Nevertheless I seem to be getting things done. The hardest part of anything is just showing up, so I got that going for me.
A few quick things of note. Quinoa (pronounced keen-wa, and yes, I was pronouncing it keen-o-wa until corrected) has impacted my consciousness three times in the past two days. Something similar happened two years ago with ch-ch-ch-chia, which, as it turns out, is a potent high energy drink runners appreciate (see: Born to Run). Quinoa is a pseudo cereal grain developed by the Andeans. It is drought and salt tolerant. When drought and heat make corn, wheat, and soy no longer an option in the American breadbasket, my guess is farmers will turn to quinoa. It appears there may be a fly in the ointment with respect to quinoa. It's popularity is driving prices up, making it hard for indigenous farmers in the Andes to continue eating it. Not when when they can sell it and then purchase pasta and noodles and rice and such. Thus the danger is that they will turn into big fat diabetic slobs like us, and then, once we have a world full of fatties used to eating high on the hog, these types of alternative crops are gone, and the the food crash and lots of hurt. As we all know, there's more than enough food produced for everyone, and if anyone starves, it's not a distribution problem, but a poverty problem. They simply cannot afford to pay for food. Ironic then, that some people who recently couldn't get enough and now get more than enough of the wrong kinds of food. Weird.
Other things. I simply don't understand why we waste so much time on Mars. Look, I don't have a problem sending probes and robots to Mars, but quit blowing smoke up my ass about how there might have been life there. Mars has been, always has been, dead as hell. If you think about the evolution of the sun it was 30% less bright at the beginning of its history. Even with greenhouse gases, Earth barely kept from freezing, and Mars certainly froze early.
Let's think for a minute what planet would have been nice and balmy in the early days of the Solar System? Why, Venus of course. If life got started early, Venus would be the place. In fact, we are probably Venusians. Too bad we can't study Venus's early history the way we can Mars. But Venus sucks now. So, like the drunk looking for his lost keys under the streetlight because he can see better there, we send probes to Mars.
My brother mailed me his HTC Incredible phone which is now obsolete. I'm going to activate it, and officially join the rest of you all in the 21st century. I will soon be one of the Great Distracted. Oh, Joy.
Maybe I can operate drones with it (considering this seems to be one of the unintended consequences of the
Lastly, I've a partial new inventory of mechanicules to cast:
And I'm working on the rewards for my Kickstarter project. One of my student aides (who by the way operates a business selling drinking horns), has run a successful funding project on Kickstarter. She is now my advisor. It's kind of funny how she gets frustrated with my glacially slow mental capabilities, and can't seem to understand why my 55-year-old brain doesn't just pick immediately on what she is saying. All I can provide in my defense is, it will happen to her someday, and, yes, my brain was pretty fucking fast on the quick draw when it was nineteen like hers.
In any, case, she has proven a valuable resource in putting my little cost-benefit analysis together re: rewards. I am turning out rewards soon, and then slap the whole project together, hopefully get it out by the end of February (and she can't understand why I am missing the end of January target date). Here's a sample:
I am going for twenty bronze pendants (kind of based upon the mutant gypsy vacuum cleaner mechanicule) for a $35 contribution. Thinking about little cast glass tiles of these as well. Those would probably be $50. Here's a closeup of a pendant, maybe about inch and a half wide. I was trying to understand why I liked them, and then realized they kind of look like Klingon warships:
That kinky ball-gag red-strapped to a donut mechanicule is waaaaay out of pocket, but I think I'll pony up for one'a'them klingon ninja star pendants...,
ReplyDeleteI'm a lifelong jewelry free type'a'guy, but my son would find endless swagger in that objet d'art.
I'm happy with about 75% of what I make. I think the gag ball attached to a bunghole - like the steampunk accordion before it - is gonna disappear from the mix. Some things just refuse to be made manifest. (Kind of, I think a material refutation of Plato's Forms). I, like you, am not a personal adornment type.
ReplyDelete