Brooks Moses

I've had passion fruit sorbet, and other things passion-fruit flavored, before. But until this evening I'd never actually had a passion fruit.

Thus, when I saw that Milk Pail Market had some in the exotic fruit section, I bought a couple. They're round smooth drab dark-purple-gray fruits, a bit smaller than a tennis ball, and these had a few small dents in them that looked sort of like dry spots or something. They seemed firm, about the texture of an apple, although not quite as dense.

When I was about to eat one this evening, I thought about doing a quick net-search to see what they were like and how one was supposed to eat them, but then I thought that would spoil the surprise. I'm glad I did.

( If you haven't seen what a passion fruit is like before, and you like tasty surprises, go find a passion fruit and eat it before reading this! It's well worth it. )

It tasted amazing, like the passion-fruit flavor I was expecting but incredibly intense and delicious. Yum!

For those of you who haven't heard of it, David Steffen has been doing an annual collection of short stories, novelettes, and novellas called The Long List Anthology, collecting stories from the Hugo "Long List" -- the stories that were nominated for the Hugo but didn't get quite enough nominations to make it into the small list that goes on the voting ballot.

There are lots of good SF stories being written these days, printed in a wide range of places, and the first two editions of this collection have been full of really good ones.

I mention this now because the Kickstarter for the third edition has just opened. You can get e-books of the first two editions there as well as ebook and print copies of the third edition.

tiger_spot showed me a short clip of a man laughing maniacally and shooting his own socks off by shooting a bazooka into the air with the projectile tied to a string tied to the ends of his socks, with the caption saying something about how chaotic neutrals often do things not for good or evil ends, but just because they can.

I looked at the picture and said, "Ah, yes. Colin Furze."

tiger_spot said, with some concern, "You know this person?"

I don't actually know him, but I do recognize him from his YouTube channel. And so I had to show her this video, which I think pretty much perfectly captures the essence of being Colin Furze: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCsg5pQimWI

And so now I share it with you.

A Dittmer's Wursthaus today, I discovered a thing they call a Hannover wurst.

Hannover wurst appears to be what happens is when you have the question of whether to have sausage or bacon with your breakfast, and you make the obvious-in-retrospect choice of "Both! At the same time!" and make sausage in part out of bacon.

Needless to say, it is delicious.

Resharing from my dear friend Elena Rose (aka "Little Light"), on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/burnlittlelight/posts/761138051178):

My loves, life is full of losing, and the price of caring is grief, eventually, always. And all of it is worth it.

I know a lot of us have been feeling this year like the decks are getting cleared of people we admired and looked up to, friends, family, cultural icons, just in such a time of trial when we need inspiration and hope and beauty more than ever.

I have been telling myself this: the world is declaring to us just how much it needs us to be new sources of inspiration and hope and beauty. Nobody is going to do the job for us. Nobody is going to shine so bright that we don't have to learn to shine too. Nobody is going to be excellent for us. It's time for all of us to carry our corner of the sky. It's time for us all to light the lantern. It's time for all of us to find our footing and our grip and the place to put our weight.

When I got ordained in May, one of the strongest feelings I had was the overwhelming certainty that there was no more time for childish things. I found my place in the world of adults and vowed to be the person I was waiting for, with no more excuses. I declared myself grown and declared a direction to keep growing in and people to keep growing toward. I made a commitment to no more backwards, no more hiding, no more being small--to being consequential. It has been challenging, brutal, laced through with a fresh education in grief and endurance beyond any limits I thought I had. It has also been worth every moment, fulfilling and gorgeous and blazing with warmth, and in this cold season I have found myself more than once in tears of gratitude that I am able to help, that I know what I am for and have the chance to fulfill that purpose.

Each of us needs to be someone in the world. I found who that someone was for me and went all in. The world needs you, too, your particular self, awake and alive and in it. It needs what you know, what you make, what you do, what you nurture, what you care about. We would not have come together this way, all our stories, all our particularities and peculiarities, if it wasn't going to matter.

I insist that there will be generations to follow us. They will need heroes to look up to, too. Let's give them everything we've got.

Take heart, friends. Everything ends; nothing is over yet.

(And here. Argh!)

"Wow, look at those goalposts go! Zoom, zoom!"

One of the things about home construction projects is that there are quite a number of thingummies that one knows the existence of (or, often, doesn't know the existence of, until one discovers them and realizes that they are exactly what one needed), but one doesn't know what they are called.

Sometimes these names are rather ... evocative.

Today I learned that the thingummy that I was looking for is called a "cable gland".

siderea posted a question earlier this morning asking how her readers got into "geeky stuff", and my answer had a lot about my father, so given the day I thought I'd repost it here.

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I don't really remember a lot from that young, but I know that when I was eight or so, in 1984, my father brought home a tiny "pocket computer" from a yard sale and we had fun programming it, and that seemed entirely normal to me. He was an engineering professor, and so I spent a fair bit of time when I was small visiting him in his office and playing with his box of turbine blades and with the toy tractor that one of the admins had. And then in 1985, when I was nine, he brought home an IBM PC and I started learning to write BASIC programs -- and, a bit later, helped him write programs that would do simple engineering computations and in a couple of cases would create numerical-milling-machine programs to make parts for his experiments.

Also my brother and I had vast amounts of LEGO bricks, and we already had a significant number of them when I was seven or so. That probably also contributed to the habits of making things. Once we got to an age of doing things with the Technic bricks, which would have started around 10 or 11, I was doing things like figuring out how to build a front-wheel-drive mechanism. (With the parts available at the time, it wasn't particularly satisfying and was a bit fragile, but it worked.)

I figure a lot of the influence was from my dad, partly just visibly doing engineer things at home and sharing what he was doing. I remember him, when I was young, sitting at the kitchen table tracing the connections on an 80-channel slip ring with a multimeter and labeling all the wires. When the engineering department had a rubber-band-powered dragster contest, we built an entry together (using, among other things, wheels from my Capsela set -- I remember that we had trouble with the wheels slipping and spinning when it started, so the night before the race he coated them in a bit of maple syrup so they would be sticky). And then, when I was ten, we built a new house -- which he and my mom designed, and I helped by helping building small cardboard models of the interior spaces and the outside and coloring them with my colored pencils. A bit later, when I was fourteen or so, the three of us (him and my brother and me) entered a contest to make a small water turbine that would lift a weight using water from an overhead tank -- he did most of the design, but showed us how to do the calculations for it and we helped in designing it.