Toward Camelot by the service road.

This is fucking beautiful, in re. this week's Hugo perfuffle (as distinguished from past Hugo perfuffles like the one with the fascists who thought they were dogs and the one where people were mad that it's cold and rainy in Ireland and they weren't getting any beer. Which family history tells me is sort of the point of Ireland! which is why I've never gone. But I digress.)

I did find it a little weird when the protest organizers kept making sure everyone stayed out of the road in front of the capital steps so that cars could get through...usually we shut that road down for protests, and I honestly thought this would have been a great moment to march out onto Capitol Way and shut down traffic for an hour or two. But it was the kids' protest, so we grownups had best stand where we're told and be supportive.

[Dear Outdoor Products Manufacturer:]

Last week I bought one of your 10L water filters for a trip with my kids and dog up to the [mountains]. We spent five nights out at a camp with no potable water and I was relying on your product to provide us with drinking and cooking water. We were pulling our water from [a really pretty] Lake, which is a very clean high-altitude lake with little sediment, so it should not have been a particularly trying situation for the filter.

While the filter worked reasonably well at first (but was a total pain in the butt to backflow) by the time I ran the last load through it last night, it was taking 1.75 HOURS to filter a bagful of water. I had been running about three bagfuls per day, so with a brand new unit this should have been well within the filter's capacity.

Since I was testing this out for potential use by [my camping group], I am particularly disappointed. While so far as I can tell the filter worked, in that we haven't gotten intestinal parasites, messing around with this thing (which was supposed to be super easy) turned into the biggest gear nuisance all week.

It is possible that this filter works better if one has a large syringe or compatible water bladder to force the backflow process. I had a noncompatible Osprey water bladder and two one-liter Nalgene bottles, and I was more than an hour's drive away from anywhere that could have sold me something like that (and that would have been out of the vet supply section at the local farm store). If you are selling this as a complete backcountry water filtration system and it needs parts that are not included in the box, YOU NEED TO WRITE THAT ON THE BOX IN BIG LETTERS SO WE CAN BUY THOSE PARTS BEFORE WE GO SOMEWHERE REMOTE. Instead you have packaged this item with diagrams where someone is doing all the things I am doing (I read the directions before I left!) and yet unlike the jovial man in your diagrams, I am holding a water filter and a half-full Nalgene bottle above my head with water dripping down my arm (because I am air-gapping the lid of the Nalgene bottle since otherwise I can't get water down the fing water filter tubing) for twenty minutes. While this is a great shoulder workout and sort of tolerable in August, in October it would be pretty dreadful.

Also, the little carabiner you package it with is too small to easily hook both D-rings. I ended up subbing in a better carabiner. You should sell this with a larger carabiner.

Basically, I love the idea of this system (I can hook it into the spout in the top of the two-gallon Rubbermaid cooler and fill that in one go, which is the killer app for [group] camping) and I was looking forward to buying several of them for my [group] to use, but after a week in the woods with this thing, I am reduced to writing super cranky notes to your service department. I want a filter that does what this is designed to do! But right now this filter doesn't do those things and if I can't make it work, given my overall level of outdoors and mechanical competence, your odds of doing someone an actual injury with this piece of equipment are higher than I think you should be comfortable with.

We're serious intellectuals. This is a serious web site.

(No, really, she went to see fucking Jeremy Bentham. I am now dead. Like Jeremy Bentham.)

ETA context for this EXTREMELY long-running internet joke: the 2008 thread where kore and I met, and oursin's recent(ish) update with all the Bentham's Head News you can stand.

It's been a long week -- so long that my normally-insomniac self, given a warm afternoon and nothing much to do, fell asleep over a novel despite the pot of coffee I'd finished an hour before.

Some weekend reading for you:

This article on making do, by which the author means also repairing, captures something I've felt for a long time but never quite had words for:

Worn clothing can be a marker of status in its own right, as it is for The Bonfire of the Vanities’ Sherman McCoy. Tom Wolfe describes the Master of the Universe’s “worn but formidable rubberized British riding mac … after the fashion of the Boston Cracked Shoe look.” (The look references a historical style, among New England patricians, to wear well-cared-for but dramatically aged shoes.) To certain elites, then, making do is familiar as a style if not an ethos. The Official Preppy Handbook advises, “Never replace anything until you have exhausted all possibility of repair, restoration or rehabilitation. No matter what it is, they don’t make it as well as they used to.” The key to a making-do revolution, of course, would be for the style to sweep the country. “I’ve always thought, there may come a point where the way to distinguish yourself and signal status is precisely by getting away from this increasing acceleration of consumption,” Mr. Trentmann says. “To stand out because you drive an old car.”

There are circles I've moved in where we were at that point some years ago.

There's a long background piece in the New Yorker about the shitbag behind the citizenship question on the census and the shitbag things he did to his daughter. To which she has now responded by throwing his life's work to the wolves. It's worth reading but it may frustrate or upset you because, well, shitbag.

Palate cleansers: a photo-essay on this year's Diné pride celebration, and the Portland Cello Project's Radiohead covers album is finally out on digital. You can get a copy from them directly.

All I want is someone who talks about me like Sue Bird talks about Megan Rapinoe.

I mean good grief.

I took my co-worker (the guy I author scientific papers with, our tech wizard, the colleague I would most like not to kill on any given afternoon) out sailing after work tonight. It was his first time sailing, I thought we'd motor out, raise the mainsail, tack back and forth a little, then go home and have some dinner.

Instead! Holy shit!

We motored out...ok...and got out away from the marina...and went to put up the sail, and whoops, jibed a couple of times. Not optimal. And the boat felt weird. I looked over and he'd pulled the gooseneck out of the mast, so the boom was floating, which prevented me from using it to control the sail (kind of a problem).

No big deal, I say, I'll turn her into the wind, everything will loosen up, you can get that set back on in there and we'll be on our way, fun will be had.

Well no. Because the boat was REALLY not handling right.

And that's when I looked down and realized that THE BOTTOM HALF OF THE RUDDER HAD SHEARED OFF.

This is essentially the sailboat equivalent of, idk, you're driving along in your car and the steering wheel comes off in your hand. BUCKLE UP IT'S NOT A RELAXING AFTER-WORK OUTING ANY MORE.

I had the outboard idling away, and I can kinda sorta navigate with that. Kinda! And then the wind picked up. And then it became clear I was absolutely in no way going to get back into our slip in the marina, because the marina we're at is pretty snug to get in and out of, and it's a bit of a test for me under good conditions. Which these are not.

Meanwhile my colleague -- yes, the colleague who has never sailed before -- is trying to strike the mainsail, because the tone with which I have said, "Oh, shit, that's really quite bad. Yeah, I'm going to need you to get as much of that as possible stowed like, right now, because...shit. Okay. Okay, we're going to figure this out," has convinced him that alarming things are taking place.

At about this point some useless motherfuckers on their way out for a relaxing after-work sail motor past. Like the non-idiot I am, I hail them, saying something like, "We've lost our rudder and have no steering to speak of! Help! Can you please assist?"

The useless motherfuckers circumnavigate us, opine that it looks quite bad, and go on their way.

No, I'm not actually sure that's legal, but I wasn't exactly writing down their name and registration number at that moment, given that I was a little busy.

Aaaanyhow! Sometimes a person has to self-rescue. So I started us motoring toward the other marina -- the one at the bottom of the bay, with the big seaplane dock that should be easy to hit even with limited steering -- and got my colleague working on calling the harbor patrol, because while it is kinda sorta possible to steer my tiny sailboat with the outboard, it is damn difficult to steer my tiny sailboat into the wind with the outboard.

Meanwhile we were passed by more smarmy assholes on their way out for a nice evening sail, none of whom seemed to understand what we were trying to communicate about our need for assistance. OK THEN. (Perhaps I should have broken out the flare gun but that seemed like overkill. It was really a very nice afternoon out except for oh yes holy shit being out in a small boat with no real steering capacity).

It was at this point that the outboard ran out of gas.

Fortunately, I had about 3/4 of a gallon of marine gasoline in a spare tank in the bilge, so we broke that out. My hands were shaking a bit so I'd like to apologize to the marine life of Puget Sound; I think most of my spillage evaporated off the top of the outboard cowling but if not, I'm very sorry.

And, as I refueled the motor, Harbor Patrol blew past us, on their way to help...us.

Whoops.

I did -- after a lot of being buffeted around by the wind, which had picked this moment in the evening to pick up pretty dramatically -- and zigzagging back and forth -- manage to land us on the north side of the seaplane dock. Which was very good because who knows where the Harbor Patrol was at this point. Not rescuing us. THANK YOU GOD, THIS WAS ONE OF THOSE TIMES WHEN PRAYER DID MORE THAN ANYTHING ELSE.

At this point a couple of old duffers who came into town a couple of days early for this weekend's small sailboat meetup came down the dock and said, "Are you having some trouble? You looked like you were having some trouble."

"Oh my GOD," I said, "We lost the rudder."

"Oh, yeah, that would do it. Okay, let's get you around the corner here. Do you have some line?"

We got the bumpers out (good, that side of the seaplane dock is completely covered in barnacles) and pulled out every grotty bit of dock line in my boat (lots) and got my colleague up on the dock and one of the duffers handed him his toy poodle, which was EXACTLY what Colleague needed at that point (Colleague really likes poodles and had them for years). And then the duffers spliced all the grotty dock line together, and I got out an oar and fended us off the dock, and we came around the side of the dock out of the wind, and...whew.

And then the Harbor Patrol pulled up.

They very kindly gave me a tow over to the visitor dock so I could tie the boat up for the night. I mean, better late than never? It's not like it wasn't helpful to get to the visitor dock instead of having to tie up to the barge.

I broke everything down and stowed it, Colleague and I did a lot of hysterical laughing (we're totally mounting the broken rudder on the wall of our office, perhaps after attaching a tiny brass memorial plaque to it), and his wife and four-year-old daughter drove over to pick us up and take us back to Marina #1, where we'd left our cars.

As I told Colleague, for his inaugural boat adventure he got to have about the worst mechanical failure it's possible to have with this boat, and hey: we got back to the dock just about when we planned to, so it's much, much less bad than it could have been. Many people sail for years without anything this exciting ever happening. Indeed, I myself have sailed for years without anything this exciting ever happening.

One of the duffers did tell me that he experienced this same failure, in this same model boat, in the Florida Keys about twenty years ago.

"How was it?"

"Oh, completely awful."

"Yeah, that sounds right."

Well, any landing you walk away from.

I'd heard that denture cleaner dissolved in hot water will get residues off the inside of your thermos, if (like me) you have one of these fancy thermoses that you can't put through the dishwasher.

Boy does it. Like, disgustingly so. I'm not sure what's in this weird coffee film residue stuff, given that I scrub this thermos out with a long-handled brush and dish soap every day and I didn't actually expect this to be a thing that would physically flake off. It makes me wonder what my internal organs look like, given the volume of coffee I put through that set of non-scrubbable tubes every day.

Some things you do for money, and some you do for love, love, love.

No shit, there we were, in the local REI:

Sara: Excuse me, I'm looking for this bag in a women's tall.

Clerk: What do you need a 15 degree bag for?

Sara: Um, camping.

Clerk: In Alaska?

Sara: No, in the mountains. *gestures toward the Olympics* With the Scouts. I've been cold.

Clerk: Most people don't need a 15 degree bag. You want something more like these 35 degree bags.

Sara: I have a 35 degree bag. It's a very nice bag and it's great in the summer. I spent the night out in it last night. I was cold. I am in the market for a 15-20 degree down sleeping bag in a women's tall and I'd like to look at this Big Agnes model, but I don't find one out on the floor.

Clerk: Most people don't need a bag that goes down to that temperature.

Sara: And yet...I...do. Because I spend a lot of nights out, and the bag I have now isn't warm enough. Do you want to sell me a new one or not?


Seriously, dude. I am well past the age where I'm willing to prove my outdoorsy bona fides to every gatekeeping retail clerk in the mall. And even if I wanted to buy an expensive sleeping bag to sleep on my couch, why would that be a problem for you? Just do a stock check, please.

(And then after all that the only bags that fit (1) would have required that I also buy a new air mattress or (2) weighed a solid pound more than the other models I was looking at. I think I'll look in Portland next weekend.)

I spent a lot of the last couple of weekends driving places and listening to the James Comey audiobook, which he reads himself. The first 2/3 or so are great -- he talks about cases he prosecuted, and how he made the decisions he did, and the things he learned about leadership along the way. He's a very good reader (which shouldn't surprise me, since he's a very good lawyer) and I think I'd like to have dinner with him.

And then he starts talking about the 2016 election...and I had to stop listening, because it becomes clear that he really thought that he had spent his career making a detailed study of leadership and decision-making and was A Guy Who Understands How The World Works, and that he was playing this game at an expert level and doing very well for himself. He was heading up a bigtime federal law enforcement agency! He was getting stuff done!

Until he wasn't.

A colleague recently introduced me to the black swan theory, which he and his team are using to theorize about a particularly bad set of risks that they would like to convince people to plan around...and I was having a conversation yesterday with an economist about low-probability, high-cost situations and where the cost-benefit breakpoints are around them...and I thought, listening to Jim Comey read his book, that he is still not quite getting that he (and his career) got the shit kicked out of him by his own personal black swan event. And not only did he not accurately assess the risks -- despite DECADES of training and thinking about this stuff -- even after the low-probability, high-cost situation had begun to unfold around him, he continued to behave as though this were a normal problem which could be addressed via conventional means.

I'm not sure what the takeaways are, here. Beware of high weirdness? In a fast world, things change more than we may expect? A lot here to digest. There are lessons but I don't feel like I can grok them yet, much less apply them usefully.

I don't know that I'll be able to finish the book. I know how it ends.

I think it's important that we're clear here that my fandoms are, like...mushrooms, obscure sailboat parts, birds, old shit I've found in the woods, fish, trains, appliance repair, trees, interesting noises, and written genre fiction. Like, I had an extended conversation with someone this evening in which I narrated what one of the snails in my kid's fishtank was doing because it was much more interesting to me than anything I could be watching on television, if I actually had a television, which I don't because that's not a thing I need. I have a fishtank. And windows. There is plenty to keep up with!

So, keeping in mind that my idea of News You Might Need isn't calibrated like most people's, I thought you might like an update on KnifeQuest 2019.

I did end up purchasing a knife, the Opinel #7 Outdoor Junior, and it arrived a couple of weeks ago and both the recipient and I are quite pleased with it. I think I may get a second one for myself.

The knife is a good size for fixing lunches, it seems reasonably weatherproof (good in our usually-damp climate), it's not too heavy, and it's got a built-in whistle, which is a little dorky but it's a good thing to have in an emergency. I also like that it's got a lanyard hole, which is sufficient to accommodate either a bit of paracord with a stop-knot in it or a split ring. And it has a nicely rounded-off end -- while it's ostensibly this way because it's a children's knife, this seems to me like a more accommodating design for lunch preparation, which is a more likely use-case for me than skinning an elk or whatever.

I don't know that I'd clip this one to a carabiner and bang it around with my keys, but I bought it as a hiking and camping knife, and I am considering buying a second one for myself to leave in a field bag -- it's inexpensive enough that that seems like a reasonable idea, which is definitely not the case with some pocketknives I've had.

Dear internets: I am 100% fine I am just writing A LOT for work right now (this is actually very good, we did a thing and it's probably a big deal? so I do actually have to get off my ass and publish except I'm a single mom with a demanding job so finding writing time when I'm not, like, stressing about stupid shit and can therefore focus enough to Do A Science is super hard) and also doing a heavy editorial pass on a massive document that WAS getting written by someone who turned out to be fairly bad at writing and much worse at taking editorial feedback and has thus been pulled off the project. Which means my boss went back through the document and everywhere I'd left friendly little margin notes about how the writer needed to clarify the legal context here or explain the process better there, she's left little response notes saying things like, "Great idea! Write it!"

Okay, boss, okay, just because I'm on the far side of about 6,000 words worth of technical writing in the last week is no reason I can't also unfuck this document, you're right that this is my actual wheelhouse, okay, yes. Off I go.

So I am kind of running short on words!

Also one of my cousins was a butt about something on FB and I had one of those if I stick around these here internets I am going to light things on fire moments.

Since this does not actually constitute healthy self-care, I set the computer down Friday night before I said something regrettable and holed up and did work stuff and made curry and read novels and visited with friends for a week instead.

Anyhow: I am almost caught up on the October Daye novels (I was about four or five behind and yes I still find the entire Irish Elves On The West Coast thing conceptually troubling but they don't require much mental processing power, which is good when that's not a thing I have going spare) and I read the new P. Djeli Clark novella about the haunted tram car in Cairo (recommended) and reread The Forgotten Beasts of Eld (how was she already THAT GOOD when she had just started? sheeyit) and some of the bullet journal method book (wow it wasn't formatted well for ebook) and a book about interpreting natural signs and...oh, probably some other stuff, too.

The city has mostly thawed out, we have these vile heaps of sooty snow sitting around in the gutters but with any luck that'll be gone by the weekend. Oh February.

I'm reading pocketknife reviews, on the principle that the entire point of the internet is that some motherfucker has already spent years obsessing over some relatively minor purchasing decision you're about to make, so instead of obsessing yourself you can just go read what these people have to say on the subject (no, really, this is true, I once spent a couple of nights reading blogs about pencils. I got into them because I had some questions about mechanical pencils but nooo, it's not just mechanical pencils, this is also WOOD pencils we're talking about here. I am a little weird about mechanical pencils and drafting supplies in general but it'd honestly never occurred to me that there would be a wood pencils fandom. There is. They self-publish zines about pencils with space for writing in with your pencils.)

Anyhow: I've carried a pocketknife most days since I was about eleven. This is normal enough among my people (both at home and work) that I assume many if not most people I interact with will have a knife within arm's reach, if not on their person, most of the time. I find it super weird that children aren't allowed to carry pocketknives at school anymore (scissors are as dangerous, but I don't see them getting banned) and the airport security theater consistently irritates me (although so much of air travel is obnoxious now). I feel about going places without a knife approximately as comfortable as I feel about going places with no underpants: you may or may not notice that I'm lacking something, but I am certainly aware.

So it is with TREMENDOUS bemusement that I observe on knife review and "everyday carry" blogs consistent discussion about what people "at the office" or "at the mall" or other out-and-about places supposedly do or don't notice about the visibility of the reviewers' pocketknives. While the knives are in their pockets, not in use.

I think the last time I can remember anyone other than a TSA agent actually remarking on my pocketknife as such was about a year ago when I was passing my big carabiner of keys, knife, and loyalty/library card rings over to a librarian for checkout (which I will admit was a bit thoughtless, but in my defense I usually use the automated checkout system, which doesn't notice you're handing it a knife unless your knife has been barcoded). He complimented me on my knife, and I complimented him on the shop steward button on his lanyard. And that was when I was carrying the relatively large knife with the turquoise anodized aluminum handles. The little stainless folder I've got right now, I think most people would be hard-pressed to distinguish it from my keys.

Maybe it's just the kinds of places I'm in, but...I've been up and down the west coast in communities of all sizes and I really can't remember this ever being an issue. With the caveat that I'm a middle aged white woman and there are absolutely contexts where people who aren't culturally coded as "100% harmless" would not be able to get away with things I take for granted.

But as far as I can tell most of the knife and everyday carry blogs...are written by white guys. Who I expect get judged for their pocketknife preferences about as much as I do, if not less: a woman with a knife is just weird enough that I get a raised eyebrow or a surprised glance once in a while. I do not see knife-carrying white dudes getting this reaction, and I know a LOT of knife-carrying white dudes. This is just not a thing that really happens.

TLDR: Buddy, don't flatter yourself. Nobody cares what you have in your pocketses.