’s not trying to be funny- they never do it as well. Personal favorites of mine include First Bite (moral: Christ cures vampire cults), Moving On Up (hat tip to Tam for showing me this one, which is by far more hilarious than his other anti-evolution tracts), and the newest one, It’s Not Your Fault. Moral? If you ask God to forgive your enemies for brutally raping you over and over again, he’ll strike them dead for you. Whether or not they’re forgiven is left as an open question.

In the department of really not funny: Columbia Professor of architecture engages in heated debate about white privilege with theater professor, settles argument by punching her in the face. So yeah. There’s not much newsworthy about this; the whole story is that there was a bar and presumably alcohol involved, and it wasn’t the first time they’d had a racial debate, and this time he was apparently so infuriated by the uppity bitch that he clocked her one and then the guy who spoke up saying it was wrong. He was released without bail, she’s wearing sunglasses to hide the black eye and won’t comment. What shot my eyebrows up into my hairline was his statement:

It was a very unfortunate event, I didn’t mean for it to explode the way it did.

“Event”? “It”? It’s like a rift in space-time opened up and the strong nuclear force took control of his fist and exploded it on her face. Does he have super-powers or something? When he drinks, does his Lantern ring go around bitch-slapping people without his permission? Most people have to willfully lift their fist and extend it vigorously in someone else’s direction for these sorts of events to happen.

“I know you’re gonna walk, but what’s the horse gonna do?”
–Katy Beth, adorable daughter of Ambulance Driver

FRIDAY
In Secret Location, CO, there are train tracks. There are crossing arms that go across the road for the times when a train must cross the street. The trains themselves, presumably, have lights, and being trains are not possessed of any particular subtlety. Have you ever been confused, when out on foot, as to whether or not there was a train passing you? Me either. Apparently everyone who is not us has the mental power of a lobotomized sea cucumber though, because the horn on the trains have been automated For Our Safety. They go off in a set pattern no matter what. Thus, at what-the-fuck o’clock in the morning, after tossing and turning through hours jesus-haploid-christ thirty to I’ll-get-religion-if-I-can-just-get-some-sleep:15 as truck after truck blasted through town leaning on the engine brake as hard as mechanically possible to transition from highway to city speed, the train arrived.

I’m not sure if I was just much more awake than I’d have liked to be at the time, or if I have a streak of pragmatism deeper than expected, but after verifying that the number showing on the clock face was one not normally seen in nature, I reached the conclusion that yes, I probably could stop the train whistle through some means or another, but that doing so would only mean I would hear sirens, and for much longer than the accursed horn.

Five minutes later, Jim knocked on the door to remind us that we were gathering at the FarmFam house at 10. Rolling over and attempting to go back to sleep until it was light out, we drifted fitfully off as the non-stop serenade of engine brakes continued.

With the time fixed firmly in mind, and distances from motel to breakfast to FarmFam all easily walkable, we allowed ourselves what seemed a more than generous 90 minutes to rise, shower, and prepare to face the gunblogging world. Shortly after the alarm went off, Jim knocked on the door to remind us that we were gathering at the FarmFam house at 10, and oh, folks are starting to head down.

After some argument with what I will very generously describe as a lock on the motel room door, LabRat and I grabbed a quick bite at the greasy spoon across the street. I will note that their biscuits are freakin’ delicious. We headed for the FarmFam house, and found that at a whopping three minutes after 10, we were not only the last ones there, but they were apparently preparing to send Jim out to knock on our door again. I made a mental note to acquaint the other participants with the NIST Atomic Clock.

Plans for the day began to gel. With the shooty bits reserved for the weekend proper, I moved the armory to someplace with a lock, and we made our way to the town library/museum. Unfortunately, I forgot my camera, but if you check any of the folks linked yesterday you can probably find something soon, including Breda with a two-headed calf.

After this, we broke for lunch. Since breakfast contained roughly 40,000 calories, and we were both tired from listening to That Fucking Train and the truck parade all night, LabRat and I retired for a quick nap, with everybody agreeing to reunite at FarmFam’s at 1. Jim knocked on the door to remind us that we were reuniting at FarmFam’s at 1.

Leaving a little more time to fiddle with the motel door “lock” (after Jim reminded us that we were reuniting at FarmFam’s at 1 again), we pulled in a few minutes before 1300 to find ourselves again the last ones there, and Jim preparing to come knock on the door for good measure. I thought about collecting everybody’s watches.

Gathered, we put ourselves out to pasture. No, really. FarmGirl took us out to see her beloved horses, and put the various and assembled greenhorns and city slickers a chance to get up on one of these strange and mythical animals of Yon West (and in one case try to kill the poor creature). Alan had an attack of look-at-meitis, and donned curious garb, despite the fact that there wasn’t a sheep for a dozen miles in any direction.

Then the fun began. I’ve done the dude-ranch “See the horsey? Niiiice horsey. Horsey friiiieeeennd!” routine a few times, so I tried to make myself useful hauling shit around. I may not be able to put the saddle on by my lonesome, but I can at least pick things up and move them from point A to B.

Breda and Christina took the first turns, though the horses clearly had in mind that lounging around like a herd of lazy asses was the order of the day. Breda’s horse was most inclined to turn circles and walk backwards, steadfastly ignoring the instructions of the rider. When Christina got on, Joan (the horse, named after the Grand Dame of Rock Ms. Jett herself on account of headbanging when herding cows) eventually figured out that things were not going to go her way that day, and that compliance might make things easier all around.

Midway through all this fun, Ambulance Driver showed up with his daughter Katy Beth in tow. After initially being a little overwhelmed, Katy was convinced to climb up on a horse and we were all treated to not only the cutest cowgirl in town, but also perhaps the most prescient.
“Is the horse gonna go fast, daddy?” she inquired.
“No, sweetie. We’ll go nice and easy,” replied the doting father.
“‘Cause I’d be scared if it started to run,” continued the budding equestrian.
” It’s ok, your daddy and I will be walking right along side you and the horse to make sure,” our hostess weighed in.
“Ok, well, I know you’re gonna walk, but what’s the horse gonna do?”

When I get serious and knuckle down to taking over the world, I’m gonna have to borrow Katy Beth so someone will be around to ask the important questions to keep me from fouling it all up. Seriously, smartest question I heard all damn day.

At this point things headed a little south. That bit about someone trying to kill one of the horses? Yes, that would be the fault of your dutifully typing idiot. After everybody else finished up (with LabRat still ambling around atop the now fully compliant Joan) I was convinced to climb atop Rebel, one of FarmGirl’s slightly-more-spirited-but-still-very-docile steeds. We moseyed off. I’ve always been a little uncertain of the quality of my mosey, but it was at least decent enough to navigate around the corral. We checked out the badger burrow at one end and after a little trotting, I came to the conclusion that I was tired of the dude ranch experience, and it was high time I finally got to experience the fun horse owners enjoy of having the creature stretch its legs and get up a turn of speed. I gave a prod with my heels, flicked the reins, leaned forward, and informed the critter “Let’s go.”

Have I mentioned that Rebel was a rodeo horse used for steer wrestling, and is very sensitive to the position of the rider in the saddle? It was news to me too.

With the last lingering bit of the “o” in go barely past my teeth, there was a stiff breeze in my face. Looking about, I ascertained this was because the horse was now traveling at approximately 87 mph, and was on the verge of leaving flaming hoofprints and depositing me neatly back in 1955. This was fucking fun. Looking at the layout again with the new speed-distorted perspective, I came up with the plan of rounding the corner we were headed for and reining in up at the gate. I figured no sense pushing my luck too far. We rounded the first corner without a hitch, and I adjusted my weight a bit for stability. This meant a bit further forward lean, which again in the information I did not have at the time category, meant I was leaning on the gas harder. I noticed my over-shirt was flapping straight out behind me. This was really fucking fun. Only, um, that gate is coming up kinda fast. No, really… you see that don’t you, Rebel? The gate? Solid thing? People behind it? We’re gonna slow down, aren’t we? We ARE going to– aw, fuck. I hauled back on the reins and tried to lean back. Not knowing about the saddle position thing, and combined with the momentum flinging me forward, I didn’t lean back far enough to convince Rebel, who only moderately slowed. With about ten feet, the horse realized there was a gate in the way and began trying to go from 358mph to 0. The plan did not entirely work.

A short skid later, the gate was ringing a bit, Rebel was shaking his head, and the general clamor of a near miss washed over the folks standing on the non-horsed side of the gate.
“Did he spook, or did you kick him up?” FarmGirl asked. Being used to horses it was clear nobody was seriously hurt, so the order of the day was figuring out just who the dumbass in this little equation was.
“That was me.”
“Your heart going about 300 miles an hour?”
“Hell no! That was FUN!”
I dismounted Rebel, who shook his head again, clearly less enthused about the ride’s conclusion. I began re-evaluating my mental map of all the tales of “horses are so clever” to take into account “but not clever enough to see the gate” while our extremely benevolent hostess told me the trick about the position of rider in saddle. Lesson learned.

From there we all trucked out to inspect the range we’d be sending several thousand rounds down over the next few days. It looked… range-like. More importantly, however, the FarmFam had more food ready, so we gathered up and hauled ass back to town.

To Be Continued…

“Holy shit, that’s a big dog!”
–Breda

So as folks may have heard, there was a bit of a shindig up in Colorado this last weekend. Before I jump in, there are other recaps here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here (with one of the best writeups of The Deer Incident out there), here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here (with hilarious arm-chair quarterbacking in comments), here, here and here.

If I missed anybody, just say so in comments and I’ll add it in.

I imagine the best way is to just start at the beginning. As you go through this, just imagine it popping up the days ala’ Dawn of the Dead or something for effect.

TUESDAY
Tuesday saw the last panicked push before Breda and Alan showed up for some pre-Blogorado fun. This was a blur. Common phrases around the house included “Heydidyoutakecareofthe” and “Whataboutthe” “Didyoualreadydo” and so forth, all spoken like a 33rpm record played at 45 while we blurred around in a frenzy that would make a hummingbird blush. After flight trouble delaying Breda, things didn’t really get started until it was basically Wednesday anyway, whereupon we took the dogs over to neutral turf to meet our guests, hoping it would help ease the “There are new people in my territory, I will let them know they are new and in my territory” reaction. Thankfully, it did. Adding in a copious dose of dog biscuits, Kodos and Kang both took to Alan and Breda like crazy, and have been sniffing around all afternoon (when not sleeping) wondering where they went. Just add some alcohol and decompression chatter and fill in your own details.*

WEDNESDAY

Wednesday started with Breda returning a favor and cooking us an utterly amazing Irish breakfast. Black pudding, white pudding, bangers, fried tomatos, Irish brown bread, eggs, and beans. There were rougly five thousand calories per fork-ful, and calling it delicious is like saying a man struck by lightning is feeling a little under the weather. It’s accurate, but it doesn’t really do the situation justice, now does it?

After that, we set about showing off the quirky** hometown. Scenery was observed at the overlook five minutes walk from our front door, and we made a tour through both the Historical Museum and the Bradbury Science Museum (also known as the “Yay LANL!” museum, since the lab owns and operates it and puts in more than a bit of excessive positive spin). There we found Breda contemplating MIRVs

and we paused by some old gizmos that might possibly be of interest to a certain alpha Geekette.

We learned about recessive genes, in the aid of which Alan huffed a bongload of mansweat, and LabRat showed off her thumb:

We tried to convince Breda to do a Slim Pickins impression with one of the displays, to no avail.

Maybe someone particularly talented with photoshop could take some source material (sorry about the sun glare) and do something? Just sayin’….

The day finished out with dinner at one of our favorite restaurants, and Breda earned the hate-filled loving approval of Zydeco.

THURSDAY
Thursday was basically spent driving to Secret Location, CO. Our lovely (if underfed, by some unfathomable miracle, but more on this later) hostess FarmGirl warned us pre-departure that there “wasn’t much” between the point we were to depart the interstate and her town. This is like saying that black holes suck***. The last hundred miles of drive between highway and blogmeet had us questioning our sanity on more than one occasion. We kept expecting the world to turn blue, or to meet an older version of ourselves peddling a bicycle the other way, or given the resemblance of the terrain to other areas see a giant yellow exclamation point floating over a bush, or hear a lot of jokes about Chuck Norris. LabRat was certain she’d seen that horse with the white fore hoof at least three times, and we began measuring time in miles rather than minutes. This did not change the fact that time dilation is a known effect, and one that was, at the time, present at curiously sub-proxiluminous velocities. I thought about attempting to check the truck and occupants for unexplained sudden increases in mass, but decided that discretion was the better part of valor, what with LabRat’s increasing stir-craziness and all. Besides, such things are hard to check properly in the dark.

6.0345 x10⁴⁸ years later, we arrived. Passing through town at a speed calculated to have optimal effect on the issuance of speeding tickets to those passing through on the previously (more or less) sensibly speed-limited highway, we found our motel. Given the neon-pink lighting and other subtle cues, I thought about asking if the daily rate was substantially different from the hourly rate. Checked in, we headed to the first evening’s gathering, tired but game. I’m pretty sure everyone we met there, FarmGirl, Christina LMT, Gay_Cynic, Snarky, the already in-tow Alan and Breda, OldNFO, AEPilotJim, is over in the sidebar, and if I forgot anybody, my apologies. The drive was long, the author was tired, the food abundant and delicious, and the beer in quantity. Seriously, The FarmFamily cooks up one hell of a brisket and pork shoulder, with accompanying sauce, hot sauce, and sides. Even now that we’re home and in good light where things are easier to measure, I’ve been afraid to step on the scale after the four-day gorge of amazing chow. FarmGirl herself, a prime candidate to dress up as Twiggy for Halloween must have a tapeworm or something to be around food this delicious all the time and yet still maintain her svelte shape. The fact that such a frame could also perform a passable imitation of Mongo from Blazing Saddles in the horse and cow punching department is nothing short of amazing.

Finally, after the iPhone addicts finished draining the batteries on their devices, to the boredom of all others, we all headed back to rooms (most of us at the same motel for that matter) and crashed for the night.

Then I discovered the train that runs through town.

I hate the train that runs through town.

To be continued…

*NOT LIKE THAT, TD!
**The polite way of saying “Nucking futs”
***Don’t act like I don’t know it’s just exceptionally high gravity. You can have my metaphors when I’ve reached room temperature.

That was more fun than is actually legal in some states. Detailed writeup and pics to follow soon.

Minor update: Anyone with pictures of us who needs to blur our faces, the standard atom we use for the purpose is here. Or just use the standard black box/blur tool. We’re easy.

Winter started this week. I don’t care what the calendar says, here we had a sudden, hard, cold snap, complete with snow. I’m dancing for joy since this means a lot of plants that had been tormenting me with their gametes are now dead or dormant, but either way it’s shifted my food desires from meat with lots of fresh vegetables to the sort of kitchen-warming, rib-sticking dishes o’ density that go perfectly with a fire outside and a frost out.

I have a thing for meat pies. I really don’t know what it is; it’s not like my immediate family are from anywhere they’re commonly made, so my entire childhood food memory of meat pies consists of the heavily spiced mystery-meat creations I could get when the Ren Faire came to town. I knew they were made with the cheapest things available (which is traditional), but there was something subersive to me about putting meat in a pie, and I always passed up the giant turkey legs and skewered steak for the meat pie and ate every last bite. No one else I know shares this bent, so until now the house has been large meat pie-free. Now that I’m in the driver’s seat, I can scratch this itch with impunity.

So, this week I decided to go for a traditional kind of meat pie: the pasty. I like lamb and there’s pretty much no point at which I get tired of it, so I wanted lamb pasties.

ingredients
350g lean lamb, diced
1 tablespoon butter
1 onion, finely chopped
1 stalk celery, finely chopped
1 carrot, finely chopped
1 potatoes, diced
2 tablespoons chopped mint
salt
pepper
1 tablespoon plain flour
375ml beef stock
1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
¼ cup frozen peas
6 sheets puff pastry
1 egg, beaten

method
Brown the lamb on all sides in the butter. Add the onion, celery, carrot, potatoes and mint. Cover and cook for 10 minutes. Season with salt and pepper.

Add the flour and continue to cook for a few minutes.

Add 1 cup of the beef stock and cook covered for 30 minutes, or until tender. Gradually add the rest of the stock as required during cooking.

Add the Worcestershire sauce and peas. Take off the heat and allow to cool. If the meat mixture is warm it will melt the pastry.

Take a sheet of pastry and cut out a round the size of a saucer. Place a large spoonful of mixture in the centre of the pastry. Brush the edges of the pastry with beaten egg and fold over. Pinch with thumb and forefinger all the way round the edges to seal. Brush the top with beaten egg and put onto a greased baking sheet. Repeat with remaining pastry and filling to make 6 pasties.

Bake in a preheated oven 200°C for 20-30 minutes until crisp and golden.

Makes 6

At this point doing things strictly by the book would be boring, plus if I’m going to make meat pies they’re going to have exactly what I want in them.

350g lean lamb, diced

Yeeeaaah. How ’bout we just get ground? It’ll save a step and also save me from having to select a cut of lamb from the limited selection in the grocery store that’s suitable. Seeing as how we still don’t have access to lamb necks and all. This calculates out to about three quarters of a pound, but seeing as how we’re not poor tenant farmers I think having a little extra lamb is just not going to hurt us any.

1 stalk celery, finely chopped

No. I have no objections to the flavor of celery, but I have a fundamental issue with the texture of cooked celery, so unless I’m making soup or a cajun-creole dish with trinity I always skip this step.

1 carrot, finely chopped

This part I just plain forgot while I was at the grocery store. Eh, whatever; part of the point of these kinds of dishes are using up odds and ends. Buying extra odds and ends to conform to the recipe is optional.

1 potatoes, diced

Sure, why not? Also, because I like it, especially in winter stews and braises, I decided to throw some turnip in there too.

2 tablespoons chopped mint

See also, “forgot while I was at the store”. This omission I regret more than the carrot, since it would have added more/more interesting flavor.

6 sheets puff pastry

I bought two packages while I was at the grocery store just to be sure I had enough… and then discovered that each package only contains two sheets of puff pastry. While this still wound up being more than enough food for two hungry adults (we wound up splitting one pie and saving the fourth for the next day’s lunch), here my mental nightmare of trying to calculate the subsequent adjustments for two fewer pies with no carrots and extra turnip and lamb began. I also learned a very important lesson, which is that I can do only one kind of math in my head at a time, but more on that later. On to the cooking!

1. Remove all sheets of frozen puff pastry from their packaging and find them a cutting board to rest on while they thaw. Preheat your oven to 200*. Find the essentials: another cutting board to sunder the vegetables on, a vegetable peeler, your trusty Santoku, and an acceptable XM channel to listen to while you work. Suggested: 90′s alternative. The metal has been a little too brutal and that’s a hazard to the fingers. The blues just encourage you to drink more while you cook than is healthy for the cook or the meal.

2. Start peeling the potato. Do as much as you can while hanging onto the skin-on end before you have to switch.

3. Retrieve the potato from the garbage can. Good thing you changed the bag right before you started. Right, important lesson: raw peeled potato is very, very slippery.

4. Have a serious internal debate about the volume of the potato. Potatoes don’t come in standardized unit-sizes and reducing by one third therefore doesn’t seem sensible; there’s also the troubling question of the turnip and just how much volume it will add and how much you should therefore reduce the potato by, since they’re both serving the same “root vegetable” category of flavor and volume. Additionally there’s the equally perturbing question of the carrots, which also do not come in standardized sizes, and how much volume their elimination leaves open; we are, after all, going to have to fit all of this into four sheets of puff pastry. Plus there’s also the matter of the lamb, which we have an extra quarter pound of even before considering two pies’ less of volume total…

5. Fuck it! Are we mice, or are we cooks? So there might be leftover filling! So what! Cooking is easy! ONE POTATO, ONE TURNIP, and DAMN THE TORPEDOES.

6. Dice the potato. Another new discovery: raw potato contains a tremendous amount of sticky starch-slime that might as well be like school glue when it comes to adhering the bits of potato to your knife, your board, and anything else not made of ceramic or glass. Optional: let your Kitchen Bitch have the fliers produced by the combination of blade-sticking and vigorous chopping. She probably won’t eat them, but she might, and either way you’re going to have to clean those bits off one surface or another later anyway. Deposit the diced potato in an appropriate vessel.

7. Peel the turnip, which fortunately contains less slime. Dice, which for this reason will take quite a bit less time than the potato did. Optional: add turnip next to brussels sprouts on the list of “vegetables that Kitchen Bitch is mysteriously enthusiastic about”.

8. Contemplate your onion. It’s a pretty big onion, so we’ll call half of it a proportionate amount to add to our filling. Peel it, then hack it in half and take a healthy step back to see if this is a Weaponized Onion. We’re pretty sure the responsible farmer has been stopped, but you never know.

9. This onion is compliant with UN guidelines regarding vegetables and chemical warfare, so sling half into a plastic bag and into the fridge, then set about the other half. Take a few moments to revel in this being the one preparation-related task where knife skills are irrelevant, since if you just hit it enough times with the knife you’ll achieve the recommended fine chop.

Brown the lamb on all sides in the butter. Add the onion, celery, carrot, potatoes and mint. Cover and cook for 10 minutes. Season with salt and pepper.

10. Chop a tablespoon’s worth of butter off the stick on the principle that we should almost never skimp on cooking fats, turn the burner to an acceptably middle-groundish “medium”, and start melting the butter. Fish around in the fridge for the pack of ground lamb. Locate a pair of scissors to open the top. Attempt to extrude the meat into the pan. Wait a few minutes with the upended pack of meat and wonder if they turned gravity down today.

11. Squeeze the package like a recalcitrant tube of toothpaste, getting most of the meat out. Scrape the rest out with your fingers while you try to stir the rest of the meat at the same time. Wash your hands and the handle of your stirring implement. Wonder what the fuck was wrong with the “plastic-wrapped meat in a diaper on a styrofoam dish” model of meat-packing that they had to go to this version. Toss the meat around until it’s mostly browned on most pieces on most sides.

12. Dump the vegetables into the pan and mix as vigorously as possible without losing an unacceptable number of casualties to the burner. Cover and cook for ten minutes. Waste the time at your favorite internet time-wasting location. Or second favorite- porn is a bad choice for right now, as it will invigorate entirely the wrong appetite.

Add the flour and continue to cook for a few minutes.

13. This step is so simple even you can’t screw it up. Just stir it in with the browned meat until it’s merged with the fat from the butter and lamb.

14. Cheat: take advantage of your spouse, who for once is not distracted trying to get work done, argue on the internet, drinking scotch, or fiddling with the AR, and is in a helpful mood. Have spouse take the now-thawed sheets of puff pastry, and cut a large round from each, put the stack of rounds in the fridge, and likewise put a bowl of the scraps into the fridge.

Add 1 cup of the beef stock and cook covered for 30 minutes, or until tender. Gradually add the rest of the stock as required during cooking.

15. Realize you never bothered to do the conversion from milliliters to cups of stock and therefore have no idea how much was ultimately supposed to be added, wonder if the hypothetical amount of stock should be reduced for two fewer pies anyway, then shrug and pour in a cup. “Until tender” is a given for the lamb, given as you’re using ground rather than a tough stewing cut, so cook until the turnips and potatoes are tender, which is pretty much now. There’s thirty minutes saved.

Add the Worcestershire sauce and peas. Take off the heat and allow to cool. If the meat mixture is warm it will melt the pastry.

16. Remove the bag of frozen peas in your freezer, which are currently behaving as a unitary bloc. Violently bludgeon the bag against the counter until you’ve shattered their resistance, then extract a quarter-cup of the victims and add them to the filling mixture. Splash in the Worcestershire and mix well. Throw in several dashes of salt-and-pepper mix, since you forgot to season back in step twelve. Remove the meat from the heat, leave it to cool down for ten or fifteen minutes, and ignore your helpful spouse’s hairy eyeball at your unanticipated excess of free time, where making rounds out of the puff pastry sheet would logically have gone. (If you don’t have a helpful spouse, this would really be a good time to do that, don’t you think?)

Place a large spoonful of mixture in the centre of the pastry. Brush the edges of the pastry with beaten egg and fold over. Pinch with thumb and forefinger all the way round the edges to seal. Brush the top with beaten egg and put onto a greased baking sheet. Repeat with remaining pastry and filling to make 6 pasties.

17. Poke the filling, which is, all right, still warm, but it’s not HOT anymore and you figure it’ll probably not melt your pastry. Grease up a baking pan and find a clear surface to put it. Crack an egg into a bowl, whose yolk will remain annoyingly intact during one of the few occasions that’s not a goal, and beat it savagely with a fork. Remove the pastry from the fridge and carefully arrange it in the center of a plate along the lines it was previously folded.

18. Spoon filling into the center until it looks like you’ve used roughly a quarter of that which is in the pan. Brush beaten egg around the edges of the pastry. Carefully tug the left edge up and let the filling slide rightward a bit as you fold the thing over and pinch the edges firmly to seal. Brush the top all over with the egg.

19. Adopting a careful and measured manner common to bomb-squad members and people holding thoroughly used diapers, transfer the resulting pasty from the plate to the baking sheet. Edge it over as far to one side as you can, given it’s apparent that all four pasties are only barely going to fit in one pan. Repeat twice more.

20. Discover your inability to judge volumes by eye is perfectly intact as it becomes undeniable that there is about half a pie’s worth more filling than there is space inside pastry sheets. Transfer as much as you can get away with to the last pastry round, give a few bits of lamb to your Kitchen Bitch if you have one, and feed the rest to your garbage disposal or equivalent family member. Fold, brush, and transfer your last pasty. Insert the pan into the pre-heated oven.

21. The original recipe suggested turning the scraps into little rolled pastries coated with sugar and cinnamon. We don’t have much of a sweet tooth, so instead roll cheddar cheese into the scraps and squeeze the whole awkward knot as tightly together as you can. Add them to their own pan. Curse vigorously as it develops that, when you moved the oven racks last time to accommodate a dutch oven, you did not leave room for two baking sheets.

22. Borrow your spouse’s welding gloves to correct the problem. Insert the little pastry-cheese-biscuit things ten minutes out from when the pies are supposed to be done and return to your time-wasting.

23. Something is wrong. Nothing is golden, brown, or puffed. Although step one would have been a much, much better time to realize this, two hundred degrees Celsius is about four hundred degrees Fahrenheit, which is what your oven is marked in.

24. FFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU-

25. Reset the oven temperature. As it turns out both of you are hungry enough, and the filling tasty enough, to consume meat pie with raw dough, though the biscuit-things barely even bear looking at. As you uncomfortably attempt to digest this, put the remaining two pies and biscuit-things back in the now at-temperature oven.

26. Everything is now golden brown and puffed to three times its original size. Split a pie with cooked pastry (which is much, much better), put the remaining one in the fridge for later consumption, and try the biscuit-things, which are fairly tasty and would be much more appealing if you didn’t suspect the raw puff pastry in your stomach was assuming its intended cooked dimensions.

So, not one of my finest hours in the kitchen, but at least I can claim I’m in the same error class as NASA. The filling was quite tasty even if there was too much of it, and we might make these again once I live it down. I think I might actually prefer a different kind of dough overall than puff pastry, and I’ll be investigating those options next time I get a craving for meat pie. Which will probably be around the same time I forget what trying to digest uncooked dough feels like.

*If you’re insane enough to be using this as an actual guide to cooking lamb pasties rather than entertainment, it would be a good idea for you to bear in mind right about now that the original recipe was written for an Australian audience, and their ovens, unlike American ovens, are marked in degrees Celsius rather than Fahrenheit.

So yeah. We are still busy as hell, mostly getting a lot of stuff done that’s been on the to-do for ages before houseguests get here, and after that we’re all up to Blogorado to drink and shoot stuff and swap lies (not all at the same time). So we’re looking at a hiatus unless certain someones let us play with their toy computers while we’re up there. I’ll be lucky if I remember cooking the damn lamb pasties by the time I get around to writing them up.

But, from the comments to the last post (which is a warm multinational troll-stomp, I must say), Pun linked to this comic, which Stingray has been off-and-on pulling up just to giggle at all over gain. Kristopher linked to the artist’s main gallery, and I’ve been having my own gigglefits ever since reading more comics.

But I damn near drowned myself with my own water glass at this one. I don’t know what’s funnier, the middle panel or the last one.

Okay, so we spent the weekend converting a very large pile of logs into a very large pile of split and stacked firewood. It doesn’t exactly make for fabulous blogging material, but it will make for fabulous combustible material throughout the winter, so that made it priority. There’s part of a Cooking Noob in the draft section, but tonight I have neither the time, the energy, or the good mood to finish it.

For some reason- I don’t know if we’ve gotten a higher Google profile or what- we seem to have attracted a few trollish comments of late. I hadn’t responded to or highlighted the first one because it’s so incoherent I frankly can’t figure out what the guy’s point was supposed to be (though I considered making a reader contest of it), but as the other is a pure finger-wagging chide for my shameful, shameful indulgence in schadenfreude, well hell. I’ll just keep that schadenfreude train rolling. From the comments to my throwaway post on Scarred:

I’m probably wasting my time with this, but I just *don’t get it*, so I have to ask.

Here’s a free hint: If you start out knowing something is a bad idea, it’s a bad idea to go through with it. Actually that was the entire point of the original post. You’ll find it embedded in the wall somewhere above your head.

What, exactly, is funny about people hurting themselves?

Inherently? Nothing much. The irony here is that I won’t watch America’s Funniest Home Videos because I don’t think men taking a shot to the balls is funny even if it’s a three-year-old doing it. Well, that and I find almost everything else they think is funny to be either boring or antihumor, but still- I don’t laugh, I’m mentally counting up hospital bills.

People hurting themselves with full knowledge that it’s very likely they’re going to do so, and then actually coming back and doing the exact same thing again and re-sustaining the original injury only worse, and then volunteering for the whole scene to be on national television, followed by their sincere pledge to keep doing what’s wrecking their bodies, is either hilarious or suicidally depressing. I go with the former. Believing that being that stupid should, in fact, be painful probably has something to do with it.

Now I know that the Americans are big on revenge and humiliation, and in their twisted minds equate it with justice, but the people in this programme haven’t done you any harm so that excuse is out.

When did nationality come into it? The show is multinational- people submit videos from all over. We happen to be American, but we write as individuals and pretty much own the fact that we’re not particularly nice ones at that. I WONDER IF THIS COMMENTER HAS A LARGER AGENDA?

The interesting thing here is that he’s right, it’s not really about revenge or justice. I don’t give a damn if somebody thinks riding the ragged edge of natural selection is a good lifestyle choice*. Freedom means being free to be stupid, after all. But that doesn’t mean I won’t comment on it either. But it sure as hell was never about nationality, either- that’s all his axe to grind.

How can anyone fully human watch a video of someone acting stupidly and hurting themselves seriously in the process, and then not only *not* be revolted, but actually enjoy it and telegraph to the world how hilarious it is while mocking the injured and trying to be witty about it?

Well, my grandmother WAS an orc. That might have had something to do with it.

They can’t, of course. Only a completely pathetic piece of human refuse would be entertained by it. And then announce how much they liked it! What kind of sick fuck are you anyway?

Somehow I get the impression this is a rhetorical question.

I used to wonder why the Abu Ghraib was just “panties on the heads” to americans, how a judge running for election can brag about how many persons he sent to execution, how rape jokes can be so hilarious and ubiquitous, and how the police are seen not as upstanding servants of the people but as violent thugs, a necessary evil to keep the hordes of sub-humans at bay.

Here’s my rhetorical question: Gosh, I wonder why so many Americans think of Europeans as bigoted and condescending?

At this point I’m just fascinated, seeing as how I’ve never commented on Abu Ghraib at all (and for the record, my position is “it was bad”), I have no idea what he’s talking about with respect to the judge- but I suspect that doesn’t matter to him- and there are several law enforcement bloggers in the sidebar. But with this kind of drive-by troll, it never IS about much but having a place to spew their guts.

But then I learned that attitudes like the one seen in this post really are very common among Americans, and the mystery of why their country is such an unbelievably fucked up combination of sexism, homophobia and violence is solved.

Cheers to you too, cupcake. I’m glad to know that in Country of Origin Not Mentioned** people never, ever laugh at other people falling down, and I’m sure that if you polled the nearest bar full of young men they’d be outraged to find out this is happening.

Meanwhile, it’s perfectly just and only evidence of your own sensitive soul to deliberately seek out and call strangers sick fucks, not even human, worthless pieces of filth, and characterize their nations as hellholes based on, apparently, word of mouth and the assumption that all three hundred million members of that culture all think the same thing about each issue- fucking subhuman foreigners, am I right?

*Although, while they haven’t done us personally any harm, their habit of tearing up private property, opening the owners to liability, and putting their massive orthopedic bills on public hospitals doesn’t make us feel all warm and fuzzy, either.

**Traceroute says Sweden. Land of tolerance and justice. And a murder and assault rate twice America’s.