stripmindblog

that's my whole thing. right there.

2009-06-11T19:24:00.002-05:00

ach. it seems that many of my personality scores are middle of the road. So... what does that mean?

hive updates.

2009-04-20T19:58:00.005-05:00

Both of our hives at Mariposa Grove (mostly) failed over the winter. The observation hive failed first, and for the clearest reason.

Starting in about August of last year (2008), it seemed like the undertaker bees were having difficulty disposing of the dead bee bodies. We could see them dragging the dead bees all over the glass, and not knowing where to go. Since I saw that the foragers clearly knew where the entrance/exit was, the behavior of the undertakers was pretty perplexing. Undertaker bees are (so i read online) young bees who have not yet graduated to foraging. Not being foragers yet, they don't really know where the front door is, and apparently the way they find the bee graveyard is by following the light. And durn it, they will keep following the same light over and over again until they add themselves to the pile of dead bees accumulating at the bottom of the hive. Apparently, some bees (the older forager bees) can learn where the entrance is, even if there's a window into the hive, but the undertaker bees don't seem to yet have that learning capability. Odd, I thought.

I tried a few different things to help this out. First, there was already a shade structure built so that the glass was shaded, but that didn't seem to be enough. So we went back to putting the foam pad over the glass to see if they'd then clear the bodies out while they weren't being observed.

The foam pad had the disadvantage of making the observation of the hive pretty non-functional. Whenever the pad was removed, the bees would freak out, and swarm over to the glass, apparently thinking that a wall of the hive had suddenly been removed. I didn't like seeing them freak out like that. It kinda ruined the observing. I didn't want to be able to see the bees in a state of freaking out, I wanted to be able to see the bees when they were working normally. On top of that, I didn't really notice a dramatic improvement in the body-disposal problem, so the foam-pad cover was a pretty big failure.

Then I drilled another entrance, below the main entrance, so that they'd have an exit that was level with the floor. That didn't work either. Still more dead bodies accumulating. We don't go in the hives very often, so this accumulation was worrisome.

At this point, the observation hive became a victim of the global financial meltdown. I was in the process of trying to get a loan from WaMu, and the global financial system was slowly killing me. In the end, we were in escrow for a year minus a week, and I lived in a state of fear/paralysis/loathing. In September I retreated to hibernate until it was all over (turned out to be mid-February 2009).

In the mean time, the bees in the observation hive weren't doing too well. There were way too many ineffective undertaker bees dragging dead bees around and not disposing of them properly. Those useless undertakers should have been doing something else with their time. I'm sure this was weakening the hive substantially (and probably causing bee sicknesses?).

I couldn't deal with it at the time, so I just hoped someone else might. Unfortunately, in community living there is sometimes undefined responsibility for the commons. Especially when the problems are tricky, or there's varying amounts of territoriality/expertise involved.

In any case, I emerged briefly in December to check on the bees, drilled another hole in the hive near where the pile of bee-bodies seemed to accumulate most (the southern end of the window - which was too near the observing window for my original intentions) and that seemed to fix the problem. The undertakers were able to figure it out at that point. Yay!

But too little too late. At that point, the hive was substantially weakened, with a small remaining population. It didn't survive the winter. I tried moving some resources from our other hive to the observation hive, but it didn't take. We were down to one hive.

The second hive seemed to be doing fine through most of the winter, with a reduced population, but that's normal. But for an unknown reason, in February, the hive's population started to severely decline. Most of our rain for the season came in a very short period and that seemed to correspond to the hive failure. In any case, the one-year-old queen didn't respond to the coming spring by ramping up the population. There's some question as to whether or not there was indeed a queen in there at all (none seen, with a tiny bee population), but suffice it to say that we were on the lookout for more swarms.

Luckily, within the space of a single week, there were 4 available swarms, with three right next door. So both our hives are now full of bees again, and I've got a lot more experience catching swarms.

As for the hives, the observation hive was re-oriented, with the shaded window now facing north. I had hoped that the new orientation would fix the undertaking problem, so I closed the hole nearest the glass. No such luck. undertakers still couldn't figure it out, and within a week there was an accumulation of bodies. Uncorking that hole has once again fixed that problem. To keep the bees away from the observers, I put an additional screen up to keep them separate. I'll post some shots or video soon maybe.

I went into the hives again yesterday, and there's a lot of brood in each hive. Good.

A couple of notes: the non-observation hive seems to get built in a much more compact way than the observation hive with the side-entrance. Seems to be a good argument for keeping the entrance on the end. Also, this time they seem to have built fairly well on Bob's top-bars. I don't know why they had problems before. There were two places on the new topbars where they weren't building it exactly straight. One where there was a popsicle stick, the other with the wax foundation. Otherwise, no problems.

I'm still of the belief that my increasingly bad reactions to stings last summer had to do with a temporary buildup in my system rather than a developing alergy. I was stung once in late fall with a very minor reaction. No stings yet this spring, and I've only worn a hood once (yesterday going into the hives). None of the 4 swarms I helped catch stung anybody, but jess got stung once yesterday.

Movie Magazine

2009-01-28T22:51:00.001-06:00

Hey all,

I got interviewed about Select Your Intention on Monday by Joan Widdifield. Joan is an NPR film reviewer for Movie Magazine. We had worked together on her documentary on Vietnamese victims of UXO, Hearts and Mines, in 2007.

To hear the interview, click here. The whole show is here.

-aaron.

Wholphin #7

2008-11-26T21:53:00.003-06:00

Hey there. Wholphin #7 is out, and it has Select Your Intention as a bonus disc. I came up with Select Your Intention as an idea for the PEAR Proposition. It ended up not going on that set, but Wholphin contacted me when the lab closed, and a year point five later, here it is... Yay!

Select Your Intention interprets psi-research protocols for the video medium, and explores the influence of the human mind on pre-recorded quantum phenomena.

There's a lot more information on the Select Your Intention page on Psyleron's site. There's a lot of video material on disc, and more online. One bit not on disc is this video with Boris Fain. Although all the media was designed for participants in the experiment, if you're not familiar with the PEAR lab and REG experiments, that video will give you the basic idea.

Featured on Instructables

2008-10-10T16:34:00.002-05:00

Hey there. the instructable I put up a couple years back got highlighted for Halloween as a unique effect for pumpkin-carving.

nice.

i updated it too, so it's a bit more complete now.

Mariposa on TV

2008-08-10T22:49:00.003-05:00

Hi there. While we were out of town, Mariposa Grove, the community where we live, was on TV.

Not too bad at all.

old photo imports - abandoned libraries

2008-05-22T17:48:00.003-05:00

hi all.

Yeah, so my digital still camera died a while back, and so I didn't have photos to go with a whole lot of photo-necessary posts, but I finally put them up and out.

Anyway, as I was going through an old photo card, I also came across some photos I took while I was scouting a location for the Wholphin shoot. I loved this location but the Oakland Film Office said I'd need to pay for a police escort to use it, and that's not really my style. But I still really wanted to share this space with folks in some way.

So! These photos are of the Miller Avenue branch library that's been closed for quite a while. It's really a haunting space to be in. I felt like I could still hear the whispers, and feel the ghosts of the books.

Even though it seemed like it was sealed off (no sign of forced entry, as the police said), somehow the whole place got tagged multiple times. There were also a bunch of files that somehow got left there, and scattered everywhere. Plus it has beautiful light.

Anyway, when I found these photos languishing on a memory stick, it kinda reminded me of the library itself, and the files abandoned there.

I wish I could learn the lesson of abandonment. In some ways, it takes the pressure off. Like reincarnation. If I could just manage to really believe in reincarnation, I think I'd be happier.

bees are cool

2008-05-22T03:03:00.002-05:00

hey everybody who hasn't seen my backyard lately! Announcement: Bees are really cool.

When we moved into Mariposa Grove, there was already a hive here. It produced a lot of honey last summer, and I started to get into beekeeping then. But in the fall, we ended up with a hive in crisis. Our queen had died and been replaced by an intercast queen - a mish-mash of a queen bee and a worker bee. Basically, a larger than average bee with queen pheremones and an infertility problem. A queen bee that doesn't lay any eggs is death for a colony, which is where our hive was headed, until some beekeepers who know what they are doing came by and identified our problem. They killed off the intercast queen, introduced some fresh brood, and saved the colony. Yay!

That's where the action begins, actually, because the uber-beekepers left us with the advice that it's easier to maintain two hives than one - when one hive is suffering, you can help it with aid from the other one. That was all i needed to hear.

So with Tim's help (he's a Grover too), and the workshop of a friend from the eastbay topbar users group, I put together a new hive this spring. Since we happened to have an almost perfectly sized piece of plate glass lying around (who knows why? it looks like it might have been a shelf or a table-top) I decided to make it an observation hive.

The observation side of the hive doesn't actually take pictures well (reflections and whatnot), but you can see it in this swarm-catching video.

It was really cool to catch that swarm. It's doing well, and I'm really enjoying having these bees observable.

Babies in Japan

2008-04-20T03:45:00.003-05:00

Hey. So we went to Japan for my friend Patrick's wedding. It was great. Here are some photos .

The highlight was Patrick making a pregnancy announcement at the after-wedding dinner/reception thing. His mom claimed to have known, but I don't believe her. I don't know why she would pretend that she knew.

I mean, when he said it was true, her face was like a stone. Like a shocked stone pretending that it didn't hear anything. And then quickly pretending that it had known all along. That's all.

Oh yeah. I haven't developed the panoramic photos yet. They're coming tho-

urbanite construction and raised beds

2008-04-15T00:09:00.003-05:00

Our backyard used to be a parking lot, and there's still a lot of concrete back there. At a work party recently, we busted up another 10'x10' square. With that busted concrete, I built a retaining wall for the raised beds that also serves as a bench for the social area around the swing. I was really surprised how well it turned out.

I learned a few things while doing this, which hopefully I, or you, can use in future urbanite construction.

My wall is rather narrow, which is preferable for a host of reasons - aesthetic, space conserving - but it's only put together with dirt, no mortar or cob or nothin'. So while it feels really stable right now, I'm not sure about its longevity.

Besides just making it thicker, or using cob under the top layer, I think it could be made to be sturdier if I hadn't made it flat at each level. Here's an illustration of what I mean:

If I was to do it again, I would make each level slant in toward the dirt, and only make the top pieces level. Or, if it was a stand-alone wall, I would make it lean in on itself, each cross section looking like a very shallow "V." Basically, as Kevin (one of my Grovers) pointed out, the cross section would be a modified (filled in) arch. This way it would better resist any lateral pressures.

Okay. So I mentioned that we made raised beds, but I didn't show any pictures yet. We used a basket-weaving technique with a lot of the trimmings from trees in our yard and on the street. Here's a couple of pictures.

a close up.
and now, an overhead:

Bob van de Walle, one of the Grovers, keeps a blog where he also mentions the raised beds. His pics might give you another idea of what they look like (tho his are during construction).

He also mentions the sprouting of some of the stakes that we used to build the raised beds. This is a concern, but we're monitoring it to make sure it doesn't get out of hand.

more oil settling & delivery

2008-03-21T20:37:00.001-05:00

Well, I finally finished (?) the oil settling/delivery system, and it took some time. I was really excited about the hand-crank pumps, because they're bright red, and made of cast iron, so they feel awesome. BUT they're leaky, and they don't have standard pipe fittings! (what??!?! yes. i couldn't believe it either.) So I couldn't make an airtight delivery sytem. With a constant source of air in the lines, only short distances would work - ie from the settlers to the clean tank. So I ended up moving the clean tank to the highest point, and the oil flows to the car by gravity (siphon) alone. In the first picture, you can see the pump that moves the oil to the sock-filter which is fitted into the top of the "CLEAN" barrel. The photo below shows the oil gravity-feeding into the car at the curb.

At some point, I may mount a hand pump at the end of the fueling line so that I can speed it along (if the clean tank is low, it can take 40 min to fill the tank by siphon). But I'm not going to do that right now.

live music

2008-03-10T22:27:00.004-05:00

I'm embarrassed about this, and can hardly believe I'm writing this here, but I just made the decision that I don't want to go see one of my favorite bands in concert, so here it goes:

I really don't like to see live music.

It makes me pheel like a philistine to write this, because - just like locally grown vegetables - live music is something that's good to like. But this winter when invited to a concert for a band that was trendy in the 90s, i had a striking realization about my relationship to this cultural pastime.

I'm saying it again: I actually don't enjoy live music.

Maybe I shouldn't say that so baldly. There are live shows that I love, for example, Zakir Hussain. But aside from vituosic instrumental/acoustic (usually "WORLD" music), I'm can't get into it. I don't enjoy it.

OLD REASONS:

In my heart of hearts I've known that I didn't enjoy live music, and I've had a host of reasons over the years that ran through my head when I found I wasn't enjoying the show.

REASON NUMBER ONE:

Too damn loud. I always prefer to be social when going out with friends, and live music is too damn loud. I'd rather be able to talk to the people I'm with when I'm out, and live music is universally too amplified. Club and bar music is also often too amplified, which I've never understood at all (why would a bar with bad speakers play music at deafening volume?), but live music is the worst for this. I always feel like I leave live music venues with a hoarse voice and ringing ears. I can never hear the music as well as I can even on a terrible recording. It's almost like the performers are scared you might do something other than listen to the show. They'd rather you lose your hearing than hold a conversation.

REASON NUMBER TWO:

Lack of focus. This is the part that's most embarrassing for me - my own personal deficiency.

It has been a number of years since I felt like I could really focus for two straight hours on listening to a band. My mind starts to wander, and then the sheer discomfort of the venue (per reason one) is more of a hindrance than anything.

(I should say here, that there are times when I can focus on music for long periods, but I can't do it on command (such as at a show), and I'm usually alone when I do have that kind of focus and interest. So the combination of the ostensibly social venue and the private focus on music really just doesn't work for me.)

REASON NUMBER THREE:

Awkwardness. The standing still thing that happens at some concerts doesn't agree with me. It's so awkward! I'm bad at pretending to be enjoying myself, or pretending to be interested. I'd rather sit down. Or listen to a CD in my living room. Instead I wander in and out of the hall, adjacent rooms, and the bathroom.

------------

So, those are the standard reasons that I have had for not enjoying going to shows. Looking them over, they're not very convincing, and only do more to make me pheel like a philistine. These reasons are pretty lame, really. So there's good reason that I haven't been comfortable saying this out loud.

NEWER IMPROVED REASON WHY AARON DOESN'T LIKE LIVE MUSIC:

But then this winter, I was invited to see an old band who I didn't really like even when they were popular in the 90s. The first thing that passed through my mind was, "why are those people still on stage?"

That's when I realized why I don't like live shows. The question "why are these people on stage" gets stuck in my head as soon as I lose focus on the music. So for me, going to see a live show is exactly like going to a two hour session of pondering, in mental isolation, the nature of the cult of personality.

It's a terribly boring mental exercise: analysis of performers' manufactured image, questioning of motives, criticism of staginess and posturing, projected aspirations to fame, criticism of the stagy passivity of the crowd, internal criticism of my own stagy passivity, repeated recognition of the vampirism of cool.

Clearly, I end up in a really terrible head-space. At this point, even if I could regain interest in the music, I'd be immediately distracted by the orchestration of "the performativity of celebrity culture." It makes me even sadder in small venues, because it's such a hollow recreation of celebrity.

So, in conclusion, seeing the show actually detracts from my enjoyment of hearing the music. For a second I thought maybe I should try going to a concert blindfolded, but then I got the better of that idea. I mean, so what, I don't like live music. Why fight it?

Goodbye, attempts to enjoy live music,
Hello...
...other things.

i should note here, that some types of music and performances are exempt from this analysis. notable exceptions: dance bands, some jazz, much "world", most street music.

I should also note that much theater, however, is not exempted; I find the stage of theater to be similarly distracting, though perhaps to a lesser degree.

algae to the rescue

2008-02-25T05:21:00.003-06:00

Here's a video showing a development on the algae-bio-fuel production method.

cool stuff. I hear that with this method they're past 50,000 gallons/acre per yr, and they're shooting to double that yield in the next year. This sort of production could really make virgin veggie make a lot more sense.

I'm not quite sure where the carbon is coming from with those numbers above. There's mention of using the algae to sequester the carbon dioxide from fossil fuel power plants, so I don't know what the rates of production would be like using atmospheric carbon dioxide, but this is still really cool.

single tank conversion

2008-02-18T21:17:00.005-06:00

So finally, with the help of Billy Jacobs, we're running on vegetable oil. Ol' Esperanza is ready to go. I ended up buying a kit from Craig Reece that included the Plantdrive vegtherm, an electrical boost heater.

The kit also included a "TurboFyner" from Ramco, which is the coolant-heated fuel filter.

A minus on the Craig Reece kit, is that you have to get most of the install parts yourself. Since I had to source and buy all the hoses, fittings, etc. anyway, of course I ended up modifying the install to some extent. I put in some temperature gauges, (one after the heated filter, one after the electrical boost heater). I also changed the order of part installation to one that made more sense to me, and added another clear filter.

The instructions that came with the kit were a bit spotty. Really thorough in parts, but misleading in others. NO DIAGRAMS!! (what!?!?). My dirty schematic looks like this.

So, anyway, it's done, and I even mounted the temperature gauges above the steering column so that they would look nice.

Also - it seems it doesn't get as hot as quickly as I expected. Sad. So there are some changes planned that I might make: reduce the amount of fuel hose in the engine compartment. change the alternator to something rated for higher loads. Also, gauges that monitor lower temperatures.

UPDATE - a week later, and we've already had a part go out. I hadn't had time to replace the delivery hose (from tank to engine compartment) with the higher diameter viton to compensate for the higher viscosity of the veggie oil. This created a higher pulling pressure on the components and lines before the fuel pump. So the manual fuel pump started leaking air, and jess got stranded one morning just before the Richmond bridge. This wasn't an expensive repair, and it was one that many folks recommend doing even if your hand pump isn't broken (because a later model pump is much easier to use). It also was actually kind of predictable (in hind sight, of course), so no fault, no (major) harm. I'm still learning stuff. Also, I'm going to have to check for more leaks in a month or so...

bubbly boom

2007-12-09T18:20:00.000-06:00

hi.

Tomorrow is Jessica's birthday, and she likes Prosecco, an Italian champaign-like drink, so we have some on special occasions. This is dangerous because when you drop a bottle of champaign it goes off like a bomb, flinging glass-shard-shrapnel and alcoholic beverage everywhere.

I'm just glad I wear glasses, and that this afternoon I was wearing layers.

WVO storage and settling

2007-12-06T11:25:00.000-06:00

i finally put together a settling setup for the waste vegetable oil that I've been collecting. Doing this has made me realize just how much energy I put into feeling organized. It seems that I really am committed to the idea of creating clean (and potentially time-saving) systems, even if they require a lot of time initially.

This is one of those cases. Linton had just been storing the vegetable oil in the containers he picked it up in, and letting it settle in those. In a lot of ways, that makes the most sense. I could have just settled on a system for keeping those buckets organized, but no. I wanted to build something, Not just shelving to organize the oil, but something a bit more 'developed'. I put it under the stairs, and I think it looks pretty good, and the first part - the collecting and settling - is done. I still need filtering and delivery, but that will come later.

Doing this, I could really see the pressure differences between a gravity drip and a siphon system. It really speeds things up to get the air out of the system, and now I have a mechanism for doing that. Still, even though it looks really organized, and I'll know I'll feel good using the system, I do wonder how much overkill this was. Ultimately, I think my satisfaction here is based on the assumption that this will save time in the long run. After doing this, though, I wonder if that's a faulty assumption.

biofuel debate?

2007-12-01T03:00:00.000-06:00

I'm on some bio-diesel listserves, which I occasionally read just to get a sense of what can go wrong with my car. But recently there's been some debates that have caught my interest, and I wanted to share some of my thoughts here.

The chatter started when San Francisco decided to start a waste vegetable oil collection program. SF is going to start running some municipal diesels on it. Cool, I think. But then these articles surfaced on the list talking about the ecological dangers of biofuels.

First this not so good BeyondChron article, got it started. It really misconstrues a lot of arguments, and generally bashes everyone running anything bio. It references a couple of articles by George Monbiot which are much better written.

I had a very negative and defensive reaction to the BeyondChron article. At first it was knee-jerk defensiveness, but looking back at the article, it is a pretty shitty piece. I think my own negative reaction would have been mitigated if the following point (from the first Monbiot article) had been acknowledged first:

Before I go any further, I should make it clear that turning used chip fat into motor fuel is a good thing. The people slithering around all day in vats of filth are perfoming a service to society. But there is enough waste cooking oil in the UK to meet one 380th of our demand for road transport fuel(2). Beyond that, the trouble begins.
--monbiot.com

I'm not going to summarize the article here, just comment on it, so go read the Monbiot stuff if you're interested.

The line of criticism in these articles is interesting and deserves some attention, but I think both articles suffer from seeing biofuels as a one-fuel substitute for fossil fuels. This comes off as plain stupid to bio-diesel users and WVO users who want to encourage the diversity in fuel supply -and use a waste product- rather than be yet another vehicle burning dinosaurs.

Some of the claims made in the articles are also a bit misleading. The figure of "10 times more carbon emissions from bio-diesel" than fossil fuels seems particularly suspect because those carbon costs are primarily one time costs, rather than recurring costs. I don't know how they're glazing over the math there, but there's something disingenous about it.

That said, I do think that users of virgin veggie have some rethinking to do. The bio-fuels vs. food issue is one that is not quickly resolved, and while bio-fuels are becoming popular because they could address the spike in carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere, we've got to recognize that climate change is not the only environmental problem we face. Reaching some of the biofuel targets - producing 25%-33% of transportation fuel from plant matter - is only possible with huge increases in the environmental footprint. Switching to virgin veggie at that scale would certainly have huge environmental impact - not only in loss of biomass per acre, but on countless ecosystems, available water, food supplies... Adding those costs into the production costs for biofuels does change the balance considerably, and virgin veggie starts to look pretty shabby.

But virgin veggie isn't really what I'm into anyway. I've never considered running virgin vegetable oil as a reason to get a diesel. For me, it was about utilizing a waste product to make a fuel. This has been said everywhere before, but the solution for the transportation fuel problem is in a diversity of solutions - a combination of public transport, greater efficiency (hybrids, etc), renewable electric power sources, AND waste-flow utilization. Picking on bio-fuels because they can't be the whole solution doesn't make sense.

But a knee-jerk defense of bio-fuels doesn't make sense either. The criticism of biofuels surrounds virgin veggie, and the large-scale mono-cropping producers who would have bio-fuel be everything to everybody. Seen from this perspective, I don't feel a personal need to refute those criticisms. It also clarifies my interest in bio-diesel. I wouldn't be excited about doing bio-diesel myself if the waste-stream of used veggie oil was already completely utilized.

Another issue is representation-
I think it is important to realize that the home-schooled grease monkey burning WVO make great publicity for multi-national conglomerates cutting down virgin forests and draining peat. A sad problem. How much does publicity for waste vegetable oil re-use get confused with agri-business push to expand into fuel production?

I think it would be great for the environmentally minded (and re-use focused) bio-fuel users to be able to differentiate themselves from the agri-businesses who are promoting bio-fuels as the next fossil fuels. How would that PR coup be managed though? The small-scale recyclers don't really have the advertising or lobbying budgets...

something to think about.

halloween 07

2007-11-06T16:34:00.001-06:00

Jess and I had a great Halloween this year. We ended up going over the hills to Canyon for a party with some friends. Not only did we have a great time, but we were at the cutest cob house.

I hadn't seen any cob construction before. This one felt like a hobbit grotto (but human sized). Jared does very nice detailed work - stained glass, mosaic, living roof... really cool. Makes you wish you could do it yourself, but I don't think Mariposa has the space for that sort of thing. Maybe if we someday expand into some other yards as well...

Jess and I dressed up, which was also fun. The only problem was that I couldn't fit through any doorways. Sad. Watching the movie, they edit out any points where Daniel San moves through a doorway. Ah, the magic of cinema. While it was very comfortable outdoors, this costume turned out to be rather impractical for party hopping.

I also carved another pumpkin (I haven't done anything with this in a while). I kinda felt like this was a practice pumpkin in a lot of ways. What would it be like going for a more minimalist twist?

Answer: I don't think it worked out too well. I think the level of detail and the complication of the forms on earlier attempts helped the effect become surprising.

Simplifying to this extent made it possible to read the image in a number of ways, and that actually hurt the effect. It also degraded the surprise when the form suddenly became interpretable, and I think that surprise element is really important. When viewed off-angle the form should maintain a high level of abstraction.

Drawings of cubes may be classic optical illusions, but in this case, the viewer's ability to interpret a "normal" cube in multiple formulations (convex, concave, open, closed) in some way over-rides the sense of distorted space and light. There are other problems, too.

Ask yourself, is the top of this cube open? or reflective? To my eye, it could be either. This ambiguity somehow makes the form less interesting. In the end, this carving does not make you reassess what the source of the lighting is. While it's possible that the top of the cube is a solid reflective surface, the prior knowledge that the pumpkin is lit from within actually pushes you to interpret that the top of the cube is open, even though this means that there's a missing line. It ends up looking almost like a paper bag with a candle in the bottom of it. And that's not such a leap to make from a pumpkin with a candle in the bottom of it.

Here's what the pumpkin looks like:

if that doesn't work for you, you can see it on youtube.

kissing alone

2007-10-03T12:31:00.000-05:00

hey there. I changed my address again. I'm now in 828 B 59th St. Oakland, CA 94608. We moved from A to B at the beginning of September. It's slightly larger, more central to the community, and is finished more to our taste. We've been painting and had some construction going on until just recently. We're very close to very happily settled. But that's not what this post is really about.

Sometimes when you leave a place, you leave things behind that you would never know you left. And sometimes those things expose you in a very personal way.

The previous occupants here, in the room where my office now is, left something like that. She was a very nice 14 year old girl at just the age when a lot of teen stuff starts happening. I didn't know her well, just the externals. Her window was always covered with a black cloth, and she started dying her hair black while we were living next door. A lot of this is my imagination, but to me it seemed she was on the cusp of making a decision - to goth or not to goth?

Anyway, when she moved out, at first glance there was nothing left in her room. The thing she left was completely invisible except under specific lighting.

I knew nothing about her except the externals and that she was new to the area - a new kid at school. But then that changed. When I saw these prints, I could identify.

Practice kisses. Suddenly I wanted to listen to New Order. I think that's what I was listening to at the adolescent moment when I was kissing mirrors.

I should really clean this mirror, but somehow I don't want to. I don't want to be the one to erase the record of that age. Even though most of the time it's painfully awkward and it really sucks, it's still a precious time of life.

Sheesh. Fall makes me nostalgic as hell.

one year later, reflecting on ritual

2007-07-09T16:42:00.001-05:00

Coming back from Ben and Julie's wedding in Boston, (a ridiculously short trip), I've found myself considering rituals again. Jess and I got married just over a year ago now, and I still haven't really had a chance to reflect on some of the decisions we made for our "blessed event".

In our own wedding planning, I found that a lot of the ritualized aspects of it made me uncomfortable from the beginning - I wanted to avoid a lot of the traditional aspects as much as possible. I wonder if I was being fair there, or simply reactionary - a knee jerk questioning of the rules. Some of this resistance to ritual/tradition/church ceremony was surely rooted in my social discomfort at church when I was young, but I think there's a lot more to it than that.

Thinking about ritual now, I'm having real difficulty coming up with a ceremony that I was a part of (before my wedding) that held real meaning for me. Baptism/confirmation/various graduations/sing-alongs/camp-rituals/nightly blessings etc. - never really meant too much to me. They even bothered me.

I love shared experiences, and in a lot of ways, I take pains to create those situations, but in some ways I seem to consistently rail against group activities. It feels odd, like I'm having some kind of cognitive dissonance there, so I'd like to figure it out more.

I hear that people like rituals because they offer a way to mark transitions, or because they bring people together, or because they get something out of communing with people in that way - being a part of a larger whole or losing the ego, perhaps?

I'm trying to come up with situations where ritual was good for me in any of these ways, and it's tough. I keep coming back to when my high-school graduation was rained out. Now that was a marker. It was real, it was over, and it was cathartic. When they decided to skip the valedictory speeches in favor of starting to call names immediately, I loved it. In the "E"s when it started really pouring, and everyone started screaming and scattering, I thought, "Now this is really the end of this era." That was a time when I really appreciated rain as a cultural symbol. the symbols of mortarboard, gown, diploma, etc. were still silly though.

The other thing I can really appreciate about ritual is the "it brings people together" bit. For me, that was a big part of wanting a wedding. I did want a marker too, a way to communicate to my community that I was in a different stage in my life. But mostly the wedding was an excuse to have a big party where lots of my friends could meet each other, and meet Jessica. For that, it worked really well. Certain rituals do have a way of getting people to turn out.

At my Uncle Dennis' funeral last month, I really did appreciate that element. It was a good time for us to be together as a family - to have that social time together. But the ceremonial aspects of it were totally unnecessary for me. My dad's side is Catholic, and once again, I found myself just marvelling at how weird it was. Most of the funeral service was so strange - the priest kept incorrectly referring to Dennis as "Michael" - there was a lot of repetitive call and response, some even stranger readings from the Bible - and I just kept wondering how this was helping. I know my Grandma gets something out of it, but I really struggle to understand why. I think she might like to have that conversation, and I hope we can talk about it some time.

The good part of the funeral, for me, was the remembrances that were a part of the ceremony. The priest forgot that my dad and Uncle James wanted to speak, but once they did, it was good. The rest was just waiting, at best. The personal bits are the best. At Ben and Julie's wedding, the parts that they added to the ceremony were the parts that worked for me. So, yeah, maybe I can be down with ritual, if I view the ritual as a culturally specific blank canvas. Still, if the people holding the ritual didn't break from it at some point... For me that would be like an unpainted canvas, or an empty stage. For me, the viewing before Dennis's funeral was like that. The priest had no contact with Dennis, he had nothing to add but empty motions.

From my own church-going days, I remember that I occasionally enjoyed the reflective sermons of one particular minister, and that 7-10 minutes could have interesting things to think about, but the rest of the hour was usually painfully dull for me. I'm still not won over. There sure is a lot of useless framing most of the time.

Another way I could look at this is to think about how I go about marking special events or turning points. It occurs to me that for a long time, I would change my facial hair when there was a change in my life. Lately I haven't been doing that - there have been significant changes with no impact on my facial hair - but I think us getting a kitten was very much like a marker in our lives.

Enough for now. I hope I come back to this again soon.

mariposa grove

2007-05-26T14:02:00.000-05:00

Jess and I have now resettled in a really great cohousing community called Mariposa Grove. We're still in Oakland, but now we're living with a lot of other people, and we're buying a condo unit. This is great. The community is made of four old (but modified) victorians, and about 20 people live here. The 3 core units house 11 adults, 5 kids. It's interesting to be around kids. I'm enjoying it (they aren't my responsibility).

Also, jess and I made the switch to a car that runs biodiesel after the corolla was totalled, so we've now got one of those 80s era mercedes. We haven't done the conversion to waste veggie oil yet, but biodiesel is working out well so far. The water pump went out last week, but it wasn't too expensive to fix, and we've still got reserves from the insurance pay-off for Sonia (the corolla).

One of the shared perks (besides the chickens) is that there's a common guest room, so if you're in the area, we can put you up on something better than our couch. That's right, your own guest room and bathroom! Just let me know ahead of time, because there's a calendar that I'd have to put you on to reserve the space...

If you'd like to move in, one of the other units is actually opening up in August, and we're holding open houses over the next couple of weeks. Pop on by.

As for working, so far this space seems like it will be pretty good for me. I'm still working on the Vietnam UXO doc, so that's fine.

-Aaron.

Phone for Aatcon

2007-03-20T14:27:00.000-05:00

I have just received the first phone call for Aatcon.

"Hi, may I please speak to Aa... Aatcon Mee... Meeshells?"

I was too stunned to say anything other than, "Aatcon? That person doesn't even exist!" (I now recognize this as arguably a fleshist chauvinist simplification.)

Whoever it was - probably one of his telemarketer buddies - then apologized and hung up.

I think the flat vehemence of my response stunned her. Certainly mine was not the usual response a telemarketer gets. Perhaps she felt she had mispronounced Aatcon's name, and "Aatcon" had taken offense. If only she knew how much deeper it goes.

As I reflected on this brief conversation, I was actually quite impressed with her pronunciation of Aatcon, and then it dawned on me. In our brief conversation, she had helped to solve a long-standing mystery.

The mystery relates to what I had previously regarded as the frequent mispronunciation of my last name, which is "Michels". My family believes this is correctly pronounced very much like "Michael's". I had always thought that the lack of the "a" in the last syllable threw some people off, and they simply went for something different. But now I realize, "Meeshells" is a perfectly legitimate pronunciation of the spelling of my last name, and in some regions of the bureaucratic underworld, it is in fact the preferred pronunciation:

"Meesheels" is Aatcon's preferred pronunciation of his own last name!

All of these years that I felt that telemarketers, phone bankers, and computer generated voices were mispronouncing my name, they may in fact have been mistaking me, briefly, for Aatcon, my second shadow-self in the world of raw information. A monumental discovery!

In retrospect, If I had been clearer headed, I would have held the woman for questioning, but before I had a chance to think, she had disappeared, back into the anonymous phone banks from which she had come.

30

2007-03-19T15:34:00.000-05:00

three decades of fun - but it's time to renew the ol' mortal coil. o yes.

So, I turned 30 a couple weeks ago, and now I'm in the 9th day of a 10 (or 11?) day fast. It just occurred to me that these might be related things. I certainly didn't decide to do the fast because I turned 30. I've been curious for a while, and my neighbor was talking about it, and had this totally kooky book that i read about it. So I thought, "This would be a good time..." I've wondered for a while What it would be like to not eat. Plus I wanted to get rid of my 'toxins'! I mean, who wouldn't?

I'm doing the "Master Cleanse Fast" which means all I consume is water and lemonade with cayenne in it. yum! It's actually been surprisingly easy. I haven't felt starved at all, just conscious of how much of life is devoted to food, and how much I like to cook and eat.

-aaron.

Oh yeah, and my knee doesn't really hurt in the morning anymore. so that MUST be the
'toxins' going away.

who is "Aaron Michels"?

2007-03-19T14:42:00.000-05:00

The other day, I was googling some old friends, to see what their web faces looked like, and then I decided to check my own - look in the google mirror, so to speak.

I did see myself, but I also saw "Aaron Michels" as a chemist, as a leader of college republicans, and as a gay porn star. How varied we are. Interesting.

Another thing I did recently was test the 20 questions AI on my name. Basically, it tries to guess the name you are thinking of by asking you traits of the person with that name. I put in my own name and then tried to answer honestly. Based on many iterations of people doing this, the AI forms a personality profile for that name - something like an "Average Aaron".

They won't tell me what the average Aaron looks like except in contradiction to my own answers.

Apparently, the average Aaron is vain, careless, and sexy. Also skinny, weak, non-athletic, and shorter than me.

The final puzzling bit is that it asked the question "Would you like to be [Aaron]?" I answered "Yes." but apparently the correct answer is "Doubtful". Yikes!

20Q results:

You were thinking of Aaron.
Do they want to be famous? 20Q was taught by other players that the answer is Yes.
Do they make careless errors? You said No, 20Q was taught by other players that the answer is Probably.
Would you go on a date with them? You said Irrelevant, 20Q was taught by other players that the answer is Yes.
Are they active in sports? You said Sometimes, 20Q was taught by other players that the answer is Doubtful.
Are they medium height? You said No, 20Q was taught by other players that the answer is Yes.
Are they strong? You said Sometimes, 20Q was taught by other players that the answer is No.
Are they skinny? You said No, 20Q was taught by other players that the answer is Yes.
Would you like to be them? You said Yes, 20Q was taught by other players that the answer is Doubtful.

Contradictions Detected
The opinions of the 20Q A.I. are its own, and are based on the input of players. 20Q's answers reflect common knowledge. If you feel that 20Q is in error, the only way to correct it is to play again!
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songs that make me cry.

2007-02-10T17:15:00.000-06:00

There are songs that make me cry every time I hear them. Some of them I grow out of to some extent, but others, not so much.

Some of them are clearly sadish songs, but strangely, others are not sad at all and I struggle to explain why they have this impact on me. I have one "song that makes me cry" that is peppy ironic electronica. It's pretty popular, even danceable, and so it tends to come on at times that are inconvenient. When this song comes on as background music in a restaurant or bar I suddenly need to take a break and go for a walk, you know, get some privacy, otherwise I'd have to explain myself. so. yeah. powerful urges. yikes.

I'm tempted to name songs here, but you know, that would be like handing over X-rays of my most private emotional being. It's as if each song is an X-ray from a different angle, and the complete list is a detailed road map of my most vulnerable bits. So. Enough said.

Do you have songs like this?