Atomic Nerds

Since Santa Fe is a liberal hippy-nest filled with people operating under the mistake impression that they’re your mother and know what is best for you, some while ago, the town enacted a fairly draconian smoking ban. It’s not the worst in the nation, but the fact that I have to make that point is damning enough on its own. Recently a friend was complaining that her town enacted a similar ban, but that the fine was only $100 per night for the joint violating the ban. I thought about looking up what the Santa Fe fine is like, but that sounded like too much effort, and besides, the whole notion kicked the squirrel on a exercise wheel that passes for my brain, and I had An Idea.

I don’t smoke, myself. I enjoy cigars, but not regularly enough that this sort of ban directly impacts me. But just because it doesn’t directly impact me doesn’t mean it isn’t still a load of steaming horseshit cobbled together by some helicopter parent with delusions of adequacy. What needs to happen, and which sadly almost never does, is that these meddling, mewling crybabies need to be told that they are not, in fact, the boss of everybody and that they are cordially invited to go fuck themselves with a steam shovel. To that end, I want to open a bar, or bar & grill, or hell, just a damn warehouse room with some chairs and a soda machine. The establishment will be named “Smoke Here.” Just to make sure everybody is on the same page, I’ll put a disclaimer on the door:

The smoking ban is bullshit. You’re an adult, you can smoke here if you want. There will be people smoking in here, so if you’re a goddamn crybaby that has to meddle with shit that’s none of your business, go somewhere else. Pay attention to your own kids or something. But given the type asshole that does that shit, your kids are probably in here anyway. So just fuck off.

P.S. The bartender is kind of an asshole.

Bar food will all be smoked as well. Smoked bacon, smoked salmon, smoked jerky, you get the idea. Every fifth drink gets you a free cigarette. Even better, just while writing this I realized I could combine two of my ideas in one and offer Angry Hour once or twice a week. And if any petty little pisspot bureaucratic dictator who thinks just because he’s got a clipboard and the official “I’m Your New Mommy” badge means he’s got the biggest dick in town wants to swagger up to the place, whichever patron successfully figures out why there’s a woodchipper and a garden hose out back gets free drinks for the night.

So, any venture capitalists out in the audience?

I’ll be going out of town on Thursday to help out my family, and things have been busy around here in general both in preparing for that and just flat in a background way, so unless stuff falls into my lap posting is/will be spotty. Same goes for Stingray once I’m on the plane.

Bear with, gentle readers.

…Specifically, on those who prefer them to “drugs”.

Drugs are not juju, they are highly specific chemical compounds with known mechanisms of action. They are generally derived, processed, studied, described, and otherwise quantified by chemists in laboratories, which for some reason seems to be objectionable to some people on its face. Drugs vary a lot in both effect and power, and usually are neither wholly beneficial nor wholly noxious; even deadly poisons can be theraputic in the right doses and right circumstances. They are chemicals that interact with your body’s own chemicals in specific ways.

Yes, your body has chemicals. It has lots and lots of chemicals. Arguably it is entirely chemicals, but for those of you that think that a chemical is strictly something funny-colored and funny-smelling that can be distributed in jars and not, say, bone, we’ll just stick with “lots and lots”. You run on chemicals. They are not particularly unique chemicals either. It used to be that scientists thought there was something unique about the chemicals involved in life, which is where the concept of “organic chemistry” came from, but later on people twigged that it was simply a matter of all life on earth being wrapped up with carbon and carbon not having any particular lifelike or life-giving property. Benzene is an extremely organic chemical and yet it remains incompatible with life.

Plants in general are simply bursting with chemicals. Any given plant makes up for its inability to get up and run away from a predator- and herbivores are the predators of plants- by being a chemical weapons factory. Plants don’t exist to feed animals, they would entirely prefer that that never happen*. Any given species of plant still exists because by whatever mechanical, chemical, or other** means, it can defend itself well enough that herbivores can’t eat all or even most of it.

What medicinal herbs are, when they are not simply vegetative placebos, is unrefined drugs of unknown quantity and unknown components. They’re chemicals just like the drugs from laboratories are, we just don’t know exactly what’s in them or exactly how much or exactly what they do. They’re drugs from a jaunty metaphorical box with an orange Riddler question mark on it. Many drugs are extracted and refined versions of herbs and other plants, because sometimes- often!- plants do produce chemicals we never thought of that have some effect on us that may be useful in certain circumstances. This goes for aspirin, ipecac, atropine, digitalin, strychnine, and many others. Note that all of these things will kill you if you take too much and all of them have side effects. Some of them will kill you if you have even a little.

Are there some herbs and herbal therapies that really do something that a commercially produced drug doesn’t? No doubt. The number of undiscovered drugs will be much greater than the number of discovered ones for the forseeable future of our species. Just bear in mind that the plant doesn’t like you and doesn’t want to help you, and because there are no side effects known, this is only because nothing much ELSE is known either except that the drug within the plant seems to do something noticeable. Herbs are not better or worse than drugs, they ARE drugs. Treat them as such.

*Except of course in the case of eating their overly developed genitals in order to get their offspring somewhere new.

**Contracting a species of animal to be your security force is a pretty good “other”. Arguably this is what domesticated plants have done, except we’re also their pimps, travel and relocation agents, and handservants. Next time you have a salad really sit down and consider who is using whom. In return, they give us more calories than they ordinarily would and poison us less. Sometimes only somewhat less.

Weerd inquires why, if we can get all that delicious meat and fat off a pig, the world is not graced with pig’s milk and similarly derived dairy products. Seems like as good an opportunity for Useless Anatomy Facts You’ll Never Need Again as any to me!

The shortest answer to the question of “why don’t we milk pigs?” is “because it’s very difficult to do”, and the slightly longer answer to the question is “because the animals we do milk have udders and pigs don’t”. Neither of which is is a particularly rich or satisfying explanation.

All mammals give milk, but they don’t all do it in exactly physically analagous ways, and some have made much more a specialty of it than others. At its anatomical root, a mammary gland is a modified sweat gland; mammals that are perhaps closest to the most primitive state we can see still living, the monotremes, make this much clearer. They don’t have teats/nipples at all- they secrete milk through their pores, and grooves along their bellies allow the milk to pool for the young to more easily lap it up. They sweat milk far more literally than any other mammal we’re used to seeing.

Most other mammals have hit upon teats as efficient milk-to-young delivery systems, and the precise arrangement of mammary glands, streak canals (the duct from which milk flows from mammary gland to the world at large), and teats varies across species.

Ruminants, which must raise very large young that must be born relatively highly developed and able to quickly move independently, and do so on a diet as nutritionally uninspiring as grass, are the milk specialists of land. Most of them produce quite a bit more milk than a single offspring will need to grow, and they have sophisticated and robust structures to house their mammary glands, which are generally referred to as udders*. While the exact arrangement of mammary glands, streak canals, and teats varies from species to species, all of them have one important thing in common: relatively large teat cisterns, the cavity inside the teat in which milk pools before the suckling action stimulates the milk to flow. A dairy cow’s udder is essentially a massive mammary gland with equally massive support structures and teat cisterns; goats, sheep, water buffalo, camels, and yaks don’t have anything that can quite match, but they have enough for a lactating female to be carrying around a respectable and easily accessible bag of milk per teat.

Humans do things completely differently. A breast superficially resembles an udder, but its interior structure is completely different; where a cow or sheep has one large mammary gland per teat, and one large streak canal, a woman’s breast has clusters of many small and relatively simple mammary glands per nipple and 10-20 streak canals per. The nipple itself serves as a rough equivalent to the teat cistern, and while the structure is small, the sheer number of the streak canals and glands guarantees a relatively high flow once stimulation happens regardless of the different arrangement to the ruminants’ udders. Thus it’s not difficult to milk a mother in the same rough fashion as a ruminant, as busy breast-pump owning mothers know.

Pigs, on the other hand, have small and simple mammary glands the way humans do, but only one per teat- and each small gland is further subdivided to drain into two streak canals per nipple. One gland per nipple, two streak canals that need to open for maximum flow of milk- and their teat cisterns are very small compared to a ruminant’s. Thus, in order for a pig’s milk to flow, she needs a hungry piglet at each teat sucking vigorously to maintain both the flow of milk and the mammary gland’s production- a much taller order than getting milk to flow from an udder or breast. Likely machinery to make this happen is possible now in an industrial society, but it would not have been possible for an early pastoralist or agricultural society at all- hence, the idea of milking a pig, across the cultures that keep both pigs and dairy animals, is not so much taboo as simply abnormal and strange.

Lastly, pigs are mean. A peeved sow won’t merely kick you when you try to milk her, she might just kill you. The motivation factor both to breed to gentle the pig and to get close enough to her to try and get milk in the first place has always been pretty low. You likely wouldn’t even want the milk much- as omnivores with no standardized diet, all sorts of odd flavors would get into the milk depending on the time of year and the pig.

Could the milkable pig be bred, fed, and technologically compensated for? Probably. Would it be economical or desirable to do so? Probably not.

*Horses, which are anatomically about half a ruminant, have about half an udder. It’s possible and has been done to milk a mare for human consumption, but it’s not economical and thus is not culturally normal.

…aka “if you don’t know it, you probably don’t want it.”

1. Not all attention is good attention. Not all attention is good attention. Not all attention is good attention.

2. If someone is willing to run blithely over your boundaries, it’s not because you’re so exciting they couldn’t help themselves. It’s because they don’t care if you have boundaries or not.

3. If someone treats you badly out of the blue, it can only have been the first time ever. Otherwise, it’s not out of the blue, it’s within the range of the expected.

4. If you ever have to enforce your boundaries with someone with physical force, and they are over the age of six, you should not voluntarily associate with that person ever again.

5. NOT ALL ATTENTION IS GOOD ATTENTION!

6. If verbal and sometimes physical assaults on friends and lovers are relatively normal behavior in your social circle, you need an entirely new social circle. Even and perhaps especially if those assaults are mutual.

7. If you’re sleeping with someone who is theoretically in a committed (and not open) relationship with a spouse or significant other, you’re not winning anything, certainly not the person you’re sleeping with and certainly not anything over the jilted lover. You’re being used.

8. Normal, stable, decent adults do not throw temper tantrums.

9. If someone tells you repeatedly they will hurt you, take them at their word.

10. Not all attention is good attention.

11. Theoretically there may be a redeemable, decent, loving person within someone who repeatedly treats you badly. You can’t redeem them. Only they themselves can, possibly with the help of God if you believe in such. In any case the state of their soul and reputation is not your problem, only what they do is, which you can best manage by removing yourself from them as far as possible.

12. In the case of someone who has repeatedly treated you badly in the past, your outlook for future interactions with them should not be “maybe they won’t this time”. Maybe they won’t, but the important part is maybe- with a nontrivial degree of likelihood- they will, and worse.

13. Someone who has been in and out of jail probably hasn’t been in and out due to a series of wacky sitcom coincidences.

14. Sexual interest is not, inherently, a compliment.

15. Exciting drama is for watching in some fictional medium, not living. If this is your hobby, consider acquiring a different one.

16. Someone who gets insane on the subject of you and your doings isn’t wildly passionate about the sheer lightning rod that is you, they’re simply unstable. Likely they also become unhinged about traffic tickets.

17. If friends and acquaintances that are not involved in the weekend drama demolition derbies are giving you warnings and advice to make different choices, you should not mentally translate this as “Stop being awesome, I am jealous of your exciting life.”

18. If any action described in a sentence beginning with “I was just…” ends in any of the following: jail time, hospital time, signficant property damage, therapy, pregnancy, or debt- it sure as hell wasn’t just anything.

19. Reasons are not excuses. Not even an entire laundry list of reasons necessarily adds up into a single excuse.

20. Because it just bears repeating that much: not all attention… is good attention.

Let me show it to you.

Agents will push ahead stagnant prosecutions as a means of mitigating the potential for lone wolf terrorists to strike out of frustration or revenge, the official said. Field offices have been authorized to expand their surveillance and monitoring to include hundreds of subjects. Potential terrorism suspects might be arrested on valid charges not related to terrorism to keep them off the streets, officials said.”

It’s not re-listing crypto as muntions, but…

In New York, the police are swabbing backpacks and shoulder bags and using Sabre 4000 chemical and biological agent detectors at subway entrances.

If anybody needs me, I’m just gonna assume I’ll be over in Room 101 about 10 minutes after I hit “publish.”

So they got Osama, huh? Does that mean we’re all safer now and we can get rid of some of the Constitution-rape we’ve had since 9/11? Maybe shitcan TSA? This is my pre-emptive shocked face.

I’ll be amazed if they aren’t seriously trying to make us all get microchipped by the weekend. I would not be surprised if they tried to re-list strong cryptography as a munition. It won’t do anything since that cat is so far out of the bag it had its own kittens, but since when has current security been about actually doing anything productive?

Close examination of the above photo will reveal frozen precipitation. It seems your latest shipment of winter has been mis-routed. Please send an agent to collect and properly deliver this allotment of snow, as this unscheduled delivery has arrived on the First of May (nsfw). This has caused the cancellation of various activities, and we would like to get back on schedule.

Your timely correction of this mistake is appreciated.

Sincerely,
The Southwest