Year: 2006

Chop wood, carry water, stem chipotles, seed anchos

If you’re looking for a mindfulness exercise, I recommend working with dried chili peppers.

Food preparation is the closest I come to meditative exercise anyway. Preparing the chiles means removing the stems and seeds manually, which requires attention to detail. It’s absorbing and keeps me in the moment. And if I lose my mindful presence with the task, I’ll inevitably touch my eye or nose or some tender spot with a hand covered in dust and seeds from very hot peppers. This is as good as a Zen monk hitting me in the face with a stick. Instantly, I am back in the moment.

Mindfulness, focus, attention, process, an absence of distraction, and finally: chili paste. So even if I am not a step closer to enlightenment, the next few dinners are greatly improved.

Windbag alert and attention conservation notice

I have developed a manifesto-sized idea and am about to blog it out. You have been warned. Long essays making a large cultural point can’t be sold and published conventionally unless the author is a respected and eminent intellectual or a rock ‘n’ roll star. Those who can, do; those who aren’t, blog.

This may fizzle or may be several essays; I’m not sure where I’m going to pinch off the blog yet. Because of TL;DR in this post-literate medium I present some bullet points below for those who aren’t going to plow through the thing.

  • Irony is worse than dead, it’s suicidal.
  • Stop celebrating bad art, bad food, and evil. There’s a place for enjoying things that are so bad they’re good. It isn’t the place called “the entire culture.” Giving up on quality of any kind has more serious consequences than we might think.
  • Phony postmodernism kills. Take the risk of being well-meaning and sincere. A couple of poorly understood Cultural Studies classes does not confer the privilege of detached Godhood.
  • Permanent adolescence is no improvement over permanent childhood. Living our lives fully and meaningfully is a duty to others and not just to ourselves.
  • Subcultures, fandoms, and gaming worlds are eating a generation of privileged and educated people alive when we could and should be doing well and doing good. Come out of the couch fort and live.
  • Cheap fatalism is a crime of privilege. Admitting defeat in advance hurts many, many people less fortunate than we are before it touches us.

I freely admit in advance that I will be didactic, pretentious, and annoyingly prescriptive. It’s likely that I’ll also be irrelevant and that I will make a fool of myself. I have no formal training in philosophy or sociology and will probably reinvent various wheels poorly.

But sometimes an idea just arrives and possesses me. This one has sat on me for years, and is at the root of a troublesome fiction project that won’t budge. Tormenting my small audience with an unsaleable vanity-press think piece is the best I can do with it right now.

Further material in this series will be tagged “ironyproject.”

Good bye Diedrich

Diedrich Coffee gives up fight
Local chain sells 47 retail outlets to Starbucks for $13.5 million to focus on wholesale bean business.

The Orange County Register

Irvine-based Diedrich Coffee, conceding defeat in the coffee shop duel with Starbucks, agreed to sell the 47 stores it owns to its Seattle rival for $13.5 million.

The local company will remain in business as a roaster and wholesaler of coffee beans. The sale includes all company-owned Diedrich and Coffee People locations. Franchise stores aren’t included in the sale.

All “non-management employees in good standing” will be offered positions with Starbucks, and managers will be provided the opportunity to interview for positions, the company said.

Here’s the company’s statement:

blabla

News update: Russians not so healthy

A Sickness of the Soul, from the Economist.

Quotes:

At less than 59, male life expectancy has collapsed in a way otherwise found only in sub-Saharan Africa. It is around five years lower than it was 40 years ago, and 13 years lower than that of Russian women—one of the biggest gaps in the world. Male life expectancy in Irkutsk (not the country’s lowest) is just 53.

There is an obvious culprit: booze, especially the Russian taste for strong spirits, sometimes not fit for human consumption and often moonshine. Heart disease and violence, the two biggest factors in the mortality surge, are strongly alcohol-related. Alcohol poisoning itself killed 36,000 Russians last year; in America, it kills a few hundred.

How the Tubes Work

The Exploding Aardvark pointed me to this handy guide for the perplexed about the Web Publishing Process on the Internet:

THE WEB PUBLISHING PROCESS

With a little help from the Industrial Art Gallery, I was able to “explode” a portion of this diagram for further detail. Below you can see some of the working parts of that mysterious “internet” lozenge above. This is for power users and hardcore geeks only; others shouldn’t worry. You’re welcome!

INTERNET PORTION OF WEB PUBLISHING PROCESS

linksmanship, the lowest form of bloggery

  1. HAVE YOU A WRONG WAY BRAIN?
  2. They have van art in Ukraine, even though it’s not on vans.
  3. DRUNKEN SCOTSMEN TO BE GIVEN LOLLIPOPS
  4. Someone thinks that a police state crackdown is an appropriate theme for a sexy fashion shoot. Someone is wrong. Note: may be triggering due to violence against women. May also be triggering due to total cluelessness.
  5. hyniof presents The Bar Scene, as acted out by sirive‘s “Those Guys” characters.

Editor’s note: I make posts with links a lot, in the style of memepool. If your viewing style does not show links as underlined or otherwise different you will not see them. I think many people mistakenly set their viewing style that way and miss my links and other people’s, thereby making this whole “web” medium kind of pointless. Check it!