Dachas are the equivalent of North American summer cottages, but with an essential difference. Great numbers of Russians seem to feel the atavistic need to get back to nature, and this means as far back as possible. Consequently, the cottages they build are small and primitive, although often delightfully designed and decorated in ``woodland peasant'' style.

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At first I was not convinced that the simplicity of the dachas was so much intentional as it was a product of a not-so-affluent society. Once, while visiting Yura Rytkheu's dacha near Leningrad I made a rather snide suggestion to this point, to which he replied: ``Farley, you think I am a poor man? Ha! I make more money than President of USSR. If I want, I have electric lights and television here. Have everything. But why I want to do that, eh? Why anybody want to take city with him on his back when he go live with nature?''

Discreetly I dropped the subject, but several months later when Yura came to visit Canada as my guest, friends took us for a weekend to their cottage at one of the summer colonies near Lake Muskoka. Yura examined the place with great interest, noting the electric dishwasher, power lawn mower, color television and other essential elements of North American cottage life, and he remembered his earlier conversation with me at his dacha. Innocently he addressed our host: ``You are lucky man! Have two city houses! But now, please, show me your dacha, your hiding place where you go to get away from city life.''

-- The Siberians, Farley Mowat

I'm sure you've tried to have an engaging discourse involving a person who couldn't keep their tongue still long enough to allow other persons the opportunity to add their twist to the mix, or what should have been a mix. I'm sure you've tasted a dish that had so much of one spice that there was no savory and subtle mixing of flavors. This is exactly the effect of traditional piano training.

Recently i was invited to join the company of some musicians. While in college i mostly ignored music given the dire need to finish and keep enough in-flow of earnings to continue to the finish. With the rigors of higher learning no longer blessing my existence, i have longed for expending more time on other activities, such as possibly playing music with other humans. You can imagine my delight on being invited to try playing music with some other people. You can imagine my dismay when i arrived and saw that a piano was to be involved.

The normal piano lessons that we infect our society with completely destroy a budding pianists ability to do anything then robotically read exact keyings from a paper, a dominate any amount of spotlight available. Playing almost any instrument with a pianist who hasn't broken free of the chains of his early piano lessons is a complete waste of time, and frustrating for all parties.

Central to the demise of such a wonderful instrument are the following elements:

Chord and ear training: how to be flexible

Pianists aren't trained how to nicely play music based off chords, nor are they trained to play by ear. The resultant ``musicians'' (robots) can only cipher the exact timings and key presses passed down to them by tedious typesetting of individual notes. When the effort is conducted to create this sheet music, it is done with no knowledge of what other instruments the piano will be playing with, so invariably the assumption is made that the piano will be alone, and the music is written so that the piano flowers on every epitaph of the resulting work. This is great until the given piece of music is chosen to be played by a piano and another instrument, at which point the piano does all the flowering, and crowds out the other instruments.

A plant that crowds out its neighbors is commonly refereed to as a weed.

Dynamics: how and when to share the stage

Pianists aren't instructed on how and when to back off and play minimally. Sure they are told how to play loudly (which they do and do well) and softly (which they forget to practice), but they learn this in the context of playing by themselves. If every instrument would use all of its advantage to play as if it were soloing one hundred percent of the time, what you have is not music but chaos. Somehow, somebody seems to forget about that when it comes to educating.

Attitude: realizing your culture is not the only culture

Finally, pianists need to realize that people are not interested in just hearing the piano, nor the guitar, nor the trumpet, nor any other interment; people are expecting to see a work or art, carefully woven together, carefully mixed so that a mixture of different voices and textures and colors interact to tell a story. This means that in timing, in dynamics, in chord transitions each instrument needs to be aware and accommodate each other so that a vibrancy and creativity are evoked. The pianist needs to realize that ``a system is a greater thing than its component parts''

I went to an art exhibition to enjoy a gallery. I was startled on arrival by walls filled with canvases, but none of which i was hoping to see. There was red with blue specs, and red with some green; red, red and red; red with thin line of gray. So while it was painted, there was not for a scene--when there's only one color, you can't make out a thing.

Each passing year our backpacking trips have gotten progressively sophisticated as the group of us have slowly become better equipped, better refined in the art, and wiser from experience. The experience department has typically been well learned lessons which have come from a mistake or equipment failure drastic enough for a death march out--retracing the last few days steps on in long haul.

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Until this year food has remained unchanged: buy one box of cheesy noodle pasta per person per day for dinners, a few boxes of instant oatmeal for breakfasts, bagels for lunches, and plenty of granola bars and trail mix. Given the assorted health materials which i've been digesting recently, it was clear that a revamp of our menu was in-store.

Dehydrated fruit seemed like a good start, but somewhere along the line a muse told me that other things could be dehydrated. Google quickly found me a nice sounding black bean enchiladas (which seems to have disappeared now) which an avid backpacker highly suggested. That was one meal, but for 7 days, diversity is not only pleasant, but essential in providing the strained body with the variety of substances it needs.

In the meantime it was time to find a dehydrator. The local stores seemed to have a pathetic lineup of dehydrators; only Walmart had anything, and since i was going to be cooking for six males on a quickly approaching trip, its cheaply made contraption made me nervous. I decided to go for quality, and was quite happy with the spendy, but well designed Excalibur Model #3500/3526T (the 5 trayed edition). I have not at all regretted purchase of this device.

The dehydrator, on arrival, came with 3 Teflon tray liners, which are slated to be used for making fruit leather. The recipe for enchiladas called for using those sheets to make enchiladas-mix-leather, which could be boiled in water to rehydrate. This opened a whole new world of ideas--for example why couldn't spaghetti sauce be dehydrated...?

It turned out that creating dehydrated spaghetti sauce was not that difficult, at least not from canned sauce. The process was quite simple:

Small | Medium | Large	Pour sauce on to tray	Small | Medium | Large	Spread
Small | Medium | Large	Place in dehydrator for about 8 hours	Small | Medium | Large	Remove now dried ``sauce'' from tray
Small | Medium | Large	Bag

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For the next few weeks my life revolved around this routine turned ritual, as i fed the machine round after round of sauce. It was almost like having a child; my daily schedule revolved around the machine and keeping it fed.

When i was done, i had a paper box full of dehydrated spaghetti sauce, hash brown potatoes, fruits, spices, olives, and mushrooms. The food looked quite strange--the potatoes were a weird grey color, the mushrooms these little black dots--i was more then a little concerned that the airport security was going to suspect me for carrying drugs. Luckily there were no incidents.

Spaghetti leather tastes very strong! To rehydrate, we unfolded and ripped apart as best as possible the mass of dried sauce, and dropped into a pan of water, and then simmered until re-hydrated, which was practically indistinguishable from the original product. The most difficult part was that in the colder environment the leather became quite still and didn't want to unfold or rip apart easily.

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In continued quest for nourishing foods, i decided that cooking whole rice and buckwheat would consume a lot of time and fuel, but was a necessary evil. Luckily one maddhatt strongly objected, and found a better solution--a pressure cooker.

I was doubtful until i saw REI's Hawkins 4 liter pressure cooker, which weighed just over 3 pounds; too much for a single person, but easily divided between 6 people.

The pressure cooker was simply amazing; we had cooked noodles in not much more then the amount of time it took to bring the pot to a boil over the dragonfly, and when whole grain brown rice only a few additional minutes.

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The result was simply delightful. Each meal was consumed with gleeful compliments, the most memorable was Joe's exclamation that he ``thought that such delicious food and such a great view were mutually exclusive.''

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Unfortunately food also turned into the trips lesson learned, although it was the first time what said lesson didn't enforce a death march. The problem was that we somehow managed to bring about twice as much food as was needed. The realization of this was that my pack weighed 65 pounds, and others were quite similar.

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We met a group of men in their forties who couldn't stop laughing at the weight of our packs. I was told my legs must be ``strong like ox''. On hearing we were hoping to get up on a mountain, they tried telling us a ``scary'' story, which we had problems keeping composure on hearing. It was perfect darwin award material: one of their dentists was taking a group of boy scouts across a glacier, evidently without proper equipment. Telling his boy-scouts ``watch how you can slide,'' he proceeded to sit down and slide down part of the glacier. Evidently the sliding worked better then expected, so much so that he wasn't able to stop before a fatal sized drop-off at the edge of the glacier.

After the first full day of carrying those overly heavy packs, and trying unsuccessfully to hoist 150 or more pounds off the ground to keep bears out, it was obvious that something(s) was going to have to go. Unfortunately there were few good options:

Not an `outhouse', just an `out'.
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buried food would easily be dug up by animals or would at least attract them, dried fruits wouldn't dissolve and wash away in the creek, and fire was much too slow. Reluctantly, we were left with the ``out'', into which we poured our excess food.

Six days in the mountains, enduring rain, and heavenly views, we finally had to make our way back to humanity. Due to all the fires in the North Cascades, there were an endless stream of people coming in. I overheard one set of mountain climbers boasting to another group of backpackers how they were going to be home by the end of the day and would be eating delicious steaks. I had to smugly grin to myself thinking about the delicious meals i had eaten each and every meal.

From Despair Inc.:

There is a very fascinating article reminiscing the Lisp Machine of Symbolics. Sounds like a really interesting product. (warning: the link is at geocities, so you might use w3m)

Recorded back in the 1980s, but still as relevant as lisp is today, this freely available lecture series, Structure and Interpretation of Comptuer Programs is really a very fascinating and entertaining way to learn about scheme, as well as see some of the enlightening aspects of lisp. This has to be about the only intro-to-programming class in the world which is building a symbolic calculus program by the sixth hour of class!

Regarding Lisp, Sussman offered the following piece of wisdom:

``Lisp is a lousy language for doing any particular problem; what it's good for is figuring out the right language that you want and embedding that in Lisp'' -- Gerald Jay Sussman

While munching in the kitchen, i read the label of a container of Johnny's Seasoning Salt, which proclaims ``It's pure magic.'' The second ingredient, directly after salt, was some substance named monosodium glutamate. Magic indeed!