Quixotica

Today I learned many things.

I learned the secret trick to getting past the locked gate that seals Noisebridge. Once inside, I sat and talked shop with a number of network security buffs; one of the most fascinating things I learned was how difficult it is to prosecute hackers due to the global reach of the Internet.

For example, let's say Korean Hacker A builds a botnet that scrapes credit card data. Your system is compromised, and now there's a text file containing your account and identity data on a server in Croatia.

We know where it is, but how do we secure the right to cross into Korean jurisdiction to arrest a citizen for data stolen in one country and stored in another? If a U.S. citizen has been targeted we have a bargaining chip, but what if that hard drive in Croatia holds damning personal data from people across the globe? Who can you trust to safely dispose of that data? Is it any better that the agents of a foreign government possess the keys to your identity, instead of some anonymous Croatian citizen?

Curiouser and curiouser.

Also, this was taped to the bathroom wall; nerd graffiti.

I have an ancient secret for you: in the dark before the dawn of the 20th century, Austrian military leaders seriously considered employing bicycles as engines of war.



Credit for unearthing this ancient history goes to the History of Ideas blog, curated by the folks at J.F. Ptak Books.

I took my ball and went to Twitter, now I'm bringing it back where it belongs.

One post a day. No refunds, no regrets.

On the weekends I meander down to Philz for a morning cup of coffee. I pay $5 to shelter for a moment amidst the pleasant peculiarity of a coffee haus that plops a honkin' great grey monolith of an ancient ATM smack dab in the center of an ever-shifting mandala with arms of overstuffed armchairs and spokes formed from old wooden park benches. Come for the coffee, stay for the calculated eccentricity.

This morning one of the cashiers kindly helped me seat a disposable lid atop my steaming styrofoam cup. He's an elderly gentleman with a passion for jaunty headwear, reliably classy when it comes to both his service and his sense of personal style; when I complemented him on his facility for fixing flimsy coffee cup lids, he smiled and claimed it was an ancient secret.

There ought to be more ancient secrets.

Nearly every waking moment of the past year has been clouded with thoughts of all the better ways I could be spending my time.

I had an aunt until around 2005 or so, when her body succumbed to an overachieving cadre of cancerous cells. They grew with great greedy gasps and consumed life without stopping to savour life, and in this ravenous regard they and their host could not have been (to the best of my beleaguered memory) more different; my Aunt Robin and I never shared more than a faint familial fondness and the occasional pleasant talk of nothing in particular, but the words of my fathers (grand or otherwise) suggest a woman who appreciated her existence.

I know she was the only evidence of my grandfather's first marriage, and thus had a nine-year lead on my father, himself the eldest of my grandmother's seven sons and daughters. I know she traveled to France at some point, and since she eventually married a Frenchman I choose to romanticize the trip as an irreverent escape to the sun-drenched shores of Normandy, mere miles from the beaches of D-Day. I know she had two sons, one a family man and the other a small marketing millionaire who cashed in with the sale of Zooba.com. I know also my uncle George Bataillon very nearly married another woman, a decorated member of the French Resistance whom we called "Isabele" and instead became a lovely old widower with greedy children. She also lived by the water in a small, beautiful blue house that reminded children of a robin's egg left precariously close to the rising sea, and her separate life in that separate house only proves how amazing my aunt must have been. I know she was infamous as a child for stealing into a neighbor's tomato patch to steal sweet sustenance, and I know she was bold enough to bring the salt shaker along and squat roguishly amidst the foliage, carefully seasoning every stolen bite. I know she laughed long and loud, with a toothy smile that split her round cheeks (a family trademark) asunder. She said our round cheeks were Indian gifts of our Ukrainian ancestors, that we were all "half-moon faces" sporting foolish grins.

Forgive my indulgence. I know my aunt enjoyed her life quite a bit, and I know it led to no grand apotheosis; on the contrary, her predilection for cigarettes, wine and hearty fare likely hastened her demise. Now she's dead, I never truly knew her or communicated what she meant to my life and it doesn't trouble me. She's gone, soon I'll be gone and there's not a damn thing waiting for us afterwards; this little slice of life is all we get.

I guess what I'm getting at is perhaps you need a little pinch of something bitter to appreciate the sweetness all around you. So stop being such a goddamn dick. Who and what the fuck do you think you are, to be so mighty?

We have spent the better part of a quarter-century cultivating a culture of negativity, a culture in which honesty is an oddity. Speaking ill of others has become pop vernacular, and in my experience expressing earnest enthusiasm for anything is tantamount to treason unless you season every expression with a pinch of snide self-awareness.

Stop it. It's okay to enjoy watching Jersey Shore or Lady Gaga videos. It's cool to like flannel or Twitter or taking long walks at dusk to nowhere in particular, and it's okay to stop and look at yourself in a mirror or just say shit that makes no sense, ever. We fuck up always, and we're lucky to have lives that allow for even the possibility of such insignificance. We're living in the best era yet, in one of the most interesting and exciting cities in the world during what is (statistically speaking) the most intriguing time of our lives.

We don't deserve any of this, so stop your goddamn whining about how shitty life is and start grabbing as much as your greedy little hands will hold.

If you love pork and live on the West Coast, get ready: the world of gourmet bacon is about to get a bit more wild and a lot more wooly. Companies like the Washington-based Wooly Pigs are importing and breeding a sort of hairy Hungarian pig known as a mangalica, famous for being the most delicious and decadently marbled pork product on the planet.

Mangalitsas (a British spelling) are a flavorful fat-filled beast first bred in 19th-century Hungary from the hardy hogs of the Balkan mountains. These stocky sausage fests became popular among the farms and rural settlements of Eastern Europe due to their robust nature and low maintenance costs compared to other breeds. Wikipedia contributors claim the popularity of the wooly pig declined in the 20th century in part due to the advent of preservatives like refrigeration and vacuum seals, and while no reason is given I would suggest that this is due in part to the higher fat content of lard-breeds like the Mangalista when compared to lean-breeds like the Berkshires (another strain of high-quality bacon beasts), which these days run much smaller and leaner than their fuzzy Eastern European cousins. Meats rich in monounsaturated fats are less likely to go rancid without refrigeration, and thus the high fat content which makes mangalitsa lard such a prize find for modern foodies was a serious survival concern for Hungarian farmers seeking cured meats that could safely keep their families fed throughout the long Balkan winters.



Like many red-blooded patriots I've always held bacon in high regard, indeed I've been known on more than one occasion to proclaim pork the prince of cured meat products; that said, I'm anxious at the thought of my porcine prince slipping inadvertently into the gilded cage of "the next big thing" in gourmet food products. First coffee, then cupcakes took their brief turns on the porcelain stage of the fawning foodistas, only to be relegated to the gourmet ghettos of yuppie markets like Whole Foods and Andronico's once their splendor spoiled.

So rejoice, pork lovers, and pursue your fuzzy pig fat fix in foodie outposts across the country. But in your pursuit of what Wooly Pigs PR calls "America's 'it' pig," I implore you not to forget the rustic pleasure of waking up to the scent of Hilshire Farms mystery meat smoking on the griddle. Mangalitsa may be perfect for (literally) whipping up a batch of lard cookies or complementing a veggie hors d'œuvre, but there's no better complement for a skillet of cheesy eggs than half a rack of Hilshire's finest.

I spent the better part of last week bumming around on a friend's couch playing their games, eating their food and just generally being a nuisance. Just Cause 2 held a sacrosanct spot in the 360 as the latest Next Big Thing, but when company coalesced and controllers were issued we regularly returned to co-op classics like the Nazi Zombies mode in Call of Duty: World At War. Yet those brief sojourns into the illusory island paradise of Panau played an integral role in gathering a crowd for multiplayer jam sessions by attracting casual observers with a smorgasbord of startling visual sequences. The game is perverse, a straightforward solo experience that's only endearing when played with others. I've met many people (most of them artists) who demonstrate an unconscious desire to create, reaching for pen and paper or a well-worn guitar at the first sign of an ebbing conversation, filling the valleys between peaks of interest with impromptu chords and margin doodles. Just Cause 2 allows for similar entertainment, rescuing faltering small talk and filling uncomfortable silences with the savage beauty of a Steven Seagal movie.



"Holy shit, did you just lasso a helicopter?" Amazement shadowed by disbelief, and a caustic conversation about college graduates tapers off. All eyes are on the screen. "Do it again! Dude, can you jack that chopper in mid-air?!" Craziness confirmed, the challenges start coming. Prior conversations scrabble to regain traction, but every discussion inevitably derails after a spectacular stunt. "What, you didn't know how to ride the exploding gas tanks into the stratosphere? It's a scene straight out of Dr. Strangelove!"



I played a shit-ton of Just Cause 2 this week, but I couldn't tell you a damn thing about the plot, setting or characters involved. It took me three days (and sustained assault by a cadre of Japanese commando holdouts) just to realize the game was set in a fictional smattering of Southeast Asian islands, instead of the real-world South American archipelago I'd envisioned. What I CAN tell you is that if you strap protagonist Rico Suave (names changed to protect my ignorance) to a canister of highly flammable propellant, blast the release valve to smithereens and ride that ramshackle rocket straight into the stratosphere while screaming "MANATEEEE!" at the top of your lungs, you are guaranteed to get a roomful of grins and at least a few guffaws. Games like Just Cause 2 are performance art, like a round of friendly extempo competition in which each player passes the controller with the sometimes-secret, sometimes-shameless hope that the next guy (or girl) will find an even more ridiculous manner of making stuff explode. Add alcohol, rinse and repeat. The memory of friends bonding over beer and a borrowed guitar is the stuff of legend, and I think we're fast approaching the day when the cultural zeitgeist will ensconce a gamepad in the halcyon halls reserved for the beloved building blocks of social capital.

Don't believe me? Let's open with an early passage from the second tablet:

"There will come to you a mighty man, a comrade who saves his friend--
he is the mightiest in the land, he is strongest,
his strength is mighty as the meteorite of Anu!
You loved him and embraced him as a wife;
and it is he who will repeatedly save you."

Enkidu is a wild man, the prototypical Starsky to lawful Gilgamesh's Ur-Hutch. Though their partnership opens on a rough note (with a knockdown, drag-out brawl through the streets of Uruk) the duo quickly build a relationship based on mutual respect, brotherhood and copious amounts of homoeroticism.

Like the reformed jewel thief played by DMX in Cradle 2 the Grave, the renegade comes in from the wilderness for justice, revenge (or in Enkidu's case, a totally sweet wedding feast) that evolves into a permanent lifestyle change as the wild one comes to respect the laws of society under the influence of a powerful lawbringer (the god-king Gilgamesh, represented here by Taiwanese Special Agent Jet Li.)



Gilgamesh and Enkidu cement their newfound partnership by paying a visit to the Uruk weaponsmiths (the ancient Sumerian equivalent of the precinct gun range) before embarking on a quest to seek and slay the great demon-god Humbaba, guardian of the divine Cedar Forest. Enkidu's decision to aid Gilgamesh against the wild god Humbaba is significant, because the wild man was originally created to oppose the tyrannical excesses of the god-king and protect the people and the wilderness. This is an archetypal test of faith for Enkidu, who must sacrifice his previous ties to the wilderness (as Sam Jackson sacrifices his reputation to protect Bruce Willis from an angry Harlem mob in the Die Hard series) for the sake of brotherhood.



Gilgamesh and Enkidu defeat the demon, and Enkidu convinces his partner to slay Humbaba despite the god-king's pity for a vanquished enemy. The wild man fails the test of civility and reverts to his primal nature, a failure that presages a fall from grace (figuratively in the case of Brad Pitt's murderous rage at the conclusion of Se7en, fatally for poor Enkidu.) Later the pair hunt and defeat the Bull of Heaven, and when the goddess Ishtar protests Enkidu literally rips the Bull's ass off and throws it at her.

"Woe unto Gilgamesh who slandered me and killed the Bull of
Heaven!"
When Enkidu heard this pronouncement of Ishtar,
he wrenched off the Bull's hindquarter and flung it in her face:
"If I could only get at you I would do the same to you!"

Enkidu's bravado and disdain for authority prove to be his undoing, as the gods lay a fatal curse upon him in retribution for the murder of Humbaba and the Bull of Heaven. The wild man pays for his "bad cop" antics with his life, much as Denzel Washington buckles beneath a hail of Russian gunfire during the denouement of Training Day.

The death of the wild man reminds the "good cop" that justice without the blessing of the gods (or the law) is a venal sin, and Gilgamesh mourns his fallen brother for days before condemning Enkidu to the earth and walking off into the sunset. Raise soundtrack, roll credits.