canyonwalker: Hangin' in a hammock (life's a beach)
Italy Travelog #17
Chia, Sardinia - Tuesday, 27 May 2025, 4:30pm

Our flight from Rome to Cagliari this morning was uneventful. And mercifully short, at 1h15m. That's because we were cramped into average-minus economy seats— not that Aeroitalia even has roomier seats, except in the exit rows— and there was no wifi. Sigh. Yet another budget European carrier. At least so far they've only joked about having to pay €5 to use the toilet.

BTW, if you're wondering how to pronounce "Cagliari", it is not Cag-lee-ARR-ee. That's kind of an Anglo pronunciation. In Italian the g is basically silent when paired with an l. Thus the locals all say CAL-yah-ray. It sounds a lot like they're saying Calgary— the city in Alberta, Canada. But fortunately the weather here is better. It's sunny and around 80° today.

The Conrad Chia Sardinia (May 2025)

It was a long ride in a van from the airport down to our hotel. We're not in Cagliari/Calgary but in the small town of Chia, on the southern tip of the island of Sardinia. Parts of the drive were through fairly rural areas. The roads in this spread-out resort hotel are mostly dirt roads.

Once on the property, we checked in and stowed our luggage. Our room wasn't ready yet. We rode in a golf cart over to a hotel restaurant near the beach. There we met several colleagues and joined them for lunch. And to put our food on my sales VP's tab. 😅 Not that the company isn't paying for it anyway; this is Club.

Private patio at the Conrad Chia Sardinia (May 2025)

We drew out lunch waiting for a text from the front desk that our room would be ready. Actually pretty much all of my colleagues were waiting for the same. Around 4pm I gave up because I felt like I was about to fall asleep and rode a golf cart back to the front. Our room was ready; they just hadn't texted us. 😒

The room is large, reasonably comfortable, but also kind of bland. The one interesting feature it does have is a large, private patio (see above). We're on the first floor, though, which kind of means no view.

Ocean view? Well... (May 2025)

I lifted my camera up over my head to look over the bushes around our patio. Yeah, we can kinda see the ocean from here. But this is not what I think of when I think "beach resort". I feel like my company either got rooked on picking this location... or cheaped out. I'm already reconsidering my choice to stay an extra day here at my own expense. It's not worth the nightly rate for this. 😔

"DFC"

Mar. 5th, 2025 02:27 pm
canyonwalker: Uh-oh, physics (Wile E. Coyote)
I don't care. I don't fucking care.

I say each of those two sentences a lot. I say them so much I created an abbreviation, DFC. Now I say "DFC" a lot. It's faster— 25% to 40% off syllables!— so it saves time. 😅

If you were in a room with me you might hear me muttering "DFC" under my breath a lot. I say it when I'm reading deleting work emails. I say it when I'm reading Slack messages. But it's not just at work; I also mutter DFC when reading deleting personal emails. Like, just a moment ago I had 12 unread messages in my personal email account. I deleted 11 as I skimmed through them. I think I said "DFC" twice. I mean, I could have said it 11 times. Sometimes I do that; saying "DFC" every time I press the delete key, like taking a verbal victory lap, but today it just seemed like overkill.

DFC. Use it. Say It. Be it. And enjoy clearing away the clutter.

canyonwalker: Sullivan, a male golden eagle at UC Davis Raptor Center (Golden Eagle)
Recently Hawk and I both encountered the term Altruistic Narcissist. I'd seen it in a new article I'd skimmed this week; she'd seen it in a social media forum she follows about dealing with difficult people. When I saw it I immediately thought, "OMG, that totally describes one of Hawk's relatives who passed away a few years ago." Hawk agreed on that, though her first thought about the term when she saw it was a difficult person she has to work with in a professional context.

I don't remember what article I saw the term in, but the best one I found in doing a search today is this page about Altruistic Narcissists at MentalHealth.com. The simple layperson's definition I'd give is:

An Altruistic Narcissist is a person who appears friendly, charming, and charitable in public but does so primarily for admiration and rewards, then turns around and is abusive to their family at home.


Curiously that last phrase in the definition, and is abusive to their family at home, appeared in every source I checked today as a classic marker of the type. And it's also what made the relative I'm thinking of such a frustrating riddle to figure out at the time. If only we'd known this term it would've made sense in two seconds!

This relative was like a woman of two personalities. To her family she was a monster. She'd been emotionally abusive to her kids when they were young, distanced herself from them as they became adults, and treated them as house-slaves when they rallied around her to take care of her in ill health toward the end of her life. Even when they were helping bathe, dress, and eat, she had nothing but nasty things to say to them. Nothing they did was ever good enough. (Personally I would tell a parent who abused me all my life she could die rotting in a gutter for all I care, but not everyone shares my values.)

To friends in the community, though, this woman was a saint. She was active in a support group for people with a specific type of cancer. With these people she shared links to information, personal stories of her struggles and victories, and gave them a shoulder to cry on. They loved her. She was like an angel to them.

It's common for altruistic narcissists, also called charitable narcissists or benevolent narcissists in different texts, to act as givers, martyrs, or heroes... in visibly public situations. They're not motivated by actually helping others, though. They thrive on the positive attention they get for being seen as do-gooders. They enjoy the praise, the admiration, or just their own sense of self satisfaction. They may also use their good deeds as a form of manipulation. "I did this nice thing for you, now you need to do this for me." If they don't get enough praise, or if the value of their actions is questioned, or if the return favor they expect is refused, they'll react angrily. That's a classic narcissist tell.
canyonwalker: wiseguy (Default)
Ever since my company made cuts and restructuring in parts of the sales and customer service organization last week Tuesday the situation has been getting worse day by day. I already gave up trying to call it worse, worse-er, worse-er-er and switched to mathematical notation like worse-(er)5 yesterday. A new day today brings yet-another increase in the exponent; i.e., a new, higher degree of worse.

Today's new degree of worse-ification comes in the form of something I heard yesterday but considered a rumor at the time now being confirmed as true. Yesterday when I was discussing problems in company strategy and execution with "Ike", a former a colleague who coincidentally quit just ahead of the staff cuts, he said, "I hear that John and Liz are leaving the company." I mentally filed it as rumor because I'd heard no official news of imminent departures and hadn't yet heard it unofficially from anyone else.

"John" is a manager within my organization, a peer of my boss; "Liz" is a VP in marketing. The news that either of them might be leaving is disappointing, as both are high performers in their jobs. Liz is the most engaged and industry savvy marketing leader we've had in years. John is relatively new as a manager but has really stepped up to lead not just his team of people but drive drive side projects that benefit everyone in the sales engineering function.

Well, today I saw confirmation that John is leaving. It was mentioned in an anonymous comment at the very end of a department-wide meeting. I haven't gotten confirmation yet of Liz resigning, though the fact that Ike was right about John makes it more likely he's right about Liz, too. Update: I got confirmation of Liz's departure a few days later.

Losing people like John and Liz is an example of brightsizing I first wrote about a few days ago. Simply put, brightsizing is when smart, successful people quit in a context of job cuts or reorganizations. When a company makes cuts it usually targets low performers termination. But when people subsequently quit because they no longer believe in or trust leadership, it's often the high performers, the best and the brightest, who leave first. That's why it's called bright-sizing.

High performers tend to leave quickly because they've got the strongest résumés and thus the greatest ability to get hired into a great new job right away. And as high performers they want to work in equally high-performing organizations. They're not going to squander their careers under executive leaders who demonstrate poorly thought-out strategy, unprofessional communication, and a growing record of insufficient results.

Brightsizing is a double-whammy for those of us who'd like to see it through. Not only is their departure another no-confidence vote in the leadership, the loss of high performers makes getting our job done well with who's left much harder.
canyonwalker: coronavirus (coronavirus)
The shit start to the new year still isn't over. While I'm mostly okay and have been since Sunday/Monday, Hawk still has what her doctor diagnosed as Traveler's Diarrhea. Apparently that's the modern, culturally sensitive term for Montezuma's Revenge. Curiously, I read a year or two ago that Montezuma's Revenge supposedly isn't't even medically a thing, that it's just a fabrication of racist, mid-20th century beliefs. Ooops, that was political correctness run amok.

Anyway, in addition to having the symptom that's right in the name Traveler's Diarrhea, Hawk has bad stomach cramping after eating almost anything. So she's limiting herself to a diet of bland foods in very small portions. She's also had fatigue and difficulty focusing. I didn't have any of the cramping last week, and I got over the diarrhea and fatigue after 4-5 days— which is normal for how most people handle the infection, from what I've read on clinical sites.

While I'm glad I'm over that illness already I'm not back to 100% yet. I'm still dealing with a lingering cough I've had since early November. No, it's not long Covid... I've had it since before I got Covid from a conference in December!


canyonwalker: wiseguy (Default)
Several weeks ago a friend of mine used the phrase, "The enshittification of everything" in conversation. It rattled around in my head for a few days, definitely striking a chord. We'd been grousing to each other about the decline in various services, and the phrase was a deliciously colorful way to capture the growing frustration that we can't have nice things, anymore. Also, I thought I'd heard it somewhere else before, but I wasn't sure where. So after a few days I looked it up online to see where else I might have heard it.

It turns out "enshittification" is a relatively new term. It was coined in a November 2022 blog by writer Cory Doctorow. (Wikipedia article on enshittification.) As you might parse from the roots of the word itself:

en•shit•ti•fi•ca•tion, n: a process by which something becomes shitty, or shittier. {my own definition}

But there's more to it than just the simple linguistic parsing of the word. And it's just not a general frustration with things getting worse in recent years, like what's happened to almost everything between inflation and shrinkflation. Doctorow coined enshittification in a specific context talking about how online platforms, particularly social media but also commerce and search, deteriorate in quality. More specifically, Doctorow described 3 stages these platforms go through as a function of their business model. I summarize it like this:


  • First, the platform delivers great value to its users. This means running the business at a loss but it builds a strong user base and locks users in via the network effect.

  • Second, the platform abuses users as it shifts to delivering value to its business customers. This builds a base of paying customers who get locked in because that's where the audiences are, and gets the platform on track toward profitability.

  • Third, the platform abuses its business customers to take more profit for itself and its shareholders. After too much of this, users and advertisers will start to peel away because they feel the frustration just isn't worth the lock-in. The presence of a compelling competitor accelerates this and hastens the platform's demise; giant companies erecting legal barriers to competition slows it.

Doctorow's blog was republished in Locus in January 2023 and expanded and republished in Wired in January 2023. In February 2024 he published a further expansion in an op-ed in the Financial Times. The term enshittification itself was chosen by the American Dialect Society as its 2023 Word of the Year.

canyonwalker: wiseguy (Default)
By now I probably don't need to define the term shrinkflation— because you've probably already noticed it. It's a combination of the words shrinking and inflation, and it refers to when manufacturers shrink the size of a product instead of raising its price (inflation). Though lately it seems they've been doing both at the same time often enough. 😡

One bit of shrinkflation has hit the crapper. I noticed when I bought a package of toilet tissue several weeks ago that the package is smaller. By how much, numerically, I couldn't tell you. I haven't memorized the number of square feet per roll. But I do know how big a package of 6 or 12 rolls is, and the packages have definitely gotten smaller.

I wasn't sure what exactly what the difference was until I opened a package and hung a roll. Then I noticed. The new rolls are narrower. Here's the new roll in the package I just opened placed side by side with the spindle of an old roll I just finished off:

Shrinkflation hits the crapper (May 2024)

Yeah, the new roll is smaller by about 15%.

And the price went up by about 20%.

Fuck inflation and shrinkflation.

canyonwalker: My other car is a pair of hiking boots (in beauty I walk)
Australia Travelog #41
Leura, NSW - Sat, 30 Dec 2023, 5:30pm

After lunch today— a gas station lunch with not-a-gas station views— we headed back through downtown Katoomba for a bit of shopping then back out to the trail for Katoomba Falls. Parking near the trailhead at 3:30pm was way tighter than this morning at 9am. Like, there was a park with 100-ish spaces across the street, and it was overflowing. Versus this morning, when we easily parked on the street right in front of the trail. Anyway, we lucked in to a parking spot near the trail, walked down past Reid's Plateau and Witches Leap, and into new territory.

Since I'm still walking on a sprained ankle— and frankly walking way too much on it— I decided hiking to the bottom of Katoomba Falls (and up again) was off the menu. Instead there was a great-looking viewpoint, the Underfalls Walk, than involved maybe one-third the ascent and descent. We started down steep stairs toward it and... oops, it was closed. D'oh!

Katoomba Falls seen from Queen Victoria Point (Dec 2023)

Instead we continued a bit further down the main trail to Queen Victoria Lookout. From there we enjoyed a view of the full falls, both the upper tier and lower tier. It was a distance view, though. The Underfalls Trail would've lead us to a spot right at the foot of the upper falls.

On the way back up we passed some hikers coming out out the closed Underfalls trail. I asked if there was trail damage, as the sign on the barricades blocking the trail entrance indicated. "Nope," they basically answered. I asked Hawk to accompany me on the trail, but she was too law-abiding to go and I was too injured to want to try it on my own.

After we ascended back to the canyon rim we looped around to Katoomba Cascades.

Katoomba Cascades (Dec 2023)

Here were some much smaller falls, maybe 30' tall in total, with lots of people wading in the shallow pools at the bottom. A sign here also explained that Katoomba, originally spelled Kadumba, is an aboriginal place name meaning "Gully".

Katoomba Cascades (Dec 2023)

Welcome to the Gully!

canyonwalker: Malign spirits in TV attempt to kill viewer (tv)
Recently I read a Buzzfeed listicle* about things people born since the 1980s won't remember. A few of the entries from the Reddit thread they scraped for the listicle ("listicle" is a portmanteau of list and article; it's a lazy writer's way of producing content) compared how watching TV used to be way different than it is today. I agree! I'm old enough to remember all the differences Buzzf— I mean Redditors— described, and then some. Here are Five Things:

1) Black & White TV. The first TV my parents had, or at least the one they had from when I was old enough to remember, at age 3 or 4, was a black-and-white set. It also wasn't terribly big, even by the time's standards. I think it was a 16" diagonal tube, but it could have been as small as 13". BTW, this was not back in the days when all TVs were B W and tiny. My grandparents had a set that already looked ancient at the time, a TV in a big wooden console, that was larger and color. I think the issue was my parents just didn't watch a lot of TV so didn't value spending money on anything more than the cheapest possible set.

2) The Time Before Cable: So Few Channels. Before cable there were, like, 5 channels. We got the three major commercial networks (ABC, CBS, NBC), the city's PBS affiliate, and one local station. But actually we got two copies each of ABC, CBS, and NBC: our city's affiliates plus the affiliates from another city 80 miles away. We got those through this thing called Community Access TV, or CATV. You might've seen the CATV acronym from years ago and thought it meant "CAble TV". Not quite. It did involve a physical cable... but it was a cable network in our town that was connected to basically a big, shared antenna at the center of town so people didn't have to climb up on the roofs of their houses to strap individual antennas to their chimneys. (Note: years later so many people thought "CATV" meant CAble TV that cable equipment manufacturers appropriated the misunderstood acronym and it became a de facto standard.)

3) Early Cable: A Few Channels More. Having community access TV in our town made it easier to get real cable TV as the industry matured. Basically the CATV company became a Cable TV company, and we got more channels. Though only a few at first. Mostly they were big stations from more distant cities, like Atlanta's WTBS and Chicago's WGN, but there was also Nickelodeon— which was a big gain for us as kids. Though early on Nickelodeon was mostly reruns of American TV staples from 25 years earlier like Leave it to Beaver and Lassie, plus some Canadian and European imports that were kind of hit-or-miss.

4) Free Pay Channels— Briefly. One bonus, for a short while, was that you could watch premium channels like HBO for free— if you had the right TV. It depended on how the TV's tuner was built. Older TVs with chunky analog knobs could only to tune in to channels 2-13 in the VHF range. If they had a knob for higher number channels they shifted to the UHF range. With cable everything was transmitted win VHF range, with channels up into the 30s, 40s, and beyond. Newer TVs at the time with fully electronic tuning controls could select those channels. The cable company glommed on to that after a few years and killed it by scrambling the pay channels so you could only watch them with a descrambler box they provided when you subscribed. Though that led to the brief phenomenon of teens and tweens watching scrambled porn channels hoping to catch a brief glimpse of wavy boobs.

5) Be There or Miss It. The way most of us watch TV is so fundamentally different today from the 1980s. Nowadays with streaming TV we decide when we want to watch TV and pick something from a vast library of available content. In the long long ago there was no choosing your own schedule. If you wanted to watch show "X" you had to be watching when it aired. Like, if it was on Thursday at 8pm, you didn't get to watch it Saturday afternoon or binge-watch 3 episodes on Thursday 2 weeks later. You sat in front of your TV Thursday at 8 or you missed it. Good luck catching it on reruns... those could be months later, and often were shown out of order. VCRs became widely available in the 1980s and changed this equation somewhat, but IMO the quality of recordings and the ease of programming VCRs didn't reach a level of making them practical for routine viewing until around 1995.
canyonwalker: WTF? (wtf?)
Australia Travelog #35
Leura, NSW - Sat, 30 Dec 2023, 9am

The rental car we've been driving in Australia the past few days has a few frustrating characteristics. One of them is the whole stereo/navigation/Apple CarPlay system. After working for the first few minutes we were in the car on Wednesday it went on the fritz and wouldn't connect either of our iPhones for the next 45 minutes or so. Then the whole system became unresponsive... like even adjustments to the radio volume via knobs on the dashboard wouldn't work... until it rebooted itself. Thankfully that problem hasn't reappeared. But it took us until yesterday to get turn-by-turn directions from our phones working through the car's audio system.

As soon as we got spoken turn-by-turn directions playing through the car's stereo, another weird thing showed up.

"SCHOOLS OVERHEAD," a male voice boomed as we were driving through town.

What? we wondered. What kind of schools are overhead? Then it came again and again.

After the warning played several times we recognized that the synthetic voice wasn't actually saying "Schools overhead"; it was more like it was saying, "Schoolz Ohnahead". Ahh, "School zone ahead"... but with poor elocution.

Unfortunately we can't turn off Schoolzie McOneahead's annoying voice without disabling the audio for our own turn-by-turn directions. 🤦

canyonwalker: Uh-oh, physics (Wile E. Coyote)
Vegas Travelog #5
Hilton Resorts World, Las Vegas - Wed, 29 Nov 2023. 3pm.

I wrote yesterday about my room on the 54th floor at the Resorts World casino. There's something that's been bothering my engineer/architect-fu all week, though. It's not actually the 54th floor. Sure, the room numbers all start with "54" and the button in the elevator says "54", but in truth it's 10 floors short of that. How? There are no floors 40-49.

There are no buttons for 40-49 in the elevator. None of the three banks of elevators goes to 40-49. And when the elevator's floor indicator goes from 39 to 50 on the way up, and 50 to 39 on the way down, it's an immediate transition. There's no pause like it's bypassing 10 secret levels. Those levels just don't exist.

Why no floors 40-49? My best hypothesis is that it's because 4 is considered a very unlucky number in Chinese. The Chinese word for "4" is a near homophone for "death" (they have the same sound but different tonality). The gambling company behind Resorts World is based in Malaysia and Singapore. When I've traveled in Greater China I've observed that buildings frequently don't have floors 4, 14, 28, etc. I don't think I saw an elevator with all of 40-49 missing... though the few times I visited a building at least that tall I didn't look too carefully at the elevator keypads.

canyonwalker: wiseguy (Default)
We're several days into what I cheekily call Daylight Squandering Time. Y'know, the opposite of Daylight Saving Time? 😅 Technically the name is standard time or normal time, but technically those are also misnomers. This timing is used 5 months of the year, versus Daylight Saving Time's 7 months, so it's not really a standard or normal. Anyway, I didn't start this post just to bicker about terminology. I started it to reflect on the fact that the clock change back to standard normal used-less-than-half-the-year time has been less bothersome than I expected.

Each year I kind of dread "falling back" an hour because it puts sunset around 5pm. It's dark before I finish work for the day. There's no more opportunity to enjoy a bit of natural light for a walk or a drink on the balcony when I'm done working. By 7pm it's so dark out it feels like late night already.

This year the clock change has been... not so bad. Granted, we're only 5 days in to it, but these past 5 days have been less bothersome than I expected. I've I definitely appreciated the positive side of light earlier in the morning. Getting up with my 6:45am alarm is easier now because there's light in the sky. (Sunrise was 6:42am today.) I wake up more naturally instead of wanting to swat the snooze button until 7:30 or later. Meanwhile the downside of darkness coming earlier has been not so bad.

Why has the downside been not so bad? I figure it's a few things.

  • One, when I actually get up at sunrise, the day still feels adequately long. For example, we went on a very enjoyable hike this weekend that was really only possible because we got up early Sunday morning after the clock change overnight.

  • Two, the weather's been good the past week. There has been sun all day. So while the days are getting shorter at least they still feel like daytime. For now.... When our weather shifts into more of a winter pattern with frequent clouds and light rain, maybe as soon as next week, I won't feel such equanimity.

  • Finally, three, I mentally prepared for the shift to earlier, darker evenings. I thought about how I handled long dark nights when I lived at a further north latitude years ago. I've also shifted focus of my free time activities to things that work well indoors rather than relying on outdoors— this past Sunday's hike notwithstanding. Though I hope we can squeeze in a few more outings like that over the next several weeks!


canyonwalker: My other car is a pair of hiking boots (in beauty I walk)
After our treks at Susan Creek Falls and Fall Creek Falls Monday morning, plus over 100 miles of driving, it was getting to be time for lunch. We found a little gas station convenience store perfectly located in Steamboat, about a dozen miles before Toketee Falls, our next hiking spot. While there I learned that I was pronouncing Toketee wrong. It's not "toe-KEE-tee" but "TOKE-uh-tee". It's a Chinook word meaning pretty or graceful.

So, do the falls live up to the name? It was a short hike, less than 0.5 mile each way, to find out.

Toketee Falls, Umpqua National Forest (Jul 2023)

Pretty? Hell yeah. But graceful? More like thunderous. There is a lot of water coming over these falls. And this is only, like, half the flow (see below).

The falls feature a 30' drop in two steps in the upper part of the gorge then a drop of 80' into the wide pool at the bottom. The water cuts through a chasm in columnar basalt rock. We saw some of that over at Fall Creek Canyon, too.

I mentioned that this is only half the flow. Where's the other half? Would you believe... an unintentional carwash?



At the trailhead parking area there is a huge diversion pipe. It's 12' diameter (in my voice-over narration I estimated 10') and made of wood. It's got a lot of leaks going. People were taking turns driving through the sprays as a free carwash.

This pipe is a penstock, diverting water from Toketee Lake just upstream to a hydroelectric power plant further downstream. Only a 1,500' length of the wooden pipe, built in 1949, remains. The rest has been replaced with a concrete tube.

canyonwalker: wiseguy (Default)
Yesterday in a blog about the trials and tribulations of buying a mattress I recounted my frustration with a sales person who starting negging us. Folks who've been on the dating scene (or have read about it) anytime in the past 10 years know what negging is. But what about people who work in sales? In sales there is a useful technique called negative selling. It's very different from negging, though.

Negging, defined

Just a quick definition to make sure we're not talking past each other. Negging is a term coined by pickup artists (usually men) for using backhanded compliments as a form of emotional manipulation. A classic negging line would be, "Wow, you're way more interesting than I expected when I first saw you." There's clearly an insult here: they look like a dull person. The negger is combining an insult with a flirtatious remark to undermine the other person's confidence and lure them into seeking his approval.

Negative Selling, or "Unselling"

Most of the time selling techniques are what you'd call positive, or constructive. As a salesperson you're asking questions to understand your prospective customer's needs and you're explaining capabilities in your product and how they help solve those needs. Switching between positive and negative techniquesSometimes, though, the positive-constructive approach just isn't working. Your prospect isn't giving up much in the way of realistic needs and they're shooting down every value you're presenting. They may also be carping (repeatedly) about things like, "I don't get why it's so expensive." At that point you might try negative selling, or unselling.

With the technique of negative selling you agree with the customer's negative remarks. An example I might use in enterprise software sales is, "A lot of organizations buy this product for its security features, to prevent software supply chain intrusions. If security's not that important to your organization, this product might not be the right fit."

Unlike with negging, the purpose here isn't emotional manipulation. The purpose here is to qualify in or qualify out the prospect. I.e., figure out whether or not this prospect is worth continuing with. Many prospects are not! As a sales professional it's critical to understand where (and with whom) to spend your time and effort.

Where the mattress seller messed up

The mattress salesguy messed up in two ways. First, he made his negatives personalized to us, not the situation. That's a key difference between negging, in the slimy pickup artist sense, and negative selling in business. Second, his attempt at negative selling was mis-timed. We weren't dismissing his value-selling or carping about things beyond his control; we were still asking questions. When your sales prospect is still asking legit questions you are totally in positive-constructive selling still. Switching to negative selling prematurely is a power move that shuts down the prospect's questions and runs a big risk of pissing them off.

We were pissed off and left.

canyonwalker: coronavirus (coronavirus)
In a recent blog I mentioned how I've never had Covid. While almost everyone I know has had it already, and many have had it twice, I've never even had it once. I'm like a unicorn.

That would be a nice term for people like me— "unicorns"— but alas that's not what the media are calling us. Months ago it was "Covid virgins", aligning us with the negative social stigma of things like "The 40 year old virgin". Then "Covid dodgers", aligning us with the negative social stigma of draft dodgers[1]. The latest term, which I saw while researching how many people have never had Covid, is "Novids". Novids.... Hey, at least that doesn't sound like stigma!

By the way, the question I was researching, How many people haven't had Covid, is not answered by the media or the scientific establishment anymore. In articles from a year ago there are estimates like "fewer than 50%". In the past few months all the articles are tut-tutting pieces like, "So you think you've never had Covid? Think again, you probably have, hahaha!"

Fuck their snotty pandering to the lowest common denominator. I'm a Novid and proud.

_____
[1] Yes, I'm aware there are arguments to be made why each of these things are/were actually good. The point is, the popular meaning of them is bad. They are insults.

canyonwalker: I see dumb people (i see dumb people)
A week ago I wrote What is "Woke"? Ask an Idiot! about a conservative author/speaker who, in moment that went viral, completely choked when a streaming interviewer asked her to define the term, woke. My use of the label "idiot" was ironic. The woman interviewed, Bethany Mandel, is coauthor of a 2022 book all about woke-ism and its supposed perils. She is also a frequent guest speaker on conservative programs and at conservative events, where she is invited specifically to talk about the subject. It would seem that far from being a (literal) idiot she should be among the world's experts on what "woke" is, right?

Here's the rub: She didn't stumble defining "woke" because she doesn't know. She stumbled defining "woke" because she does know... and she also knows that actually defining would make a lot of people go, "Wait, what's so wrong with that? Being woke sounds like a good idea!"

Indeed conservative media figures all united on a common message by the second day after Mandel's viral choke. Defining "woke" is not possible, they argued. It's a feeling, a mindset, they continued. ...Ooookay, well feelings and mindsets can actually be described. For example, I can define "white nationalism" is and how it describes them.... and I'm not even a book author and frequent public speaker on the topic!

Asking us to define "woke" is a trap, cooked up by the Left, the conservatives contended.

You know what? They're damn right it's a trap. It's a trap to expose their hatred, lies, and misrepresentation.

The truth is conservatives just want buzzwords they can repeat to keep their audiences angry. Angry about what? It almost doesn't matter. In fact, they're deliberately vague. Psychology shows that it's easier for people to stay riled up when they use their imaginations to fill in the specifics of what they're so angry about. Basically everyone's got their own personal boogeymen. Keeping it vague also makes it hard to for opponents to respond. Make a specific counterargument, and the conservatives dodge and say, "It's not about that, you clearly don't understand it!" Yes, that bullshit is bad-faith arguing. Welcome to modern conservative politics.

canyonwalker: I see dumb people (i see dumb people)
Several days ago I wrote about the intellectual bankruptcy of conservatives blaming the failure of banks like SVB on them being too "woke". So what is "woke"? you might ask. The term has actually been bandied about quite a bit on the political right. The recent failure of a few banks was hardly the first time conservative political leaders and pundits have used it. They've actually been railing against "woke" this and "woke" that steadily for two years. It's pretty clear it's something conservative leaders want their followers to hate, but what is it?

Briahna Joy Gray, a streaming interviewer with news outlet The Hill, popped that question to conservative author Bethany Mandel on her streaming show. In a moment that went viral Mandel stumbled over the definition. Watch the first 1:45 of this video retrospective by Gray, or watch the whole thing for greater context:



Ironically Mandel herself says, "This is going to be one of those moments that goes viral," as she gets stumped trying to define the term.

Note, this was not "gotcha" journalism. This was not a journalist ambushing a minor politician with a question about, say, issues causing political unrest in a tiny nation 10,000 miles away. Mandel co-authored the 2023 book, "Stolen Youth: How Radicals Are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation". It's all about the alleged sinister perils of woke-ism. In that book Mandel wrote an entire chapter defining what "woke" is. She is clearly an expert on the topic. Yet when asked to give a concise definition she stumbles and says it's not possible.

BTW, after Mandel's inability to define "woke", a term she co-wrote an entire book about and speaks about frequently in interviews with sycophantic media, went viral she posted multiple times rejecting the question as completely unreasonable and basically had a meltdown about The Left was "attacking" her.

So, what is "woke"? I'll act like I am getting interviewed and offer an extemporaneous answer— not researched, not checked against a dictionary, not even wordsmithed. This is basically off the top of my head:

Woke, adj.: a state of awareness that centuries of systemic oppression against minorities create inequalities that persist today and must be addressed to create a fair society.

See? That wasn't so hard.

Again, I wrote this in one pass, no editing, no research, not even consulting a dictionary. How did I do? Followup coming soon; share your thoughts now in the comments.



canyonwalker: Message in a bottle (blogging)
North Las Vegas Epilog
Fri, 10 Mar 2023, 11pm

I've finally caught up on my blogging about our North Las Vegas trip. I posted blog #17 last night. With that, along with the (now re-numbered) blog #18 I posted 18 days ago. Let this then be my epilog blog— or epiblog 😅— to stitch the pieces together.

Yeah, it took my a while to catch up on this trip. It took longer than I thought; I thought I'd be done in a week. Though 18 days late is hardly the worst. There are trips from years ago I've meant to write about but never got around to.

As always the reason for the blog backlog was the sheer number of things I wanted to write about. Remember, this trip was just over 72 hours long. And I wrote 18 blogs, most of them with pictures or video (or both). That's one blog every 4 hours. And that includes the hours I was asleep! The days are just packed.



canyonwalker: A toast with 2 glasses of beer. Cheers! (beer tasting)
How's my 2022 Beer Tasting project going?, you might wonder. Especially now that it's 2023. Well, almost a year after I started it (Mar 2022), it's still going. It's been going slowly the past few months but might pick up again now after I bought several packs on a beer shopping trip last weekend. I have a few new— or "new" since I last tried them years ago— varieties to try.

One of the new-ish beers I picked up last weekend is North Coast Brewing Company's Blue Star wheat beer.

Taste testing North Coast Brewing's Blue Star wheat beer (Mar 2023)I first encountered this beer at the brewery's tasting room in Fort Bragg, California seven years ago. It was one of the beers in the amazing 14-beer sampler platter I drank.

FWIW they don't offer that gonzo sampler anymore. When I visited again a few years ago their new policy was to limit samples to 4 small glasses at a time. Bummer. 🤷‍♂️

That first time I tried the wheat beer was also the last time I tried it. I remember that it was a fine tasting beer, and great to drink on its own. But once food came— you didn't think I was going to drink 14 different beers without eating food, did you?— the lighter flavored beers like the wheat were overpowered by the flavors of the rich food, while the richer beers shone.

I figured I usually drink beer with a meal and enjoy richer beers anyway, so I didn't buy any of the Blue Star wheat after that sampler. Until now, 7 years later.

What changed? Well, tastes change over time. Appreciation for a category can change, too. I've come to appreciate the category of wheat beer more in the past year since learning about the difference between the classic, German style of wheat beer, weissbier, and the more American style of hefeweizen.

Erdinger Weissbier on a warm afternoon (Jun 2022)Months ago in this tasting project I picked up a four-pack of Erdinger Weißbier on a whim and really enjoyed it. That whim, BTW, was, Hey, this is on a really good sale, I might as well try it! 😅

I'm glad I had that whim because I've enjoyed the Erdinger. I've bought a few more four-packs since then, even when they're not on sale. 🤣 It's a mild, pleasant beer, great for times when I want to drink a quality beer without accompanying food. In particular, as a weissbier rather than a hefeweizen it doesn't have the yeasty character or flavors of clove, banana, and other fruits that American style hefeweizens feature.

The difference, BTW, is right in the names. Weissbier, or weißbier, means "wheat beer" in German. Hefeweizen is "yeast wheat". They're different categories. It's just that in the US they're usually conflated, with yeasty, fruity hefeweizens being called "wheat beer".

Alright, enough with the language lessons. Time for tasting notes!

➢ The Blue Star wheat was great to drink on its own. The character is light, but unlike many "light" beers it's still flavorful. There's no icky aftertaste as with "light" beers, either. Blue Star is enjoyable as an on-its-own sipper.

➢ Next I tried it with dinner. Remember, trying it with a meal is where it came up short last time. This time I was surprised! The Blue Star paired just fine with a takeout pizza I bought.

➢ Finally I tried Blue Star compared to Erdinger Weißbier. Another surprise— I like Blue Star better! The difference is that Erdinger does have slight notes of clove and banana still, like a hefeweizen. I never noticed that before because it's so much cleaner in its flavor than a hefe. But Blue Star wheat beer makes it clear what a clean, wheat beer should be.

North Coast's Blue Star is my new easy-drinking, lighter flavored beer champ!



canyonwalker: Malign spirits in TV attempt to kill viewer (movies)
Last night I watched the movie Sicario. It was released in 2015 and has been on my to-see list since then. ...Not very high on my list, obviously, as it's taken me 7½ years to get to it. 😅 This is a non-spoiler review.

Going in to the movie I expected it to be a shoot-'em-up, cops-and-robbers action flick, drug cartel hit men vs. the DEA or FBI. That's the impression I got from seeing the trailer in theaters 7½ years ago, anyway. That's not what it's about. BTW, I recommend against watching the trailer if you haven't seen the movie yet. Various reviews caution that the trailer gives away all the action scenes. That's because Sicario is not fundamentally an action movie. Yes, there are guns-out action scenes. Violence comes hard and fast. But it comes in discrete pieces. The movie is more of a cloak-and-dagger thriller, where the main character is trying to figure out what's really going on in this murky plot she's been hooked into, and we (the audience) are trying to figure it out along with her. It's also a dark story that conveys grim morals.

Sicario (2015)

Sicario stars Emily Blunt, Josh Brolin, and Benicio Del Toro. Blunt is the aforementioned main character, a young FBI agent who agrees to serve on an inter-agency project after her team discovers the bodies of several dozen victims murdered by a drug cartel. Brolin is the leader of the inter-agency team, and Del Toro is a mysterious operative with a personal stake in the outcome.

Sicario, the film tells us in an overlay at the beginning, is a word that comes from the Latin word sicarius. It was coined 2,000 years ago when insurgents in Judea fought Roman invaders. A sicarius was a hunter who murdered Roman officers. In Spanish sicario means assassin.

The film was directed by Denis Villeneuve with cinematographer Roger Deakins and audio director Jóhann Jóhannsson. I mentioned these three directors because they made the film so much more than just an action flick. Deakins's visuals are beautiful, combining visuals of the desert landscape with helicopter overheads and views through night-vision goggles and infrared cameras in ways that aren't gimmicky. Jóhannsson's orchestration helps set the mood of tension without drawing attention to itself.

The visual work of the movie, and its telling of a story with grim morals, reminded me of the 2000 movie Traffic. That was directed by Steven Soderburgh, though both movies have Benicio Del Toro as one of the leads. Del Toro's characters are not the same person, though it's possible to imagine one is like the other but 15 years later. That's because Del Toro carefully underplays both of them, portraying characters who are surprisingly capable yet believably underestimated by their opponents.

Del Toro's acting in Sicario is better because the character is in some ways more challenging. In Traffic his character was a police officer who wanted to stop chasing drug kingpins and get back to some semblance of normal, watching neighborhood kids play baseball. In Sicario his character burns with an understated intensity because he's resigned himself that there is no other way. Curiously one of the last scenes in the movie is a neighborhood kids' baseball game— I'm not sure to what degree that's an intentional homage— but instead of watching and enjoying the game, Del Toro admonishes one of the other leads, "You should move to a small town where the rule of law still exists. You will not survive here. You are not a wolf. And this is the land of wolves now."

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