A Revolution In Evolution

This is a response to an essay about out of control "mutant killer" seaweed.

I do a certain amount of experimentation with cross-breeding, mostly trying to remove defects that have ill advisedly been bred into pedigreed animals, especially cats, but sometimes dogs as well.

I cross bred some chickens as well, trying to get them to turkey size. Sometimes things don't go right. I did get some twelve to fifteen pound chickens, but it was a disaster from several different perspectives. The chickens were so big that they just couldn't dissipate the heat on an unusually hot day, and often spontaneously gave up the ghost.

And the amount of feed required to produce these sumo chickens was monumental. The chickens would be cost prohibitive. Not only that, but the skeletal structure of the chicken is not designed to carry that much weight. The chickens wind up painfully waddling around, and eventually, they just sit and eat. This results in the fat/meat ratio being skewed far toward fat.

But all was not lost. During this same time, I also began to experiment with foods that chickens are not usually thought to eat, and found many things that are now thrown away in vast quantities, that could be turned directly into chicken meat.

I would like to get a modest quantity of this offending seaweed, and perhaps the zebra mussels which are causing so much trouble in so many different places, to see if chickens would thrive with this sort of supplemental feed.

I would of course take special pains to render these foods impossible to propagate by heat or other reasonable means, before they went to the chickens.

I really think we should not be feeding chickens so very much corn and wheat and other very valuable grains when, with thought, so many other alternatives are available. Properly mixed with other things, I'll bet my chickens would consume this variety of seaweed in substantial quantity.

And another post of mine on the same thread:

I know virtualy nothing about seaweed. When I was a kid I nibbled on a little kelp. I don't remember spitting it out in disgust. I doubt that it was a delight either since it didn't become a staple of my diet. But it was really a nutritional mystery to me. I wasn't much into nutrition in those days in terms of the content of foods. While I was technically an omnivore, vegetables were well down the list from meat, which I would kill for, especially during the years of frequent escape.

I saw nothing in the story about actual toxicity though. And to expand on the comment about goats eating anything, I have demonstrated for myself that chickens will too. Not to mention swine, which I have no plans to experiment with. But if they will accept this variety of seaweed as a reasonable portion of their rations, and if there are no actually toxic features of this seaweed, we could wind up saving a whole lot of the various grains they are now being fed that could be diverted to human consumption.

My own personal experience in raising beef is pretty limited. When I was rehabilitating my father after his stroke, something my siblings would have no part of — (Not casting any blame. They were both damaged pretty severely in their youth, and could not have coped) I had to stay pretty close at hand, rarely leaving for more than a few hours.

I had had to stop my customary traveling up and down the west coast and my income came to a virtual halt, dropping by about 90%. I patented one of my inventions and it helped me to stay caught up on my child support for about five years, but the funding to grow the company just was not going to happen. I had spread myself to thin. On the good side, I was able to get custody of one of my boys, and had kidnapped my current wife away from her date in a Chinese restaurant/bar/dancehall.

One of the sidelines I got into which was very fruitful was because of these lean times. My Christmas budget had dropped by 90% as well, and it was pretty hard to take. To cover up my newfound poverty a little, I bought a lot of beef, hand cut it, designed a meat marinade that I thought was satisfactory, and smoked a lot of jerky which I could parcel out in various sized packages to the friends and acquaintances on my Christmas list. I told nobody that I had made the jerky. I was still pretending I wasn't too up against it. And I wasn't above going out at night to hunt a few tarantulas to sell the local pet store or a science teacher or anyone else who would cough up five or ten dollars for an exotic arthropod. I never felt too guilty about that because the tarantula had better chances of long term survival in comparative luxury. (If a tarantula is discovered by a particular kind of wasp, it is paralyzed alive and becomes the long-term food supply for the wasp hatchlings. But getting back to the jerky.

Between Christmas and New Years, about a third of the people not only thanked me, they wanted to get more. So I was off and running with a second little business along with the product I had patented. I kept polishing the marinade and the smoking methods for another seven years, and came to the point that I couldn't figure out how to improve anything about it — at which point it became pure drudgery, so I gave it up as a business, though I still took care of my biggest most loyal patrons for some years to follow.

At one point a local farmer got a taste of my jerky from someone, but couldn't afford the $25-30 a pound I was getting (at least $50+ in current money). He asked how much jerky he could get for a Black Angus bull calf. We haggled a bit and I presbyterianed him down to three pounds.

So now I had a Black Angus calf and no idea what to do next. I would have grass fed him but I was living in rocky desert terrain and I kept him on a big hefty chain. I removed his family jewels so he wouldn't get cranky when he grew up. Early on, he was getting some grass, but mostly he (now it) was eating baled alfalfa and a multigrain mix with molasses in it. I was feeling very uneasy because I hadn't figured out anything really innovative to do to make this steer reasonably unique.

But then I got my little eureka idea. I had read about Kobe beef, perhaps the most expensive beef on the planet, getting astronomical prices in Japan. I wasn't interested in confining and trussing up the steer to limit his exercise, for the same reason I don't eat veal or pâté de foie gras. But they also mixed beer into the rations. I didn't know the quantity. But when the steer was about six months old, I began adding a case of beer per week to his rations. Then, about a month before it was going to go to that big pasture in the sky, I added a gallon of rhine wine every three days. And on its' last day, a couple of gallons so it would not be too conscious of its' departure.

And as for cattle — they are most naturally eaters of grass and other green vegetation. It is actually a digestive hardship of major proportions for them to be fed the vast quantities of grains they get, to artificially fatten them up, to marble the meat with fat so that it will be more "choice." Choice in this case certainly does not mean more nutritious to us, but less. So it is entirely possible that even cattle could consume a certain amount of this seaweed and perhaps wind up solving some of the serious digestive problems that they have developed since being switched to such a high grain diet.

I've got to tell you, I have had Chateaubriand in some of the fanciest restaurants in America. I have been a steak chef myself, but never for longer than it took me to learn every meat skill I could absorb in the place. The next restaurant I work in I will own.

Zebra mussels too are an ongoing ecological disaster in our lakes and waterways — until we come up with a way for them to be usefully utilized. I frankly have no idea what the eating habits of mussells are, but wouldn't it be nice if, being deprived of their normal food, they could be used to consume large volumes of this seaweed, even if it had to be killed and ground up and then harvested in some fashion as some proportion of the food for farmed fish like catfish or tilapia.

And my last comment:

Brilliant people down through the centuries
have had a strong tendency to be unsound of
personality. They become a little bonkers. It is almost inevitable I think. I am not talking about run-of-the-mill Mensa members here. Those I speak of are really quite alone, surrounded by "normals" who live almost totally as they are conditioned by their social jungle.

These isolated wretches truly do see things that others do not see. And these things are not always hallucinations, although sometimes, in an attempt to make sense out of nonsense, some desparate wishful thinking will actually result in becoming a little delusional.
I could give countless examples throughout the centuries. And I could give countless examples just relating to me alone. It is frustrating to be alone. No, frustrating is not near strong enough a term. I don't know if there is a strong enough term. It is an aloneness that cannot be assuaged, only endured. I was attracted to this place because I got a sense that there was just a scintilla more sense in the comments than could be found in general in the blogosphere.

Mr. Bellows and his cadre are to be complimented on several counts.

First, the general quality and the effort and workmanship that has gone into the essays.

Second, the absolute patience with which they except the utter drivel that characterizes, unfortunately, the majority of the comments. But I can tell that they too are having some morale problems that are hard to overcome.

I can tell this because they regurgitate with the frequency of a bulemic. Something is telling them that they are not really taken seriously at all. That they are casting the best pearls they are able to produce, before mostly swine, metaphorically speaking.

They can tell, I am quite sure, that most of the readership are nothing more than jabbering dillitantes, amateurs, dabblers, in no sense connecting the thoughts and information they have so conveniently been provided, and with those thoughts, generating new and valuable ideas. I exclude a half dozen or so of you from these caustic remarks. I honor you and your efforts.

To the trolls among you, in spite of occasional vestiges of ability, you are quite unredeemable.

When I started my blog a few years ago, I envisioned a thinktank to attract really serious seminal thinkers who really wanted to address the most pressing problems for the species, and all life on the planet. A pretty tall order. And an abysmal failure.

I experimented. I put a lovely Siren in the foyer to attract intellects, because all the intellects I have met in my life, all ten of them that I have stumbled across and who made themselves visible to me, in almost seven decades, have been, down deep, pretty sexy, and lovers of beauty for the sake of beauty alone.

I no longer care that the blog is a failure. That it is now just a storage room, a filing cabinet for regurgitations of posts elsewhere which I have transferred, posts which I thought that perhaps a few of my grandchildren might enjoy, should they by luck or other chance event, turn out not to be aliens.

I do not wish to sound pessimistic here. It is my guess that at least half of them have an even chance, much above the chances for most. I cling to that and thank my very lucky stars that of the children and grandchildren I know of, I am at about that fifty-fifty rate or better. A blessing upon me, and my blessings upon them.

My Honey and I have many cats, and too many dogs as well. Uncritical children who will not grow up. We cannot afford them and cannot afford to part with them. My dogs are mostly brilliant, as dogs go. Our cats range from witless to incredibly sophisticated. These animals have provided us with what old people in general have least. Regular daily affection, touching, caring, dependence and need. We are useful to them when the rest of society has relegated us to the trash heap as obsolete.

My other pets are in my Dojo, where I teach chess. I do not do so to make strong chess players. It is just a vehicle to help young people become better people. I spend perhaps half my time talking about other subjects, and about life in general.

On Monday, after about four years of training, one of my most advanced students, who went to Russia and several other countries to test his new chess skills, clearly one of the strogest two or three players ever to have evolved out of my tutelage, was dishonorably discharged from my Dojo, failed in the course, and discharged from my life. I hold no hope that he is any more redeemable than was Bobby Fischer. An evil little twerp, with greatness in him which never saw the light of day. A stunted freak of a man, whose monumental talent ultimately did injury to the world of chess. There was in him, no honor. I will list no other Grandmaster whores and failures. But let me honor the greats for a moment. Spassky! Benko! Tal! Botvinnik! Korchnoi! Reshevsky! Larsen! And Waitzkin! What a well rounded young fellow. I have had the pleasure of watching all these greats in action except Botvinnik, whose games too were true art.

These men make me truly sorry I played no tournament chess until I was in my forties, and that I had been teaching all comers for a quarter century by then, and continued to do so even while competing. The kiss of death. But I wouldn't trade any of it. No take backs. No regrets. No blunders, without a new lesson learned. No if only's.

Chess. My refuge, my solace, my food, my dream. Thank you.
* * * * * * * * * * *

Now about this damn seaweed. We screwed up. Now we have to fix it. We can't irradicate it. We have to harvest it. We have to figure a way to feed it to chickens, to swine, to cattle, to replenish depleted soil, to make paper, to make building material. Now let us pull our heads out of our asses and get to work!