Caturday Post: Deadly Sin Kitteh Demonstrates Sloth

Fairy Tales and Candles

I am reading a book of fairy tales.  This is an especially good book, because it has tales I haven't read any version of before.  Like the Witches of Ashkelon:

"Long ago, in the city of Ashkelon, the people were plagued by a coven of 80 witches...Not only did [the witches] play nasty tricks, such as turning wine into vinegar, or causing the fire to go out, but they also brought about grave dangers, casting spells that kept the rain from falling, and causing the cows to go dry."

-Babylon, c. fifth century; retold by Harold Schwartz in Leaves From The Garden of Eden 

But part of me keeps stepping outside the story and whispering to myself that truly, science is our "candle in the dark:"   

"For much of our history, we were so fearful of the outside world, with its unpredictable dangers, that we gladly embraced anything that promised to soften or explain away the terror."

-The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, by Carl Sagan

All of the things that we blamed and tortured other humans for?  Killing them didn't stop bacteria from living their lives, or fires from running out of fuel or oxygen, or weather patterns from shifting over time, or bovine biology from running its course.  

Science has found ways to fight bacteria (although they may learn evolve faster than we can invent).  Science has a pretty good explanation for what fire is, and what affects it.  Science has some beautiful models that may give us a start on weather (see Lorenz attractors, now taught in any decent first course on differential equations, but also light a candle for Lovelace and Babbage and Turing and Hopper, because some mathematics needs computer graphics to drive home the point), and science has made the U.S.A. take safe, endless supplies of milk for granted.  

Science is my candle in the dark.  Nay, not just my candle, but my bonfire, my excited vapor returning to a lower-energy state, my sun and star emitting energy all along the electromagnetic spectrum.

Poetry Tuesday: An Unsuccessful Secrecy Protocol

Since the pillow knows all,

We slept without a pillow.  

Still my reputation

Reaches to the skies

Like a dust storm. 

~Lady Ise

In Which I Lose Versus Chocolate-Covered Cherries

I found a recipe for chocolate-covered cherries at Chocolate Covered Katie, a website which I like but have artistic differences with since I deeply believe that the secret ingredient is butter.  The secret ingredient is always butter.  Fortunately, shortening to butter is a straightforward 1:1 conversion and she gives an alternative to coconut oil and cocoa powder that involves actual chocolate.  

Nonetheless, I ran into problems.  First, getting the pits out of my cherries.  

I've heard devices exist to remove cherry pits.  I have a knife
and my fingers.  

Life is just a bowl of slightly mangled cherries.  

Problem number two came when I realized I have no double boiler, and now I'm wishing I had used a recipe calling for lots of cream that I could melt and then pour over the chocolate.  I'm nervous about melting chocolate directly over a stove.  It's really hard not to burn it.  

I added sugar because unlike the
recipe, my chocolate is unsweetened.

After all that angst about melting chocolate, I succeeded only to have my chocolate sauce be way to sticky to be sauce.  Possibly the adding of the butter was a mistake.  I tried adding milk, got too much in, and turned to my dear friend cornstarch to fix it.  

Despite my completely unfounded belief that cornstarch will fix my problems, the resulting sauce was too thin to really stick to the cherries.  Or I didn't give it long enough to cool first, or something.

Dipping cherries one at a time is just way too much work.  

The result was not so much chocolate covered cherries as cherries with a slight chocolate tinge.

Well, I still have a glass of wine, slightly chocolatey cherries, and the world cup.  It's not that bad a loss.

Facebook Footballing: Doing it Wrong

I try to not be judgmental about how other people use the internet.  There is no One True Path to internetting happily, and I find it's much better for my peace of mind to block people than engage with them, but sometimes, people are just wrong on the internet.

I am currently irritated with the large numbers of people I have noticed on my Facebook feed complaining they don't like the World Cup because they don't understand the offsides rule.  If it was just people that didn't like the World Cup, I don't care.  Americans aren't interested in football or the metric system.  I get it.  If, however, the stated logic for not liking something is a lack of understanding it, I get annoyed when this statement is made on a web application.  If one is connected to the greatest repository of knowledge and cat pictures ever created by humanity, and uses this to complain about ignorance rather than as a remedy, that's just a waste.

I get that looking for credible information on the web is a learned skill.  I am trying not to be judgmental about people who struggle with this skill, because I have been called upon to teach this skill, and utterly failed because I search without thinking about it and don't have any intuitive (or, frankly, intellectual.  I just don't get it.) understanding of what exactly the problems are that many people face.  However, football is kinda the world's most popular sport here, not some esoteric little-known thing that must be assiduously hunted with just the right combination of search terms.    Typing "offsides rule" into any search engine should turn up something useful.  I really can't manage to not be judgy here.  This is not a topic like vaccines or genetically modified crops; there aren't a lot of quacks filling up search results with claims that the offsides rule is doing terrible things to children and something something chemicals.

I realize also that disliking something due to a lack of understanding is a human tradition that I would guess is older than cheese.  Note that cheese has been dated back to at least 7-8000 years ago.  However, we ought to be able to examine our traditions and discard those which are useless (anti-intellectual xenophobia) while continuing to embrace that which is glorious (cheese).

Caturday Post: Summertime and the Living is Easy

Ophelia, an old kitty who lives with my parents, demonstrates her relaxed approach to life.

Poetry Tuesday: Cicada

Shizukasa ya

iwa ni shimiiru

semi no koe

Stillness

penetrating the rock

the cicada's voice

                   -Basho

I heard no cicadas in Wyoming.  It makes me happy to hear them once again.