deathmtn

I had lunch with my friend Richard who was in town today. He now has this really pastoral life in Vermont where he walks around the woods a lot and makes his own furniture! But also does remote open source community management work.

I learned one bummer thing from him and one cool idea.

First, abebooks.com is owned by Amazon. It's this amazing web site where you can get used books for really cheap. I've been really enjoying it. But fuck Amazon. I'm going to have to just check local bookstores.

Second, he has this perspective that your library should mostly be books you haven't read, instead of books that you've read and might read again. That probably creates this really good feeling about having a lot of potential on hand! Space might be an issue, though.

I got some nifty (if possibly flawed) books for cheap at Goodwill, partly informed by this perspective.

This is a good episode of Space Out. (Starts with a bit of silence in both channels, though.)

10-4-4-4-4-3. Lower back twinges that bothered me sporadically this weekend did not appear!

I received some insanely good extended family news. I don't think I can talk about it, but I can say it's nice that the distribution of probability sometimes does work out in a way that people like.

Our apartment is almost clean in time for guests! We did not have high hopes last night.

BELIEVE
AND
ACHIEVE

A dire portend! It is going to snow Sunday.

I did get a workout in today, though. 5-5-6-5-6-7. Slow start, but decent rep total.

As is every second day of a holiday where there's practically nowhere you can go with a kid (though it did not rain this morning, so we got out to the playground), today was tiring, but I made it harder on myself by deciding to fry chicken legs because there were a dozen for $5 at Wegman's.

Here is what's hard about frying chicken:

1. Huge amount of oil spatter, no matter what you do.

2. Hard (for me) to maintain the right oil temperature, even with a cooking thermometer. I looked away for five minutes, and it was smoking.

3. Huge amount of smoke. Whatever "savings" I got from the chicken leg pricing was lost and then some by having to open all the windows in cold weather.

4. You have to wash your hands a dozen times. You're handling raw chicken when washing it. (Unless you do some awkward tong thing.) You're handling it when you dredge it in batter. God help you if your kitchen garbage is full when you throw away the packaging. Now, you have to get it in the garbage bag, then go wash your hands before you take out the garbage so you're not touching all the doorknobs with chicken germ hands.

5. Even if you're not reusing the oil, in order to dump it, you have to get it into some kind of container. That is messy as hell.

6. You have to use a jillion paper towels. Both to pat the chicken parts dry after washing and to soak up the grease after they're done.

7. Jabbing the chicken with the meat thermometer to make sure it's hot enough inside to kill all the germs releases a lot of juices. Also, sometimes you stab all the way through it and don't actually measure it. But the time you get it into the right place, the chicken is overdone.

The reasons this was an especially poor way to direct my cooking energy are: A) Katt doesn't eat meat on the bone and B) the guy is unlikely to like new foods. I hoped that because he likes kalbi, which is meat on the bone, that he'd like the chicken legs. He ate two bites, which was fair.

But yeah, now I gotta eat like eight more overdone fried chicken legs.

Wow. I had no idea about Warith Deen Mohammed.

He became the national leader (Supreme Minister) of the Nation of Islam in 1975 after his father's death.[6] As a result of his personal studies and thinking, he had led the vast majority of the members of the original NOI to mainstream, traditional Sunni Islam by 1978.[7] With this merger, he oversaw the largest mass conversion to Islam in the history of the United States.[8] He rejected the previous deification of Wallace Fard Muhammad, accepted whites as fellow-worshippers, forged closer ties with mainstream Muslim communities, and introduced the Five Pillars of Islam into his group's theology.[3][9]
…
In 1961, on his 28th birthday, Mohammed began a term in federal prison for having refused induction into the United States military. He could have performed community service, but his father pressed him to accept the jail time.[5] He spent most of that time studying the Quran, the main Islamic holy book.[20] He became convinced that the Nation of Islam had to change. In 1963 he was released from prison.[21][22] Close to Malcolm X, who was also questioning the NOI, he found that by this time his viewpoints deviated significantly from those of his father, whom he no longer believed was a prophet.[5][23] Because of this conclusion, he was excommunicated five times, but by 1974, he was returned permanently to NOI.[5]
…
Mohammed's changes reached deep into the philosophy of the movement his father had led for so long. He rejected literal interpretations of his father's theology and Black-separatist views and on the basis of his intensive independent study of Islamic law, history, and theology, he accepted whites as fellow worshipers.[33][34] However, he also encouraged African Americans (Bilalians) to separate themselves from their pasts, in 1976 calling upon them to change their surnames which were often given to their ancestors by slave masters.[12][35] He forged closer ties with mainstream Muslim communities, including Latinos.[36] He also decentralized power. On September 10, 1978 in an address in Atlanta he resigned as Chief Imam and appointed a six-member council to lead the Community.[37][38]

Of course, in a sense, it didn't last. Farrkhan reclaimed the Nation of Islam name. Then again, maybe Mohammed dispersed even more people than the current NOI membership out into something a little less culty.

In lieu of my subway adventures book not getting completed for NaNoGenMo, I made some alternate Bibles.