embarrassing food revelations

I newly, dearly, and enthusiastically love Soy Vay Teriyaki sauce.

What's embarrassing? Let me put it to you this way... I had never had it before until I bought the first bottle 2-3 weeks ago. I accidentally dropped it on the kitchen floor while unpacking groceries and it made a sticky, goopy mess. But it smelled so good I couldn't help but dab my finger in the broken-glass-strewn puddle and risk my tongue to have a taste. Delicious. So I bought another bottle. But that bottle, every time I take it out of the fridge for potstickers, or just on rice... well, I sneak a little swig of it.

Yes, I've come to terms with the statement: I do shots of teriyaki sauce. I'm not ashamed. I think.

The sweet and salty, with enough chunks of ginger, garlic, sesame to chew a little bit at the end.. This is a sickness, isn't it? I bought my 3rd bottle today. Not because I was out of it, but because was going to be out, and I don't want to not have any when the craving hits me.

The other revelation is about popcorn. I've always wanted a hot air popper, so I finally went out and spent the $22 on one, and now I'm stylin'. The thing is, I always thought "corn is corn". I mean heck, how big of a deal is dried out corn? Well, I have learned that the people I was scoffing at all those years buying fancypants dried corn kernels - well, that's me. I now see how the $1.99 2lb bag of crinkled, ugly kernels is not exactly a bargain. They pop all weird, small, and unsatisfying. When I'm out of this stuff, I'm buying the fancypants stuff.

it'll do for now.

Loyal and devoted readers will remember a certain broken bike from last season. Well, due my lack of disposable income and the simple existence of winter, that bike sat around something fierce. Not being able to put it down, not wanting to spend money to make it healthy. Something to be said for not throwing good money after bad.

But the thing is, it's getting really, really, reallllly pretty out, and the dirt trails have been calling to me somethin' fierce. So I gave in... I've got a crappy wheel that was just laying around, and it works. But the derailleur hanger, that was a different trick. Last weekend, I got by with a little help from a friend. M got a new TIG welder and would let me use it, so I went about fixin' me some bike. I had a loose replaceable derailleur hanger, access to TIG, a burning desire, a steady hand, and intentional ignorance of the possiblity of failure.

Now, former fellow bike mechanics and metallurgy professors of mine will surely be horrified to see that I welded a wrought alloy to a cast alloy. But you know what? It might not be kosher, but I really don't care right now. There is simply so much that is wrong with this bike that it's just time for something new. But I'm still not in a financial comfort zone (at least not for a few months) and so I just want to ride in the meantime. What other compelling reasons are there for the retirement of this bike?

- 125 mm rear axle spacing really limits wheel(hub) and drivetrain options.
- Limping along on a crappy junker rear wheel.
- Hardnose/hardtail (i.e. rigid, non suspension) frame... it's served me well, but the riding out in Arizona on the big rocks has shown me how keeping wheels in contact with the earth can be beneficial to traction... especially in those high-pucker-factor moments when pointed downhill at speed into The Chunky. I do, however, like passing the sissies on the $3000 bikes who marvel that someone can even ride on trails [gasp!] without the cushy boing-boing bikes. So I'll miss that part, surely. Of course, I'll be one of those sissies sometime soon, but only by half.
- Aluminum. I'm done with it. Great to make airplanes out of, I'm sure, but I'm a Clydesdale and honestly, I'm thinking steel. A bike with some chutzpah to it. Not a single-speed noodle-bar freak bike, but not something that's made 3 million at a time in a sweatshop somewhere.

So many things the bike needs, that I'm just not interested in throwing good money after bad:
- New middle chainring. Now that it's not single-speeded anymore, I had to put more chain on, so I put a new chain on, but the worn out ring made such a problem that I had to dig up old worn out chain, and that's what's on there now. Don't get me started that it's a Wipperman spliced with a section of Shimano in it. Yet another kludge-job to limp along on.
- New rubber. Tire sidewalls excessively crackly. But why spend $100 on tires when I'm in the market for a whole new ride?
- Aggravating U-brake setup.
- 7-speed thumbshifters on a banged-up short cage XT derailleur. Not so crisp with the shifting any more.
- I've already blown out 2 freewheels (i.e. broken all the pawls) in the life of this bike, and this one doesn't seem too healthy. But no one makes freewheels anymore, and besides, it's a 125 mm rear, so that's a problem too.

Anyway, why am I complaining? Just ride the fucking thing, I sez to myself.

I'm not ready to stimulate (nay, rub the the nipples of) the economy, but when I am, it's going to be with a bike, not some stupid fucking iPhone. (we'll ignore for the moment that I'm actually shopping for a new phone these days too)

Hardy's "Apology"

I've had it laying about and been meaning to get to it, and tiny little thin wisp of a book (not much more than an essay) called "A Mathematician's Apology" by G.H Hardy. Written 70 years ago, in a British style that sometimes takes my American eyes a second glance to adjust to, there's all sorts of nuggets that I latch onto as an expression of something similar to what I was trying to say, sometime, in some conversation, to someone, at some point or other.

Hardy regards the comparison between the nature of chess (or puzzles) as problems/questions of mathematics, and the proofs of mathematical theorems:

In the first place, the superiority of the mathematical theorems in seriousness is obvious and overwhelming. The chess problem is the product of an ingenious but very limited complex of ideas, which do not differ from one another very fundamentally and have no external repercussions.

This, I like. Specifically, on seriousness. It's one thing to think an idea important, or fundamental to a topic of study. But is it serious? Not how stern it is, nor whether it lacks whimsy, but the scope of "external repercussions".

How art or poetry are patterns, like mathematics, but constructed of colors and words rather than ideas and that it is ideas that have permanence greater than objects or languages or colors or sounds. That a prime number is always a prime number - across generations, eons, cultures, and (at the risk of sounding too poufy) across space and time.

A painting may embody an 'idea', but the idea is usually commonplace and unimportant. In poetry, ideas count for a good deal more; but as Housman insisted, the importance of ideas in poetry is habitually exaggerated: 'I cannot satisfy myself that there are any such things as poetical ideas... Poetry is not the thing said but a way of saying it.'

And as this sudden sleepless morning draws on for me, I leave off with this little bit that I keep touching back to:

There are many highly respectable motives which may lead men [sic] to prosecute research, but three which are much more important than the rest. The first (without which the rest must come to nothing) is intellectual curiosity, desire to know the truth. Then, professional pride, anxiety to be satisfied with one's performance, the shame that overcomes any self-respecting craftsman when his work is unworthy of his talent. Finally, ambition, desire for reputation, and the position, even the power or the money, which it brings. It may be fine to feel, when you have done your work, that you have added to the happiness or alleviated the sufferings of others, but that will not be why you did it.