Jumping the shark is an idiom used to describe the moment of downturn for a previously successful enterprise. The phrase was originally used to denote the point in a television program‘s history where the plot spins off into absurd story lines or unlikely characterizations. The expression was popularized in 1985 by Jonathan M. Hein, who would later create the web site jumptheshark.com (which now redirects to TVGuide.com). Hein explained the concept as follows: “It’s a moment. A defining moment when you know that your favorite television program has reached its peak. That instant that you know from now on…it’s all downhill.

This post, I present to you the sinus relief system.

The ad reports that the system “uses the same principles as jala neti … i nwhich a neti pot is used to pour a saline solution through nasal passages.”

So, let me get this straight. Instead of buying a neti pot for about $10-15, and pouring saline solution through my sinuses, I should spend $100 to have an electric doodad do it for me.

In some examples of reality jumping the shark, the object of ridicule actually provides a functional difference, for example, in minutely reduced labor at great expense. In this case, all you’re doing is eliminating the act of tipping the neti pot to drain the saline solution into your nostril. Instead, you’ll have a pump shoot it up there. For $100. $100 to have another thing sitting on your bathroom counter. $100 to have another gadget that’s going to break in a year and end up in a landfill.

The ad reads:

A view from the top.

When you’re striving to reach a goal, it’s always above you. You’re climbing upward and reaching higher. You’re overcoming adversity and winning the race. And when you finally make it to the top, you feel the success—and it feels great.

The analogy of climbing upward for achieving goals strikes me as exactly backward. When I think about my goals, they all involve looking down. In some cases, literally. I’m digging and weeding in the garden. I’m mucking out pig manure and tossing it on the compost. All of these things ground me. They give me a sense of connection with the processes that sustain me.

And what’s the deal with “goals” anyway? I’m not sure I have goals. I have… things I’m doing. I have things I want. It doesn’t feel like I have “goals”. Mostly, I have things that are in front of me, and I do them. When I got my black belt in jiu jitsu, it didn’t feel like I was climbing a mountain with the “goal” of the black belt on top. I just went to class every day because I liked doing it. Somewhere out there was the idea that some day if I kept doing it, I would get a black belt, but mostly, I just focused on what was in front of me. I think that focusing on “goals” would keep me too focused on the future, to the detriment of my experience of the present.

Additionally, what I want in the future is likely to be different than what I think I will want, but setting a “goal” locks in my conception of the future. If I turn out to want something different, I have to give up on my “goal”. I have to be failure just to change my mind.

Look at that guy in the ad. Yay, he climbed the mountain! What is he going to eat now that he’s up there? Who is he going to talk to? Oh, and let’s not even get started on how only one person can be at the peak of the mountain, and everyone else has to be underneath.

All you over-achievers are welcome to enjoy your mountain. I’m going to go get dirty.

We will always burn the man. Burning is a collective experience, shared with and mediated between a community of people that forms around the central act of Burning. Although burning is a collective experience, it is expressed uniquely by each individual. There is no one to whom we can abdicate the responsibility of practicing this ritual, to perform it on our behalf.

We will always burn the man. The act of burning springs from within each of us. The right to burn is not granted to us by anyone else. The capability to burn is ours, although we each express that capability in different ways. There is no one to whom we grant the authority to prevent us from practicing this ritual, in some form or another. Not a board of directors or a planning committee; certainly not Larry Fucking Harvey; and least of all, not the idea of our own lack of ability.

We will always burn the man. In a culture that fears and reviles death, intentional, personal, ritualistic destruction is a powerful spiritual act. We claim destruction as our own right, as free people, not solely to be authorized by the government or some other authority figure. We claim destruction as a natural part of the cycle of life, not something to be feared and reviled.

We will always burn the man. In testament to the truth of these ideas, we offer up that which we value most, knowing that its destruction is inevitable, choosing to be the instrument of that destruction, and secure that we can create something like it again when the need exists.

WE WILL ALWAYS BURN THE MAN.

Fuck this tea.

This tea is pissing on John Lennon’s grave, and the memory of every hippie who stood up to oppose war in the name of capitalism and imperialism. For the record, I have looked for examples that this tea is using the word peace as more than just an advertising slogan. I have looked for works of altruism and activism that they have performed. Nothing. Just perverted quotes about peace from leaders like John Lennon and Martin Luther King. If I believed in sacrilege, this tea would be it.

Peace tea company is whoring out the corpse of the hippie movement, and when you buy and consume peace tea, you are the John.

That idea has been coming to mind as I move forward on the process of selling my townhome in Georgia. I bought the home in 2004, which, if you’ve been paying attention to historical housing prices, just made you cringe. That was, literally, just before the bubble burst. Since the bubble hadn’t popped yet, you could still get an 80/20 mortgage with zero down payment and no PMI, which is exactly how I was able to move from a 2-bedroom rental apartment into an 1800-square-foot townhome, basically at the drop of a hat. One day, I woke up and decided it was time to own instead of rent, and a few months later, I had moved into my new home. Okay, it wasn’t exactly that simple, but closer than you might think.

I paid a total of $167,000 for the home. Within the next few years, I would hear on the news about housing prices tanking, but I didn’t think much about it, because I had no immediate plans to sell. My time horizon for moving was 5-10 years out, and I figured I’d deal with the situation when the time came.

Of course, the housing market didn’t improve. In June of 2009, I moved into a group-living situation with some friends and decided to rent the townhome out. By July of 2010, I had bought a home in Knoxville and relocated entirely. The housing market was a little better in 2010 than they had been in 2009 (at least in part due to the tax credit, which I didn’t know at the time), so I decided not to rent again, but to sell.

Lots of financial advisers would tell me that this is the absolute worst time to sell. The housing market in general is still depressed compared to 2004. There are three to five units for sale on my street, and there have been for the last three years. There have been two sales on my street in that time period, in the range of $140k to $150k. At least one of the units for sale is a foreclosure. Many units are empty, their owners apparently still continuing to pay, since no foreclosure signs have shown up, but it doesn’t bode well for the neighborhood. The conventional advice for this situation is to ride it out and wait for the housing market to rebound.

Rebound to what? Rebound to the point where the home can be sold for at least as much as you paid for it, of course. And that’s where we come to the Myth of Progress. Everything is seen through the lens of profit and loss, except the scale is distorted. Lack of profit counts as a loss and profit is barely seen as breaking even.

Consider this: thanks to a generous contract on a book that I wrote, I was able to dump a bunch of money into the mortgage on the townhome. I put the money into the mortgage, instead of some other investment, at least partly in preparation for this very situation. The principle on the loan is currently about $120k, so theoretically, I could sell the house for as little as $120k, plus my agent’s commission, and walk away clean.

Most people would be horrified at that prospect. If I bought at $167k, sold at $120k, they would count that as a $47,000 loss. The only factor that would come to their mind would be the starting number and the ending number, and the Myth of Progress says that the ending number must be higher than the starting number or you have failed. But here’s how I think of it: if I had continued renting my apartment, I would have paid about $1,000 a month for five years. That’s $60,000 to live in a 2-bedroom apartment. Instead, I paid $47,000, or $783 a month ($885 if you add in the HOA dues) to live in a beautiful townhome, about twice the size of the apartment, that I loved dearly. And that’s not even counting the approximately $5k to $10k in interest that I was able to write off on my taxes! Sounds like a bargain to me.

Of course, the speculators will say that if I hold onto the townhome, the market will eventually recover, and I will be able to sell it for more. By my own logic, selling for $150k might count as a profit, even if it’s numerically a loss. That’s true, but making a profit isn’t my primary goal. I’m not interested in wringing the maximum amount out of every single transaction. I just want to have “enough,” and I think that’s where the Myth of Progress most leads us astray. It makes us view every transaction through the lens of maximalization. The question is always whether you have gotten everything you possibly could, not whether you got “enough” to satisfy yourself.

For me, “breaking even” and walking away from the townhome clean would be “enough,” and any cash I get out on top of that would be “profit.”

I do want to be clear that I’m not bragging or anything like that. I’m not showing off, “hur hur, my metabolism is awesome I can eat whatever I want and not gain weight!” Actually, for many years, my weight hovered around 165-170, pretty much no matter what I did. Once, in a frenzy of effort, I exercised and counted calories to get it down to 155, but… you guessed it… it crept back up to about 165 and stayed there. Until around last October or thereabouts when it went up to around 170-175 and stayed there. So, I have both “failed” at dieting and gained weight before.

So what is my point? If I can go a whole year without counting a single calorie or thinking twice about what goes into my mouth, and at the end be pretty much exactly the same weight that I started out at, what must that say about the power of the metabolic processes that are maintaining my weight? I guarantee you there were days in there where I consumed 4,000 calories. You know, “bought a pint of Ben and Jerry’s then ate the whole thing over pound cake,” kind of days. “Ordered a large pizza then ate all eight slices instead of leaving four for leftovers,” kind of days. Somehow, it all worked out in the end, and I weigh the same as I did a year ago.

The basic premise of dieting is that if you eat fewer calories than your metabolism burns, then you will lose weight. And, strictly speaking, that’s true, but the problem is that it treats the amount your metabolism burns as a fixed number, which it isn’t. Studies have concluded that the body’s metabolism speeds up or slows down in response to increased or decreased calories. The degree to which this happens varies depending on the individual, but in one study, some participants had to consume as much as 10,000 calories a day in order to gain weight, and then quickly lost it without any particular effort once the study ended. These people were certainly outliers, but they were not mutants. Your body and mine probably works the same way, even if the threshold above which our metabolism could not compensate, and we would begin to gain weight, is less than 10,000 calories a day.

If weight gain or loss was as simple as “calories in – base metabolic rate” then the chances of my ending up the same weight after a year of not monitoring my food intake would be nil. Every day for the last year, some part of my biological process has moderated my desire to eat food and my metabolic rate in order to keep my weight where my body “wanted it” to be, without me even being aware of it. Kind of like breathing or blinking my eyes. I don’t think about either of those things very often, but they keep happening. I can take conscious control of them, but it requires a lot of attention and effort, and pretty soon I go back to not thinking about them, which is the way my mind and body normally work.

Counting calories in order to lose weight is like trying to consciously breathe or blink your eyes 20% slower than you normally would. All day. Every day. For the rest of your life. Could you do it? Yes, if you really wanted to. Would you do it? Probably not. You’d be out of breath and dry-eyed all the time, and at some point, you would just say, “fuck it.” And who could blame you? Who wants to be out of breath and dry-eyed all the time? Who wants to be hungry, physically weak, grumpy, and measurably worse at tests of cognition (all effects of dieting) all the time?

The reality is that weight is 70% heritable. That means that weight is more heritable than breast cancer, mental illness, or heart disease. You can do things to influence your probability of getting cancer, mental illness, or heart disease. If you know you are at risk, you can avoid exacerbating factors. But in the end, we all understand that some people are going to get these diseases through no obvious fault of their own. It’s just genetics. This is the same treatment that we should give to weight.

Here is a link to an article with more on this topic.

I pulled all of the potatoes last week. You can see the result above. They’re Russets on the right and Yukon Gold on the left. The Russets were still a bit small, but the plants had mostly succumbed to some form of fungal disease that was causing their leaves to wither and fall off, so I figured better to take what I had now than risk them rotting in the ground later. I don’t think they were getting much bigger, honestly, given how little green there was left on the plants. For perspective, this is from about ten pounds of seed potatoes total, so it’s pretty bounteous. Suffice it to say, we’re eating potatoes every day. Kind of like the salad days of summer, but with simple carbs instead of leafy greens.

I called this post “the end of the bounty,” because even though it’s pretty early in the summer to call the garden quits, I’ve pulled or lost most plants. The squash and melons succumbed to vine borers; the cucumbers to a fungal disease; the tomatoes were determinate and had mostly finished production; or they were cherry tomatoes and were just absolutely taking over everything in a ten-foot radius. Maybe next year, with better management, I’ll keep plants producing until first frost, but as-is, I’m calling this one a win and beginning the process of reclaiming my beds and putting them down, eventually, for the winter.

I’ll close with an adorable picture of Basement Cat.

This is what she does when she wants to be let inside.

Concessions Hawkers

The only low point of the experience was the concessions hawkers who came into the theater before the trailers began and tried to sell us candy and such. It would be one thing if they said, “Hey, if you skipped concessions because of the lines, here’s your chance,” and stopped there, but it really came off as a hard sell. It felt embarrassing for them, and it was awkward for me to have to keep ignoring them, and it really disrupted the “movie bubble” that I like to imagine myself in going into a theater experience.

Recognizing Guns Instantly

No spoilers here, so don’t worry.

In the opening scene of the movie, the main character’s shirt is lifted and it is revealed that he has a pistol stuck in the back waistband of his pants. The image below is from a crappy vid-cam version of the film that I downloaded specifically so I could get a screen-cap of the shot in question, so you can see how much of the gun was revealed. It looks like shit, but you get the idea.

Even from the little bit of the backstrap, beavertail, and slide that was revealed, I instantly recognized it as a Px4, the same gun I have. It’s funny to me how firearms can be extremely distinctive based on very non-specific characteristics. Issa and I have had conversations where I’ll show her, say, a Beretta 92 and a 1911, and she’ll say, “They look the same to me,” and it seems to me like I could tell them apart at 100 yards, in the dark.

Sliencers and Caliber

The Px4 comes in calibers 9mm, .40, and .45. I wasn’t surprised to hear that the firearm used in the movie was .45, because it was suppressed. Here’s why.

The laws of physics apply to bullets the same way they do to anything else. There is a three-way inverse relationship between the speed of the bullet at the muzzle, the weight of the bullet, and the pressure in the chamber and barrel. Larger calibers have more mass, therefore it requires more pressure to drive them to higher speeds, which makes for more volatile, heavier, more expensive guns. Therefore, larger calibers tend to move slower. Interestingly, this does not necessarily mean that they sacrifice impact energy, since kinetic energy equals 1/2 mass times velocity squared and momentum equals mass times volume, some loss of velocity can be made up for by the increased mass. Additionally, larger calibers make bigger holes, even if they’re going slower. In other words, don’t let the fact that a .45 is going slower than a 9mm fool you into thinking there’s anything wrong with the .45.

What does all this have to do with suppressing the sound of a gunshot? A gunshot consists of several different components. The major component is the expansion of hot gasses that follow the bullet out of the muzzle. This is the part that a suppressor takes care of. Most handgun and rifle rounds are also supersonic, however, and for them there is also a miniature sonic boom that contributes a not-insubstantial amount of noise. For example, 9mm pistol rounds have a nominal muzzle velocity of about 1200-1500 f/s. The nominal speed of sound is 1125 f/s.

In this video (embedding disabled, so you’ll have to click through), an AR-15 is fired both with and without a suppressor. The sound that you hear with the suppressor on is the sonic boom caused by the bullet breaking the sound barrier.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvQUhzMHk98&NR=1

If you’re thinking that the suppressed .223 sounds a lot like a .22LR, that’s because a .22LR has such a small amount of powder that its primary sound component is the sonic crack, so a suppressed .223, which is all crack and no boom, sounds pretty much the same.

The sonic crack can be mitigated by simply reducing the amount of powder in the casing to reduce the velocity of the rounds below the speed of sound, but that requires either hand-loading your own cartridges or buying special cartridges intended for use with a suppressor. It’s more common to simply choose a caliber whose nominal velocity is already below the speed of sound. This avoids the potential loss of potency involved with down-loading a caliber designed for higher speed, as well as the potential difficulty involved with using specialized ammunition. With a nominal muzzle velocity of about 800 f/s, .45 is one of the only common handgun calibers that fits that bill.

First cantaloupes.

Pretty much all of the onions from this year. The leeks didn’t do so well. The weeds grew in pretty thick and held moisture near the base of the plants. The leeks mostly rotted away at the base. The onions did the same, but since their greens aren’t really required, the fact that they were mushy to the base wasn’t as big a deal. The bulbs were entirely sound, and I dried them in the sun for a day before putting them in the pantry. They seem fine.

OMG, it happened again. This is the last harvest, from about a week or so ago. It will probably be one of the last big ones. The squash and cucumber have been pulled out, as their production had started to drop (cucumbers) and they had started to succumb to some form of fungus or another. The tomatoes are nearly half eat-up with early blight, and the ones that aren’t are so out of control that they’re overgrowing everything in sight. I’m going to pull them soon too.

Making tomato sauce is my favorite, but drying tomatoes in the oven is the quickest and easiest way to preserve them.

Here, Issa is putting cuts of pork into the freezer, after picking them up from the processor. All of those coolers that you see, and a few more, were full.

The freezer is filling up. This is about half of the meat. In the end, the entire thing was full to the brim. Looks like this is a two-pig freezer!

The whole thing is really packed, emotionally, for me. What we’ve done, Issa and I,  feels like an incredibly meaningful, powerful, and intimate act. It really feels dysfunctional in some way that I’ve gone this far into my life without participating in raising and killing my own meat. I feel like I’ve been missing out on some really fundamental aspect of life, as if at the age of 35, someone had said, “Oh hey, did we forget to tell you where babies come from? Yeah, sex and childbirth and raising kids is pretty awesome. You should try it.” I realize that to people who grew up around livestock, this might sound pretty silly, but if you grew up around jetpacks and hovercars, you probably wouldn’t think much of them either.

Here’s one of the last photos of Yorkie and Hampie alive. They’ve been loaded in the back of the truck and have been secured with straps to prevent them from climbing out, which they proved amply capable of doing. Mental note: pigs are more agile than their weight and stockiness would suggest.

Here’s a post from Issa’s blog from when we first got them.

They were so tiny, but they got big fast.

Here’s a post from Issa from April, when they were a little bigger.

Finally, here’s one of my favorite videos of them, in what I think of as one of their most contented times.