Diabetic Drinking Diatribe

In light of my recent mutations (alas, still no tail) I have been forced to re-evaluate my alcohol consumption. This isn't nearly as problematic as it would have been, say, ten years ago when I was a fairly regular sot, but even in these dry times of maturity and mortality it's goddamned inconvenient. Bearing in mind that one serving of carbohydrates is approximately 15 grams, and that a one serving evening snack is a fairly normal allowance / guilty pleasure for diabetics, it's a fairly simple leap to say that - all things equal - a one carb choice nightcap is an equally allowed indulgence (at least from a blood sugar perspective). Bearing in mind that I am (a) monastic in my normal dilligence to my carb levels and (b) a big guy anyway, my endocrinologist has even suggested two carb servings aren't out of line, which is even better on paper.

But what's a carb serving of alcohol? Therein lies the rub...


12 oz of Alfred Gratien champagne or Guiness Extra Stout
6 oz of mixed daiquiri (fresh ingredients / bar recipe)
3.5 oz glass of Inniskillin Vidal icewine
2 oz of Bailey's or Carolan's
1.5 oz of Jagermeister or Drambuie
.75 oz of Kahlua or Amaretto

However...

It is worth mentioning that pure hard liquors (e.g. bourbon, brandy, cognac, gin, rum, scotch, tequila, vodka, whiskey) have absolutely no carbs whatsoever, provided nothing has been added and the fermentation wasn't arrested prematurely. They contain plenty of calories and are destined to be converted into a large amount of triglycerides, but no carbs. In the end, doing shots at the serious end of the bar carries the same risk as it always has, no more and no less.

Although, it's weird to note that that the orange juice has more chance of fucking me up now than the vodka, LOL.

Coulomb, Avogadro, Faraday, Newton, & Jesus

Charge is measured in a unit called "coulombs", so named for the French physicist who defined electrostatic attraction and repulsion (Coulomb's Law). There are 6.02214e23 electrons per mole of electrons (Avogadro's number); further, there are 1.602177e-19 coulombs of charge per electron, so that means there are 9.64853e4 coulombs of charge per mole of electrons (Faraday's constant). Back to Coulomb's Law, any two point charges (nice, tidy, mathematically simple massless "points in space" that are easier to deal with than electrons, or nuclei, or Buicks) placed one meter apart and each having a +1C charge will repel one another with a force of 9 billion Newtons. That's the same force that 900,000 metric tons of weight exerts on this planet due to gravity - about 100 Eiffel Towers, to bring things back full circle to France.

A 1 gallon jug of water is about 4000 grams of H20, which at 18 grams per mole means that the water in that jug has about 210 million coulombs of charge, and if you placed another similar jug one meter away each would be exerting 4.1e26 N of force on the other. The scale of that is so fucked that the only comparable explanation of weight I can offer is that if you weighed the Earth itself on another Earth-like planet, it would be exerting less force due to gravity than the nuclei in one of those jugs of water.

Fortunately, the electrons in one jug have an equally strong attraction to the nuclei in the other, which cancels the incredible force of repulsion. It is an important distinction that both the attraction and repulsion forces are still present and still just as tremendously strong as we've described, they're just balanced so perfectly that the effects of those forces are diminished to nothing.

So what happens when some irresponsible ass turns the water in one of those jugs into wine (Jesus's First Sign)? Kind of a dick move, really. Being only 85-90% water, the rest of that shit has a completely different molar mass. Hell, ethanol (the majority of the difference) works out to slightly more than 46 g/mol instead of the 18 g/mol of water. The anecdote is clear: the water turned to wine, so I can only assume that if one can pull off such feats of alchemy they can do so with enough precision that I don't have to fuck around with estimating the amount and composition of all of the adulterants, dirt, and other shit floating around in that jug. So the water is water, and then it is not, and in that change there is no point for the universe in which all of this takes place to catch up to that fact; the electromagnetic force, infinite in range and ludicrous in potency, is not granted a reprieve from duty or a do-over - it simply continues to apply itself the entire time.

But along a given timeline those forces must at some point be particulate; either there is a point in this occurrence where the water is, from the perspective of the universe, not water and not yet wine, or there is a point where the change interrupts the constant force. In either case, the delicate balance of attraction and repulsion is broken.

At least the guys at CERN put a little more thought into whether to fuck with reality than having a snit with their mom about whether or not they would help.

Consonance / Futility

Simmer and boil, till and toil,
'til the stock is hot and the roots uncoil,
'til the rot plows under the autumn spoil;
all shall end in soup or soil.

Positive Thinking

Bierce defined "Positive" as "Incorrect at the top of one's voice". In this modern era of remote and non-present social interaction it may need to be updated to "Incorrect on the internet", because posting has eclipsed shouting as the medium of choice for morons with messages.

I'm not talking about assholes, people who like to argue, or the irrational. I'm not even talking about political, religious, or philosophical messages...or even "causes". I can deal with polemic pundits, evangelical essayists, deontological douchebags, and even Bulimic Buddhist Chicks with Dicks with Cancer for Green Technology or whatever the fuck happens to be the random weirdness I'm supposed to give a shit about this week. I expect those people on the internet. I'm talking about otherwise normal people who have somehow completely lost the ability to do things like basic goddamned arithmetic, and feel the need to "correct" people who aren't wrong.

::sigh::

The Yellow Brick

Years ago somebody told me The Yellow Brick Joke ("...and the yellow brick sailed off into the sky...and simply vanished"); it's a joke within a joke within a group dare, for those of you who are unfamiliar. The purpose is to tell the first joke, which is deliberately not at all funny, anticlimactic, and perhaps even a little baffling, to some unsuspecting mark - preferably in the company of several people who themselves once fell for it. You end with this non-punchline and everyone laughs like it's the funniest fucking thing ever...except the one person who isn't in on it. If that guy does laugh, he's a douchebag who laughs even when something isn't funny and you should avoid him.

You wait a pre-determined amount of time until everyone is gathered again (a few days at least), and you explain that you feel awful about the last joke you told him. You tell him it isn't him, it was kind of an inside thing with everyone else and you hadn't even thought about how weird it must have sounded. So to make it up to him, you tell him another joke that has an obvious, almost juvenile punchline that you telegraph the whole time. If the guy calls you on the fact that punchline is obvious or acts like an asshole, he's a douchebag who doesn't give people the benefit of the doubt and you should stop hanging out with him.

If you get to finish the joke you'll basically ask him for the punchline ("...and guess what the parrot had in his mouth?"), and he'll probably respond with the obvious answer you handed him ("the fat man's cigar?").

And then you hit him with it: "No, the yellow brick."

If he doesn't laugh, he's a douchebag who...ah, fuck it. It isn't really so much a joke as it is a douchebag test, but the point is that timing is everything.

Like today, for instance. My landlord told me I could keep the new dog we rescued from the streets a week ago. Fifteen minutes later, I told my wife the good news, and that I would cough the extra money for the permit, shots, new kennel, and other bullshit since we'd given it a week and he was doing well with the other dogs, and since nobody had posted any signs looking for him or answered our own inquiries. Fifteen minutes later, she took him for a walk and stopped to get a coffee.

And at the coffee shop his owner came running up, and fifteen minutes later we were returning our new dog to his previous owner. We did the right thing; I know that, and she knows that. We took care of the dog when he needed it, we did our due dilligence looking for his owner, and just when we'd accepted that this was meant to be it suddenly, very obviously, wasn't going to be. He knew his name when the woman called it, she described the collar he'd had on when we found him, and he was very obviously excited to see her kids, who having accidentally left a gate open one night, were heartbroken that the dog had ran away on their watch. We didn't accept anything in return, and we tried not to get weepy in their living room as we said our goodbyes. None of this, of course, makes it easy to lose the dog right after we decided to keep him, LOL, but it certainly isn't "wrong" for him to return home; the timing just sucks.

So my wife is equal parts inconsolable and pissed, and I keep waiting for the brick to show back up.

Tanka

The autumn wind blows;
I breathe in and I breathe out.
I prefer neither.
Rote becomes a ritual
when a sigh becomes a song.

Working Definitions Revisited

Pragmatism is the noble ability to look at a moral dilemma and see a logistics problem; it allows strong people to make difficult choices and weak people to capitulate without taking responsibility. Characterized by a propensity to willingly accept the hatred of those less capable.

As contrasted with Opportunism, which is the preferred term for the same quality when it is displayed by some other mercenary bastard.