Piled High and Deep

The Compact Disc

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 10:21:13 -0500

Music recording technology never really evolved past the CD. A few weeks ago, I had the chance to peruse the offerings at a second-hand music store, and I ended up buying a few CDs, and now I’m getting back into them a bit after scuttling my entire collection about fifteen years ago and just ripping all of them to flac. I still have all of those flac files, too, but when I was in the music store, I guess I sort of missed browsing through the media. Vinyl is back bigger than ever, by the way. I monkeyed around with vinyl for many years, and I had some interesting turntables, especially a NAD table, but my favorite one was this direct drive and fully automatic Onkyo. Records are fun, but they have some serious drawbacks that made me start to question if it was worth the time and money. For one, records are dust magnets, and you can brush and brush them, spray them down with all sorts of cleaners and chemicals, and you still get dust, and that turns into pops on the record. For two, they are bulky and heavy. For three, they don’t sound good anyway especially compared to a CD with a good DAC setup. It’s not even close.

The Meat Grinder

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 10:21:13 -0500

People are patterns. Let’s start there. Built into us we find a biological imperative, a drive to copy ourselves, but that drive is blind and aimless aside for it’s singular goal of fitness, but fitness can never be achieved with any sort of permanence, and so it drives on and on, go, go, go, with no end in sight for the process, though all it does is spit out carnage as it churns along.

Remembering Suzy McGrath

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 10:21:13 -0500

One of my oldest girlfriends died this week, Suzy Quinta McGrath Barichivich, Suzy Q, died on March 24, 2026. She was 52 years old. I gleaned from facebook posts that she had a degenerative condition of the brain called frontotemporal dementia. You can google it, but suffice it to say, it sounds terrible. I know she seems to have stopped working in 2021, so it looks like it was a slow and steady decline over several years.

About

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 09:56:32 -0500

Welcome to my corner of the web

I’m Jason Michael Wester. This is my personal web space where I write about the things I enjoy the most. There’s something like fifty Jason Westers living in the U.S., but I’m the only one who has secured jasonwester.com, obviously.

Piled High and Deep, the blog’s title, is a reference to an old joke one will sometimes hear bandied about, that a Ph.D. stands for piled high and deep (with bullshit). Not only is that mostly true, but it encapsulates the American distrust of intellectuals, something intellectuals have earned. Americans ought to distrust them more, not less. I have a Ph.D. in English, in the sub-field of composition studies, which is a completely bullshit domain. Completely, and I regret having spent so much of my life having pursued it. Why did I do it, then? Because in my late teens and early twenties I was an idealist who pursued his passions without a single thought about how he would earn a living. Getting a college education was good enough. Then, married, child on the way, the need to earn a secure living became very real, and one can’t advance in academia without the Piled High and Deep behind his name, so I continued down the road I was on. Path of least resistance.

Moving to Hugo

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 05:00:46 -0500

Admittedly, I’ve neglected the site lately, and when I wanted to issue an update a couple of days ago, I could not get jekyll to work on the old site. I tried different version of ruby, and nothing worked. Actually, I think ruby is the issue. I mean, what a mess.

This is built using hugo, and so far no ruby to mess with at all. It is dead simple to generate pages.

Exploring New Orleans

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 05:00:46 -0500

New Orleans is great. It has so much going on with its restaurant scene. When you get there, you’re bombarded with so many different food options. On Canal Street and into the French Quarter, you find places that serve beignets and breakfast/brunch, which is huge in New Orleans. You will find places that have fried chicken and daquiries, and you will find dozens of places that serve cajun/creole meals that are seafood-centric. I don’t usually get any meals in the French Quarter, but I do like to grab a Lucky Dog sometimes, and I like the muffaletta at Central Grocery quite a lot. It costs $30, but it will feed four people, and it is delicious. Cafe Du Monde is one of those rare places that lives up to its reputation. Yes, it is a tourist place, and yes, it is awesome. We always get cafe au lait and an order of beinets, and it’s so fast and simple, and you get to sit down and take it all in for a minute.

College Football No More

Sat, 03 Jan 2026 05:00:46 -0500

First of all, defeating Georgia still feels historic. Usually it is Georgia that will win games like that, and then go on to play for the title. This year, that team is Ole Miss. It feels unreal. If Ole Miss can defeat Georgia, it can defeat any team in college football. That much is clear to me.

College football is a mess. It has been pretty insane to be a lifelong fan of the team at the epicenter of the madness. The transfer portal opened today, and it has been interesting to see all the players looking for a new team, especially the Ole Miss former starter and current backup, Austin Simmons. I don’t think Ole Miss would be where it is without the play of Trinidad Chambliss, and I don’t think Simmons is nearly as good as Chambliss, so it isn’t at all suprising that he wants to leave and look for a better opportunity. What confuses me is why is the portal is opening now at all, when there’s still football to play. It feels like everything is geared toward next season already, so the games are almost like a sideshow. I hate it.

Rebels Defeat Bulldogs 39-34, Sugar Bowl Champions

Fri, 02 Jan 2026 05:00:46 -0500

The Ole Miss Rebels defeated the Georgia Bulldogs 39-34 to take the Sugar Bowl trophy and to advance to the semifinals of the college football playoff.

The first thing to say is this: This is the best Ole Miss football team of my lifetime. It doesn’t matter what happens after this, though I am pretty excited to get Miami in the semi-final game (more about that later). I didn’t give the Rebs much of a shot to win this game. To beat Georgia, you have to stop their run, and Ole Miss couldn’t do it during the first matchup earlier in the season. Georgia ran through Ole Miss like crap through a goose in that game. In this Sugar Bowl victory, Ole Miss did a much better job at stopping the run, and that kept them in the game. Early on as Ole Miss showed some stiffness on defense, I said that if Ole Miss can continue to stop the Georgia running game, I’ll take anything else they want to do. I’ll take the Georgia quarterback trying to beat us with the pass. That’s how you beat Georgia.

Monkeying with Stoicism

Thu, 30 Oct 2025 05:00:46 -0500

I finished re-reading A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy by William B. Irvine, and it is a book that never fails to give me something to ponder. Often I miss things that would seem to be obvious, and upon this particular re-reading, the single word tranquility has been resonating, because I caught a single sentence in the book that says something about how having a philosophy of life makes decision-making easier because one simply makes his decision based on his philosphy of life. In the case of the Roman stoics, if the attainment of tranquility is the centerpiece of a philosophy of life, then decisions ought to be made based on which option leads to tranquility. Sounds simple, but I hadn’t conceptualized it like that until just this week. I have to make a decision about something: Which of my options has the highest liklihood of yielding or adding to my sense of tranquility? I have never asked this question before when confronted with a decision. Not explicitly.

Meaning Where You Find It

Wed, 18 Jun 2025 05:00:46 -0500

You’re doing fine. Keep going. Don’t give up.

You know that thing you are striving for? It doesn’t matter.
You know that thing you’re worrying about right now? It doesn’t matter.
You know that thing you want? It doesn’t matter.
You know all those regrets you have about the past? Let them go, because they don’t matter.

You can just go to Crumbl and eat the entire box of super-sweet cookies. You can also run a triathlon. Whatever. You are free to be you. I give you persmission to chase your dreams, to follow your heart, to do that one thing you’ve been putting off for years. I also give you permission call in and lie in bed all day.

Harrys of Manhattan, Kansas, Closed

Thu, 08 May 2025 05:00:46 -0500

One of my life’s more memorable meals was enjoyed at Harry’s in Manhattan, Kansas, in the fall of 1998. Harry’s was a more upscale restaurant located in the first floor at the old Wareham Hotel in Manhattan, Kansas, so I google Harry’s, only to find that it closed its doors in 2020, a victim of the covid fiasco. The owners mention it in the press release, that they could not weather the storm, and they had to close. It had been in business for 30 years. The meal was a traditional bacon-wrapped filet with garlic mashed potatoes, bread, probably a salad, rice pudding for desert, and I washed it down with a few glasses of the house red. I was up in Manhattan, all alone, pretty much, and I had just gotten my first paycheck from working as a grad assistant. I lived in the building, in a small studio apartment in the upper floors, and I’d never had the money to eat at Harry’s, but I smelled it every single day. There was something particularly adult about sitting at the bar and ordering anything I wanted, in this case a very nice Kansas steak, and drinking red wine. I took my time and savored the experience, then I took the elevator up to my apartment and crashed, and I remember thinking about how convenient it was that I didn’t have to drive. That was the only time I ate there, but it’s just one of those meals that stands out.

Working On Cars

Sun, 23 Feb 2025 05:00:46 -0500

People who work on cars have my deepest respect. I do a lot of my own maintenance and repairs, but I have my limitations. I was just working on the replaceing a leaky valve cover gasket, and I was fully intent on just doing that and leaving the plugs alone, but the gasket was faulty around one of the cylinders, so oil was in there and it was pretty gunked up. So, I drive to the store and get replacement plugs. No big deal. But, when I tried to get out the other plugs, they didn’t want to come out. I’ve done plugs many times, and I’ve never run into this. Maybe one will sometimes be more difficult, but they always come out without too much fuss. This time, the three remaining cylinders were stuck, and I fought with them all morning, and I broke one of them off. Yep. The others stripped. So, I’ve got one working cylinder.When I compared the old plugs to the replacements, the old ones were about half-inch longer, so when I replaced the plugs when I first bought this car, I just went up to autozone and got the replacements, and I didn’t check them against the old ones, because they just threaded in fine. Big mistake. Now I know why you should always check the parts before you install them.

The Beach Boys

Thu, 26 Dec 2024 05:00:46 -0500

I feel like everybody has some basic knowledge about The Beach Boys, wouldn’t you say? So many of their riffs have entered the cultural lexicon, surely most people can conjure the chorus to “Good Vibrations” at will, and “California Girls” and “Surfin USA” and “Barbara Ann” and “I Get Around” and . . . it just keeps going and going.

I had a greatest hits cd, so I knew all the basic hits, but I have to confess, when Kokomo came out, I think in the late 80s, I just really hated that song, and if you’ll remember, you couldn’t turn on a radio back then without hearing that song. It was everywhere. I still really hate that song.

Reflections

Sat, 30 Nov 2024 05:00:46 -0500

2024 has been an interesting year in my life, mostly because I have changed so much in how I see things. It’s been a year of a kind of quiet reflection for me. I’m 48 years old, and one of my oldest dearest friends, Casey, died back in March, and his death just had a slow-simmering effect on me as I went about my day-to-day life. I have not tried to write about it until this very moment. I felt sad, sure, but not in an immediate sort of way. I hadn’t been in daily contact with Casey in many years. Instead, it sent me into a sort of reverie. I remembered my time in school. It seems like it was so long ago. The 1990s, to me, seem almost like this different world, and I’m not at all sure when I felt this continuity break. I’m getting old, and this was the year I really understood that. Already, I know a handful of guys my age who are dead, guys I knew. I’m not going to be around all that much longer. In that context, it hard to feel like I have some certainty about what I am supposed to be doing with myself.

Used Beets on Music Collection

Sun, 06 Oct 2024 05:00:46 -0500

Back in February I went through my music files using Beets, which was good for it’s automation. It could download the tags and the cover art and write all of that, and it also was good for renaming folders so that all of them had the same formatting. Recently, though, I’ve been going through and fine tuning things using a tag editor program called Kid3, and then using Strawberry, a multi-featured music player. I did this because the years are hit and miss with Beets, and another quirky thing is how has trouble with naming when it comes to a solo musican. It prefers Aimee Mann to Mann, Aimee. The years of my albums were all over the place, and often just wrong. I used Kid3 to enter the correct album year, and Strawberry has a really useful batch re-tagging feature. I just wanted to note some of this. All these files, flac and mp3 and aac, get out of control fast.

Tanners, Greenville, South Carolina, Closed

Sat, 10 Aug 2024 05:00:46 -0500

I’m a touch late with this one, but I wanted to go ahead and note that last Christmas Tanner’s Big Orange in Greenville closed its doors for good. It had opened in 1943. When I lived in Greenville, it was located across the street from my work, and it was really hard to abstain from getting lunch there. It’s proof that I do in fact possess a quality called will power. It was a dogs, burgers, fries and onion rings place, but in the Southern style, which just means you could get slaw and/or chili on anything, pretty much. They also served a great Orange drink. Another place in this mold is The Varsity in Atlanta, where I have enjoyed chili dogs and orange drink in those big cups full of that fantastic ice. If you understand the kind of food I’m talking about, imagine that plastic hot dog eyeballing you from across the street at work. Just about every single day was a struggle. The last time I was in Greenville, in I think 2010 when I attended a conference there, the last thing I did, and I mean the very last thing I did, driving out of Greenville was a stop at Tanner’s for a hot dog and some orangeade. Tanner’s was great.

Calvin and Hobbes

Sun, 21 Jul 2024 05:00:46 -0500

Growing up, we always took the Daily Journal, either at home or at my grandmother’s house, and I read the newspaper just about every day. I’d read the sports page and the editorial page and I’d check out Calvin and Hobbes. I don’t know what got Bill Watterson’s strip back on my mind, but I acquired The Complete Calvin and Hobbes for my birthday, and it is a four-volume set of every Calvin and Hobbes strip published during Watterson’s ten-year run from 1985-1995. It’s one of the finest things I know to exist. Masterpiece is an understatement.

Pizza Factory, Baldwyn, Mississippi

Sun, 07 Jul 2024 05:00:46 -0500

Pizza Factory, located on old 45 in Baldwyn, Mississippi, has been slinging a mighty fine deep dish pizza pie for 40 years. (There’s a West coast chain with the same name, but it has no connection.) Pizza factory is a local place, locally owned and operated, and they are known for their deep dish pies and calzones, which they call smokestacks. It is a local institution and it is almost always hopping.

Tomato Sandwich Time

Thu, 04 Jul 2024 05:00:46 -0500

This is the first tomato sandwich I’ve had this summer.

Mississippi grown. Best in the world.

OpenWRT Upgrade Fail and Recovery

Mon, 17 Jun 2024 05:00:46 -0500

I spent last night rebuilding my router, for no reason whatsover it turns out. I had this dual-port Intel gigabit adapter I wanted to add to the pc, but I forgot about how hardware changes and OpenWRT don’t really mix, especially if you’re talking about wireless adapters, so I ened up taking it back to stock, three times I think, because the machine did not like that adapter. I pulled it from a working system, but as soon as I plugged in a cable to it it caused the system to go into a reboot loop. I have no idea what’s going on there. So, I ended up right back where I started. The system is really old at this point. I bought it back in 2008 I think. Only one dimm works and all but two of the sata ports pulled off, but it keeps hobbling along somehow.

Setting Up VSFTP on Arch Linux

Tue, 11 Jun 2024 05:00:46 -0500

I just wanted to make a few notes about getting vsftp (very secure ftp) to work. It was just a matter of going through the manual and looking at the boolean operators, little fine-grained settings. I ended up setting it so that users with passwords can log in and download/upload into their home directories, but they are jailed there. The default config file that came with my build didn’t include anything about using ssl certificates, so I ended up importing a few things, but looking over it now, it isn’t that much at all.

Tribecca Allie, Sardis, Mississippi

Thu, 06 Jun 2024 05:00:46 -0500

We drove to Sardis a few weekends ago just to eat pizza at Tribecca Allie again. I figured that the last time we were there was back in 2015, so that’s a nine-year gap. I wrote about Tribecca Allie a while back in a post about my approach to eating pizza., and I claimed that it was the best pizza I’d ever had. Back then, the place was hopping during the weekends. They had a wait staff and things were a bit on the fancy side. They served only 10-inch pies, and you could order them with one or two toppings or they’d warn you that it wouldn’t be good with too much on it, that the crust couldn’t support a load of toppings. I remember they even for a time didn’t have the parm sprinkles and the red pepper, and those items have become expected at pizza joints in the U.S., like asking for ketchup packets at the McBurger. They were kind of saying, we’re not your typical pizza place. And that was fine, but it was a bit froufrou, especially for Sardis, Mississippi. Sardis is a literal one-redlight town sitting right on the edge of the Mississippi Delta. Honestly, a froufrou brick-oven pizzeria has no business existing there. Tribecca was always a touch out of place.

Steam Fix on Arch Linux

Wed, 05 Jun 2024 05:00:46 -0500

Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, released in 1994, still holds the record for the picture I saw the most at the movies during it’s release. I saw it nine times. Nine times, throughout the summer and fall of my transistion from high school to college. I saw it, then I took two different dates to see it, my sister, my best friends, and I saw it by myself a few times. To say that this movie has sentimental value to me is an understatement. I loved it, and I had never seen a movie that was anything like it.

Three Ideas to Return To

Tue, 07 May 2024 05:00:46 -0500

Detach from your own thoughts. Learn to discard them with ease because they are inconsequential to your well being.
Remove gravity/weight from everything at will. No key insights, no fears, no consequences that matter, no losses you can not bear.
Identity is entirely fictional, a story about yourself told by a very biased, unreliable narrator, inevitably based on falsified memories.

Hoffmans Reality

Mon, 25 Mar 2024 05:00:46 -0500

Writing this one has taken several starts before I figured out how to approach it. Probably over a year ago I had run across cognitive psychologist Donald Hoffman on a podcast, and his ideas about reality struck me pretty hard, and that coincided with where I was in my thinking at the time. I had just written about eternalism, and honestly I don’t even remember what I was reading at the time that put me onto that, but my idea was that reality was an analog recording, and people are only active on a small slice of it, kind of like a vinyl record. Hoffman talks about how all of the physics we see in our slice are merely manifestations of some deeper reality, a reality that is not directly accessible. What we experience, our “reality”, comes through a small window of perception that Darwinian evolution crafted for us, and evolution crafted us to survive long enough to reproduce. Our perceptions are tuned to survival, what Hoffman calls fitness payoffs. Perception is not tuned to truth, just survival, so what we end up with is a kind of graphical user interface, a GUI. Hoffman means this quite literally. Nothing about a human’s perception deals with direct reality.

Visitation for Casey

Sun, 24 Mar 2024 05:00:46 -0500

I attended the visitation for Casey, and his widow Heather cried when she saw me, and she gave me a huge hug and told me that Casey loved me. It told her that I loved him, too. I saw a handful of people who went to high school with me, and we’re all pretty old now, and I suppose there’s going to be plenty of these events to attend in the years to come.

Remembering Casey Deaton

Tue, 19 Mar 2024 05:00:46 -0500

In the picture above, well, this was high school, Chris, Casey, and me. Three nerdy musketeers who found each other. Casey called this our “Sears pose”, like out of the Sears catalog.

My best friend died yesterday, Casey, or “Case”, after a three-year bout with colon cancer. He’d had his entire ass cut off, only for it to spread to his lungs, and it was the lung cancer that ended up killing him. I visited him a handful of times over the course of his treatment. I watched his decline in increments. Last time I saw him three weeks ago he told me that the cancer was like a spider web inside his lungs, an image straight out of a horror film. It was bad. He’d lost a bunch of weight and he was breathing oxygen from a tank, and his color had a tinge of gray at the edges.

Movie Review: Asteroid City

Sun, 17 Mar 2024 05:00:46 -0500

I caught Wes Anderson’s latest exercise in whimsy, Asteroid City, and I wasn’t thrilled. This one is more cartoon than live-action, though it is a live-action film. It really double-pumps the whimsy. Whimsy for days.

The picture at the top was a totally random selection from the film, and if you think I hit it lucky, you’re way off. This entire movie is like that picture. Half of it is elaborate paintings that surely must have cost a small fortune to get done, and the other half is expensive actors such as Tom Hanks, Scarlet Johanssen, and many, many others.

Quick Tech Fix, Network Manager, Linux

Tue, 05 Mar 2024 05:00:46 -0500

Most of my machines use wifi to connect to the network, and several I run headless. After the initial install, they refuse to connect to wifi unless I log in with the gui. If I use the gui to log in, they connect on login, but if not, they don’t, so I can’t reach them with SSH. I had to put a monitor and keyboard on them and then use the terminal to delete the connection and then reinitialize it. After that, on reboot, these machines connect automatically.

Using Beets to Sort Out Music Collection

Wed, 14 Feb 2024 05:00:46 -0500

I stumbled upon Beets, a powerful piece of command-line software that helps to organize and clean up music files. I have quite a lot of music files I’ve gathered over the years, going back to when I converted my entire CD collection to FLAC files and just tossed the CDs in the trash. Much easier to lug around.

Like I said, Beets is powerful, and it offered fine-grained control over what it does with the files, depending on how you set up its configuration file. It’s a YAML file, so the spaces have to be exactly right for it to work.

Ligotti and Pessimism

Tue, 06 Feb 2024 05:00:46 -0500

I’ve been retracing steps lately. I reread Thomas Ligotti’s The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, the third time I’ve read it, and I think I’m ready to talk about it, maybe a little. I found this book because I watched HBO’s True Detective, the first season with Woody Harrelson cast as Marty Hart and Matthew McConaughey cast as Rust Cohle. McConaughey is so good in this. So good. Rust Cohle is one of my favorite characters in all of television, I’ve discovered. Harrelson is good, too, but damn he irritates me with the peanut-butter-in-his-mouth thing he does in this. These two play Louisiana state detectives investigating a weird ritualistic murder.

Installing Encrypted Arch Linux

Sat, 27 Jan 2024 05:00:46 -0500

This is the way I’ve been setting up my Arch machines. I want the root drive to have strong encryption.

I follow the instructions to install Arch with a few changes.

I just set one up that was an older legacy bios with GPT. I’m going to use GRUB as my bootloader. I created four partitions on the disk.

sda1 - Bios boot partition, unformatted, 4 MB.
sda2 - Boot partition, ext2 formatted, 512 MB.
sda3 - Swap partition, 4 GB.
sda4 - Root partition, formatted with BTRFS using the rest of the space.

You can add new system partitions as you like, but I like to keep it simple. I’m going to encrypt partition 4, the root partition. For a UEFI, you don’t need the bios boot partition, and you’ll format the boot partition with FAT32.

Just a Note About Little Things

Tue, 23 Jan 2024 05:00:46 -0500

I so seldom write about personal matters that I didn’t even have a category for this post, and that’s by design I suppose. I don’t have any social media accounts. I opted out of that scene because I don’t particulary like the traits it encourages in people, to share their personal stuff they ought to keep to themselves. When people do that, they’re saying they really care about what other people perceive about them, but people ought not care about that at all. That said, I wanted to record what I’ve termed the Snow-In of 2024 here in North Mississippi. A week ago today the snow came down, about 4 inches worth, and then a layer of sleet came down on top of that, locking it in a sheet of ice, so for a week the roads have been like an ice rink. Schools closed. UPS and the postal service haven’t run in a week. People couldn’t drive anywhere. I was shut-in with my two wonderful daughters, and we made split-pea soup, then chicken noodle, and I broke out my best chocolate chip cookies recipe, and I made waffles and bacon and the best hot chocolate from the recipe that is printed on the Hershey’s cocoa cannister. Having lived in Georgia for the past six years, I hadn’t experienced a winter at all, so all of my winter gear was boxed up, and I had to dig all that out so we could go sledding and take walks around the neighborhood. We even bundled up, put on our backpacks, and hiked a couple of miles to the only open grocery store in town, mostly because I ran out of cream for my coffee, but I told the girls, this is the kind of thing you will remember because it isn’t often you hike to the grocery store. Well, here we are with temperatures above 50, and all the ice is melting away, and school re-opens tomorrow, and the snow-in is over, and I’m sitting here completely understanding that I will never forget this beautful week I just spent holed up with my daughters. I just wanted to record how special it was.

Reverse Engineering God

Fri, 19 Jan 2024 05:00:46 -0500

I’ve been reverse-engineering God for a few months now, but really I’ve been working on this project for my entire thinking existence, going back to when I was a kid and I studied the bible for Sunday school and to compete in a Church of Christ youth event called bible bowl. Recently, though, I’ve made a few breakthroughs, which I expressed in a post called “The Voice of God”. That piece happened because a handful of threads started to coalesce in my thinking. One of these is simply clearing away as much of my previous filters as possible and just looking at the universe for what it is, from my limited vantage point as a talking ape. When I did that, I ended up noticing quite clearly that God doesn’t care. Next, it strikes me that the proper, most resilient, most powerful response to that is humor, and that humor doesn’t make any sense otherwise. Humor seems to tap into God’s universal nature. Thirdly, I wrote that God plays dice, a reference to Einstein’s dislike for the the probabilities of quantum theory. Quantum theory seems to be telling us that there’s a certain element of chance in the fabric of things, something Einstein did not like. He wanted an orderly and predictable physics. I didn’t base my acceptance of this element of chance as a facet of God because I’m good at quantum mechanics, because I most certainly don’t understand it at all, but instead it came from my noticing that things do sometimes happen that defy the odds, and that humans create their own games of chance to utilize this function of reality. It’s one component of the three that I’m least sure about.

Getting Wifi for Gentoo Install

Wed, 17 Jan 2024 05:00:46 -0500

You need to use wpa supplicant to connect to a wpa or wpa2 secured network to proceed with a network install, but this isn’t spelled out in the Gentoo handbook, which is kind of odd since how else would most people be connecting to the Internet over wifi?

First, get the name of the wireless interface:

ip add

The output looks like this:

The wireless interface begins with a W, in this case it is: wlp4s0

Some Excellent Sausages

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 05:00:46 -0500

Just wanted to drop a quick note about these outstanding sausages I’m buying lately, made by Lil Butcher Shoppe in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. These sausages are the best I’ve ever tasted, the highest quality I’ve ever seen, and I’m picking them up for about five dollars at my local supermarket. They make six varieties, pictured above, Sweet Fire, Jalapeno Cheddar, Three Cheese, Blueberry, Apple, and Pineapple, and I’ve had all of them but the sweet fire, just because I haven’t found that one yet. My favorite the the apple. Roast it for twenty minutes, and it is like eating a piece of glazed, tender ham. I’ve never had a sausage like it before. The three-cheese, properly roasted, is rich and decadent, the cheese giving it a melt-in-your-mouth effect. Normally, I’m not going to be moved to write about sausages, but these are that good.

God and Stuff

Fri, 29 Dec 2023 05:00:46 -0500

In my writing a few weeks ago, in the post Someone to Talk To, I wrote that these morning writing sessions, lubricated with coffee and heavy cream, are in essence conversations I am having with myself, a back-and-forth process of generating words from thought. The words then flow from the synapses to the fingers and emerge almost miraculously in the black-and-white pixels on the screen so that I can see them, and that engages the eyes and the emulated ear that hears internally, and it has occurred to me that these emulated internals are not merely taxing the neocortex, that there’s something of the lizard brain hissing in there, too, and something of mammalian emotion pleading also to give its grunting and its laughter and its cries some linguistic expression. It can seem as if the words themselves pull from some ethereal space, a locus somewhere out there.

Approaches to Pizza

Fri, 08 Dec 2023 05:00:46 -0500

Pizza. I’ve yet to write about it on this site, but it was inevitable, really. Just like I have my own set of ideas about eating barbeque, certainly burgers, and certainly I have rules about eating at any cafeteria (idea for another post), about which hot sauces, mayonnaise, canned chili, iced tea are the best to buy, and certainly I’ve poured considerable thought into pimento cheese, and what I’ve called the Southern-sytle deli, I have over the years formed some strong opinions about pizza and pizza places. As with most of my opinions, I won’t issue them until they’re sufficiently well-informed, and it just so happens that I understand quite a lot about pizza. When I got married back in 1999, we received a Kitchen-Aid stand mixer as a wedding gift, and it was on from there. I started to figure out breadmaking. You can make bread without a Kitchen-Aid, but the machine really opens up the possibilities. (Another article for another time). I came up with a basic pizza crust that I still make to this day. Also, I did two stints as a delivery driver for Dominoes, one in college, and one to pocket some quick cash after my divorce, so I can speak well enough to the chain pizza phenomenon and why I almost never buy chain pizza. Hell, I even have an opinion about store-bought frozen pizza (I only buy Red Baron). All of that is just to claim my bona fides to speak about pizza with some degree of authority.

Movie Review: Melancholia

Thu, 07 Dec 2023 05:00:46 -0500

The pattern I’ve established for writing about movies is that when I’m writing about my favorite movies, I specify that in the title, and when I’m merely writing about movies that I find interesting for one reason or another, I don’t. This one, Melancholia, released in 2011 and directed by Lars von Trier, I had to think about for a minute. Is this one of my favorite movies? Honestly, no, but it is a movie I refer to a lot, that I think about a lot, and that’s because it deals with a theme that has served as a splinter in my brain for pretty much all of my adulthood, the theme of meaning and the dearth thereof, in an uncaring universe. Not a lot of media straighforwardly deals with that theme.

Someone To Talk To

Mon, 04 Dec 2023 05:00:46 -0500

How old were you when you realized that no one knows anything?

I miss that time in my life when I thought adults knew things. I remember showing up at my uncle’s house, my Dad’s brother, to ask him his opinion about pre-marital sex, because I was really wanting to screw my girlfriend, but I felt guilty about it. Christian upbringing. Plus, it was bothering me that all of my friends were losing their virginities, and they said pussy was the best thing, and I wanted to find out about it, but I was afraid God would be mad. I didn’t want to talk to my own dad about it, like, I needed a some privacy, and I knew full-well that dad had to maintain the Christian message about fornication, but I thought maybe my uncle would give me the real talk. I was fifteen years old, and I thought he knew things.

Quick Recipe for Lasagna

Mon, 27 Nov 2023 05:00:46 -0500

Those Chef Boyardee pizza-maker kits, you know the ones that come in a box with the pouch of dough mix and a can of sauce and I think a packet of cheese? That sauce in the box is so damned good. It is almost worth buying the box just to get the can of sauce, and I’d use that can of sauce for anything, like for spaghetti or just anything pasta-related. Well, I was in a grocery store the other day and they had those cans of Chef Boyardee pizza sauce for sale stand alone, something I haven’t seen or either haven’t noticed, so I picked up four cans of it just to have it for the aforementioned purposes. Then I got to thinking, I’m going to make a lasanga with this stuff, see what happens.

Ranking Iced Teas

Sun, 26 Nov 2023 05:00:46 -0500

I should have written about this a while ago since I arrived at this conclusion a good while back. What’s the best brand of tea for making iced tea? Well, the conventional wisdom among Southerners is Luzianne, by a wide margin. Just about every house in the South is going to have a box of it. I grew up with it, and I was perfectly prepared to just declare that settled science, but if you know me, well, once I got to thinking about it I had to actually settle the matter.

Movie Review: Road House (1989))

Mon, 20 Nov 2023 05:00:46 -0500

I wanted to write about this movie Road House, released in 1989 and directed by Rowdy Herrington. I wanted to write about it as a challenge to myself, because this is such a stupid movie that could have been quite good, and the challenge is to articulate why that is the case. I’ve seen it several times; it was one of those movies that was all over the cable movie channels during my teen years, and I remember it well. I remember that it was a silly yet somehow entertaining movie, and I believed it was cheesy, but to my surprise, upon a recent rewatch, cheesy isn’t the word I would use to describe it. It isn’t anything like a cheesy movie with a cult fan base. No, it aspires to be a serious movie, I think, but aside from that it really doesn’t know what it is. Is it a redemption story? Is it a Rambo-esque action flick? Is it a gangster movie, if the gangsters were white Anglo-Saxon protestants? Is it a tale about enduring masculine friendship? What is this thing?

The Death Nail

Mon, 20 Nov 2023 05:00:46 -0500

I enjoy mondegreens quite a lot, you know, misheard phrases like intensive purposes instead of intents and purposes, pacific instead of specific, deep seeded instead of deep-seated, and I collect them when I catch them in the wild. I most like how they often make more sense in our contemporary context than the orignal expressions.

Pimento Cheese Part Seven, Final

Tue, 03 Oct 2023 05:00:46 -0500

nto cheese](/assets/images/pimentocheesefinal.png)

I’m done. This is my official pimento cheese recipe. This is the one I’m passing down.

1 lb. mild cheddar cheese, grated by hand
1 lb. colby jack cheese, grated by hand
2 1/2 cups of Bama mayonnaise
2 large jars of Lindsay pimentos, drained
1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon of sugar
1 tablespoon Hotter Texas Pete hot sauce
1 tablespoon Crystal with garlic hot sauce
1 tablespoon soy sauce
1 tablespoon onion powder
2 to 3 tablespoons fresh ground black pepper

Throw all of this into a bowl and mix the hell out of it. Refrigerate overnight for maximum enjoyment.

Steam Fix on Arch Linux

Sun, 01 Oct 2023 05:00:46 -0500

Just a quick one. I have this game on steam I play from time to time called XCOM 2; it’s a strategy game that pits a resistance force against alien invaders. It’s pretty fun, but challenging. Anyway, it will run out of the box on my Ubuntu boxes, but on my main PC that runs Arch, it will not launch. I spent several sit-downs looking for fixes, installing missing libraries and the like, all to no avail. On reddit, of all places, I found a fix that just works.

The Saddest Day of my Life

Sun, 17 Sep 2023 05:00:46 -0500

The saddest day of my life was in January of 2016 when my wife packed her car and left me and our two daughters standing in the garage. All we could do was watch her leave. To this day, I do not understand how she was able to do it. I know that I will never understand, because even if I asked her, she doesn’t know. That’s how these things go. A big challenge of living with it is learning that there are things I will never understand, that nothing the other person can say will further my understanding. I knew at the time that that was it for my family, that it would never be whole again.

Pimento Cheese Part Six

Mon, 28 Aug 2023 05:00:46 -0500

What a difference a day makes! Now that this stuff has melded, I can give some definitive answers to yesterday’s questions and formulate my next recipe with a high degree of certainty.

Just to recap, the stuff I made yesterday followed this recipe:

1 lb. sharp cheddar cheese, grated by hand
1 lb. Monterrey jack cheese, grated by hand
1 package cream cheese, softened to room temperature
2 1/2 cups of Duke’s mayonnaise
2 large jars of Lindsay pimentos, drained
2 teaspoons of sugar
2 teaspoons cayenne pepper
1 tablesppon onion powder
1 tablespoon Crystal with garlic hot sauce
1 tablespoon soy sauce
Fresh ground black pepper

Here’s the revisions I am going to make:

Pimento Cheese Part Five

Sun, 27 Aug 2023 05:00:46 -0500

I’m getting close to the ultimate pimento cheese recipe. In my previous post, I mentioned sampling some different store-bought concoctions, with Callie’s Hot Little Biscuit being probably the best pimento cheese I’ve ever tasted, so the goal has to be to beat it. I think I can do that.

So, my approach today was to combine all the good things from all of these recipes, and then I can subtract anything I need to subtract, or tweak the measurements and fine tune. I was specific and careful with my measurments for this batch.

Pimento Cheese Part Four

Fri, 25 Aug 2023 05:00:46 -0500

I’ve been thinking a lot about pimento cheese with the goal of arriving at what I will consider my pimento cheese recipe, the ultimate pimento cheese recipe. That’s the goal.

So, in furtherance of this goal, I stopped by Publix the other day to grab some Lindsay pimentos and some sharp cheddar for my latest attempt, when I noticed two brands of packaged pimento cheese that I’d never seen before. Knott’s and Callie’s Hot Little Biscuit. I want to talk about these two gems, but first, just a word about how the market has changed.

Pimento Cheese Part Three

Wed, 23 Aug 2023 05:00:46 -0500

I picked up some of the “homestyle” pimento cheese made by Pawleys Island Specialty Foods, their “Palmetto cheese”. It’s good and it does in fact taste like homemade. It’s flavor profile has no sweet notes at all, but interestingly it has a pronounced hot note, and I liked that. I do like just a hint of sweetness, though. When I read the ingredients, I discovered that they use cream cheese in their recipe, so immediately I resolved that I would give that a try in my next batch, and wow, it makes a big difference, mostly in the consistency. It becomes a richer, thicker concoction. This has given me some ideas about where I am going next because I think I want to add some umami notes, and that means going for some good aged cheddar, or maybe even a tablespoon of soy sauce. Stay tuned for that.

Pimento Cheese Part Two

Wed, 02 Aug 2023 05:00:46 -0500

Yesterday, I mixed up a batch of pimento cheese and I just sampled it after it had chilled for a day in the fridge. It’s pretty damned good. Here’s what I tweaked:

I couldn’t find the Lindsay pimentos, just the store brand at Wal-Mart, and I can state with full confidence that the Lindsay-canned pimentos from California are indeed the best choice. These store-branded ones just don’t pack the same pepper essence.

Pimento Cheese, Part One

Mon, 31 Jul 2023 05:00:46 -0500

In a little over a week, it will be two months of practicing a strictly keto style of eating, and during that time I have dropped two notches on my belts. You might be wondering how much weight I’ve dropped in terms of pounds, but I have not weighed myself. Not even once. I’m not focusing on that. I’m using how I feel, how I look, and how my clothes fit as the metrics. Why? Weight never drops as fast as one would hope if he or she is watching the scales. It can be frustrating, especially when one hits the inevitable plateu phase. Instead, I’m trusting in the process and just letting it happen. A watched pot . . .

Watching What I Eat

Fri, 30 Jun 2023 05:00:46 -0500

Or, How I learned to stop worrying and love feeling hungry.

Hunger is what it feels like to burn fat and thus lose weight. If one wants to lose weight, he or she must consume fewer calories than he or she burns. This isn’t some magical formula. It is really straightforward. Calories in and calories out.

What does it feel like when one burns more calories than one consumes? Hunger. It feels like hunger. Anyone who is serious about dropping weight must tolerate being hungry, and my guess is the vast majority of people who fail to drop weigh even though they want to drop weight fold when the first hunger pang hits them. One must go into it knowing that it is impossible to lose weight without hunger pangs. Impossible. One must accept that he or she is going to be hungry, and he or she must decide to tolerate it, or even enjoy it. That’s entirely possible. When I am dieting and cutting my weight, I play a mental trick on myself in which I tell myself that the hunger pangs are the feeling of fat burning.

Dreamland Bar-B-Que, Tuscaloosa, Alabama

Mon, 26 Jun 2023 05:00:46 -0500

Pretty much every single time I have watched a home Alabama football game at some point the announcers mention Dreamland Bar-B-Que. On message boards, Alabama fans brag that they got their tailgating catered by Dreamland. Certainly, it is a Tuscaloosa institution. I’ve been wanting to try it for years, and I had filed it away as a must-try given the chance.

Well, the chance arrived only yesterday, and what-the-Hell, Alabama? Forgive me, but what the actual Hell? This is considered good barbeque in Tuscaloosa? I have had better ribs, far better ribs, at non-descript gas stations.

Movie Review: Watchmen (2007)

Sat, 24 Jun 2023 05:00:46 -0500

revised June 5, 2024

Zach Snyder’s Watchmen, released in 2009, is my favorite comic book movie, and no one is more suprised about that than I am. For one, it’s a Zach Snyder movie, and I find none of his other films even remotely compelling. For two, his use of hyper-stylized CGI is grating in pretty much all of his films, and this one is no exception. It has this chemical, synthetic overlay that I have to actively work to forget about because it keeps inserting itself into the movie as if it is a character itself. It is distracting and annoying. For three, It’s based on a graphic novel that I never read, so I have no emotional connection to the material at all. Before I saw it, I wasn’t even aware of the the Alan Moore-penned graphic novel.

Two Weeks of Taekwondo

Sun, 18 Jun 2023 05:00:46 -0500

Does your brain ever pull seemingly random thoughts out of the depths of it’s memory banks? There’s a handful of memories that my brain seems to hold on to for a reason I cannot easily dicern, but I was just sitting here and one of them hit me and it made me laugh, which it always does. It is about the brief period of time in 2009 when I took taekwondo.

College Fight Songs

Mon, 12 Jun 2023 05:00:46 -0500

College fight songs are great. I’m not even going to wax poetic about them, either, that they are Americana and apple pie and all that. I’m not going to make an argument for their greatness, either. I’m just baldly asserting it: College fight songs are great. If you disagree we can’t be friends.

Seriously though, they are great. I’ve been a sort of connoisseur of them since I was a teenager, back when I followed college football closely. I haven’t heard them all by any means, but really there’s only a handful that are truly distinctive; the lesser ones tend to all sound the same, a sort of generic fight song that we’ve all heard, probably in part based on the Notre Dame fight song which is titled “Notre Dame Victory March”:

Movie Review: AI, Artificial Intelligence (2001)

Fri, 19 May 2023 05:00:46 -0500

A.I., released in 2001 and directed by Steven Speilberg, sits alone on my list of favorite films as the only film that makes me weep pretty much every time I see it. It happens during the long ending when David, played by Haley Joel Osment, spends the final perfect day with his mother; it triggers within me a profound sense of sadness.

A.I. was one of Stanley Kubrick’s back-burner projects and for many years it lingered in development hell. When Kubrick died in 1999, Speilberg went ahead and made the picture, and it is exactly what it is: A.I. is film with a Kubrick foundation but made by Speilberg. It has Speilberg’s unmistakable Hollywood gloss, but that gloss is applied to a dark exploration of the human condition that is more characteristic of Kubrick’s work. It explores the themes of meaning, love and hate, death, childhood, parenthood, and it is, at its core, a deeply pessimistic film. It uses the android sci-fi trope to generate an outsider’s perspective about humanity, showing it to be short-sighted, weak, fearful, and at the end of the film, extinct.

Southern-Style Delis

Wed, 26 Apr 2023 05:00:46 -0500

Southern-style deli is what I’ve termed the style of restaurant that serves all the salads, specifically a chicken salad, pimento cheese, potato salad, probably a pasta salad, probably a fruit salad, and they serve a dish called a cold plate that has a scoop of each salad on a bed of lettuce, a salad sampler plate. They offer salads and sandwiches and sometimes soups otherwise, so you can get a chicken salad sandwich, for example. These types of delis proliferate all across the Southeast from Georgia to Mississippi, and often they are the only real lunch option in towns that seem even too small to support a restaurant, like in towns so small they don’t even have a McDonalds.

My Favorites Horror Movies

Sat, 22 Apr 2023 05:00:46 -0500

The Fly (1986)

The Fly, the 1986 remake by David Cronenberg, is so, so bad. It is bad in the sense that it is such a hard movie to rewatch because one already knows what is going to happen and it is terrible. It is the only movie on this list that has a lingering and menacing effect on me every single time I rewatch it. It is really bad.

Backpacking As Voluntary Discomfort

Sat, 08 Apr 2023 05:00:46 -0500

Or, How to Brew the Best Cup of Coffee

Following the advice of ancient Stoics, I have experimented with causing myself discomfort, which was one of the justifications for taking an overnight backpacking trip recently after years of non-practice. I had other reasons, but that was one of them I very much had in mind. It struck me that backpacking itself is an exercise in managing discomfort. For an overnight trip in which one sleeps on the trail, he or she must carry the necessary items on his or her back. More items means a heavier pack and that means more discomfort. The pack itself could be selected and purchased based on its weight and the comfort provided by its suspension system. I have an Osprey pack with a 48L capacity, which I find just about right for overnight trips, and I have to say it is the best pack I ever owned. It is just about as comfortable as I can imagine a pack could be. I have a small propane burner that folds up to a size of a double pack of cards, and the thing will boil 8 cups of water in less than five minutes. Pretty damned incredible if you ask me. I take that mainly because trail coffee is the best thing. I take a little dehydrated Folgers and a little creamer powder, and it is better than anything served at Starbucks.

Being So Small

Fri, 24 Feb 2023 05:00:46 -0500

I used to think the vast distances between stars to be sufficient to answer that question. The closest star to the sun is Proxima Centauri, which is a little over four lightyears away. According to NASA:

The Voyager 1 spacecraft is on an interstellar mission. It is traveling away from the Sun at a rate of 17.3 km/s. If Voyager were to travel to Proxima Centauri, at this rate, it would take over 73,000 years to arrive. If we could travel at the speed of light, an impossibility due to Special Relativity, it would still take 4.22 years to arrive.

Movie Review: The Royal Tenenbaums

Sat, 04 Feb 2023 05:00:46 -0500

I make no secret that Bottle Rocket, Wes Anderson’s first feature film which was released in 1996, is my favorite movie of all time. I watch it every year, but I could watch it every week, probably. I just love it, and I always have. I’m not sure why it speaks to me so profoundly, either. I can say that the entire love story between Inez and Anthony is a kind of romantic dream. This girl you found, she is everything, the prettiest thing you ever saw, and you have to have her. You’d do anything to have her, and you can’t think about anything other than her. When she’s gone, you count the minutes until you will see her again.

Janis Joplin

Wed, 01 Feb 2023 05:00:46 -0500

For no reason that I could easily discern, Brain conjured up “Piece of my Heart” by Janis Joplin and whatever terrible band it was that backed her, and I put it on and listened to it a couple of times on my good sound system in the den, and it is such a great song despite the band being really awful, and the standard studio recording also being really awful, yet Janis’ screeching on that track singular and somehow correct. Is it screeching? If not, what is it? I never know what to think about Joplin’s voice. Definitely, it is singular, and probably very difficult to imitate. When I try to sing along with pretty much anything Janis recorded, I can’t. If I tried, I’d peel my throat; I hit a physical limitation right away, yet she does it over and over again. Truth be told, I think it is something more than screeching, like on the track “Try (a little bit harder)” when she launches into the Try . . . . . it really is something extra-human, like dogs probably hear it very differently as it seems to be skirting the edge of human perception. Janis’ voice isn’t pretty, and it isn’t all that musical, yet it is inimitable and I like it. It pleases me despite myself.

Movie Review: Swingers (1996)

Sun, 01 Jan 2023 05:00:46 -0500

Swingers, released in 1996 and directed by Doug Liman, is a time capsule that captures the moment in the 1990s when the swing aesthetic was imported from the 1940s amongst all the cool kids, as I never saw anyone dressing that way in real life. Zoot suits, long wallet chains, brylcreem . . . I only ever saw any of that on TV and in movies like Swingers, but I’m sure out in LA, where this movie is set, it was all the rage. Nevertheless, what struck me was that in the 1990s it was still possible to import and update old bits of Americana and celebrate that cultural richness. Swingers is light-hearted and fun, frequently very funny, and it contains not even a hint of the totalizing wokeness that characterizes today’s cultural products, which is to say that this movie is, in the woke parlance, highly problematic. It is fun and light-hearted, after all, so it actually offers nothing in the way of ham-fisted political commentary. It contains only one black character, and that black character is a well-adjusted and cool hep-cat who doesn’t seem to even notice that he is black, and this movie overtly celebrates heterosexuality; it explores the complicated mating rituals surrounding how men get women, so this movie is overtly racist and homophobic and misogynistic by today’s totalized and humorless cultural standards.

Setting Up My Laserjet with Cups on Linux

Wed, 28 Dec 2022 05:00:46 -0500

Setting up my HP Laserjet 1012 on my home server and configuring printing on client machines. I’ve had this printer forever, and it just keeps going. I want any device on the home network to have access to the printer.

The home server is running Arch Linux.

Install:

sudo pacman -S avahi cups hplip avahi nss-mdns

Enable Services. As root or sudo:

systemctl enable cups

systemctl start cups

systemctl enable avahi-daemon

systemctl start avahi-daemon

Configure CUPS

The Fruits of Wokeness

Tue, 27 Dec 2022 05:00:46 -0500

The single most deplorable and craven thing I ever witnessed from a University administration occurred at Middle Georgia State University, which is a regional university that serves the Macon area. I worked there as a lecturer and a professor, so I got all the internal emails and memos, including the boilerplate emails that came out of the president’s office, which I always read with a great deal of interest. Christopher Blake is his name, and the only thing I really remember about President Blake is that he was really sorry that he was born white. He made that clear in a campus-wide email he sent out just after George Floyd died. Blake was broken up about George Floyd, about Breonna Taylor, and others I’m sure, and he made it clear that he recognized and understood that he had benefited from the advantages bestowed upon him just by being born white and male.

Mike Leach Dead

Tue, 13 Dec 2022 05:00:46 -0500

Mike Leach died last night rather suddenly. He had coached practice for MSU’s bowl game on Saturday. Sunday, he had a heart attack. Monday night, he died.

Only two weeks ago he’d won his first Egg Bowl in a very good game that ended with the Bulldogs defeating the Ole Miss Rebels 24-22. I’m glad his last game was a victory, and I have to say I was touched by Lane Kiffin’s statement about him:

Finding Memory Information in Linux

Sun, 11 Dec 2022 05:00:46 -0500

I have two extra dimms I want to add to my system, but the stickers on them are worn and unreadable, so I don’t know for sure their capacity. The system currently has 16 GB, and when I add the new dimms the capacity goes up to 20, so that means they are 2 GB, right? Well, probably, but not for sure. Without looking at each bank, I can’t rule out that maybe one dimm isn’t working, is seated poorly perhaps, and the system is only seeing one. To check, I’ll run the following command as root or with sudo:

Movie Review - Raiders of the Lost Ark

Sat, 10 Dec 2022 05:00:46 -0500

I wonder if Steven Speilberg wakes up every morning in a state of perpetual amazement that a movie as stupid as Raiders of the Lost Ark, released in 1981, became such a tenacious piece of cultural iconography. Yes, it has its charms. It has the splendid all-American charisma of Harrison Ford, the fedora, the bullwhip, first-rate costumes, sets, supporting cast, and a John Williams score, but holy moly this movie is stupid. Plot holes throughout, this movie was cut to the bone just to make a 110 minute run time, and these are hard cuts that call attention to themselves, as in, I was aware while rewatching it that the editor made a tough call here and a tough call there because a little more of this scene or that scene would have smoothed it out quite a lot.

Drinking Buttermilk

Thu, 08 Dec 2022 05:00:46 -0500

So, I drink a lot of buttermilk. I remember when I was a kid watching my grandaddy crumble day-old cornbread into a large glass and drown it in buttermilk to the rim, then eat that with a spoon. I thought that was weird. What is it with old-timers and buttermilk?

Here I am with a low-grade buttermilk addiction. I don’t even understand how everybody isn’t trading in their sodas for it, either. I’m being serious. I don’t know what happened, fully. I think the tastebuds change. Sweet things don’t hold any sway with me. I want savory, and umami. Buttermilk is liquid umami, I think. When people tell me I’m weird for loving it so much, I don’t even understand what they are talking about. How can one not love liquid umami? I just don’t get it. This stuff is like nectar to me. I like it that much.

Thoughts About Linux

Thu, 08 Dec 2022 05:00:46 -0500

First, a word about Windows: Why?

Yes, I understand why, that Microsoft had and still has all the money behind it, but still, it is weird to me that this uniquely awful operating system is the default on all PCs across the world. It is amazing that anything works at all, and I suspect that if the world’s servers didn’t provide a linux-based backbone, not much would. Every Windows PC ever eventually breaks, and the only option is to reinstall and start over from scratch. They accrue bloat and become so bogged down that they become unusable.

Smoakies Barbeque, Cordele, Georgia

Sat, 03 Dec 2022 05:00:46 -0500

Right off exit 102 on Interstate 75 in Cordele, GA, (pronounced Kor-Deal) one finds a workhorse of a barbeque joint called Smoakies As it should be, the building was nothing fancy, but a hair above a shack and painted plain brown. It had a porch with a few picnic tables, another good omen. Inside, the pig motiff dominated the decor, the walls, nooks and crannies. Pig pictures, figureines, statuettes, you know the drill.

People are Just Yapping Dogs

Sat, 26 Nov 2022 05:00:46 -0500

“A Man Said to the Universe” by Stephen Crane

A man said to the universe:
“Sir, I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.”

William B. Irvine in his excellent Guide to the Good Life makes the point that we ought not concern ourselves with other people all that much, or at all, pretty much. Exceptions exist, such as people who depend on us and people who relate to us in some sense. I am bound to do my duties to those who depend on me, and those people ought to matter to me to the degree that I keep up my end of the relationship, that I do my duty.

Dark Matters

Sat, 29 Oct 2022 05:00:46 -0500

In the above meme, we see a meme doing what memes do best, which is distill a complex topic down to its bareboned essence. In this case, it is the dark matter problem, which is this: When scientists observe galaxies, what they see and can measure doesn’t account for their action. Based on calculations of the observable matter, galaxies ought not hold together, yet they do. It isn’t close, either. To make the math work, they have to add 80% more stuff, more matter, and they call it dark matter.

Movie Review: It Follows (2014)

Sat, 01 Oct 2022 05:00:46 -0500

All good horror must take for its beginning a source of human fear, the more primal the source the better. Obviously, fear of death and dying is about as primal as it gets, but also sickness. Fear of darkness. Fear of the unknown. The fear of being followed or stalked. My guess is that I am not alone in having experienced the nightmare that someone or something is following me, and no matter what I do I can’t get away from it. It Follows taps into that very nightmare. It’s a great premise, a great starting point for a horror movie, but perhaps the most persistent problem I notice in otherwise perfectly serviceable horror films is a failure to deliver a satisfying payoff. The setups are often quite good, with many horror films opening with an intriguing premise, a novel idea, or a clever twist on an well-worn plot. The strong opening sets a trap from which few directors manage to escape, that the strong setup raises expectations so high that they are next to impossible to pay off. It Follows, released in 2014 and written and directed by David Robert Mitchell, is that rare horror film that finds its way out of the payoff problem. It delivers a satisfying ending that complements the preceeding 90 minutes of film and more than adequately pays off its excellent premise. It is a classic in the genre that stands toe to toe with the very best.

Return to the Buffyverse

Sat, 10 Sep 2022 05:00:46 -0500

This summer I rewatched Buffy the Vampire Slayer in its entirety. I’m going to write about it a little today, but first things first: I hate Willow.

The Willow Challenge

I despise Alyson Hannigan’s acting; her mouth-agape portrayal of the character Willow as a mumbling semi-literate retard almost make this series unwatchable to me. If you like, take the Willow challenge, which I am going to do right now: Pick an episode of Buffy at random. It doesn’t matter which one; any episode will work. Now, click through until you get a scene with Willow and pause it. Take a screenshot. There’s a better than 90% chance her mouth will be agape because Hannigan almost never closes it. I’m not talking about line delivery, either. I’m talking about when she isn’t delivering lines, about when she is listening. I picked the episode “Amends” from season 3, and this is the result:

Fresh Air Barbeque, Jackson, Georgia

Tue, 30 Aug 2022 05:00:46 -0500

Piggy Park, Thomaston, Georgia

Mon, 22 Aug 2022 05:00:46 -0500

Piggy Park in Thomaston, GA, opened in 1950 and it is an old-school drive-in that specializes in barbeque, but I’ve never sampled their BBQ. How can I when the burger is so good?

They do their burgers scrambled style, which is not quite loose-meat like a Maid-Rite, but more like chopped up on the griddle. The burger is a glowing example of a dead-simple formula that rises high above the sum of its parts. The cheeseburger deluxe is dressed only with a slice of American cheese and a special sauce that I used to think was some kind of magical alchemy, but in fact when I asked about it they told me it is just a mix of ketchup and mustard, which suprised me. The magic must be in the proportion of ketchup to mustard because it is far better than it ought to be. It is burger candy, and that, combine with some very good fresh french fries, makes this one of my favorites.

My Approach to Eating Barbeque

Fri, 22 Jul 2022 05:00:46 -0500

When I sit down to eat barbeque, this is how I do it:

First of all, when I encounter a new place, I order the biggest combo/sampler plate offered. Usually it is 3 or 4 meats and 2-3 sides with bread and sometimes pickles.

I ask the counter girl which meats are must-haves. If she says they are all good, we have a problem, so I’ll probe further. A barbecue place has one thing, maybe two, but certainly one thing that they do really well, and the counter girl has to know what it is. She must have an answer. Telling me all of it is good is automatically putting that BBQ joint behind the 8-ball.

Eternalism and Observation

Sat, 02 Jul 2022 05:00:46 -0500

The Greeks and Romans utilized tales about the three fates, Clotho, the spinner, Lachesis, the alloter, and Atropos, the unturning, to conceptualize existense, more or less. One’s life was a yarn spun as a small part of a much larger tapestry. Clotho spins the yarn, Lachesis measures it, and Atropos cuts it.

I suppose the first thing to say about this arrangement is that all of it is outside the control of the mortal, the human being. He doesn’t decide to be born. He doesn’t pick his parents, nor his genetics, nor his nationality. He just finds himself composed a certain way and thrust into it. Everything gets set in motion by Clotho, and one’s starting point determines the range of his choices.

Ole Miss National Champions!

Sun, 26 Jun 2022 05:00:46 -0500

Hotty Toddy! The Ole Miss Rebels defeated the Oklahoma Sooners to become the 2022 national champions! The Rebels won game one and game two to win the best-of-three series, completing what many have called a magical run through the post season. The Rebels were about as unstoppable as a team could be. As a lifelong Ole Miss fan, I can hardly process watching Ole Miss dominate the competititon and play with confidence and swagger. It was a sight to behold. Highlights of the postseason must include legendary pitching performances by Dylan Delucia, who in my view has secured Archie Manning-tier status in Mississippi lore. Three-in-a-row homeruns to destroy the sooners in game one of the series was spectacular. You won’t read many write-ups about it, but pitcher Hunter Elliot had two timely pick-off plays at the College World Series that got the Rebels out of binds. And then there was the game 2 decision by Oklahoma skipper Skip Johnson to change pitchers. That call is going to haunt Johnson as one of the most inexplicable and ill-fated decisions of all time. Cade Horton, the starting pitcher for the Sooners, had dominated the Rebels the entire game. The Rebels could not hit him. Inexplicably, in the top of the 8th inning with the Sooners hanging on to a 2-1 lead, Johnson replaced Horton after he allowed a single. I said, “why in the world would he do that?” There’s absolutely no doubt in my mind that had Horton pitched the complete came I’d be writing about a game three right now, but instead in came the Sooners closer Trevin Michael, and the wheels came off the wagon. The shift in tone was immediate and palpable. The Rebels got two hits and brought in the tying run, and then Michael threw no fewer than two wild pitches that allowed the go-ahead run to score, and then another, which gave the Rebels a 4-2 advantage going into the 9th. I was so immersed in the drama of that 8th inning that when Oklahoma set up to bat in the top of the ninth that it didn’t immediately occur to me that the Rebs were three outs away from victory, and then it dawned on me, oh wow, here we are, three outs away from a championship! Rebels closer Brandon Johnson struck out the remaining Sooners to claim the victory. The Ole Miss Rebels are national champions!

Recipe: Country-Fried Steaks

Sat, 25 Jun 2022 05:00:46 -0500

The fun of this dish is taking what is a tough and cheap cut of beef and making it awesome.

Ingredients

Cheap cuts of beef
2 eggs
1 cup milk
All-purpose flour or bread flour
oil or lard for frying
Cajun Seasoning

Instructions

Take your cheap beef cuts, such as top round or whatever is cheap, and pound them out pretty flat with a mallet. I put them one or two at a time in a gallon-size zip-lock bag and pound them in that to contain the mess. The pounding tenderizes them pretty nicely.

Rebels Defeat Pigs 2-0, Will Play for National Title

Fri, 24 Jun 2022 05:00:46 -0500

Hotty Toddy!

Dylan DeLucia blanked the pigs from Arkansas 2-0. It was a masterful outing. Nolan, the pig hurler, also had a good outing and all the Rebels could scrape up was two runs, but those two runs were plenty. The Rebels will play Oklahoma’s Sooners for the national championship. It is a best-of-three series and the first game is scheduled for Saturday at 7 pm.

Stoicism and Following Ole Miss Sports

Thu, 23 Jun 2022 05:00:46 -0500

Or, Skill and Chance in Baseball

By design, a curious round ball with seams and a rounded-off bat yields a hefty element of chance. The way that balls comes off the bat then hops based on the terrain means that one could be the most talented and well-seasoned shortstop in the game and yet still duff the occasional ground ball. Baseball is such that, if you took two identical teams and played them head to head fifty times, thus accounting for skill, the results would vary based on the element of chance, and to my mind baseball is much more of a game than a sport. If sport is the staging of various contests to determine the best, then surely baseball is a game in which, if we account for skill, it is lady luck who determines a winner.

Pigs Hold Off Rebels

Wed, 22 Jun 2022 05:00:46 -0500

Rebels One Victory Away From Final

Trailing in the 9th 3-1, the Arkansas reliever beaned two consecutive Ole Miss hitters to load the bases with no outs. In other words, the pigs tried their best to give Ole Miss the victory, but they could not claim it. The Rebels got one run and left three on base. They Rebs and pigs will play one more time tomorrow. The winner will face the Oklahoma Sooners in the best-of-three final.

Rebels Butcher Pigs 7-3

Tue, 21 Jun 2022 05:00:46 -0500

Rebels One Victory Away From Final

Solid pitching and clutch hitting has propelled the Ole Miss Rebels baseball squad within one win of the final at the College World Series in Omaha. The Rebels need to dispatch the pigs from Arkansas just once more. Should they succeed in doing this, their opponent will be either the Oklahoma Sooners or the Texas A&M Aggies. The Sooners are in the same position in the opposite bracket, needing only one victory to gain a berth in the final.

Rebels Down Tigers 5-1

Sun, 19 Jun 2022 05:00:46 -0500

Ole Miss’ staring pitcher Dylan DeLucia tossed a masterful game in a 5-1 victory over the Auburn Tigers. DeLucia retired the first 14 Auburn hitters and pitched 2/3 of the 8th inning. Reliever Josh Mallitz closed out the victory. Next up for the Rebels will be the Arkansas Razorbacks, who demolished Stanford. The Rebels and the Razorbacks will meet at 7 pm on Monday June 20.

Bills Hamburgers - Amory, Mississippi

Tue, 14 Jun 2022 05:00:46 -0500

Bill’s Hamburgers in Amory, MS, is a special place that serves a special hamburger. Aside from a couple of choices of french fries and I think some turnover pies, Hamburgers is all they serve. Only burgers with or without mustard and onions, and that’s how you order them. I take two cheeseburgers with, you say, and that means you want mustard and onions. If you’re a child and your onion/mustard gene hasn’t yet activated, you get them without. They’ll put ketchup and hotsauce on them if you make a special request, but if you want anything from the garden like lettuce or tomato, you’re flat out of luck.

Rebels to Take On Auburn

Tue, 14 Jun 2022 05:00:46 -0500

The Ole Miss Rebels baseball squad is slated to play Auburn on Saturday June 18, 2022, in Omaha for their first game of the College World Series. Of course, as both teams are members of the SEC’s western division, they already faced each other during the regular season with Ole Miss winning the series two games to one at Auburn. All three games were batting practices. The Rebels two victories came with scores of 13-6 and 15-2, and Auburn’s lone victory was by the score of 19-5. That would seem to suggest we are going to see some runs scored on Saturday.

Ole Miss Baseball Omaha Bound

Mon, 13 Jun 2022 05:00:46 -0500

My Ole Miss Rebels baseball squad has punched its ticket to Omaha. The Rebs didn’t have a great regular season, and knocked out of the SEC tournament in the first game, they were selected to the NCAA tournament as the very last pick, so they squeaked in by a hair’s breadth. From there, Ole Miss is undefeated, crashing into the College World Series with five consective victories, including a 22-5 teeing-off against the University of Arizona. It is going to be interesting to see if they can stay hot.

Switching to Jekyll

Sun, 12 Jun 2022 05:00:46 -0500

Jekyll is a blogging/web site platform based on ruby and which runs natively in Linux, and best of all, it uses no databases at all. So, last week, and I don’t really know the issue, but Google’s Chrome browser had flagged my site as a phishing site, but of course I had nothing to do with that. I was using wordpress, which has a mysql database backbone, and when I went into the FTP server to look around for anything weird, I just decided to delete the entire thing and start over, but interestingly, I could not delete certain files. I had to log in to my hosting provider to get rid of the old wordpress site. This leads me to believe some malicious code had been inserted into the mysql database, which Google was flagging. I’m just speculating.

Spaghetti Squash

Wed, 08 Jun 2022 05:00:46 -0500

Often I use spaghetti squash in place of pasta when I do Italian-style dishes so as to avoid the huge calorie count, but the squash can be too watery, which was the case the last few times I cooked it. Imagine a plate of pasta swimming in a pool of water on the plate . . . not all that appetizing, so this recipe I sought to eliminate the water leeching out of it. It turned out well, and it was delicious to boot. It scratches the lasagna itch without all the calories.

Ranking Store-Bought Hot Sauces

Fri, 20 May 2022 05:00:46 -0500

Understanding Brain

Thu, 12 May 2022 05:00:46 -0500

Using MacLean’s triune brain model to explain what I mean, we can take a cross-section of any human brain and see its evolutionary heritage. (I am aware that this model has been revised and fine-tuned, but it perfectly serves our purposes here because all we need to see here is that the brain has evolutionary regions that correspond to the same brain structures in different animals). MacLean divides the brain into three broad regions, the base of the brain is the reptilian brain that is analogous to the full brain of a repitle like a snake, lizard, bird, or alligator. We can observe reptiles to get a sense about what this core of the brain governs.

Phillips Grocery

Thu, 05 May 2022 05:00:46 -0500

Phillip’s Grocery

My current reigning #1 cheeseburger is the Phill-Up burger at Phillip’s Grocery in Oxford, Mississippi. To date, no other burger has knocked it off its top spot.

The original Phillip’s Grocery is located in Holly Springs, MS, and there’s another location located in Oxford. The connection between them isn’t clear. The Oxford location has a web site and it traces its history to the Holly Springs location, yet the Holly Springs location has no web site that I can find. I’ve eaten the burgers at both, and both are out of this world and equivalent. If I’m not mistaken, the must-have house burger in Holly Springs is called the Deluxe Cheeseburger, and in Oxford they call it the Phil-Up Burger. Pictured below is the Phill-Up:

Movie Review: The Escape Artist

Fri, 15 Apr 2022 05:00:46 -0500

Caleb Deschanel’s The Escape Artist, released in 1982, is a film that is near and dear to my heart. I first saw it when my dad screened it at home back then when I was only seven years old, and the boy protagonist Danny, played by Griffin O’Neal, probably made an impression on me. That, along with the final scene in which Danny locks himself in blue mailbox, provided imagery that has stuck with me.

Sweet Vidalia

Mon, 04 Apr 2022 05:00:46 -0500

When I was a kid my dad scored a huge sack of Vidalia onions and to preserve them over the coming months he’d heard panty hose was the key, so we knotted them up one after another in panty hose and hung them in a hall closet. They weren’t as readily available back then in the early 1980s, so Dad getting a sack of them was indeed a score, and from there he was chopping onions and putting them in everything from tuna salad to salmon croquettes.

The Best Mayonnaise

Sat, 19 Mar 2022 05:00:46 -0500

When it comes to mayonnaise, I have an unbreakable tie for the #1 spot in my rankings, Duke’s and Bama. I adore them both in equal measure. Duke’s has no sweetness, while Bama has a pronounced sweet note, so I have to point out that they are very different formulations, that their tie for #1 is not due to closeness but to distinctiveness and richness. Say, you take all of the commercially-available mayonnaise brands you can find at your closest supermarket. You’ll find Bama, Duke’s, Kraft, Hellman’s Sauer’s, maybe Heinz, maybe Blue Plate out of New Orleans, and one or two store brands. If you line up all of them, slap a blindfold over my eyes and hand me a teaspoon, I will pick out Bama and Duke’s from this lineup. Easily.

Dukes Grill

Thu, 10 Mar 2022 05:00:46 -0500

Last week I had cause to take a day trip to the vicinity of Charlotte, North Carolina, so I went ahead and scouted out the burger joints and found myself deeply humbled because I had never heard of a Carolina-style cheeseburger before. I don’t know how I missed it, but sure enough, I had to that point. A Carolina-style burger is dressed with slaw AND chili, mustard and onion. I like to imagine how this concoction came to be. Perhaps some poor jackass was low on cash one day and he was hungry so he thought he’d spend his last five-spot on a slaw-burger, but then the chili-burger caught his eye and he found himself in a deep internal conflict. Ultimately, he said, hell with it, put it all on one burger, and bingo, there you go.

Review: The Offspring, Star Trek TNG

Thu, 10 Mar 2022 05:00:46 -0500

The Offspring (Star Trek, The Next Generation, Season 3)

Star Trek, The Next Generation episode “The Offspring”, directed by Jonathan Frakes for the show’s third season, is about as powerful an episode of science fiction as is probably possible. I have here and there over the years screened this episode to my composition students as part of a larger discussion about dramatic works, and it will jerk a tear or two out of a significant percentage of those students, especially if they happen to be parents.

You Will Die Tomorrow

Wed, 09 Feb 2022 05:00:46 -0500

Everyone’s Story Ends Exactly the Same

Tomorrow, you are going to die, and while I don’t relish my role as the bearer of bad news, you probably ought to know and perhaps do some soul searching about the implications of your impending date with oblivion. It is work, and not the fun kind, so you will want to do what most people do and avoid it, but that would be a bad idea because this work is necessary. If you persist in avoiding it, you run the risk of ending up an old man who is scared of death, and there’s nothing more pathetic and pitiful than that.

In-N-Out

Wed, 02 Feb 2022 05:00:46 -0500

I’ve been searching out good cheeseburgers since I was a teenager, always looking for the places that serve up the fatty and salty and cheesy goodness. My daughter comes by it honest as I’ve successfully replicated this trait in her, so when we travel, an important point of business is to research the best burger joints and devote one or two meals to cheeseburgers served up by local establishments.

Ranking Store-Bought Hot Sauces

Wed, 05 Jan 2022 05:00:46 -0500

Louisiana-style hot sauces ought to have only three ingredients: Peppers, vinegar, and salt. No thickeners. No preservatives. That’s how I see things. Nevertheless, one finds the addition of various gums as thickeners and sometimes garlic powder. I can tolerate the thickeners, but I really dislike the addition of garlic.

#1 - Tabasco

Nothing off-the-wall here. Of those you’ll find on the shelf at the supermarket, my favorite is Tabasco. It has the fermented fruity complexity and the just-right level of heat. Nothing tastes quite like Tabasco. When I get the chance to go home to Mississippi, my soul finds a spicy salve in finding a bottle of Tabasco on pretty much every table when I go out to eat. I especially enjoy a few dabs of it on over-easy eggs, and I keep a bottle of it in my glove compartment for emergencies.