Just The Caffeine Talking

AlbaCon 2021!

It takes more than an endemic to keep Albany's long-running SF convention down. AlbaCon 2021 is going on tonight and through this weekend, but only in virtual form.

I'll be there, participating in four events:

At 10:00 a.m. on Saturday the 18th I'll be part of a panel discussing "No One Goes to Space Anymore." Given that we just watched four private passengers launch into orbit, I'm going to be questioning the premises of that topic.

At 11:00 a.m. I'll be talking about "Why the DCU and the MCU Are So Different."

After a short break for lunch I'm doing a reading from The Godel Operation at 1:30. 

And then from 2-6 p.m. I'm running an online Weird War 1 game, "The Black Khan."

Afterward, drinks in the hotel bar. First round's on me.

 

Food Bragging: Harvest Edition

When you belong to a farm share, you get the vegetables in season, and you get as many as the farmers have produced. This means one must learn to deal with huge waves of vegetables, often more than can be eaten in a week. We're just past peak sweet corn season, so we're still getting half a dozen ears a week. Skip a day or two and it starts to accumulate.

I discovered a nice way to burn up accumulated fresh corn, especially the ears which have been sitting for a few days: make a pie. Tonight's dinner was corn pie and a salad of heirloom tomatoes and fresh lettuce.

How do you make a corn pie? Not hard. It's your favorite savory pie crust, with a large onion, some celery, half a dozen ears of corn cut off the cobs, a couple of sliced hard-boiled eggs, and parsley. To thicken the filling, one recipe I found suggested making a puree of some of the corn and mixing it with another egg to help it set. 

Not especially difficult to make, though what with preparing the filling, making the crust, assembling the pie, and then baking it, this is not at all quick. Save it for a weekend if you're pressed for time.

Now I just have to figure out what to do with a peck of hot peppers. Any ideas?

The Zydeco Operation

The Godel Operation comes to Acadiana! On Wednesday, September 22, I'll be doing a reading and signing at southwestern Louisiana's premier book shop, Beausoleil Books of Lafayette, from 6 to 8 p.m. The event is free and all are welcome.

Come on down and hear some of the adventures of Daslakh and Zee in the Billion Worlds of the Tenth Millennium! I'll answer any questions and sign whatever is put in front of me. 

Did I mention this bookstore has a wine bar? That's the hallmark of a truly advanced civilization.  

A Chilling Analysis

This article, "The Good Death — Cancel Culture and the Logic of Torture," by Christopher Van Eecke takes a look at the phenomenon of online Twitter mobs and their fetish for destroying lives and inflicting public humiliation on people. He finds a useful — and disturbing — parallel in the public torture and executions of past centuries. The fact that the worst excesses of "cancel culture" come from people who loudly praise themselves for their empathy and compassion is particularly grotesque.

Bari Weiss has a personal account by academic Peter Boghossian of his experiences as the target of a Twitter mob. What's particularly awful in his story is the way he was abandoned by his institution and his colleagues. I don't know if it's cowardice or malice, but this will only end when people running large institutions like academia, government, and corporations stop going along with these witch-hunts and lynch mobs.

It must end soon, because our society will not survive if it doesn't.

The Endemic

Note: I haven't put up any new blog posts for several weeks, and this one is the reason. I've been thinking about this piece for a while, but was reluctant to post it because I didn't want to feed the endless anger. Nevertheless, I think it's important, so here we go.

The definition of an epidemic is "An outbreak of disease that spreads quickly and affects many individuals at the same time."

A pandemic is "An outbreak of a disease that occurs over a wide geographic area . . . and typically affects a significant proportion of the population."

These two word have become excessively familiar to all of us over the past couple of years, but I'm afraid we need to get accustomed to a third term: endemic means "Characteristic of or prevalent in a particular field, area, or environment."

During the COVID-19 pandemic there has been a sense among people — both the general public and those in charge of making policies to deal with the disease — that it is temporary. That if we can just get enough people vaccinated, or lock down gatherings, or seal the borders, or get everyone masked up all the time, then it will go away and everything will return to normal.

I'm afraid that's not going to happen. The COVID-19 virus isn't going away. It will never go away, not completely. This is no brushfire pandemic that sweeps the world and then vanishes. No, this disease is now endemic to the entire world. It will be with us for decades, possibly forever.

Some diseases, like smallpox, are transmitted only from human to human, and can't reinfect people who are immune. We were able to literally drive smallpox to extinction. Polio is spread by contaminated food and water, and also only affects humans. By vaccinating and improving sanitation, we have gotten the number of cases down to just a few dozen worldwide. AIDS is spread by sharing body fluids, and even though there is no vaccine, education about safe sex practices and the development of antiviral drugs has drastically reduced the number of cases.

But COVID-19 isn't like those diseases. It isn't easy to stop and it will never be eliminated.

First of all, it has already spread throughout the entire world. It can't be confined to a "hot zone" where it will burn itself out. The Chinese government failed to do that, and denied there was a problem until it was far too late to prevent COVID-19 from breaking out of Wuhan and spanning the globe. No sub-group is more at risk of catching it than anyone else. No simple measures will prevent its spread.

Second, vaccination isn't the "firewall" for COVID-19 that it is for, say, smallpox. Even after vaccination, people can catch it. Their cases tend to be much less severe, which is very good — but by the same token that implies a large number of vaccinated people can have mild or asymptomatic cases without realizing it. This means that even if everyone is vaccinated, the virus will survive. And if it survives it can continue to mutate, brewing up new variant strains. It's likely that some of those variants will slip past the antibodies of vaccinated individuals, setting off new rounds of infection and transmission. We can't exterminate this virus.

Third, we're pretty sure the original virus came from an animal host, most likely bats. There are a lot of bats in the world. A lot of them live in and around human-occupied structures, so that people get exposed to their urine and feces. We don't know about other possible animal reservoirs. Other primates might be susceptible, too. All this means that the COVID-19 virus and its variants have a reservoir apart from the human population, where the virus can survive and mutate. We can't eradicate bats (nor would we wish to), so there's no way to get rid of COVID-19 in the wild.

It's not going away. It's never going away. We will never reach zero cases.

Am I just counseling despair, here? No. Quite the reverse, in fact. I think we should stop treating COVID-19 as a crisis. It's an ongoing, endemic problem, part of the world from now on, and we must face it on those terms.

Treatment should become the focus of medical research and public policy. If we're not going to be able to stop people from catching it, then we should be working to stop them from dying from it. Instead of tracking case numbers we should be watching the death rate. We should be working on antiviral drugs with the same fervor we developed vaccines, and investigating ways to mitigate or prevent the lingering side effects of the virus.

Another useful step would be to tone down the social division and anger. This disease isn't going away, which means that there's no point in scapegoating the unvaccinated. They'll get the shot, or get the disease, and they'll either live or die. The virus will remain. Screaming at people and moral posturing won't change that.

Finally, the crisis must end. Arbitrary and contradictory rules, economic damage and travel restrictions, censorship and scapegoating all need to stop. They're making us all insane. Nobody wants those things to go on indefinitely, they aren't going to make the disease disappear, so end them. Reduce the stress, reduce the panic, reduce the anger, reduce the fear.

I expect getting each year's COVID variant vaccine will become as routine and uninteresting as getting a flu shot. We'll probably adopt the habit of wearing masks if you think you're contagious. People will get sick from the disease and recover, just as they do with the flu, mono, walking pneumonia, shingles, and other endemic diseases. And as with those diseases, some of the infected will die. Nobody can prevent that.

The good news is that diseases mellow out over time. The strains that kill their victims don't survive as well as the milder ones. Combine that with better treatment, better medicines, and the immune response boost from vaccinations, and in a few years nobody will worry. We've gone through far more deadly epidemics. It's going to be all right.

For more on this subject, check out these articles from The Atlantic (sorry about the paywall).

Ed Yong on the Pandemic Endgame.

Sarah Zhang: The Coronavirus Is Here Forever.

More Food Bragging

Turned 20 lbs. of tomatoes (from the farm stand, not our garden) into 6 quarts of sauce, put up in jars for winter. Had the excess sauce with some garlic and basil over homemade linguine.

It was very good.

Summer Afternoon Supper

The fresh corn and tomatoes are now appearing in our farm-share and at the local farm stands. Also, it's really hot. The obvious solution: Caprese Salad and Corn Fritters.

Caprese Salad is one of the simplest, most elegant salads out there. Tomato, fresh mozzarella, and basil leaves, with some oil, salt and pepper. Cool, subtle, and delicious. As a bonus, like so many Italian dishes, it patriotically displays the colors of the Italian flag. (The United States and other red-white-blue countries are all handicapped by the lack of blue foods to include in national dishes.)

The corn fritters were mostly a way to use up a couple of left over ears of corn. It's also pig-easy: cut the corn off the cobs, mix together with a large egg, a minced green onion, grated cheese, and a chopped small pepper (I don't know what kind of pepper it was, but it was a mild one). Flavor with salt, pepper, and a generous amount of cumin. Add flour until the mix is the right thickness for a batter. I can't be more specific than that, but stop just before you think you've added enough. Fry in about half an inch of oil until brown.

Accompanied by a butter-smooth Gascon white wine.

Movie Review: Prospect

The other night we watched the 2018 science fiction movie Prospect, made by the highly tasteful and perceptive people at DUST Studio. It was excellent. More importantly, it was excellent science fiction.

The story concerns a young woman named Cee and her father, a pair of struggling prospectors hunting for weird biological gems on an alien moon with a toxic atmosphere. They're looking for a big score which will let them escape their hardscrabble existence.

The pair run across an even more hardscrabble duo, Ezra and his nameless flunky. After a series of betrayals and counter-betrayals, Cee's father and Ezra's sidekick are dead, Ezra's got a bullet in his arm, and Cee's got him at gunpoint.

Cee and Ezra make their way through the deadly forest to the site of the mother lode of gems, controlled by a squad of mercenaries. The mercs need someone who knows how to extract the gems without ruining them, while Cee and Ezra need a lift off the moon. And then . . .

The two main characters carry the movie. Sophie Thatcher, who plays Cee, is absolutely phenomenal — simultaneously naive and tough, and utterly believable throughout the movie. Pedro Pascal, as Ezra, is a great "Long John Silver" figure, trying to manipulate Cee even as the two of them come to respect and rely on each other.

And as I said, it's good science fiction. Though the film was made in the Pacific Northwest, the environment is obviously hostile to humans. They must wear protective suits and breathe through filters. This gives the story urgency: Cee (and Ezra) must get off the moon. They can't carve out a little Robinson Crusoe homestead in the forest. The main MacGuffin, the gems, is not something one can simply dig up with a shovel — which is why the mercenaries need Cee and Ezra to extract them. The movie couldn't work as a tale of gold miners in the Old West. There's also an impressive amount of casual background worldbuilding, which I loved. Lots of showing without explaining; the level of detail that made the original Star Wars and Blade Runner feel so rich. Fans of Firefly (or the Traveller roleplaying game) will like the gritty, blue-collar feel of the characters' lives.

Highly recommended.

Movie Review: Pig

Went to see the new Nicholas Cage movie Pig. It's . . . unlike anything else. 

This isn't gonzo Nick Cage, it isn't action-movie Cage, it isn't "I'll do anything for money" Cage. This is Nicholas Cage the by-God actor, in a movie with a real story about people having real emotions. We thought the other Cages had locked this one in a buried schoolbus in the desert, but he's back.

Oh, and it's about a reclusive ex-chef delving into the seedy underbelly of the Portland restaurant scene in search of his kidnapped truffle-hunting pig. So, yes, there is some weirdness.

I could include a lot of "spoilers" without spoiling it, because it's a movie you watch unfold, driven by sheer interest in what's going on rather than mystery or edge-of-the-seat suspense. Stuff happens, but not the stuff you might expect. There is no paint-the-kitchen-red rampage of revenge. Mr. Cage seldom raises his voice, and spends much of the movie being barely audible. It does go on the list of Great Food Movies, along with Babette's Feast, Tampopo, and Big Night.

Highly recommended.

 

Wood

I grew up in an old house with a fireplace, in a city where it is a news-worthy event when the temperature gets below freezing on a winter night. My father would sometimes light a fire, but it was entirely an aesthetic experience. I never paid attention, but I'll bet the gas heater ran more when the fireplace was in use than when it wasn't. Our woodpile consisted of just a few dozen segments of tree limbs, pruned from the trees around the house or scavenged from where city workers were trimming the live oaks on St. Charles Avenue.

When I moved to my current house in Deerfield, it had a fireplace — and about four acres of trees. The woods are mostly maple, gradually being replaced by oak, with fast-growing birches at the edges and a few big old pines. Naturally, I wanted to use the fireplace, so I had to learn to cut and split wood. For several years I used a handsaw to cut fallen trees, and an axe someone gave me to split the cut segments.

We rapidly discovered that in a modern insulated house, burning wood in the fireplace is a good way to cool the place off in winter. The fire sucks in air from the outside through cracks and under doors, and shoots most of the warm air straight up the chimney. For a time we could only have fires when the temperature was above sixty degrees, which definitely ruins the appeal of a blazing fire on a snowy night.

So a few years later we got a fireplace insert. I had been advocating for a free-standing wood stove (more efficient) but my wife pointed out that 1.) it would eat up a big slice of floor space we couldn't really spare in the living room, and 2.) we had small children. So I got an insert, which is basically a wood stove that fits into the fireplace and has a little fan to circulate air around it.

That worked far better than I would have believed. With just wood burning in the fireplace I can keep my house comfortable even if the temperature outside is down to freezing. Below freezing the gas-powered baseboard radiators have to take up some of the load. I suspect that if the fireplace was located in the center of the house, rather than on an exterior wall, we might be able to manage in even colder weather.

Having a fireplace that wasn't a cooling system meant that we burned a lot more wood. Which led my wife to buy me a chainsaw for my birthday, as sawing through tree trunks by hand was just too inefficient. Around the same time I also bought myself a proper splitting maul, and then a sledgehammer and iron wedge for the really tough pieces.

I've been cutting and splitting my own wood for a decade now, and I've learned quite a bit. One of those things is a tremendous appreciation for the men of the pioneer era who did all their wood-cutting with axes.

Felling a tree and cutting it into segments with a chainsaw is sweaty work, about the same way mowing a lawn with a power mower is hard work. But cutting a tree with an axe is about a hundred times more difficult, and that's not hyperbole. Each swing of the axe cuts a little chip, the width of the blade and maybe a quarter-inch thick. Chopping through even a modest-sized tree with a foot-wide trunk takes a couple of hundred swings.

Everything in the colonial era depended on cutting wood. If you wanted to grow food, you had to cut down all the trees on the land you wanted to farm. And those weren't the piddly little third-growth trees you'll see on my land today. Those were massive old-growth elms, oaks, and chestnut trees with trunks a yard wide. Clearing a field meant days of back-breaking work to cut them down, then more work to uproot the stumps. The air must have been full of the sound of axes year-round.

And it was a good thing you had all those cut trees, because you'd need the wood to build your house. More wood to make barrels and buckets. You'd save the especially straight limbs of oak and hickory to make new handles for your axe, because all that chopping would wear out handles in just a few weeks.

All those demands were dwarfed by the need for firewood. Every house had a fire burning all the time. Wood powered cooking, wood powered clothes-drying when there wasn't sunshine (i.e. nine months of the year). And burning wood kept the house warm enough to keep the inhabitants from freezing to death. Barely.

Every bit of that wood was cut and split by someone with an axe. The sheer amount of calories needed for that work was immense. There's a reason why early Americans in portraits and old photos look so lean and rawboned. They were burning calories at a rate matched nowadays only by professional athletes in training. Until the arrival of the railroad made it possible to buy wood or coal for home use, I doubt there were any overweight people in Deerfield, simply from the work needed to keep their fireplaces and stoves burning.

(This post also appears at the Friends of Deerfield Facebook page. Check it out for more on the town of Deerfield, its history and wildlife, and the upcoming 350th Anniversary celebration!)