Utterly Inappropriate

Last week it rained and was above freezing. It went all the way up to 10 degrees. This week it's at least snowing, but it's still above freezing and the slush and puddles are much more Toronto-esque than what one would expect to find in Montreal.

My birthday is in two days. I have had a nose-bitingly cold birthday every year of my life and if I don't have one this year I will hold Reagan, Bush, OPEC, the automotive and aeronautical industries, and every single SUV driving, air-conditioning-cranking, meat-eating, suburbanite asshole responsible, and though I have neither the time nor the resources to kick all their asses personally, I will be sending them some VERY BAD VIBES.

I had better have proper winter weather on my birthday. That's all I'm saying.

Write your Big Fat Blog Posts

Ampersand over at Alas, A Blog has put out a call for submissions for the first edition of the brand new, bi-monthly Big Fat Carnival, which is happening on Tuesday, February 7th.

From the submissions call, the guidelines are as follows:

The Big Fat Carnival is a carnival for collecting some of the best blog posts regarding fat pride; fat acceptance; critiques of anti-fat bigotry, attitudes and research; celebration of images of fat people; practical difficulties of being fat; fat love (queer and otherwise); feminist views of fat and fat acceptance; the health at every size movement (HAES); and whatever else each edition's editor feels fits into the theme.

(But please note, The Big Fat Carnival is not a place to advocate weight-loss diets, weight loss surgery (WLS), or feederism.)

If I can get my ass together to write something, I'll be contributing. I have some ideas, but the muse has not been with me lately (in case you couldn't tell from the dearth of posts).

Joy to the World...

...the sun is come.

The days will start getting longer now. Hopefully moods will be lifting as well. Despite the lack of sunlight, and my attendant grumpth, this is my favourite time of year. I spend it surrounded by loved ones, in light and warmth. There is always good food, warm drinks, and conversation around the fireplace. There is always snow and cold on the outside, and blankets and couches on the inside. There are always arguments; there is always strife. But we wouldn't be us if there weren't.

There are dogs to walk, pies to bake, potatoes to mash, and yes, even a turkey to roast.

There are candles to light, and latkes to fry, and chocolates and oranges in abundance.

I'll be there in less than 48 hours. I can't wait.

The Voters Delivered the Jab, Now Judge Jones Gives the Reverse

The Dover ID trial is over and the good guys won. The judge thoroughly spanked the ID proponents, as can be seen from the decision. Here are some of my favourite bits:

...Professor Behe remarkably and unmistakably claims that the plausibility of the argument for ID depends upon the extent to which one believes in the existence of God. (P-718 at 705) (emphasis added). As no evidence in the record indicates that any other scientific proposition's validity rests on belief in God, nor is the Court aware of any such scientific propositions, Professor Behe's assertion constitutes substantial evidence that in his view, as is commensurate with other prominent ID leaders, ID is a religious and not a scientific proposition.

and

It is notable that not one defense expert was able to explain how the supernatural action suggested by ID could be anything other than an inherently religious proposition.

It's so nice when someone really seems to get it.

More from the decision:

The Supreme Court instructed in Edwards that it has been particularly
'vigilant in monitoring compliance with the Establishment Clause in elementary and secondary schools.' 482 U.S. at 583-84. The Supreme Court went on to state that:

Families entrust public schools with the education of their children, but condition their trust on the understanding that the classroom will not purposely be
used to advance religious views that may conflict with the private beliefs of the student and his or her family. Students in such institutions are impressionable and their attendance is involuntary.

Id. (citing Grand Rapids Sch. Dist. v. Ball, 473 U.S. 373, 383 (1985); Wallace, 472
U.S. at 60 n.51).

and

After a careful review of the record and for the reasons that follow, we find that an objective student would view the disclaimer as a strong official endorsement of religion.

The decision is a long one (139 pages), but I suggest everyone at least skim it. It's good reading.

I congratulate this judge on a job well done.

(hat-tip, Pharyngula)

Another Meal Born of desperation: An Attempt at Fart Juice Soup

Fart juice, for the uninitiated, is the liquid that's left over from cooking dried beans, so called because of what it makes most people do.

Now, opinions differ when it comes to what one should do with this liquid. Some cookbooks say to strain it off and rinse the beans, lest the fibre that has leached into the liquid cause discomfort and embarrassment, while others claim that much of the beans nutritional value is now it the water and throwing it away is wasteful. I used to abide by the former recommendation, not out of any desire to avoid flatulence, but rather because I would have had no idea what to do with the juice, had I kept it. Until one day I was cooking with Floh. I forget what we were making, but we were cooking beans, and when it came time to strain them, Floh strained the liquid into a container and stuck it in the freezer. In Costa Rica, Floh explained, one *never* throws away the fart juice. No, no. In Costa Rica, one reserves it, along with some beans, to make Fart Juice Soup another day.

"Sounds good," I thought to myself, and the next time I cooked beans I reserved the liquid. Then I called Floh.

"I have three litres of fart juice in my freezer," I said. "What do I do with it?"
"Three litres?!?" came the reply. "Jeez, well, I'll come over and make soup, but I can't use all three litres!"
So, come over she did, and soup she did make. But that was almost a year ago. And I've had two litres of fart juice sitting in my freezer unused ever since. Until yesterday.

Yesterday I was hungry. I wanted something that would make me feel good. Something high in fibre and vitamins and low in fat. I looked in the fridge. I hadn't gotten around to doing a proper grocery shop in a while, and my produce supply was down to two carrots of dubious quality and a few apples.

"But I want vitamins!" I cried, "I want veggies!"

"Well, I'll start making some brown rice," I thought. "It's got lots of fibre in it, and I can eat it with whatever I come up with." So I put 2/3 of a cup of rice and 1 1/3 cups of water in a pot on the stove and set it to boiling. Then, out of desperation, I looked in the freezer. "Fart juice!" I exclaimed. "Fart juice has vitamins! Fart juice has fibre! I'll make Fart Juice Soup!" Then I realized a problem. When Floh made me soup, it contained veggies. It had tomatoes and potatoes and all manner of good and healthful things, none of which were to be found in my apartment. Not to mention beans, to thicken it. But the beans that the fart juice was made from were long consumed. Not to be discouraged, I looked in the pantry, on the legume can shelf. There stood one lone can of chickpeas. "Chickpeas are beans," I reasoned, and grabbed the can.

Still not sure where I was going with all this, I put the yogurt container of fart juice in a pot of hot water to melt, and examined my options in the freezer. There was a bag of freezer-burned corn, some frozen berries, and a plastic bag containing the results of my cleaning my snail tank, which I freeze to kill off the eggs.

Sighing, I pulled the corn out of the freezer. Freezer burnt though it was, I supposed it would do.

The fart juice was now sufficiently thawed that I could get it out of its container, so I poured the water out of the pot, dumped the fart juice in, added my last can of chickpeas and a bunch of corn, and put it on the stove to heat up, along with a bunch of tabasco sauce and some salt. When it all came to a boil I slowly poured in a whisked egg.

Once the rice was almost done I strained the water off and added it to the soup. And you know what? It's seriously yummy!

Thanks, Floh!

(x-posted to Knife-Wielding Feminists)

Knitblogging III - Christmas is a'coming and there's yarn in the air

I was looking over this blog and I realized I haven't knitblogged in for*ever*. Well there's a reason for this.

Since Christmas is on its way, most of what I'm knitting now is gifts. Since I don't know which of my family members read this blog, I don't want to report on what I've made until it's been distributed. Don't worry, though, I'll be taking plenty of pictures before I give things away, so you'll get to see what's what.

For now I'll just give you a teaser and say that all my presents are being made from the coloured versions of Cascade Yarns' Eco wool



Purty colours!

Can You Laugh So Hard Your Lungs Come Up?

This quote, from Fundies Say the Darndest Things, via Pharyngula, made me laugh so hard I thought I'd puke. Ready for it?

Remember, this is said in complete seriousness. Really.

Okay, here it is:

One of the most basic laws in the universe is the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This states that as time goes by, entropy in an environment will increase. Evolution argues differently against a law that is accepted EVERYWHERE BY EVERYONE. Evolution says that we started out simple, and over time became more complex. That just isn't possible: UNLESS there is a giant outside source of energy supplying the Earth with huge amounts of energy. If there were such a source, scientists would certainly know about it.

For those who don't believe me, here is the quote in its original context.

Let's all join PZ and point and laugh at the stupid people.

Breaking My Heart into Little Pieces

I know I've been posting more links than content lately, and I don't generally like to do more than one link post in a row, but I think everyone needs to read this most amazingly powerful post over at Baghdad Burning about how war destroys the human soul.

From the post:

In war, you think the unthinkable. You imagine the unimaginable. When you can't get to sleep at night, your mind wanders to cover various possibilities. Trying to guess and determine the future of a war-torn nation is nearly impossible, so your mind focuses on the more tangible- friends. Near and distant relations. I think that during these last two and a half years, every single Iraqi inside of Iraq has considered the possibility of losing one or more people in the family.

and

I try to imagine what would happen to me, personally, should this occur. How long would it take for the need for revenge to settle in? How long would it take to be recruited by someone who looks for people who have nothing to lose? People who lost it all to one blow. What I think the world doesn't understand is that people don't become suicide bombers because- like the world is told- they get seventy or however many virgins in paradise. People become suicide bombers because it is a vengeful end to a life no longer worth living- a life probably violently stripped of its humanity by a local terrorist- or a foreign soldier.

I strongly encourage you to Read the whole thing. And then come back here and tell me this war was justified.

I learned something from Jesus

Well, not from Jesus directly, but from his General. And since the General is a manly heterosexual man who loves Jesus in a purely heterosexual way and claims to speak on Jesus's behalf, well, I have no reason to doubt him.

Anyway, this is what I learned from him:

1. I learned that the Leader of the decreasingly Free World has a blog. And some thieving thiever has thieved his strawberries!
2. I also learned about another Mr. Manly Man who went to a Promise Keepers meeting and touched other men only in appropriate ways.
3. In addition to that, I learned that I still find jokes about Bill O'Rielly's falafel funny.

Okay, that last one is a bit embarrassing to admit, but overall I'm quite pleased. If the General keeps being this informative I may have to add him to the blogroll.

Consent Talking

I apologise in advance for the writing in this post. I'm usually careful to craft my posts; I'm picky about how my writing sounds. This time I had a rant that just needed to come out and I knew that if I tried to craft it I would just end up stifling it. So here it is in its raw, unedited form. Be kind.

I want to talk about sex. In particular, I want to talk about consent, and how it's given, or, more frequently, not given.

I want to share a quote from a training I received recently. This training was for becoming a facilitator for workshops that raised awareness of, among other things, sexual assault, and during this training there was one thing that was said that I want to share. Ready? Here it is:

'No' is an answer to a question that's almost never asked.

I had never put it in those terms before, but it immediately rang true to me.

The fact is that we almost never say 'yes' to sex. Yes is considered to be the default answer, and we're expected to speak up only if the answer is no. I find this to be deeply disturbing. I think it sets us up for a situation where we are constantly risking violating each other's boundaries, and are only informed of a problem when it's already too late.

I think silence should default to 'no'. I am made exceedingly uncomfortable by people who hit on me and who take my lack of response as an invitation to push further. I am not comfortable with a dynamic that forces one person to say "back off" rather than expects the other person to say "is it okay if".

I'm not saying we can't flirt or hit on each other, or that we have to stop and ask explicit permission before each activity from eye-contact onwards (although I certainly don't think that talking deserves the bad reputation it gets). What I'm saying is that we need to be aware of each others' reactions. We need to pay attention, and if we're not getting an explicitly welcoming or inviting response we need to back the hell off and wait for one.

I've put this in gender-neutral terms because I think it is one of the few things about sex and consent that really are gender-neutral in terms of roles. I don't, however, think that it's gender-neutral in terms of context.

Snöfiskcaviar!!!

It's snowing!! Enough to accumulate!!

Check out the back staircase:


And this car:


And the grass of a neighbour's backyard:


Winter's really and truly coming!

Housekeeping

There are three things I have to mention here. I've made a minor change to the template, and added a few things to the sidebar (that's two), and a post of mine has been chosen for the 21st Skeptic's Circle (that would be the third).

Firstly, template. The time of posting at the bottom of the posts no longer links to the post. Instead, the title of the post does. I find this much more intuitive.

Secondly, sidebar. I've removed the Einstein quote, because it was getting on my nerves. I had intended to collect a number of them and ask Dave or Q. Pheevr to write something that would display a different quote each time the page was loaded, but I've changed my mind. Instead I'm providing links to resources for women in North America who need a bit of help. The abortion in Québec link points to the Morgentaler clinic's homepage, and the one for the rest of Canada points to Planned Parenthood Federation of Canada's find a clinic page. I also provide a couple resources for women in the US who need emergency contraception. Those last two links, as well as the idea of providing these resources, were stolen directly from Bitch, Ph.D.'s sidebar. The button that serves as a heading was made with Adam Kalsey's button maker.

I've also added Pharyngula and Pooflingers Anonymous to the Us section of the blogroll. These are two excellent science blogs that inspire me to keep thinking and acting and stay skeptical.

And, thirdly, Skeptic's Circle. I submitted my posts In Defense and Why do we Bother to the Skeptic's Circle, and the latter one made it in. This is very exciting to me, as I only learned about the Skeptic's Circle very recently and am still not a hundred percent sure what it is. Being part of something I don't entirely understand is always fun! As far as I can tell, the Skeptic's Circle is a monthly (weekly?) collection of skeptical posts by skeptical people about things of which they are skeptical. It's not at all clear to me how the posts are chosen, but I understand it's quite popular; certainly having been chosen has driven more traffic to this site than anything else. My daily hit count has just about doubled! For a little while I was considering holding a silly contest, a la litigious moron and offering to send a cookie to my thousandth visitor, but then I realised that that was too silly, even for me, and furthermore it wouldn't work because if my thousandth visitor was Australian (you never know!) then I would have to insist that they send me a cookie instead because we can't get Tim Tams in Canada and it's just Not Fair. So that put an end to that idea.

Ultimately I decided that the only thing to do was to write another post. This one doesn't count, obviously, as it's rather devoid of content, but I've had one brewing for a while about why providing women with the resources mentioned above is so damned important. I have thrown reams of metaphorical crumpled paper over my shoulder in trying to compose that post and I make no promises about when it's coming, but it's definitely brewing.

And that's all she wrote.

Snail Porn

By popular demand, here is a picture of my snails doin' the nasty:

And the results thereof:


Unfortunately I don't have any photos of the truly revolting intermediate stage (100+ slimy, shiny eggs that seem to just ooze out of the adult), but I'll get a picture next time it happens (which it will, have no fear).

EDIT:
See the mole-like lump on the side of the snail's neck in this picture?

Well, that lump is what eventually develops into the white stabbing spear you saw in the first picture. They only have that lump when they're horny.

Why Do We Bother?

This is a companion post to In Defense of Reasoned Inquiry below. I want to talk more about why it's so important to keep creationism out of science classrooms.

First, let's take a gander over to a fundamentalist Christian blog. Rand, of A Form of Sound Words said this

As for these millions of years of evolution scientists love to throw around so much, here's a quick thought for you: can God create a mountain that has all the physical properties of being millions of years old? If He can, then the evolutionist doesn't have the "proof" he thinks he has.

Leaving aside for the moment the small matter of evolution and geology being different fields of study, let's take a good look at this quote. If we accept, as Rand does, that God is omnipotent, then it does of course follow that He can create a mountain with all the properties of being millions of years old. If we furthermore accept that the bible is the word of God, and meant to be taken as literally as possible, then we are left with this one, inescapable conclusion: God is willing to deceive us. The account in the bible and the evidence we see before us simply don't match. If God was responsible for both, then God has lied to us.

Now without getting into a discussion about whether God would or should lie to us (such hypotheticals bore me to tears), I just want to discuss the implications of the fact that God (if such a being exists, and is responsible for the bible in the way Rand claims He is) *has* lied. This means that we cannot trust our senses. We cannot trust the results of our experiments. If we cannot trust the world to be as our senses perceive it and our reason deduces it to be then we can't investigate anything. Let me say that again. We can't investigate anything. If we presuppose the existence of a God that falsifies evidence, the entire field of science is moot. Moot. Hell, even if we didn't have proof that this God falsified evidence, the mere fact that He could would suffice. The musings of Descartes and Hume are fun for keeping ourselves up at night, but the scientist must proceed on the assumption that her results are reliable, or she may as well not bother.

This is precisely why creationism, Creation Science, Intelligent Design, or whatever you want to call it, does not belong in the classroom. By presupposing an intelligent guidance of natural phenomena, it flies in the face of everything science is trying to achieve. It states that things are the way they are, not because of the immutability of natural laws, but because they were arbitrarily designed that way. If that is the case then there is nothing to be learned from studying them and we may as well all go home. I'm not interested in that. There is certainly the possibility that Rand or Descartes or even David Hume were right. That the universe our senses show us bears little or no relation to the universe as it really is, but as there is no possibility of bringing evidence to bear on that conjecture, it does not belong within the realm of science. Take your ID and shove it up your philosophy teacher's ass. It has no place in a science classroom.

(Thanks to my father for providing the main idea behind this post)

Wow. Um ... Wow.

It would appear that my post In Defense of Reasoned Inquiry has been nominated for the Best Blog Post award in My Blahg's 2005 Canadian Blog Awards.

I have no idea who nominated that post but, well, thank you. I'm not sure what to say... I'm certainly flattered.

Round 1 of voting is supposed to run from November 24th to 30th, and round 2 from December 3rd to 9th. It would appear that the results will be announced on the 11th of December.

So, yes. Thank you, whoever nominated me.

Snail Reference Post

Remember the knitblogging reference post? Well this is like that, only for snails.

• Snail Porn
• Snails

Two Thousand

Much has been made in the lefty blogosphere lately about the fact that the number of American deaths in Iraq has recently passed two thousand. The best post that I have seen so far was by P.Z. Meyers of Pharyngula, so I'll just refer you there. Here's a particularly poignant quote:

I think we're supposed to console ourselves with the idea that they accomplished so much more by dying in a foreign land than they could have achieved by living in their own.

I've noticed a distinct lack of mention of the number of Iraqi civilian deaths which, by conservative estimates, has already well surpassed 25,000, so I'm mentioning it now. What this war amounts to is throwing good money after bad. But in addition to money, they're trowing lives.

Letting My Curiosity Get the Better of Me

I'm going to be putting Google ads in the sidebar. They won't stay there long unless they end up being a significant source of income (which, given this blog's stats, they won't), I'm just really curious about how they work, and there are things they won't tell you (like how much money you get per view/click, how they pay you, etc) that they won't tell you unless you sign up. So, yeah, signing up. But, like I said, it won't last long. Please be patient, and remember, this is *my* webspace, to do with as I please.

UPDATE never mind. They want permission to use and publish my name in their marketing materials. Fuck that.

Knitblogging, a reference post

Because Blogger doesn't have the option of creating categories, the way WordPress does, and because I want a way to collect all the posts about one subject into a single link I can put on the sidebar, I'm creating this post. I'll put a link to this post in the sidebar, and every time I blog about knitting I'll put a link to the post in this post, at the top of the list.

• Christmas Teaser
• Slipper Socks
• Rogue!

Oh, and when I finished the Rogue, I promised a picture of myself wearing it, and then never delivered. Well, here it is:

Knitblogging, part II - Slipper Socks.

When I was in the 11th grade my class went on a canoe trip in Algonquin Park. Because it was autumn, cooling down, and likely to rain, my mother loaned me a pair of heavy wool socks. Wool, she said, was essential for this sort of trip, because it retained its ability to insulate even when wet. These socks, she said, would keep my feet warm even if I fell out of the canoe (although she made no promises about the rest of my body). So I wore the socks, night and day, for the full three (or was it four?) days of the trip. I loved them. True to my mother's word, these socks stayed warm even when drenched. We won't discuss what they smelled like by the time we got back to Toronto. I loved the socks so much that when I moved to Montreal a year and a half later, I asked my mother if I could take them with me. She had two pairs, and so was happy to let me have one. I kept wearing these socks. I wore them in the house, in place of slippers; I wore them inside my oxblood, steel-toed Doc Martins (which are very sexy, but don't insulate very well, and are too big for me besides). I wore them inside my hikers during winter, because I'm too cheap and lazy to buy proper winter boots. I wore these socks all the freaking time. I figured they were heavy wool, they could take it. Well, they are heavy wool, and they did take a lot, but eventually they started to lose their battle with friction. The bottoms started to go at the heel, and then at the ball, and eventually they made very poor slippers, because they let my bare heel come into full contact with the cold wood floor. I wasn't ready to throw them out (they still did a good job of keeping my feet warm under the blankets on particularly cold nights), but I was forced to admit that I was going to need a new pair.

I waffled. Being cheap and lazy, and hating shopping in general, I wasn't inclined to buy a new pair. Then, a little over a year ago, I took up knitting again in earnest, and that reinforced my desire not to buy a new pair. After all, I could knit a pair! But I didn't. Every sock pattern I looked at was either intended for a much lighter yarn, or waayy too complicated, or both. I got increasingly frustrated with the situation, but then my aunt got me a pair of fleece slipper socks for christmas, and that held my frustration in check for a while. But only for a while. The fleece socks, while nice, couldn't hold a candle to the look and feel of socks made from real, heavy, good quality wool.

Finally it happened. I had finished the Rogue. I was casting around for a new project. My confidence in my knitting skill was high. I had some spare, good, heavy wool yarn on hand. And I came across this pattern. At first I wasn't sure, but once I looked at the pattern and realised how trivial it would be to get rid of the godawful moon-and-stars design I was sold. I did it. It took about a week. I am now the proud owner of an incredibly comfy pair of slipper socks, pictured below:



Here's a detail shot of the heel. The picture links to some notes on the construction.


The slipper socks were made from Knitting Pure and Simple's free pattern, on 3.75mm Brittany birch needles, with Cascade Yarns's Ecological Wool, shade 8061 which just happens to be almost the same colour as the original wool socks my mother gave me all those years ago.