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mini Squid Game binge
Wednesday, November 3 2021
There was a little frost on the windshields of the cars this morning, the first frost of the year (I think) in Hurley, although (judging by the bedraggled look of the pepper plants and a single formerly-beautiful daisy-like flower) it might've come a few days before.
I took advantage of the cold to run a series of experiments with an old mercury-tilt thermostat (salvaged from Oberlin College at least three decades ago), seeing if I could get it to trip at unusually low temperatures (that is, colder than the normal 50-degree floor of most thermostats). What I wanted from it was for it to be able to short the two wires of the cabin generator's two-wire starting system when temperatures fell to something like 40 degrees. This would protect the plumbing from freezing temperatures while conserving fuel (that is, not running too often). I could, of course, rig up some sort of Arduino to do the same thing, but that would require battery power and bug-free software that I would have to write. It's much easier to use a switch that can be flicked on and off by temperature itself, a very good proxy for when power is most needed.
Normally on a Wednesday at some point in the afternoon I'd crack open a beer, but at around that time yet more videos about liver disease appeared in the menu of possibilities suggested by YouTube. It's unlikely my drinking has done much damage to my liver, but it's fairly easy to abstain from alcohol when you've just heard a horror story about someone who could've decided to stop drinking but did not and now is either dead or is the recipient of a liver transplant. And it's hard to think of a liver transplant as much of a solution when you know in detail the life changes that result from having received a transplant (as I do because of Powerful's recent heart transplant).
This evening at a little before 5:00pm I began making a pot of chili, though I was nowhere near done when Gretchen returned from the bookstore. She always likes to get involved in my cooking and give me bits of unwanted advice. Today her advice was to rinse the canned beans I was using. She had it in her mind that this would make them easier to digest, but then she did a Google search and learned this was just to reduce their salt and starch content. But if I rinsed away the salt, I'd just have to add it back (and starch acts as a helpful thickening agent).
After Jeopardy!, Neville was snuggling with me so hard on the couch that we decided to watch more teevee, in this case the first three episodes of the Netflix series Squid Game, about which there is much buzz in our society. Squid Game is a Korean export, meaning we watched it with subtitles. Initially Gretchen wasn't sure how much of it she could take, as she'd heard that it was extremely violent and the characters generally unsympathetic. This was true, but it was also deeply weird and also somehow beautiful, which much homage paid to Stanley Kubrick and even, in one recurring setting, M.C. Escher. We begin the series in the life of a man in early middle age whose life has been destroyed by a history of gambling, debt, and generally poor decisionmaking. At some point he gets an opportunity to participate in a mysterious series of games where there is a small chance of a big reward and, we soon learn, a much bigger chance of death. At this point, the show pans out and over 400 such people are gathered off the streets, knocked out with gas, and spirited away to the private island of what appears to be a malevolent billionaire. There, masked employees administer the games and eliminate the losers (usually dispatching them with a gunshot to the head). Even after seeing for themselves what happens to the losers, the rogue's gallery of losers continues to compete. By the end of the third episode, both Gretchen and I were fully engaged and deeply impressed, but we weren't going to stay up all night binge watching it all. As you know, I have a special fondness for dystopian television, particularly the Black Mirror series, the only other television show I can think of that Squid Game resembles.
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