Blood Sausage

Slop is good food

One time I was on a mission to the Dominican Republic. My companion and I went to visit a recent convert and her mother was in the "kitchen" making blood sausage. This is how it is made. Take a pig's poop chute and everything attached to it and put it in an enormous bowl on the floor. Add some water of questionable potability. Slosh the intestines around in the water for a while in a vain attempt to remove things that are disgusting. Now take the open end of the intestines and place the opening around your mouth. If this is starting to sound revolting to you, just relax, breathe deeply and keep in mind that the end product will be blood sausage. That should keep you going. Now that you have the opening of a pigs intestine wrapped around your lips, inhale through your nose and exhale through your mouth into the intestine in order to inflate it like a balloon. Continue this process for a while. Soon you will have inflated intestines leading from your mouth, to the large bowl on the floor which still has approximately 43 miles of intestines to fill with air (depending on your height). Now, take the blood which came from the pig as it was being slaughtered and which any sane individual would recognize as being worth collecting. Pour this blood into the open end of the intestine which you have now peeled away from your mouth. It will go into the air-filled intestine where it will soon clot. Yes, clot. Tie off the ends of the intestine. Once clotted, you can put your soon to be delicious blood sausage in hot water and boil it. Please, now enjoy your homemade treat. You were following along, right?

I thought it would make a fantastic photograph with me pretending to blow air into a pig intestine, so, with the permission of the woman making the treat, I took the intestine in my hands and brought it near (not touching) my face. (Okay, I accidentally did get a tiny bit on my face.) My companion took the photo and I handed the previously manure filled flesh sack back to its owner. It stunk. It really stunk. Have you been around pigs? If not you have no understanding of the degree to which it stunk. And now it was on my hands. I went to a water source with some soap and I washed my hands. They still stunk. I ended up washing my hands about 8 times. But that stink would not leave my hands for 4 days.

Fame

I don't know how you feel about emoticons. My guess is that you despise them or have no idea what I'm talking about. I realize that there is a strong pre-pubescent stigma associated with emoticons but I know their true history and armed with that knowledge I use them to help communicate. For instance, if I were to mention to you that I had just eaten some guacamole by accident then I would want you to understand that doing so makes me feel slant-mouthed so I would type this.. :/
I can't believe you don't know what emoticons are. OK, I'll tell you, but I feel like I'm tooting my own horn here because if you didn't know, Paul and I invented emoticons. Emoticons are typed characters that represent a face in the attitude of expressing an emotion. Also, the face is turned on its side. Turn your head to the left 90 degrees to read the next few lines:

:) <- happy
:( <- sad
:P <- poking my tongue out at you
:/ <- slant mouthed

There aren't any more than that because think about it. Slant mouth says it all, really. Ok, so you've probably already heard about how Paul and I put a big white letter "Y" on the side of a mountain in Provo when we got confused trying to write "Cool guys" on the mountain. You've also probably heard about how we invented instant messaging. I imagine you've had quite a few moments of smug superiority telling people "I know the guys that invented IM." I don't blame you. Well, since you've never heard of emoticons, I'm guessing you also haven't heard about how they were invented by Paul and me. And since you don't know what they are, you're still probably more pleased with yourself for knowing the inventors of IM (and maybe a little bit as the guys who put the Y up there on that mountain). I'll fill you in. So after we invented IM we were messaging each other and Paul said something that made me smile so I typed back to him "<smile>". That happened several times before I responded, "<smile> is too many characters. I need a shortcut. So from now on, this means <smile> -> :)" He thought the arrow pointing to the smile was part of the smile and for a while there was some miscommunication because he thought the smile looked rather evil. see? >:) <- Evil smile. Once we got that cleared up he really liked the idea and added the frowny face to the collection. Now we could always quickly notify the other how his previous statement made us feel. But then one time he told me he was eating nachos and I couldn't have any. This made me feel sad, but also a little cheeky, so I invented the tongue poking out emoticon and sent it to him. At first he thought it meant that I was drooling over his nachos. Next came slant mouth which we believe is self-evident. So there you have it. The history of emoticons in a nutshell. So the mere fact that sloppy and uneducated children use emoticons fervently should not dissuade you from accepting them for their ability to convey feelings via an emotionally neutral medium like text.

Book Review: Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

Is he very bad? Is he very tough? Is he very formidable? Is he very? No, not very.

When I got this book I felt anticipation to begin reading it because it is long and I tend to like long novels. The paperback is 1152 pages. It was soon after I began reading that I realized the mistake I had made in thinking the length of the book somehow contributed to its enjoyability and value.

Six pages are dedicated to describing the mathematics involved when one of the characters calculates precisely how long he can ride his bicycle before a broken spoke will interfere with a weak link in the bicycle chain. Is that very interesting? Are six full pages required to convey the importance of this issue which is never referenced at any time later in the book?

Ten pages are used when some of the characters succeed in hacking a colleague's laptop and read a document about the victim's passion for women's stockings. Ten pages of the victim describing how important stockings are to his libido. Ten. Again, this distraction is of the utmost unimportance. It is never referenced again.

Mr. Stephenson fills six pages describing a main character's interaction with his favorite food, Cap'n Crunch, and provides arduous detail about the use of ice cold milk in conjunction with the cereal. Six pages.

How interested am I in doing complex math problems in my leisure time? Lots, if Neal Stephenson doesn't miss his guess. There are significant and numerous formulas included throughout the book.

Does this clear some things up for you? Next time you're looking for the better deal between two options at the grocery store, pull this handy formula out. You're welcome.

Summary: Neat things happen to some people in WWII. Alternating chapters describe neat things that happen to the descendants of the WWII characters. It all comes together in the end for a hearty conclusion with RN things happening to the RN people you have come to... uh... distinguish.

But at the end of the day, you can open the back flap of the book and see the author's awesome photograph and realize.