In an alley
a giant Cadillac, like my grandfather drove,
dried blood rage red.

From under festival orange tarp shroud
juts chrome snarl grill
between lifeless headlight eyes.

What better to do
with such a monster
than bury it with its children?

Ben Bumhertz writes:

I’m a new driver, and I’ve heard that being passed by cyclists can strike you gay.  I’m scared, what should I do?

Well, Ben, you heard correctly.  Being passed by a cyclist while driving can strike you gay.  It’s only natural, as you sit there powerless in your car or truck, to imagine those powerful legs and glutes pounding your fleshy bottom (with prosthetics as required) for hours on end.

Researchers in the field call it queeralysis, and if you drive a large truck or sports car, you may be especially vulnerable.  And we’re sure you are aware of the downsides of being struck queer: constant discrimination, no longer being able to call everyone a fag, possibly dramatic changes in hygiene and style, and an enjoyment of TV shows that are only aired on expensive premium channels.

Fortunately, you can protect yourself. There are several tactics that you can use to delay or even avoid being struck queer.

1) Pass the cyclist as quickly as possible, even if it means speeding. It is very important that you also rev your engine as you pass, to signal to the cyclist that you meant to let them by, and that you could have overtaken them at any time with your powerful machine, and that you didn’t just spend the last thirty seconds imagining them filling every inch of you.

2) Shout at the cyclist. This technique has been used since the time of your ancient, lemur-like ancestors to reclaim dominance and heterosexuality.  ”Get off the road!” is one suggested line, since it gives an impression of authority, wisdom and straightness, but if you feel the strike coming and you can say it without a quaver in your voice, try shouting “Fag!” or “Dyke!”  Since this technique might lead to eye contact with the cyclist, we suggest that you clench your anus before shouting, in case they use witchcraft to teleport inside you.

3) Endanger the cyclist. Remember, the goal here isn’t to kill, only to prove that you’re not queer.  If they don’t survive the encounter, they will never know.  Passing them as closely as possible and then cutting them off is a classic; try stepping on your brake afterwards for a more powerful effect.  Again, we suggest clenching your anus to protect against witchcraft.

So there you go, Ben.  With the appropriate use of these techniques, you will be as well equipped as possible to resist queeralysis.  Good luck, and happy driving!

Sam stood in the darkness, one foot raised, eyes closed.  He took a slow, deep breath and let it out, focusing his attention on making the inhalation and exhalation even.  Still, his heart was racing and his beak was clenched.  He tried to remember his Sensei’s words.  Breathe the feeling into your chest.  Gather it into a ball in the centre, over your heart, and you will be able to separate yourself from it.  Then transmute its power to positive chi.

He took breath after breath, his body completely still, using the movement of the air to gather his rage, but after each inhalation contracted it, the exhalation delivered more to every part of his body.

He tried to focus on what he’d gathered so far, but if there was any ball it barely stood out.  His heart ached; maybe that was part of it.  Maybe he was getting somewhere.  Oh well, he’d try to transmute what he could.  Remember how it worked: shoot the energy down through your rooted foot, your anchor anchor to the ground.  Concentrate on cleansing it, or maybe trading it in for good chi.  Bring it back inside.

OK, he could do this.  He visualized the energy moving down from his chest, but didn’t feel anything.  But something shot up, and he suddenly wanted to cry.

Sensei!

The image leapt to his mind, as vivid as the day it happened: his Sensei, head and neck stretched over a log, the farmer with his axe silhouetted against the rising sun.  Sensei looks to Sam with an unreadable expression, and then up at the farmer. The axe falls.

With a shout, Sam lost his balance.  He put a wing out to catch himself, and struck it on something before falling against it with a deep thud.

“Shit,” he whispered as he gathered himself, feeling his bruised elbow and opening his eyes.  He looked at what he’d fallen against, bewildered, and then it struck him: it worked!

He had grown!  He was way taller than he had been before, as tall as the farmer.  Maybe taller.  He’d channeled a portion of his rage into growth energy and had unlocked the power to defeat the farmer and get revenge!  YES.

It was still dark, and the farmer wouldn’t be up for a while yet.  Sam didn’t want to confront him in his fortress, there was no telling what defenses he would have devised to keep himself safe from Sensei.  He decided to wait until sunrise and prepare.  He resumed standing on one foot and dropped back into meditation, finding his rage soothed by cold intent and the giddy confidence of his new-found power.

Sam held the feeling for over an hour, and started to feel uncomfortable. Strive for light and warmth, Sensei had told him, but what he felt was dark, cold and sharp. Was this right? Of course it was: it was justice. The farmer had killed, without provocation or reason. He deserved what was coming to him. Besides, Sensei also said that way to the light is always through the darkness.

And this is where his concentration was snapped by a scream and a terrible shattering sound. That scream… it was Ella! And it was coming from the farm house! Oh no, she was the only one left! He ran towards the sound as quickly as he could, and rounded the corner of the house to find himself face to face with the farmer. Fragments of glass littered the ground between them, and from the inside they heard the sounds of struggle.  Sam locked gazes with the farmer, and raised his head into the first wing-fu offensive stance.

The farmer’s eyes were wide, and then they closed. He exhaled and seemed to collapse slightly. “I never would have thought it’d come to this,” he said, apparently to himself.

“You killed my Sensei. Prepare to die.”

The farmer’s eyes squeezed tighter, and a tear trickled down his cheek. He has remorse, Sam thought; good, he has accepted justice and his soul will find peace. Beak ready, he leapt.

After dreaming of strings of Rubik’s cubes shifting and solving and sharing blocks, Ella woke to an uncomfortable prodding sensation in her backside. Both of these were confusing: there was only straw below her when she fell asleep, and—being a chicken—she had no idea what Rubik’s cubes were or what they were doing in her dream. She reached down and tried to move whatever she was sitting on, but it didn’t budge.

She yawned and stretched upward, painfully striking her head against something.  This was also confusing, because there was only air above her when she fell asleep.  She opened her eyes.

Oh!  What a funny joke.  Somebody put her in a really tiny version of the coop while she slept.  They did a really good job too; it must have taken a long time.  Every familiar detail of the the cavernous ceiling was recreated with painstaking accuracy in the one that was now within wing’s reach.  The dusty windows were identical but now only as wide as her shoulders.  She looked down and saw that she was sitting on the remains of a ledge that looked just like her ledge, but far too small and flimsy.  Whoever built this replica didn’t make it very strong.  Maybe it was a prank by the giant lady who took her kids to school.  They’d both been kind of sad since all the other hens moved to the retirement home.  It was nice of her to be so thoughtful.  Ella liked the giant lady, and hoped she wasn’t too lonely.

There seemed to be no point in hanging around in there, and it was really small and sort of uncomfortable.  She looked around.  The hatch where she usually left would be impossible to squeeze through.  The only thing that seemed likely was the giant lady’s door, which was now about the right size.  She felt a flicker of guilt as she looked at the handle.  The giant lady would put her paw on it and turn it, and it would click and then the door would open.  It didn’t feel right to use it, because it wasn’t her door.  Wait!  This wasn’t the same door.  This was a mini prank-door.  She reached out her wing, grasped the handle, turned, pulled, and stepped into the light.

Oh!  The world…

The feeling that she’d been pranked escalated to a paralyzing terror.  The whole world was smaller.  This was impossible.  The indomitable fence around the coop wasn’t even as high as her head.  The area it enclosed was no longer an arena, it was only… an enclosure.  The sturdy crab grass growing around the fence posts looked frail and thin, and in the wind it’s majestic sway was only a stiff wiggle.  Even the trees seemed tiny and rushed compared to the swaying mountainous majesty of the day before.

After about five minutes the shock subsided into a deep unease and Ella decided to go about her day.  For a while she decided to stay in the fenced area, but it was really too small now and she had to move.  She’d normally start the day with a jog, but the shock of this whole thing made her want to just run around like her head was cut off.  She walked around in tight circles faster and faster until she fell over, dizzy.  There was no way around it: she had to cross the fence.  Hopefully the giant lady would understand.  She closed her eyes and jumped over.

The world didn’t explode.  She looked around and decided to start her jog.  She ran across the farm’s yard and hopped over the fence into the field where the cows lived.  She said “Good morning!” to them as she passed, but the cows just stopped, their eyes bulging and grass falling from their mouths.  She ran to the far end of their field and back, her excitement growing as she went: all of this stuff had been way off in the distance her whole life, and now she was seeing it.  It was very exciting.  Maybe if everything stayed smaller, she could help out more, Ella thought.  The tuition for her kids must be pretty expensive.

She went around the south side of the barn where the tractor slept, and turned north to go see the pig pen.  ”Good morning!” she called to the pigs as she approached.

“Is it really?”  one of them replied, calmly, with one raised eyebrow.

“Of course it is,” Ella replied, “The sun is out, everything’s gone tiny and I’m out for a run!”

Another pig looked at her for a moment before saying, “And we’re in a fucking sty, suffering our disenfranchisement under the heel of bipedal despotism.”

“Well, if you don’t clean up after yourselves, that’s your own problem.  And I don’t know what the rest of that means, but it’s probably hooey too,” she said.

“If you can read, take this,” said another pig, who handed her a pamphlet.  ”It’s the latest from Kroporkin.  It explains everything.”

“Oh, these look like those squigglies on the food bags,” Ella said, and then realized that they meant something.  They meant “Hamarchist Morality,” and she almost know what that meant.  ”I always used to think they were for decoration.”

The pigs looked at each other.  One of them said, quietly, “Poor girl, she has no idea.”  They all looked serious and sad.

Well, enough of that, what a downer.  Ella thanked the pigs for the booklet and jogged on.  She rounded their pen and approached the farmhouse.  Through the no-longer-big shiny squares she saw the giant lady, now the same size as her.  She was standing in front of a white box with four black circles on top, and one of the circles had fire coming out and there was a thing on top of it that looked like a round metal feeding trough.  The giant lady was holding something round and white in her hand; why, it was Percival!  Her dear Percival!  She expected he was going to be a doctor, some day.  The giant lady held him in one hand, and then her arm swung down.

It was forty minutes after I decided to quit.  I was agitated, twitching.  Three or four times, I reached for it: where I work, it’s always there.  I can’t escape it.  I was irritable.  I didn’t sweat, but I felt uncomfortably warm.  It’s only for a week, I told myself.  Only for a week.

The extent to which it had invaded my habits and my interactions—even my thoughts—was shocking.  Every move without it was different enough to draw conscious awareness of it.  Walking across a large room, sitting in a chair, relaxing at home: all different.

What the fuck was I supposed to do without the internet?

OK, it’s more general than that.  I’m doing this Artist’s Way course, and one of the things that happens in it is a week of reading deprivation: no books, magazines, bus adverts, newspapers, etc.  The obvious modernization was no more internet.  Of course, there are things that don’t involve reading, like youtube, but I decided to follow the spirit of the exercise instead of the letter of it.  The results so far have been kind of shocking.

After half a day, what rose from the pit of time left by dislodging and removing the internet was amazing.  Shoots of ideas: something to write, something to draw, something to organize, something to build out of carefully cut pieces of wood.  And later, what followed?  Action.  I actually went through a huge chunk of laundry, did some preventative maintenance on my room, practised piano, did yoga, meditated, added another 20km or so kilometers to my commute home, pulled out a sketchbook.

It’s now been two solid days where I’m only allowed gmail and its chat thing, as well as blogging and flickr uploading, which are creative outlets.   No wikipedia, no best of craigslist, nothing about software development, security or politics.  No silly animal pictures, no comics, nothing.  I still don’t know what to do with all of the time that’s reappeared without it; the only thing seems to be to act on all of these ideas.  So I’m letting myself blog again, and I suppose uploading to flickr will be ok, and one tweet per blog post until I finish.  Otherwise, I think I’ll make stuff.

Well, I’ve now had half a week with my new bike, Aurore Astrid Macaroni, a beautiful Marinoni Sportivo Express.  After some initial shakiness, related to my toe clip technique and slowing down, I’m used to riding non-fixed again.  Last night, after getting home on Aurore, I switched to Carrera, my beautiful fixed-gear Soma Delancey, and went for a spin to directly compare the riding experience.

And it’s a total toss-up.  They’re both amazing.  They’re completely different.

Aurore is fast.  I’d blow past people on Carrera, but this is something else entirely.  Aurore’s top gear is 53/12, four and a half tire revolutions per pedal revolution, and Carerra’s 46/17 is just over two and a half.  While I would hit the limit of my spinning ability on a straightaway with Carerra, I’m not powerful enough to use Aurore’s top gear at a proper cadence unless I’m going slightly downhill.  Apparently this isn’t at all abnormal.  Additionally, having gears means that the thought of going up a big hill is only mildly disgusting.

Aurore is also smooth.  The carbon fork and stays absorb a lot of the (irritatingly frequent and large) bumps that I encounter on Edmonton’s (shitty) roads.  Sections of road that were bone-rattling on Carrera are only uncomfortable on Aurore, and going over them more quickly feels less stupid.

Aurore is an amazing machine.  But she doesn’t win, because Carerra is so much goddamn fun to ride, for almost completely different reasons.

The fixie versus freewheel thing has probably been done to death, and I don’t think it’s fair to compare them¹.  With a freewheel bike, the core mechanic is “pedal means go, brake means stop.”  When you ride one, you’re driving.  Riding a fixie feels more like skating: every motion of your feet has significance, and it feels more like a different interface to the ground than a vehicle.  It’s really no surprise that people who have been riding other kinds of bikes have trouble with fixies, at least at first.  The idea of brakes being only semi-useful is understandably strange, because vehicles have to stop.  It’s the same with the idea of not being able to coast: what’s the point of driving a vehicle if you can’t just sit and let it carry you a bit?  But once you accept this conceptual shift, the reasons for loving your fixie are just too clear.

For me, the biggest one is probably speed control.  I accelerate as hard as I pedal, I slow down as hard as I resist.  Another one is feedback.  Based on what’s coming to me through the pedals, I can feel the ground I’m going over.  I find that these two things combine to make the ride almost meditative, because any time my mind wanders the pedals bring me right back.  I also find that my cycling style changes, because I never want to touch my brakes.  On one hand, I’m more aggressive in taking safe openings that I see; on the other, I’m way more cautious of everything that can move.  It’s a wonderful experience.

So I guess that puts the whole fixie debate to bed for me.  They’re awesome, but so are other bikes.  I’m now bicyclically polyamorous.

1. In my defence, I’m only going to contrast them.

Hey, it’s nice to see positive progress in education once in a while. After all this time, someplace in Canada—and I’m so proud that it was my home province of Alberta—has picked up the debate that rages south of the border and seems poised to make evolution an optional topic, along with sex and sexual orientation.

I have always held that neither evidence, logic, reason, observation, math, nor any other liberal socialist propaganda technique constitutes a rebuttal of anything I believe based on supposition, gossip, superstition, illiteracy, or incomprehension.  Believing things that are verifiable has never helped anyone make good decisions, and there are studies that prove this [1, 2, 3]. It follows naturally that nobody should ever try to teach me anything unless I already agree with it or know it, and that goes doubly for any children I might have (because they’re chattel until they turn 18). It makes me so happy to see that the government agrees with me:

“This government supports a very, very fundamental right and that is parental rights with respect to education,” said Premier Ed Stelmach.

Awesome!

Now that we’re finally making some progress on denying the existence of evolution and homosexuality, there’s another issue that I’d like to raise again, because it’s lain dormant for too long. That, friends, is heliocentrism.

I’ve thought this for a long time, and had merchandise for it even.  But I think that the time to act has finally arrived.

We geocentrists have mountains of evidence to support the truth of our statements.  Even the scientamists will admit there’s nothing wrong with our view of solar mechanics: those lovely elliptical orbital equations of theirs still work if you make Earth the origin, they just get really huge and ugly.  And hey, you know what?  So’s your liberal heliocentrist face.

So let’s get out there and spread the word.  I want to make it as difficult as possible to teach that the Earth moves around the sun.  Write letters to your overpaid conservative wankjob bureaucrat!  March in the streets!  Spin fire poi while shouting, “This is the way the universe works, bitches!  Deal with it!”

1. Kiss
2. My
3. Ass

I was recently compelled to write a verse of geek poetry in an archaic rhyme scheme.  I think it might be the first iambic quadrameter I’ve ever written, and it turned out flawlessly except that it’s indecipherable to non-geeks.  Enjoy if you can:

And after all the code was made,
compilers with their flags were silent,
linkers slept, their objects laid,
and weary hands and headaches vi’lent
statements to the shell conveyed
and started code meant for a client.
“Perhaps it’s done!” they all exult:
Behold! A segmentation fault.

My plan to post every other day has taken its first blow, but I think it’s fairly justifiable.  The last post was the day before I left for a few days in Vancouver, where I was reminded just how beautiful it is, why I didn’t want to leave and what I gave up when I did.  There’s nothing like a straight view into downtown and across to the mountains, framed by rows of blossoming cherry trees.  Or, for that matter, the similar view from Seasons in Queen Elizabeth Park, and that while eating a some excellent duck and drinking BC wine from one of those dozens of awesome vineyards that don’t get their products past the province’s borders.  Late night bus rides down Hastings.  Having pastries and cider in the sun in Grandview Park¹.

Back in Edmonton, spring hasn’t quite started yet.  It’s only mid-April, after all: yesterday was a blizzard.  The desert-carcass tan that’s dominated the ground since the snow melted is only just starting to hint at shifting towards the lime-and-urine green² that will replace it once plants start coming out and the dust is blown into our eyes and out of our lives.  I know it’s tired to bitch about the climate here, but seriously, the temperatures overnight are still dipping below freezing, and they’re going to continue to do it.  My forecasting widget says that even the day a week from now where we’ll hit a tropical 14°C will be -2 overnight.  The five months of non-winter here are usually beautiful, like an abusive partner you were about to leave suddenly being extra-nice to keep you around.  But this year, not so much.  The freezing nights and mornings are like catching that partner watching you with hatred and clenching their fists while you sleep.

Anyway, back on the blogwagon.  I’ll aim for something more interesting by Friday.

1) Hell, even realizing that the Sweet Cherubim bakery that I’d previously overlooked is more than half gluten-free was awesome.

2) I remember that for years I hated the way landscape paintings here always used pastel colours to depict grassy fields, or wheat fields, or patches of trees around fields, or old farm buildings collapsing in grassy fields or wheat fields.  I’d always assumed it was a really lame stylistic choice.  It turns out that when you’ve seen what colour looks like in other places, using pastels when painting landscapes here is more documentary honesty than style.

For the sake of the search engines, I’ve just started tagging entries.  I went back and retroactively added a tags and installed a plugin to help deal with them.  They’re a pain in the ass.

The idea is that when I write a post, I include a bunch of words or short phrases in the metadata that describe what I’m writing about.  The tags for this one are inevitably going to include “software quality” and “software,” and probably “geek,” maybe “blogging.”  I do this so search engines and blog tracking sites can do a better job of matching what I’m writing about with what people seem to want to read.  It also leads to things like tag clouds, which are great for roughly nothing¹.

The deep problem that we’re up against is that computers are really dumb.  If I talk about software and mention bugs, it will take a long time for a computer to figure out that I don’t mean bugs in general.  Despite the fact that I’m clearly saying the two are unrelated, the fact that I linked both of them in one article means they’ll get slightly closer in the search engines.  And when you add metaphors, satire, similes, etc, computers fall apart entirely.  A surprising number of humans can’t handle it either, but we’re talking about a level of fail never before seen.

This amounts to going over what I write, doing the first level conceptual digestion, and picking the largest lumps of crap that come out of it².  It feels like telling a joke and then explaining it in detail.  But if to get meaningful use out of things like Technorati, then, as they say in the parlance of the streets, those are the breaks.

1) If you’re an idiot and you’d like to know the buzzwords surrounding some new buzzword you’ve heard, they’re very effective.  I don’t endorse technology that helps buzzword-driven idiots fail to function more effectively.  They’re also useful for figuring out how other people are tagging similar articles.

2) And with that, software bugs get a bit closer to dung beetles and tapeworms.