Delicious Peace

Need a fresh cuppa Joe? Think about ordering some Mirembe Kawomera Ugandan coffee next time you stock up.

Mirembe Kawomera (mir´em bay cow o mare´a) means "delicious peace" in the Ugandan language Luganda. It is the name of a Ugandan cooperative of Jewish, Muslim, and Christian coffee farmers.

The farmers of the Mirembe Kawomera Cooperative are a courageous example of people of faith working together for peace, tolerance, and economic justice.

Thanks to the good folks at Thanksgiving Coffee (who have been doing the whole fair trade thing forever) we can get the product of this co-op's toil right here in the USofA. And lest you suspect your pruchase might only line the pockets of fat Americans:

On October 1st Thanksgiving Coffee wired $2,500 to the co-op's bank account in Uganda. This is an advance on future rebates from sales of Mirembe Kawomera Coffee, and will enable a dramatic expansion in coffee production this year in Uganda.

That money is being used to purchase hand-cranked coffee pulping machines, of which the co-op has only had one to date, thus limiting their production capabilities.

Ink Feeds the Ego

Forget Botox, I Prefer My Tattoo

In the weeks since, I've thought about how it is that scars make us human. Far from thinking it a mistake, I am so proud of my new tattoo that I have been walking around sockless, even in the pouring rain and the freezing cold. I pull up my foot in restaurants to show it off and find myself talking to total strangers, to kids with holes in their noses and navels and pictures of writhing snakes and dragons all over their bodies.

When we chat, I like to think that what they see is not an often tired, wrinkled 53-year-old woman but a fabulous tattooed lady with an open book on her ankle, a woman with a story to tell. And that, to me, is a beautiful thing. It makes me feel alive.

Having a visible tattoo definitely opens you up to a lot of random human contact. I get at least a couple people every week (especially food service folks) talking to me about my set of family crests on my forearm. At first it freaked me out (I don't talk to strangers much), but since I've put two and two together and realized I signed myself up for this by getting the tattoos, I just go with it now.

It's actually kind of nice.

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Totally unrelated: UV ink?! Needled has more info.

MacGyver to the Rescue

So get this: That problem I had with ColdFusion 5 and Oracle9? Well, at this point the work around may be what we call a "gateway" solution. That means we have CF5 post search parameters via HTTP (using the CFHTTP tag) to a ColdFusion MX 7 server, which actually does the search on the Oracle database (MX and Oracle like each other fine). The CFMX code then takes the resultsets from the Oracle reference cursor and outputs them as WDDX XML. So, that WDDX gets deserialized on the CF5 box and voila! the CF5 box has its data to play with.

Unreal. Don't worry, this sort of gymnastics is just as ridiculous as you think it is (almost as ridiculous as the fact we're still using CF5). The thing is, it's likely to end up in production...

Jake Sutton: MIA

So, yeah... I'm still here. Here's a little catch-up:

  • My efforts at work on the superultramegaubercrazy-high priority project have come to a rather frustrating result so far thanks to interoperability problems between ColdFusion 5 and Oracle9. Every time we hit the Oracle9 database it causes the memory usage of the ColdFusion server to climb, with that memory never being released. This eventually causes the connection to the database to die with an S1001 Memory Allocation Error, which requires a ColdFusion restart to fix the problem (until the memory allocation builds back up again). Super-fucking-duper.
  • The Big Blue Couches rock. While we are trying to keep the pets off them, it's obviously futile. At least the puddles of Mingus hair come off the ultra-luscious blue microsuede without a problem. I'm just extra-pleased with the fact taht I can lie completely prostrate on the big sofa without touching either arm.
  • The Wife and I have been to the hotbox yoga a total of three times so far. I am enjoying it quite a bit, though I think I may have overstretched my back the last time out. We hope to squeeze a couple more classes into our two week trial period.
  • My motorcycle wrenching buddy Erik and his wife are inches away from having their baby boy. Very exciting times for them!
  • I'll be brining the second turkey of the month for Thanksgiving festivities starting tonight. If you haven't brined a turkey or at least eaten the product of said process, I can't even express how much you need to try it.
  • I'm almost done with the Tales of the Otori trilogy. I highly recommend all three books.
  • Now let's turn the lens outward a bit:

And thus concludes today's category smorgasbord.

That's some red hot coffee!

$15M suit for burns from java

"I thought I was dying - that's how bad it was," said Shea, a mother of two who lives in Dongan Hills. "All my skin was pulled back like a nylon stocking a lady takes off."

So, she's suing Dunkin Donuts because she "suffered second- and third-degree burns after the cardboard tray she was holding in the passenger seat of a friend's car toppled and spilled over her left leg and ankles."

Now, at first this caused me some doubt, because I had always thought third-degree burns meant you had charring of flesh. As it turns out, that's wrong: "A third-degree burn is the most serious because it destroys all the layers of the skin."

So, yeah... That coffee had to be thermo-friggin'-nuclear! How does that even happen?

Hellboy Animated Series

Hellboy Animated: The Production Diary of the Hellboy Animated Projects

Fast forward to now, with me comfortably nestled in Mike's fog shrouded lobes, working at a studio that is as excited as I am that we're bringing Hellboy to animation. I've never worked at a place that gives such support and encouragement to the creators. And I was hired to bring Hellboy to animation, not a friendlier, blanded out, kid's version of the character but the guy who stalks the pages of the comic. It seems the stars are aligned and the appropriate rituals have been performed and so the party can begin.

Sweet.

The Revolution Is Still in Full Swing

Lest you think my lack of recent Monkey Revolution posts means the Simianistas have become less active: Monkey menace comes to haunt Sector 18

Residents of Sector 18-C are being terrorised by monkeys who are entering houses, eating food and damaging household articles and plants.

Manish of Sector 18-C, whose house suffered a monkey attack, said that residents were afraid of going out. ‘‘The monkeys become furious whenever they are stopped from damaging household goods,’’ Manish added.

Near as I can tell, Sector 18 is right in the heart of the Indian city of Chandigarh.

Shit's also getting crazy in Delhi...

Life in the Hotbox

Today, the Wife and I went to our new local Bikram Yoga joint for a little sweat lodge calisthenics. Hezzy had done this sort of thing sometime last year and she really liked it and got really good results from it. Given that, we were excited to have a school right around the block from us. All I can say is: HOLY CRAP is it hot in there! It being my first time, I did a lot of sitting or just standing there instead of trying to stand on one foot with my other foot tucked up my arse. H tells me it took her a few classes before she could get through the whole thing, and one of the other guys in the class congratulated me for staying in the room for the whole class, so I guess I did alright.

Unexpected benefit to sweating five pounds of water onto a beach towel: My skin is unbelievably soft and smooth. (Yes, I'm a girl. Thanks.) My fingers were actually pruned up by the time we finished the standing exercises.

CL350 - Progress Marches On

Last night, Erik and I changed the front tire. Went on easy-peasy. In the mean while, we've taken to calling the bike "Rocket Man" because the Elton John song keeps coming on Erik's radio while we work on it. Erik is convinced the gas tank need sa pin-up girl on it. Of course we find all of this hilariously ironic, since the CL is A) no rocket and B) not a pin-up worthy chopper.

Good stuff if you ask me. Like a guy on a Vespa with a Hell's Angels jacket.

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Side Note: Happy Veterans' Day. Always keep the men and women of the armed service in your heart.

Catching Up

I've been in nose-to-the-grindstone mode at work lately with a project I classify as superultramegaubercrazy-high priority. It's kind of fun, though, so no complaints there. In the real world, we had one of our Sutton Family Sunday Dinner parties, which rocked the house. About twenty folks came over to partake of brined turkey, lasagna, pork roast, and a veritable cornucopia of delectable delights. I enjoyed a couple glasses of Matt's Versinthe, but both The Wife and coworker Sarah hold suspicions regarding the effects of the tiny tastes they had. Perhaps the thujone conflicts with the female disposition... ;)

So, what's going on in the world? Let's see...

  • "We do not torture." -- But we'd rather not make any promises.

    Over White House opposition, the Senate voted 90-9 last month to approve an amendment by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., that would ban the use of torture. Vice President Cheney has pushed for an exemption for the CIA.

  • France is in nationwide turmoil, but I guess that's not entirely new.

    France was slow to react to the spreading violence set off by the accidental deaths of two youths on Oct. 27, in part because the initial nights of unrest did not seem particularly unusual in a country where an average of more than 80 cars a day were set on fire this year even before the violence.

  • An Amish village in Minnesota has a polio problem. Thus man’s faith is rewarded.
  • In Bosnia, we get an illustration of the fact that hot potato is an extra dumb game if the potato has a blast radius.

OK, good. Still the same crazy world.

Freak of the Week: Vincent Gallo

I've always thought Vinnie Gallo was an odd duck. Consider this bit of drama surrounding his film The Brown Bunny:

Roger Ebert called the film "the worst in the history of Cannes" to which Vincent Gallo responded that Ebert was a "fat pig with the physique of a slave trader". Ebert paraphrased a remark of Winston Churchill and responded that "although I am fat, one day I will be thin, but Mr. Gallo will still have been the director of 'Brown Bunny'". Gallo then put a "hex" on Ebert's colon, to which Ebert responded that "even my colonoscopy was more entertaining than his film".

That's kooky.

Then I saw this: Vincent Gallo's Sperm $1 Million

If the purchaser of the sperm chooses the option of natural insemination, there is an additional charge of $500,000. However, if after being presented detailed photographs of the purchaser, Mr. Gallo may be willing to waive the natural insemination fee and charge only for the sperm itself.

Good to know Vincent has "no cripples" in his family history.