rest-in-power/predator
1
0
Fork 0
Code Issues Pull requests Packages Projects Releases Wiki Activity

Initial and final commit

Browse source
This commit is contained in:
Fiscal Velvet Poet 2021-10-28 07:58:56 +10:00
commit 12a673b1ac
Signed by: fiscalvelvetpoet
GPG key ID: D8EBFD58B023BD47
35 changed files with 19406 additions and 0 deletions
Show stats Download patch file Download diff file Expand all files Collapse all files

81
ADSL.txt Normal file
View file

@ -0,0 +1,81 @@
This is a shortish rant about my experience building a Linux ADSL router
for a Telstra Big Pond ADSL service, from a pile of old parts
Equipment:
One SMC 10baseT Elite Hub (12 ports)
One Pentium-100 with 60Mb of RAM,
1Gb of harddisk
a cdrom,
a SMC-ULTRA ISA NIC
a 3Com 3c509 ISA NIC
Various ethernet cables, power cords, etc.
Originally I tried using Smoothwall Linux, and the green zone worked but I
couldn't get it to talk to the DSL modem. Also, suggestions mentioned at
Becsta.net concerning a stripped-down RedHat Linux 6.2 distro with added
PPPoE didn't work for me either.
On the suggestion of a Rent-a-Geek member, I dowloaded the 279 mb cdrom
image
smeserver-5.1.2.iso
from
ftp://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pub/e-smith/e-smith-5.1.2/iso/smeserver-5.1.2.iso
As root I used cdparanoia to burn this to a cdrom on another machine,
since the Pentium100 box happened to have a cdrom in it and was able to
boot from cdrom.
<digression>
However if neither of these conveniences apply and you're running an ftp
server on the machine were the downloaded iso exists you can mount the
iso image:
mount -t iso9660 -o loop smeserver-5.1.2.iso /mnt/somewhere
Then look in /mnt/somewhere for a file called bootnet.img ... when you
find it, dd it to a floppy like so:
dd if=bootnet.img of=/dev/fd0
then boot the prospective router machine off this floppy. The floppy will
enable the machine to find a PCI network card in the router if one exists,
and you simply answer the questions concerning where the ftp server is and
where on the ftp server the
image is known to exist.
</digression>
I followed the install and it was very straightforward (remember that
username is not
username
it is
username@bigpond
My only real problem was that, while there were kernel-loadable modules in
the /lib/modules/<uname>/net directory for my ancient ISA NICs, I couldn't
configure them through the normal install procedure which is built to
handle PCI NICs but not ISA ones. So I used a text editor and modified
modules.conf to contain:
alias eth0 3c509
options io=0x300 irq=10
alias eth1 smc-ultra
options io=0x290 irq=3
I also found I had to set the immutable attribute bit on the
/etc/modules.conf to prevent later stages of the configuration from
messing it up.
# chattr +i /etc/modules.conf
Both my linux laptop and Dave's G4 Powerbook gleefully recieve
dhcp-assigned numbers from the hub when they're plugged in and booted. The
hub, naturally is plugged into the ethernet port *not* currently occupied
by the link to the ADSL modem.
<predator>

BIN
ROBO-608.jpg Normal file
View file

Binary file not shown.
Side by side

After

Width:  |  Height:  |  Size: 1.3 MiB

2293
approach.htm Normal file
View file

File diff suppressed because it is too large Load diff

119
aquacave.txt Normal file
View file

@ -0,0 +1,119 @@
File: aquacave.txt
Cont: Description of Aquacave, a recently discovered big drain in
Bowen Hills, Brisbane, Queensland, by <predator>. December 1999
Finally I had my motorbike back from the motorbike shop in Kew NSW (which had
the approrpiate name of "Far Kew") and could hit Brisbane again. I met Ogre
in his luxury Brisbane apartment an hour earlier than he expected because I
forgot to wind my watch back one hour when I crossed the QLD/NSW border, duh,
so he was still half-asleep when he opened the door. I said hello to Dirge
while I got the blood circulating in my legs again after sitting on the 400cc
Predabike for the last four hours... those gloves I found in Charity Creek
room (under Victoria Road, Ryde) made excellent motorbikin' gauntlets.
Brisbane had turned it on for me again. Rain, that is. I was itching to do
this new drain that I'd heard Ogre and Trioxide raving about on the web ring,
but it was pissing rain. Dirge hadn't done the power station yet and was
headding back to Sydney the following day and wanted value for her Brisbane
Railpass dollar. We decided to have another look at the Tennyson Power
station. We got off at Milli-Vanilli-Silly-Billy-Yeerongpilly station and
trudged out to the powerhouse.
We scanned the perimeter for a secluded site where we could enter. Ogre, being
the big beast he is, couldn't fit through the tight squeeze which permitted
Dirge and I into the sub-basement, and he pulled off a heroic climb up the
bars and through a gap four metres off the ground, and also disposed of some
chicken wire, before getting in.
The place hasn't changed much since I was last there (see: Tennyson.txt) and
this time we went all the way to the very top of the roof, in the freezing
rain and wind. There was an amusing situation where, at one end of the
plant, we looked down at the dwelling where the security guard lives, to
determine the whereabouts of the guard dog which was responsible for the dog
shit distributed throughout the place. There it was, being fed its bowl of
dinner, by none other than the security guard wearing only his black hipster
underpants and a wristwatch. Well, there's no likelihood of being busted here,
we grinned, and kept exploring until we ran out of light.
**
Dirge and Ogre went home to their rooftop party and I got the train to Bowen
Hills Station, which is about 250m from the entrance of Aquacave. The entrance
is at the corner of Sneyd St and Campbell St, Bowen Hills (Gregorys: 250-F1)
down a steep embankment near a Queensland Rail depot. I got there in the dark
and it had stopped raining, but the tunnel spewed a torrent down the canal. I
weighed it up: it's an unfamiliar drain, probably with a big catchment (turns
out it services most of Fortitude Valley so the floating payloads could be
unpleasant too) it's night time, the clouds are threatening, and if I go in
there and it rains, I'll probably die. Aw, shit.
Yes, the threat of death keeps <predator> out of drains, but only so he can
come back the next day - which, fortunately, was on a bright sunny morning
while the tide was out. It made the whole journey worthwhile.
Aquacave is the best drain I have explored in Brisbane. It is better than
Batcave, better than Brisbane Darkie and One Hundredth, all of which are quite
worthwhile drains. Aquacave is long, has lots of interesting rooms, ancient
sections and shape changes, a nice loop, and is vertically user-friendly for
almost all of its length.
The first part, up to the junction, is roughly hacked in a straight line
under Sneyd St, straight out of the tuff, with cement-bevelled sloped
bottom edges. At other points the tuff has been hewn into large blocks and
these make up the walls.
At the junction these bevels become too steep to walk on. You have to
negotiate a large step to take the right hand fork, and it's loud due to all
the water flowing over it. This fork takes you up the 2m concrete rectangular
section to a large (6m tall, 20m long, 10m wide) arched red brick room beyond
which is another 2m concrete section, which promptly takes you to the grilles,
which are probably in Victoria Park someplace and from which I have not heard
any reports of an exit without two people to lift them.
I went back to the junction and took the left fork. The shape changes to 3m
high, moulded concrete with a sloping invert and concreted-in beams in the
roof every couple of metres. This converts into a 2.5m old round pipe, which
is soon replaced by a welcoming, much older and larger section with its
own natural lighting, and what appears to be bluestone block flooring and
walls, about 2.5m high by 3m wide. This comes quickly to another junction,
the right continuing on as is, the left is a debris-strewn 2m round concrete
pipe, similarly well lit.
I followed this round one through several small corner rooms, via a room
which has a weird pointy-edge-upstream, wedge-shaped steel plate conduit
duct, with lifting bolts on top, across the middle of the drain at about
waist height. The round tunnel section then comes to a concrete room which
connects with the old bluestone conduit section, and also connects to an
even older bluestone section 1m wide, 2.5m high (finally they got the height
and width the *right* way around!) with eroded bluestone or brick floors,
and beveled top shoulders. I frequently placed my foot where I expected floor
to be, and only ended up landing at the bottom of a half-metre deep puddle,
awkwardly loading my foot or bruising my ankle.
This is a old, long, serpentine section, interrupted periodically by 2 x 1 x 3
concrete rooms with new (1990s) manholes and stepirons. It is also interrupted
by a strange concrete section 4m high, 1m wide at the bottom half, and 2m
wide at the top half. Shape changes galore, and they don't stop there. Some
of the bluestone wall sections slope gently outwards, and have these annoying
iron cross-bars at chest height every few metres. Once the bluestone-upright
segment ends, it is replaced with another shape change, first of the permanent
shrinkers - a kind of dished bowl shape with vertical walls and a shallow
domed roof.
I was conscious of the time and the tide, and after a couple of hours up this
excellent tunnel I tagged up on some PVC conduit and headded home via the
other side of the bluestone loop. On the way out I noticed the shape of the
exit had changed - the dished bottom had been replaced by a flat horizontal
line, which means one thing - tide waters... so *that* was where the name
came from! I made it to the exit with water almost up to the crease of my
butt cheeks, and I was standing on tip-toe for much of the wade out. With wet
shoes it is a bit of a scramble to climb up and out of the trench, use the
right hand side as you face downstream, and leave happy wet footprints up
Campbell St as you return to the rail station.
G@tew@y Bridge will need nothing less than a battery powered angle grinder.
The bolts are about 12mm dia SS round rod, the site is very exposed and lit at
night.
<predator>, Cave Clan Sydney Branch, 22/12/1999

374
barron.txt Normal file
View file

@ -0,0 +1,374 @@
File: barron.txt
Cont: Data on accessing the abandoned power station at Barron Falls, Kuranda
(near Cairns, FNQ, Australia)
Date: 18 June 1999
By : <predator>
This is a legendary Cave Clan epic. Following in the footsteps of Diode,
who had explored the area a decade before the Clan even existed, a lone
explorer motorbiked about 1700 miles to the far-flung northern Queensland
outpost of Kuranda in search of trespass, wicked hidden places and awesome
photographs of dodgy old infrastructure. The site was finally infiltrated
on May 24, when <predator> turned 28.
This rant is the personal log of the <predator> on the Clan's most
northerly Australian conquest.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Cairns is about 2700km north of Sydney. Kuranda is a small town on the
mighty Barron River about 50km north of Cairns. Barron Falls is about 2km
out of Kuranda, and is part of Barron Falls National Park. It has its own
railway station with a line from Cairns, and this rail station, which
overlooks the falls, is where the journey down to the abandoned Barron
Falls power station begins. I originally climbed across the wier at the
top of the falls. This demands a risky trek along the railway cutting
(which has no extra clearance for people when the train comes around a
blind corner) then a scramble down a scree slope strewn with loose leaves
and railway metal. With some effort I made it up to the touristy region
built near the Skyrail tower. The cool earthy whiff of the forested river
is replaced by the esterified stink of toilet deodorant blocks and the
clank and squeak of motors and machinery which drive the cable car
station machinery. Who permitted this place to become a theme park for
rubber-neckin' tourists who haven't the guts to brave the trees on foot?
On the Skyrail side of the Barron River wier is a concrete inlet tower,
at the base of which is a heavy metal debris screen, which used to take
water into the penstock far below, but it is fairly well secured and
probably pointless to get into anyway.
The tourist displays at the Skyrail station say this:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
1) Water power.
In 1885 the explorer Archibald Meston described the Barron Falls in flood
where the raging waters `rush together like wild horses as they enter the
straight in the dread finish of their last race ... (where) the currents
of air created by the cataract waved the branches of the trees hundreds
of feet overhead ... the rock shook like a mighty steamer tumbling with
the vibrations of the screw.'
Decades later these waters were harnessed to generate Queensland's first
hydroelectric power. Two hundred metres below where you are standing an
underground power station was carved into the cliff face. Water was
delivered through pipes to drive the turbines, two 1200kW turbo-alternators.
The substation, workshops and staff houses were built around the area now
forming the Skyrail station. Look out for the concrete engine mount blocks
and fence posts as you wander around.They are some of the more obvious
remains of the power station.
Delivering equipment was complex. It first came by train to a rail siding,
was transferred over the falls and then lowered by tramway to the worksite
below.
2) Power in the Rainforest
The idea to build a hydroelectric power station on the Barron River was
first suggested back in 1906. It was nearly 30 years before the dream was
realised.
The site presented many challenges : precipitous cliffs, torrential rain,
and raging floods were foremost. Hauling equipment from Cairns was
relatively easy. There was no road in the early 1930s but there was the
railway on the opposite bank. Getting across the gorge was another matter.
The flying fox solved that problem. A fragile bridge built across the top
of the Barron Falls failed to withstand the floods. Plans to build an
outdoor station had to be abandoned. Earthworks proved too unstable.
Going underground proved relatively easy. That is, once the tramway was
built down the nearly vertical clifface.
By 1935 those years of frustration had been largely overcome. In November
the Governor of Queensland offically opened Queensland's first
hydroelectric power station.
It was popular. Demand soon exceeded supply. In 1940 the two 1200kW turbo
alternators were supplemented by a 1400kW unit. Twenty years later the
present Barron Falls power station was commissioned. It generated 60
megawatts of power.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Naturally, in a country where heritage is thought best sent to the local
tree shredder or mashed into landfill by a D9 bulldozer, the sad addendum
to this amazing story of engineering is that the place was decommissioned
in the 1960s and subsequently, very thoroughly trashed - a metaphorical
precis of the history of our species, it seems. Nature has nevertheless
invaded the skeleton and the station is now home to bats and various other
organisms, which cloak it in the timeless decency deserving of such a
noble corpse.
**
Barron Falls is, visually, a mightily impressive gash in the forest and rock.
From the far upstream (Kuranda) end of the station, you can spot a white
seam of quartz in the rock at the bottom / distant downstream visible end
of the gorge. If you trace your eye along this you will spot a small dark
hole, which was the power station's wastewater outlet and which is about
10 feet tall.
The jungle hasn't quite overtaken the little brown cement and corrugated
iron blockhouse on the opposite cliffside, but it's making progress. It
appears as a brown speck with a silver and black speck beneath it, in a
carpet of greenery. The black speck is where some of the sheet metal is
missing from the remains of the attempt to seal the place up with
corrugated iron, which provides the silver speck. The brown speck has
writing on it but there's no way to resolve it at this range. To enter the
station, this is where you must go.
The gorge is very, very steep. Getting down was going to be a nontrivial
exercise.
On my first attempt at finding a way down I met nothing but cliffsides,
screeslopes and sheets of entangled thorny plant life. I eventually asked
a local chap named Greg Taylor about the place, and he came up with the
name of a guy who had a clue, who gave me a pretty close description of
how to find the track to get down. Greg had a wrenching lifestyle change
forced upon him years ago in a car accident, which compells him to get
around in a wheelchair, and hence I was unable to even consider badgering
him into coming down the cliffside with me for logistical reasons. The
cliffside has not yet been fully converted for wheelchair access (and holy
shit you'd need good brakes to deal with it if it did) - the rugged geography
displays indiscriminate contempt for all who attempt to negotiate it, several
rock climbers have met their messy gravity-related ends in this setting.
The eventual journey, its photos and this text are unlikely to have ever
been carried out without the local information he provided. So if you ever
get this file, thanks for the info Greg dude. Oh, and thanks again for
sending my towel back to Sydney, too.
I had to look around for a long time to find the track which permits you
to descend to the bottom of the gorge. It has been deliberately hidden,
the signs which designated its existance have been uprooted but remain
lying in the nearby undergrowth. The access to the track is either by
squeezing past, or vaulting over, the black railing fence on the upstream
side of the large water tank. The first few metres of the track are very
degraded and crumbly, use *extreme* care getting through here - the
morbidly obese need not apply, and penalties for grip failure are severe.
The rest of the track isn't particularly safe either. It narrows to 20cm
at some places, with significantly fatal sheer drops just past its edge.
The remains of handrails stick out of the ground, rusty bits of iron
attached to rotting bits of wood by siezed bolts and disintegrating
strapping. Some of the track is heavily overgrown by blackberry or lantana
and might require a machete or brushhook to penetrate. It is a long,
winding, steep trail, at the end of which is the next difficulty - the
riverbed.
It is not a good idea to commence this trip when it is raining, and not
just because of storm flood waters (the weir mitigates this to an extent).
Rather, you need to cross the river, and the millennia of raging torrents
has slowly polished the rock to a high finish. When this is wet it is very
difficult to clamber around upon without a lot of defensive posturing and
experimentation to see if your next handhold or foothold will slip out of
your grasp when you really need to rely on it. Rain and falls-spray and an
unfavourable wind had lightly misted the rock surface, and it required all
my rock-climbing experience and caution to stop myself from sliding into
the swirling waters below. It was a relief to be off the rounded knolls
and buttresses, but even the horizontal surfaces are not to be trusted,
being lightly coated in living slime with particularly treacherous
lubricating properties.
I eventually reached the quartz vein at the bottom of the river, with a surge
of excitement. I hadn't fallen, drowned, or become lost. I couldn't see the
blockhouse from this vantage point because the jungle had enveloped it, but
there was no mistaking the outlet port. I had a quick look at it, slightly
less than twice my height and about five feet wide. Rough hewn - no point
laying pipe to get the wastewater out when you could cheaply just dump it
back into the river. And - it was thoroughly sealed off by a mesh of 15mm
diameter stainless steel rods, mounted in holes drilled into the rock. Hmmm...
would the access facilitation tools I had in my pack be enough? Someone had
obviously gone to considerable effort to seal the place up.
I didn't dwell on it as I searched for the path up to the blockhouse. Sweaty,
I clambered up through earth, moss and fern, using the occasional tree or
length of abandoned pipe or cable as an anchor, until I reached a heavily
overgrown and leaf-strewn staircase. Small plants were germinating in the leaf
litter, which was quite deep in places. On the steel railing hung the rotting
remains of tea towels and doormats... huh, what were they doing here?
I crawled along below the weeds and finally made it to the doorway. The little
place was only about a metre wide, two metres high. A rusted fan was
vertically mounted in the top of the roof slightly offset from one wall, I
couldn't tell if it was meant to suck air in or blow air out. I peered out
the window and back at the wall above : there partly obscured by foliage, in
the style of metropolitan building text everywhere in the 1930s were the
words in half-inch cement relief.
BARRON
FALLS
POWER
STATION
The entry blockhouse was littered with rotting junk. Old propane cannisters,
camping gear, mosquito netting, toothbrushes, clothing, a yellow biohazard
disposal container, disintegrating pulp Western novels. All the hallmarks of
makeshift human habitation long abandoned. But whom, and why? The psychedelic
multicolour artwork sprayed on the walls provided a clue, but nothing
definite.
One walks along a short corridor and, just past a rotting makeshift wooden
bench, is faced by another of the heavy welded stainless steel rod mesh
installations which block entry to the wastewater outlet. Fortunately some
kind person has chopped out a segment of this mesh in the bottom right
corner, which saved me hours of farting around with a car jack and hacksaw
and I wriggled through into the coming darkness. I put on my head torch,
checked my spares, descended some stairs and took a flash shot with my
camera, aimed at the impenetrable gloom in front.
Immediately about a hundred bats detached themselves from the roof and
stormed the doorway which framed me. Demonstrating astonishing aerobatics
they'd be pinned momentarily in the beam of my head torch and then bank
sharply before powering past my head towards the dim light of blockhouse.
When I'd remembered to breathe again I swept my torchbeam in front of me
to reveal a sheer drop and a large space behind it. Evidently whatever had
functioned as stairs or flooring here had gone. A significantly unreliable
looking ladder beckoned but I knew better than to use it in such a place -
if I injured myself seriously, any rescuers would have a hell of a time
coming to look for me.
I uncoiled my rope and put on my harness. The unkind individuals who
installed the anti-fun barrier had inadertantly provided me with a
super-secure anchor from which to belay myself down into the unknown. With
my heart beating fast, I knotted the ends and payed out the coils into the
black volume, clipped in, leaned back and started the descent.
It didn't last very long, my feet hitting the ancient concrete within
about five metres. I didn't know how reliable the stuff was, so I stayed
clipped into my rope while I sussed the place out. The place was a grim
picture of total devastation. As my eyes adapted to the dark, I could
start to parse outlines and generate a map in my head of what I was
exploring. What were these strange shapes around me?
I was on the generator floor. Below it was a sub-level with large cast
iron pipe sections, which had been unbolted and moved out of position. The
drop to the bottom was about three metres below the floor I stood on. The
irregular trickling of running water matched the visual chaos.
The whole building was encased, the cavity having been dug and the
building growing up, roof and all, inside it.
On my right was a rotting double mattress, plus more abandoned clothes,
empty prescription pharma cannisters (circa 1997), a cheap bulk-carrier
plastic bag with more rotting junk in it. The walls sported more examples of
Giger-esque spraycan artwork. Above me was a very corroded, arched,
corrugated-iron roof, covered in condensation, and immediately under it
was a large 8.25 ton rail-mounted crane on heavy iron beams. Sigh. These
metals were smelted before the days when the atmosphere was contaminated
with radioactive fallout, making them intrinsically special, products from
a less polluted era - no transuranics in these members here.
I later learned, upon discussions with people who knew about the controversial
construction of the Skyrail, that during construction a population of ferals
were using the disused power station as a base from which to launch their
protest activities. It fitted what I told them about what I found in the
station. I was amazed that anyone could actually live here for any period,
in such an inaccessible, damp, dark and hazardous place - but simultaneously
amazed at the dedication to forest preservation it demonstrated. And before
we go slagging the ferals at their lack of clean-up, it needs to be remembered
that the station was left as a proxy garbage dump when the power utility
gutted it. Ferals and suits presumably left the mess for similar reasons -
the effort of getting the junk back up the cliff.
On the generator floor itself were strewn the guts of the trio of
alternators. Huge, heavy six-pole rotors, bits of armature, and various metal
shapes whose function I had no clue about lay stripped of their valuable
copper windings and scattered about as if only contempt and gravity cared.
The green and black cowlings of the hydroelectric generators hadn't moved
from their regimented layout, presumably by virtue of their mass and
having been embedded in the concrete floor. The covers were off, their
exposed blades retained their original ordered configuration, showing the
fine precision workmanship of their long dead manufacturers.
The green machinery and heavy plumbing was to enable the flow of water to
be controlled smoothly. If the station had been running at full capacity
and suddenly the valves closed off, the pipe with the massive, internally
stored inertia of several hundred tonnes of fast moving water would tend
to rip straight off its mountings and pile up, mangled, in the bottom of
the penstock tunnel, with the additional bonus of flooding the basement of
tht station. So the system presumably had to be brought up to speed, and
also choked back to a stop, over a period of several minutes. This was all
manually done - no PLCs in this place. Hence, huge levers and handles and
gear-wheels sprout from the generators. I could imagine 1940's men with their
vests and caps throwing the switches, the throb and hum of the alternators
as they spun, the swooshing roar of the waste water as it splattered and
bubbled down the outlet tunnels. Did they have pride in the place? I can't
imagine that they didn't.
The station's long black power systems control panel had been stripped of
every switch, meter and indicator, the switchgear fittings and racking
rusted or slumped according to their constitution, what couldn't be
pilfered and wasn't indestructable was damaged or destroyed. Even a small
stepdown transformer sits forlornly rusting along one wall, with its lid
ripped off and windings gone. It was all a bit sad, the place has been well
ruined since its heyday.
Wandering around brought me to each of three short tunnels which took
tonnes of spent water from each generator and dumped it into the outlet
port. They've been relagated to the task of disposing of the seepage from
the penstock tunnel and from the rock cavity in which the station exists.
Another door brought me to the penstock, the large-diameter pipe which
took the speeding waters from the weir and fed them into the turbines.
The penstock tunnel promised much - logically it'd go all the way up to
the weir, which not only looked like an interesting place to go, but
which, if it provided an exit, would save me clambering across the river
and fighting my way back up the cliffside in the rain. It is rumoured to
have an opening half-way along it, which surfaces at the sheer cliffside
with a spectacular and rarely-seen view of the railway side of the falls.
I was sorely tempted, but stuck to the rules which had kept me alive so
far and declined to explore this confined and structurally unknown quantity
on my own. Aw, drrrrAT.
The biggest hole in the floor drops straight down to the sub-basement
floor, which is unadorned local rock submerged in a half a metre of
ludicrously clear water. Was this a large, once-covered access hole, or
was it left for future installation of another generator? I don't know.
I used a lot of film and flash battery capturing the place on camera, and
then realised I had to get out if I was going to make it back to the
railway before dark. I definately wanted to avoid the dark for the ascent
up the tricky track via which I'd arrived. So I prussiked out, coiled my
rope, packed and silently thanked the place for having me, before crawling
out and compost-surfing back down to the exposed rock of the riverbed.
The sun shone feebly over the lip of the falls, and I knew I'd have time
to get out in the remaining light, so I commenced the climb. I didn't much
care about getting wet now, so I waded through some wide, shallow sections to
cross the river, and clambered up some of the blockier outcrops to the
track I'd come down a few hours before. The effort of ascent warmed me
and dried my clothes, and by the time I arrived at the Kuranda station
platform and climbed over the fence (in front of some tourists obviously
distressed by my dishevelment) I was thoroughly knackered. I guzzled
rainwater from the tank behind the information displays on the station and
raided my wet, heavy pack for the last of my munchies. I sat and looked at
the place for a few minutes before I gathered my strength and walked back to
the carpark. I was glad I didn't have to kick start the motorbike! I rode
back to Greg's place at Koah Road, sweating relief and smelling of moist
earth, swollen with happiness that I'd finally done the Barron. Stuffed if
I was going to carry my climbing gear back to Sydney in my backpack - I
mailed it back the next day.
I had the photos developed in Lismore and was amazed anew - yes, I'd
really been in there. My bum ached after nearly 2000km of southward
motorbiking, and reminded me that yes, I had indeed done the travel after
all.
So there it lies, awaiting the next explorer. It's an excellent place,
and I hope you're enjoyed the story, even if it's a little long-winded.
It's a sad tale of deliberate neglect of yet another landmark chunk of
Australia'a early struggle to become a self-sustaining nation. We neglect
these relics at our peril, for doing so permits us to forget the struggle
which permitted us modern folks to have such comparatively easy,
electrically powered, computer-driven, air-conditioned lives - or should
I merely say - existances? Have we already forgotten? Perhaps in some senses
we already have. Time will tell us eventually.
<p r e d a t o r>

39
benfords.c Normal file
View file

@ -0,0 +1,39 @@
#include <stdio.h>
#include <math.h>
/* This program is made available under the terms of the GNU copyleft*/
int main(void)
{
char buffer1[20];
char buffer2[20];
double symbols;
double proportion;
double actual_symbol;
/*get the nums*/
printf("How many symbols are available in this system ?\n");
//gets(buffer1);
if (fgets(buffer1,20,stdin) == NULL) { exit(1);}
printf("Of these, which symbol's Benford proportion do you want? ?\n");
//gets(buffer2);
if (fgets(buffer2,20,stdin) == NULL) { exit(1);}
/*conv to values*/
symbols=atol(buffer1);
actual_symbol=atol(buffer2);
/* benford's proportion = log to the base n of (1 + 1/D) where D is*/
/* some symbol included in the symbol set */
proportion = log10(1+(1/actual_symbol)) / log10(symbols);
printf("Symbol %g occurs with proportion %g.\n\n", actual_symbol, proportion);
return 0;
}

105
bentcops.txt Normal file
View file

@ -0,0 +1,105 @@
This is a document which attempts to describe some aspects of endemic
corruption in the NSW police force, specifically during the period around
1979 to present. It is a transcript from a conversation with Blackheath
Flowers 7th September 2000.
Thoughts on the mysterious Rick and Luke.
During the period about 1979-80, "Rick" a.k.a. Richard Seary, was active
in the Kings Cross region. Rick's main occupations, assisted by his
partner Luke, were narcotics dealing and unsolicited surgery without a
license to practise medicine. Rick's primary employer for surgery and
general miscellaneous public nuisances was an anonymous, tall Australian
gent <large finger pads> who drove a Monaro who used to enjoy the
hospitality of the Bourbon and Beefsteak, a well known watering hole for
NSW detectives and CIA agents of the time. Rick was facing a lot of gaol
time for narcotics dealing and inept surgical procedures on unwilling
patients, but was able to remain in circulation owing to his other role as
a police informer. Rick had also insinuated himself into various
aboriginal groups.
Rick and probably many other informers find themselves in their role
because their previous involvment in the narcotics distribution system.
The informer-to-be, usually sourced from a position of socioeconomic
vulnerability, is threatened with prosecution if they fail to reveal
information on people involved in other (alleged) criminal activity in the
locale. Since illegal drug transactions are a victimless crime, and there
are no complaints raised about lack of prosecutions of disposable,
small-time dealers and habitual users, there is never any pressure on the
police to reveal the identities of their informants.
Regarding Rodney Podesta.
Rodney Podesta recently came to some notoriety as one of the police officers
responsible for the shooting of Roni Levi on Bondi Beach in 1998. He was not
subsequently charged for this shooting. He has some other interesting personal
historical aspects which have not yet seen the light of newsprint. Some of
these serve to highlight the entrenched nature of corruption in the NSW police
force.
Rodney Podesta, having failed both of the maximum permissible two applications
to join the NSW police force, was subsequently permitted to join the NSW police
as a trainee police officer when he applied for admission a third time. These
circumstances for admission are highly unusual. Applicants who have failed two
attempts at admission are, without exception, refused a third application.
Unless, of course, they have relatives who hold high office in the NSW Police
training Academy at Goulburn. Rodney was subsequently permitted to undergo
training and graduated as a probationary NSW police constable in 1996, despite
te knowledge that he had many friends and associations over many years in the
Kings Cross area, which would, one might expect, have rased a red flag about
Rodney's suitability to perform as a law enforcement officer at all, let alone
in the Kings Cross region.
Rodney Podesta's now deceased father, Joe Podesta, long-time owner of the
Piccolo Coffee Shop in Kings Cross, was brought up before two Royal Commissions
and was reputed to be involved in three gang wars of an unspecified nature.
This establishment provided a safe haven where cannabis dealing could occur
without any intervention by the local police, and this is the reason for the
immunity of this establishment to harassment by local police and emerging
criminal gangs in the region.
Rodney Podesta was initially posted to the Rose Bay precinct upon
graduation. The choice of assignment was determined in part by the nature
of the associations he had made in his preferred and subsequent region of
operation, which was Kings Cross. Rodney, during his time as an
adolescent, was occupied on Wednesday nights supervising the running of
the Piccolo Coffee shop, which one might expect swayed the development of
Rodney's character and view of the world and his place in it. Much of the
Piccolo's clientele represented a less law-abiding and honest section of
the community than one might prefer as an environment in which a
upstanding adolescent might be expected to develop within. Rodney was,
through his father's ownership of the Piccolo, exposed to influences which
certainly shaped his later choice of carreer and his attitude towards it.
Rodney was bored (and not sufficiently remunerated) by his initial assignment
and, because he wanted to "see some action" applied for a transfer. This led to
his reassignment to the Bondi Beach police station.
It is alleged that there was unusual behind-the-scenes police computer
database activity in which Rodney was involved. Access to the police files
is logged, but this logging does not ensure that access to these files is
made for valid reasons - for instance, an officer or other individual with
access to the files could conjure up a reason like "suspected stolen car",
enter the license plate details and see what - and who - comes up.
The actual nature of Rodney's accessions was never determined, but an
indication of their significance is given by the fact that neither the
state or federal police investigated this activity - and this activity was
never investigated in the courts. The only organisation which investigated
Rodney's activities prior to the shooting or Roni Levi was ASIO, who
installed a surveillance camera into the cieling of his Randwick unit (via
the floor of the unit above).
The issue here is not that Rodney was corrupt, but rather that Rodney was
an instrument of a system with corruption so entrenced that it encouraged
and fostered corruption as a way of life for law enforcement officers.
What does it say that in order to run the police force in NSW that one has
to appoint a person from another country to do the job, and that the first
major change he implemented was to prevent the Goulburn Police Academy
from functioning as a manufacturing plant for additional institutionalised
and generational corruption and nepotism in the police force.

579
bill_me.txt Normal file
View file

@ -0,0 +1,579 @@
File: bill_me.txt
Cont: More crap in the interminable saga of predator's near-life experience
Dates: 22 Dec 2k3 -> Jan 6 2k4
On account of Bill's appearance in my neck, I went along and saw Paul the
oncologist again, this time without bringing Dad along since I expected
he'd just fall alseep in the chair again. It was good just being there
alone with the guy, so I could do a bit of a brain dump without having to
care what dad thought. He hadda feel of Bill The Lump. I reek faintly of
methylselenium and volatile sulfur compounds, since I'm stuffin' myself
full of foods full of free-radical scavenging molecules, avoiding carbs,
plus imbibing various transition metal trace elements, enzyme cofactors
and B group vitamins. He reckons the changes I've made to my diet are
mainly preventative rather than curative, tho the way I see it, any new
tumor cell is another one which can be prevented, or persuaded not to
propagate, if the surrounding biochemical circumstances are configured
against it doing so. To my gobsmacked surprise he reckons we should leave
this thing here in my neck unless it causes pain since its presence there
is irrelevant to the progression of the disease. That is, do what you
like, you're still fucked so leave it there. He'll cut it off if I say
that it's painful. I want the fucker out before it does something bloody
annoying like eat into the nerves which make my left arm work (ruining my
clutch control, wanking technique, and typing speed - you the reader
should be so lucky). He sent me off for a CT-scan so we can determine
wether or not it has invaded anything nearby. Ho fucking ho.
Now, my take is, either chop the fucker out as soon as poss, or, since
it's so conveniently located where _I_ can get at it, try something whacky
like inject into it small quantities of bacterial lipopolysaccharides to
provoke a massive, feverish immune response like Coley used to do back in
the 1920s before chemo' and radiotherapy appeared on the scene. It didn't
succeed all the time, maybe 20% or so, and it was generally tried on
inoperable tumors... If I can get my hands on the two relevant strains of
microbes, I can culture them myself (I know sterile technique, have the
glassware and my old centrifuge will be just fine for getting the pellet
down) kill 'em in hot water, titrate their CFU density on a slide, and off
we go. I'm gonna have to trawl around to find the relevant bugs, tho. One
can't just walk into the university microbiology department these days and
snare an Eppendorff with a frozen pellet of your bug of choice in 10%
DMSO, and nor can one just waltz into Sigma-Aldrich-Fluka and buy a bunch
o' growth medium. Everyone assumes microbiologists are terrorists.
I popped along for my third CT-scan of the year. This was a 32-detector
Toshiba item, with better resolution than the previous 8-detector GE
instrument, but this time they weren't gonna ionise my dick - the
objective of the visit was to cook my brain, neck and lungs. More
sensitivity means they needed more radiation. Scans are a sort of
self-fulfilling technology - if we keep this scanning up I will be mutated
by radiation into the same sort of mutant blob I am attempting to locate
using radiation in the first place. It took half an hour, a bit over half
a grand, and I walked out with an envelope saying "To be opened only by
referring doctor." Grrrr. How dare a patient directly acquire a clue about
themselves?
Christmas is usually insane and depressing even when you're not sick,
since everything's dripping with *enforced good cheer*.
"Shuddup. Be Happy. Obey All Orders Without Question.
Shuddup. Consume. The Comforts You've Demanded Are Now Mandatory."
-Jello Biafra, "A Message From Our Sponsors" - Terminal City Ricochet
soundtrack.
The usual diversions one might turn to on teev have been replaced by round
the clock saturation christmasturbation (I do *so* love that word, it sums
everything up so well!) and full-spectrum bandwidth bombing with cricket
matches so stupefyingly pointless and boring that it is surely in the
national interest for us to nuke the entirety of the commonwealth just to
expunge the game from the surface of the planet. The roads are crawling
with cops intent on, say, fining motorcyclists for not wearing seat belts,
ha ha. And since the shops are shut, you can't even smack a load of
consumer therapy up your arm when you're in need of it. Not that I am.
Usually I spend the festy season avoiding the 'phone, and dicking around
with various bits of hardware.
Weapons-grade farts aside, the oldie's dog has proven itself most amusing,
insofar as our new postie has failed to deliver letters to us on the
grounds that he considers our remarkably docile pooch to be too savage to
make it worth his risk putting his armload of mail through the gap in our
fence. The dog normally races out, barking, and runs up and down the fence
yappin' at the postal motorbike. She's doing this entirely for show, but
the new postie hasn't been told. Oz Post officialdom came to investigate
the savage dog claim. The mutt waddled out calmly, and when the postal
investigators opened the gate, she gave 'em a polite lick, a bit of an
inquisitive sniff and sat on her bum, looking upwards at them plaintively.
We've stopped calling her doggo, and now refer to her as Savijdog. Poor
postie.
My apologies: I was gonna have some links in here to pictures of the
scanned images of the tumor they chopped out of me, but that's not gonna
happen anytime soon. After fighting with it for two days, I have given up
getting the HP Scanjet 5100C to work with Debian/Knoppix 3.2... I've
transplanted drives, installed the whole OS anew, installed more recent
kernels, patched them with the horrible kludge-around required to
implement SCSI over parallel ports, frigged around with the BIOS settings,
apt-got more packages than is reasonable over this shite 56k modem link
and I'm at that point I so often arrive at in a Linux install, which is
defeated, resigned frustration. As far as Linux installs go, Knoppix is
very fucking good. For the first time, I conclude it's not the OS's fault,
or even mine - it's just that this particular scanner is a really, really
stupid design, most uncharacteristic of Pewlett-Hackard. As shamefully
wasteful as it is, I am gonna just drop the whole rig in the bin, victim
of its own poor documentation and interface design kludginess. I'd go
playing with a USB rig 'cept the interface stakes on this mobo are layed
out incorrectly for every USB feed socket I've ever laid my hands on. And
I don't have one handy either. I might have a PCI SCSI card lying around
somewhere. Maybe I'll just go up to a net cafe and scan it in there, and
fight with whatever broken ftp clients they force me to use.
I've been playing with hardware of a transportational nature too. After I
re-packed the pedal bearings with lithium grease and oiled the chain and
derailleur, I took my old aluminium-framed pushie for a spin. Slowly. I
shamefully bemoan the lack of raw acceleratory grunt and monster
respiratory reserve upon which I used to unthinkingly call as a serious,
kill'em'all, fuck-right-off urban commuting weapon nearly half a decade
ago before I really became enslaved by the convenience of liquid
hydrocarbons. In 1998 I was pushing 150km a week, keeping up with cars on
arterial roads. I destroyed bottom brackets and pedal bearings with
impunity... my lungs greedily gouged oxygen and nearby insects from the
surrounding air, vast planes of dorsal meat plated my back, and my pelve
was welded to a pair of sculpted, throbbing, half kilowatt Krebs cycle
engines barely recognisable as legs. By comparison, at the moment I'm a
weedy piece of desk-driving shit, and the muscular remnants of my arse
exhibit all the athletic responsiveness of a scoop of icecream gone soft
in the sun. So soft, in fact, I've gotta snare myself some seatpost
suspension, I am tired of having the seat hammered up my bum every time I
drop the back wheel into a pothole.
It's actually been a pretty pleasant week, but it contained various
stupidities. I angrily chopped a friend of ten years out of my life, after
deciding he was being rather more interrogatory than he shoudda been. Ah,
well, it isn't like I didn't warn him. It's intriguing - I am much more
freely prepared to do this, these days, but even if awareness of my life
expectancy hadn't suddenly dropped by three decades in the last month, I
wasn't about to have anyone make unsolicited, unwarranted deductions about
my shag life, crow about their success at it when they're wrong, and then
keep at it when I tell 'em not to. I'll reveal what I will, which is quite
a bit, but will not be interrogated, no matter how subtly. Nor will I have
my crankiness about this specific incident written off as a background
effect of my being suddenly aware of the foreshortening of my lifespan. If
you're reading this, and you know who you are, you have a couple of years
to think about it before I'll take you out of my killfile.
Anyway.
On the 'eve I had a delightful nosh'n'blab and a couple of beers with a
couple of friends over at Maroubra, a stroll along the beach, with
complementary perving upon the nearly naked bods of nearby women who got
their gear off and ran into the freezing, pounding surf. Salt spray
condensed on my specs, a cold wind raced off the choppy ocean and sucked
all the heat out of me. We went back to my friends' share house and in
don't-give-a-shit mode I ate lots of delightful foods dripping with carbs
and sugars. I'm sure Bill grew a bit as a result, but arrr, fuck him.
"That's WHAT he does. That's ALL he does." -Kyle Reese, referring to
Terminator
The Cookie Manufacturer and I rode back to the ice cream factory through
suburbs largely depleted of traffic, and after killing dozens of midnight
mozzies before they could drill us, shagged farewell shags since one of us
was leaving the country for a month. Christmas only comes once a year, but
I'm glad we don't. Off she goes, back to the land of the free where they
imprison more people per capita than anywhere else on the planet, landing
at an airport on the edge of a state run by precisely the same fuckin'
Terminator that Kyle Reese was referring to above. Fucked if I'm ever
gonna go to the US again, they fingerprint everyone who goes there now,
which is a sure sign the place has turned into a police state the likes of
which it specifically set out to avoid becoming, if their constitution is
anything to go by.
Goddamned mozzies have no decorum, I discovered in the morning there were
several mozzie bites on my arse presumably installed while I was
distracted by shagging from the task of smashing them into bloody mash
against me.
Christmas day was crushingly hot and murderously dry. I soaked my T-shirt,
put my leather jacket on over the top of it, and motorcycled up to Palm
Beach (maybe 60km north) in the hazy, shimmering thermal waste. When I
started the bike, the fuel was *boiling* in the tank, toxic, flammable
vapours hissed out of the fuel cap. The road was sticky - the kick stand
had sunk slightly into the melting tarmac. I kept the visor down because
otherwise the dry breeze sucked the moisture out of my eyes. The traffic
was heavy, I saw several cars on the roadside with their owners gazing
under the hoods. I had a pretty good run apart from encountering some
homicidal tailgating clowns, who I motioned to pass me only to watch them
tailgate the cars in front of me. Dickheads. Much of the way a
motorcyclist stays alive out there is by reading people's roadcraft and
vehicle damage status and assessing people's ability to fuck up in such a
way as will fatally include oneself when one has not positioned oneself so
as to avoid the wreckage. This defensive tacticality is habitual, these
days, and its still worth the effort of keeping my eyes peeled.
Reprogrammed to self-destruct from the nucleotides up, nonetheless I'm not
driving around with a deathwish. The wet shirt under my jacket was bone
dry by the time I got to Palm Beach. The place amazes me, it looks like a
fuckin' four-wheel drive convention, huge Toorak tractors parked all over
the place, obstructing the roads.
It was good to see Lissie and Craig - my cousins. I watch their kids grow
up at intervals of twelve months and there's something oddly satisfying
about it even though as an adoptee I am biologically unrelated to them.
Lissie and I have some pretty raucous, very enjoyable conversations. I ate
a ton of seafood, configured Liam's evil X-box for him (Micro$oft:
Enslaving Your Children), had a swim in their pebblecreted pool, and
caught up with some of my proxy rellos. Their maniacal bad-attitude male
pomeranian has literally arse-raped, disembowelled and scattered the
pieces of every stuffed toy in the house, which makes me glad it's not a
rottweiler. I took Liam's grandma Julie for a spin (admittedly, she had me
at knifepoint) on the motorcycle which she thought was pretty cool, if a
bit draughty on account of the aerodynamics of spread legs and a dress. It
was great to catch up with them all. Half full of piss, I answered their
questions about my cancer as best I could, which probably wasn't very
well. Liam's only about three, and he reckons I have a nasty scratch up my
front. Well, yeah, I do.
I'd have hung around for longer but I had to meet an old friend on the
19th floor in the offices of the NSW Minstry for Police. I locked him out
of my life two years ago and I thought we were about ready to tolerate
each other again. To look at him he hadn't aged a day, but I could see in
his right eye a cloudiness that spoke of a cataract. Staring out the
window at the nighttime view upon which the chrome-domed NSW police
minister used to gaze, with our feet on the furniture, we caught up in the
heat of a stuffy office with broken airconditioning. We would have got
pissed but all the pubs on Oxford st were shut so we couldn't score any
Guinness.
We chatted up about a lot of stuff, but some fundamentally annoying things
about him have not changed. He mentioned to me as news things I remembered
him telling me two years ago. The percentage of his thought processes
ripped directly from TV still exceeds the number of hits I want on my old
news / useless bullshit filters. It's not gonna be a prolonged reunion.
I rode home topless in the stinking nighttime heat.
By the time I got there Dad had got his hands on the CT-scan report.
To everyone's surprise, I have a brain, and to my surprise in particular,
it appears to be normal. So are my lungs, though they're the lungs of a
slack bastard who doesn't do enough exercise. The report is worded
obscurely, almost defensively, as if they didn't trust me not to rip the
envelope open a couple of days ago and come to my own conclusions from
whatever the radiologists wrote. They report a large, hypodense mass,
where I had told them it was. Well, surprise, surprise. It seems to have
not invaded the surrounding bones or vasculature yet. They didn't say it
_was_ a lymph node... its identity is referred to obliquely - `there is no
other evidence of metastatic disease'. I feel like I have learned
precisely two fifths of fuck-all about this lump. I'm from the school of
though that sez, biopsy the bastard, stick some of it on a slide and
identify its cellular morph. But maybe that'd rupture it, freeing whatever
is contained in the putative node, to wreak invasive havoc on the rest of
my neck.
When I see Coz on the 5th, I'm gonna ask that he wield the tactical
machete once more. Out, damned spot!
27th Dec
I got an SMS from a number I didn't recognise late on the 26th, and was
invited out to a fuck-my-anticancer-diet dinner at an Italian restaurant
in Newtown, by a mysterious brown woman of part South African extraction whom,
when she wears her distinctly 1970's silver-rimmed Polaroid sunglasses and
straw hat, bears a startling resemblance to a famous Chilean dictator. The
nosh was great, inclusive of garlic bread with enough topping to change
the refractive index of my exhaled breath after eating the stuff. We
wandered down to her friend's place to play with a nice telescope (Saturn
looks the best it has for thirty years just now, since its orbital
inclination is at its maximum so the rings are obvious) but it was a
cloudy night so we couldn't see the stars, and had to settle for perving
into the neighbor's front windows and discovering the type and rating of
various fluoroescent bulbs in the nearby streetlamps. And, later, snogging
in the park at Camperdown. Next day I popped over to her place on the way
to drop a packload of books in East Hills and spent rather longer there
than I intended, for reasons which you could probably guess by now given
the content of previous rants. Man... people go buy fibro houses in
suburban wastelands and wonder why they're isolated, lonely
and bored outta their minds when they're not out, busy working. To
alleviate this, she's looking for some sort of long-term relationship but
I told her I'm not really in a position to participate in such a thing.
I'm happy to share a shag even if it is simply to relieve the solitude,
which appears to be engineered into the very fabric of the suburb - I
speak with authority when I say this place's groundwaters, secluded and
swaddled in rusting cylindrical ferrocrete, are more interesting than its
streetscapes. Regardless of how good such shaggery might be, it's a
meaningless gesture against the brute fact that the whole district was
designed to partition its inhabitants off from each other, to prevent the
spontaneous growth of a community before it ever might take root. Nobody
plays in the treeless parks, prowling cops hassle every cluster of kids
which happens to condense anywhere, etc etc, and you can only hang around
in the sprawling mall if you're spending money. Even the public seating,
optimised for discomfort, is specifically manufactured to tell your bum to
get lost after five minutes.
28th Dec
I finally caught up to a head torch modification project I've had in the
works for at least two years. See conway.cat.org.au/~predator/whiteled.txt
I thought for a moment during testing I'd fucked the MAX1698 chip (a truly
incredible bit of DC-DC engineering!) which would have been an expensive
exercise, but it turned out I'd just blown a Schottky catch diode (surface
mount, B4H) which rectifies the N-channel FET output on the way to the LED
array. I swapped it out for something slower, fatter and tougher from my
parts bin... rated to 4A, 1kV. The SMD part which I had blown up was 1mm x
2mm and the exact replacement would be an absolute pain in the arse to
solder in, anyway - capillary action makes the fuckin' things stick to the
point of the soldering iron, during which time they get fried and don't
work any more.
Pete and his f'yonce Louise (great... there's gonna be two people in the
family named Lousie Maher now) popped in, which was a good excuse to stuff
myself with all that shitty carbohydrate I've recently noticed how keenly
I have missed. I might pop in and see them down in Wollongong when I am
next doing a clandestine reconnoitre of the Port Kembla copper smelter. I
miss good coffee - the vac-sealed Vittoria stuff, plunged through
stainless mesh in gleamin' borosilicate.
30th Dec.
Long lost (well, about 12 years since we've seen him) cuz Tony showed up
without warning. Great to see him and I would have chatted to him more
except that I had pre-arranged to go waste some time with Keoh. Keoh's
done a good job on the cubby at the back of the junkyard. Fuck alone knows
how he acquired the very swish pair of cufflinks he gave me - embossed
with the NSW police service emblem, and cloaked in the insignia of the
Drug Squad. Very amusing, but they're illegal to wear if you're not a cop,
and besides, wearing them could very well get me killed in some of the
circles I move in.
The Cat firewall (tarvat, so named since our previous fw was called
avatar) has developed some odd glitchiness. Thinking it was thermally
related I did a guts transplant (harddisk, display and network cards, this
way we know there won't be any interrupt conflicts or failed module
dependancies on bootup) into our hot standby box but I got the same error
there.
While I was furiously hammering this stuff to see if I could make it go,
Coco comes into the geek room to slowly drone in my direction a stream of
low information content small-talk. Coco is a pain in the arse who has
disappeared from the Ice Cream factory for a month - his cat has remained,
dropping cat turds in unexpected places and, if you ask me, considering
itself very lucky not to have been found euthanased in a deep freeze
somewhere. He says, how ya going, and without looking up I mention
"frantically busy and unable to talk to you, sorry." "Ok, get fucked,
then." He says. Yeah, never mind that I was genuinely frantically working
on something important which lots of people depend upon, or that I gave
the dude a key to my old squat when he was moaning about his impending
homelessness last month, nor that I was fighting to get his net link
working as I spoke. Sometimes I wonder if I should just give up
volunteering and find some fool who's prepared to pay me to do what I do
for fun anyway. Arrr. but then again, maybe I'm becoming a grumpy prick
and he's just doing me the favour of telling me.
It's amazing. After I blew Coco off, Len, David, and Rana blew in for a
chat. I'm trying to track this bug down, and nyaargh there's all these
people chewing on my brain while I'm tryin' to get this box workin'. Rana
cooked me a delightful tofu/eggplant something-or-other. I eventually
pinned it down to a bug in shorewall's IP-conntrack. The firewall's still
knackered. Andy logged into it remotely later, and fucked it up even more,
which is uncharacteristic. So I have to go out and torture it in person.
Not tonight tho.
New Years Eve.
The oncologist rang up in the morning to tell me what I already knew about
the CT-scan. Which was, more or less, nothing more than my fingers had
told me. I reckon I'll try and talk Cozzi into doing a fine needle biopsy
of this neck thing - if you have to accuse me of spending too much time in
front of microscope slides, go ahead, but I reckon there's a lot you can
tell from cell morphology which no CT scanner on the planet is gonna ever
reveal.
I rode up to North Head to a Cave Clan party in the abandoned gun turret
emplacements nestled in the saltbush on the sandstone flats above the huge
cliffs which rise, sheer, 70m out of the Pacific ocean. Fireworks exploded
on either side of me as I drove across the Harbour Bridge under police
escort at 20km an hour like all the other drivers, but I couldn't waste
attention on the pretty colours.
Fortunately there was a southerly breeze, since the biggest sewage
treatment plant in Sydney was only 200m north of us.
Like all Clan parties, it seriously rocked. Really, given such a high
concentration of worthwhile, kick-arse, criminally minded free spirits,
sex, drugs, wicked melancholy electro plus old school rock'n'roll, no door
charge (no doors either), no dress regs, and a site with a view the
government's been trying to sell to developers for bazillions of dollars,
where the fuck else would you bother to go on NYE? 'Oxide brought his
generator, Siolo his Linear Designs speakers and an amp' which could
easily incinerate both of them; to this seismic survey apparatus was
connected an .mp3 player which had about ten thousand ripped tunes in it.
Word's got around. ... diode announced some weeks ago to the Clan on my
behalf that I've been seriously sick of late, people were glad to see me -
I got an ear-smashing reception when I arrived, which was cheering.
As might be expected of a bunch of mortals in denial, we're a catalog of
sickies. Hatchet's kerosene habit has cost him a lung, curly-haired Pete's
liver's being eaten alive by Hep C, Oggie's MS is chewing him up slowly,
MrI was nearly felled by pericarditis, on it fuckin' goes. About fifty
people who are collectively a bigger law enforcement job creation scheme
than the entire district of Cabramatta showed up, ate, drank, smoked good
grass (for which I can vouch), danced like epileptics on nitrous, fucked
in the bushes (for which I can also vouch), detonated things of an
explosive nature, conjectured on what was _really_ in the tabs they'd
taken before they got there, sat and chatted by the fire which was perched
on the iron mountings where the army's coastal surveillance optics used to
be installed. I met some Adelaide clansmen who were amazed that I'd been
there and tagged up in the drains under their city, and who mistakenly
think I am some sort of god (Chinese Whispers effect, I guess). Feenie and
I compared scars - they used his tattoos to align the edges of the one in
his legs, but his sensory mapping is wrong now, he feels the back of his
leg on the front of his leg, or something like that. Marauder, grinning
fiendishly, his hair short and bleached white, looked terrifyingly similar
to Billy Idol except he's a metre too tall and six orders of magnitude
smarter.
We were too far away to see them but heard the muffled thumping of the
harbour fireworks at midnight. The klaxons, and roar of the blowers and
scrubbers of the sewage processing site kept us company throughout the
night... along with the blink-blink, blink of a lighthouse somewhere on
outer South Head. I got some shut-eye in nine dollars fifty worth of
fluorescent orange, half-deflated dinghy MrI had dragged out there and
failed to go to sleep in, but I managed, I guess because I was definately
more stoned than he was. Out of the corner of my eye, through heavy lids
(but not so heavy that they'd close properly) I watched uncaringly as some
smartarse got a photo of me crashed-out in the dinghy. I was not so stoned
that I couldn't perch myself cross-legged atop one of Silo's speakers and
gaze at the sunrise. The thumpin' bass signals deliciously jabbed up my
body, faster up my backbone.
A sax/synth track by KennyG (called Infinity, I think) came on while I sat
there gazing at the fiery pink beams radiating from gaps in the distant
clouds, and I had one of those little searing, teary moments where I
wondered if I'd see the next New Years. I gazed out to where the sky and
the ocean met indistinctly, and looked at the tiny boats tossed on the
endlessly repeated waves stretching from the gleaming white cliffs to the
horizon. The wind flogged my hair against my skin, I stank of cannabis,
campfire smoke, sex on crushed shrubbery, leather preservative and Talby's
(legitimate chocolate chip) cookies, and I didn't know wether to feel
defeated or exuberant. The dawn arrived and hurt my eyes which were
leaking already anyway. I climbed down and went to sleep against the
concrete footings of the makeshift fireplace and woke up a couple of hours
later with some wanker stickin' a camera in my face as - action shot - I
discovered I'd accidentally snorted a blowfly.
I dunno about you, but I think if you are ever called upon to justify your
life in terms of what you do on such an arbitrarily decreed day as New
Years, raising hell with a bunch of people you played a key role in
bringing together over ten years, and who are here because of something
you decided to write and make freely available to the public at large,
really beats the shit out of flocking with a nameless herd to watch
delightedly as the government sets fire to your sequestered tax dollars,
or sitting at home watching the Edinburgh fucking Tattoo on the telly.
On with the year then. The hardcore kamikazi kore of the Clan is off to go
abseiling or skateboarding without authorisation down 100m drops in 12m
diameter pipes in the upper reaches of the Snowy Mountains Hydro scheme
(empty since there's a drought on). Slightly drugfucked and wussy, I rode
back to Blakehurst and spent the day zonked out in bed, only emerging to
write this before the neurons responsible for remembering it commit
programmed suicide in disgust at what they remember. Five beers, a cone
and a root could only devastate me like this if I was in shit shape to
begin with.
T-6 days to biopsy. Listen, lumpy, we have ways of makin' you talk.
Jan 3.
Fuckin' PCI interrupt allocation... grr. Andy had logged in and fucked up
the gateway entries while he was remotely messing around tryin' to get the
firewall working, thereby locking himself out. He got shorewall working
again but there's a wrinkle... when I did the gutz-transplant from one
machine to another to check about the (I think) thermally related kernel
barf, I put the NICs back in their slots in a different order. Now, on my
planet, a card gets an interrupt on the basis of what it's set to ask for,
but this particular mobo assigns them partly on the basis of which card
asks for one first. The DMZ and LAN NICs were assigned opposite IRQs, were
thus initialised in a different order, and although cabled the same way as
before the rebuild, were in fact now assigned as different interfaces so
the original routing tables were now totally fucked up. I eventually
figured this out and now it works. If you ask me, ISA buses work better
just because you can have definitive control over them with bits of
fuckin' metal on the boards deciding how they behave instead of some wafty
dynamic interrupt assignment workaround implemented to circumvent the fact
that most computer hardware people appear to be unable to count to ten
more than once. It seems to work for the time being. Good.
The kind individual who offered to shag me came pretty close to making
good on her promise early this morning, after we ate some Thai and
demonstrated our recorder playing skills (or lack thereof) to each other
in the dark at Enmore Park, but she was leakin' erythron and not entirely
happy with shagging in that circumstance, so we just lay upon the futon,
clinging tightly to each other in the lavender scented sheets, being
occasionally inspected by her inquisitive dog (got a hardon you want to be
rid of? Try an unexpected canine nose in the eye, heh heh).
I grew up in the 1980s and was bombarded by the Grim Reaper ads in the
early 1990's, and have done enough pathology to scare anyone off getting
outta bed in the morning, yet I find myself strangely blithe of the
personal consequences of all this knowledge - e.g. being bled upon by
immunological strangers holds no terrors. I'm getting NRMA syndrome -
nothin' really matters anymore. It would nevertheless be rude of me to
become a viral vector in the final months of my life, a free software
conduit between people who know me, so I keep a few microns thickness of
polymerised isoprene handy. Arr.. I'd love to ride bareback, but it'd just
be irresponsible of me.
Something's changing. Contrary to my misanthropic default, I'm starting to
appreciate this whacky species of which I am a member. I am not sure why.
We're the same bunch o' treacherous creeps as we were before I got my
oncological marching orders from the rank and file of the human race, but
as I stand at the edge, it is hitting home that they're all I've got.
Maybe I've never seen it from the point of view of someone unaccustomed to
what appears to be the sudden availability of shags-on-tap, but I'm
becoming more hungry for company than shaggery. Maybe one appreciates more
the things one has irretrievably lost or thinks one is about to. I am
keenly aware what a privelage it is to hold these precious beings in my
grip, be cradled by them intimately, even if we do run the same
metabolisms as the thing which is trying to kill me, and I can't help
getting a bit furrowed of brow and teary eyed amidst it. I am gonna miss
them as I am dying. If this dopey disease can decide wether to take me out
or not.
Before taking life off you completely, cancer takes over your life in more
insidious ways than you realise (and in my case, chains me to the
keyboard, QED). I popped into Kogarah to return a book, and chatted to
Larry who is missing a lot of guts since he had colon cancer chopped out.
We concur that the worst thing about cancer is possibly that everyone else
who is aware of it can't have a conversation with oneself without talking
about it, so one ends up having permutations on the same conversation to
dozens of people before you get killed by it. It's sort of unavoidable, I
guess. It's not that we're not grateful for the concern, but as you the
long-suffering reader of these rants would surely agree it's just fuckin'
boring repeating the same stuff over and over again. So boring in fact I
want to get back to my mundane life of meaningless, anarchist
thermodynamic-eschatological drifting. Painting walls. Writing aleatory
crap. Uncaringly watching red traffic lights stay red for ages. Fuckin'
with computers and pondering on the computational nature of chemical
systems.
I ate breakfast at midday at the old Fish Cafe and couldn't help smile at
the parade of unconcerned locals walking past. If the place was any more
laid back you'd need velcro to stop your drinks sliding off the table.
Cool.
-----
If, perhaps in a moment of masochism you want to look at the next file in
this series try
http://conway.cat.org.au/~predator/getting_it.txt
It might not be available yet.
<predator>

31
bits_per.c Normal file
View file

@ -0,0 +1,31 @@
#include <stdio.h>
#include <math.h>
/* This program is made available under the terms of the GNU Copyleft */
int main(void)
{
char symbols[20];
double sym;
double bits;
/*get the nums*/
printf("How many symbols are available in this system ?\n");
//gets(symbols);
if (fgets(symbols,20,stdin) == NULL) { exit(1);}
/*conv to values*/
sym=atol(symbols);
bits= log10(sym) / (log10(2));
/*shannon's law is expressed in terms of log2(x) hence fiddly conversion*/
printf("This is a radix=%g system with %g bits per symbol.\n\n", sym,
bits);
return 0;
}

28
blog-index.html Normal file
View file

@ -0,0 +1,28 @@
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<title>Predator's blog index</title>
</head>
<body>
<ul>
<li><a href="consent.txt">consent.txt</a></li>
<li><a href="gutful.txt">gutful.txt</a></li>
<li><a href="gutting.txt">gutting.txt</a></li>
<li><a href="gutted.txt">gutted.txt</a></li>
<li><a href="hunting.txt">hunting.txt</a></li>
<li><a href="bill_me.txt">bill_me.txt</a></li>
<li><a href="getting_it.txt">getting_it.txt</a></li>
<li><a href="losing_it.txt">losing_it.txt</a></li>
<li><a href="ides.txt">ides.txt</a></li>
<li><a href="march.txt">march.txt</a></li>
<li><a href="foolish.txt">foolish.txt</a></li>
<li><a href="fools.txt">fools.txt</a></li>
<li><a href="mayday.txt">mayday.txt</a></li>
</ul>
<p>
<small> created posthumously by andy -at- cat.org.au, stacy -at- cat.org.au -- Monday June 07 2004 </small>
</body>
</html>

48
channelz.c Normal file
View file

@ -0,0 +1,48 @@
#include <stdio.h>
#include <math.h>
int main(void)
{
char sn_ratio[20];
float ratio ;
/*ratio is the sn_r expressed as an actual ratio, not dB */
char bwidth[20];
float bandwidth;
float channels;
char chan[20];
float bits_per_sec;
float dB;
/*get the nums*/
printf("How many Hz of bandwidth is available?\n");
if (fgets(bwidth,20,stdin) == NULL) { exit(1);}
printf("What's the signal/noise ratio (NOT in db, eg 30dB=1000) ?\n");
if (fgets(sn_ratio,20,stdin) == NULL) { exit(1); }
printf("How many channels exhibit these parameters in your system?\n");
if (fgets(chan,20,stdin) == NULL) { exit(1); }
/*conv to values*/
ratio=atoi(sn_ratio);
bandwidth=atoi(bwidth);
channels=atoi(chan);
dB= log10(ratio)*10;
printf(" B/W : %f Hz , SNR : %f dB\n\n",bandwidth, dB);
/*shannon's law is expressed in terms of log2(x) hence fiddly conversion*/
bits_per_sec= (log10(ratio +1) / log10 (2)) * bandwidth;
printf("Total bits per second per channel is %.2f bps\n\n", bits_per_sec);
printf("Total throughput for combined channels is %.2f kbps \n",
((bits_per_sec * channels)/1024) );
printf("which is equal to %.2f Megabits/sec \n",
(((bits_per_sec * channels)/1024)/1024));
printf("which is equal to %.2f Megabytes/sec \n",
(((bits_per_sec * channels)/1024)/1024)/8);
return 0;
}

161
consent.txt Normal file
View file

@ -0,0 +1,161 @@
File: consent.txt
Cont: (pre)venting one's spleen : fine art of consent and legal obfuscation
Date: 18 Nov 2003
If you take your top off and feel your belly below the left lower margin
of your rib cage, you won't feel anything much, but that's because you're
probably normal. I can, and I'm a bit curious about it. I normally sleep
face down with a forearm across my abdomen, and of late, stuff has been
moving about inside my guts when I do this, to accommodate a change. This
is 'cos my spleen has become large and relatively rigid, taking up more
room than is normally allocated to it, a condition known by a word which
rolls delightfully off the tongue - splenomegaly. I knew that's what it
was called, 'cos when, years ago, I did honours and (deliberately) became
acquainted with cytomegalovirus III (which is present in about 90% of the
human city dwelling population, and has called me home for about 20 years)
splenomegaly was one of the listed symptoms of active CMV infection. CMV
usually does fuck-all as long as you're not immunosuppressed or a neonate,
in which case it raises all kinds of hell. I sure as shit don't feel
immunosuppressed and am exhibiting none of the signs associated with that
state (like, being sick all the time). So what's going on?
Spleens (a few people have more than one, some are born without them) are
the centrepiece of your lymphoid system, wherein is trained an
astoundingly complex army of highly specific, molecular recognition
capable, cellular attack dogs. Spleens are connected to the lymph nodes
(most people call 'em glands, such as the ones in your neck, armpits and
groin which swell up when you're sick) via specialised lymphatic plumbing
wherein these attack dogs (lymphocytes) roam in search of specific things
to kill. You can live without a spleen but you tend to be an easier target
for massive bacterial infection if you lack one.
I waddled off to retrieve me ol' Merck Manual (any time you're feeling
hypochondriacal, DO NOT READ THIS BOOK) and had a gawk at the shitlist of
conditions associated with splenomegaly. The 'Manual is best read when
you're in perfect health, since it's pretty depressing if you're not. The
list is extensive and distasteful. It includes EBV (gives you glandular
fever, close viral rello of CMV). CMV (hello old friend, hope it's you).
Polycythemia Vera (broken erythropoiesis leading to too many red cells in
the blood, the spleen has to expand to provide sufficient resources to
destroy 'em). HTLV-3 (which is what they used to call HIV before they
realised HIV was an RNA retrovirus). Wilson's disease (inherited disorder
of copper metabolism). Lymphoma (malignant cancer of the lymph system,
ooh, yummie). Spleens also enlarge for other reasons... sarcoidosis
(nobody really knows what causes this), chronic parasitisation,
spherocytosis, sickle cell anemia, kinks in their associated vasculature.
Various bone marrow fibroses which, on account of their preventing
erythrocyte synthesis, can also provoke the spleen to start making these
cells instead, but spleens aren't very good at it and tend to release
erythrocytes before they're really ready to do their job. With the
exception of CMV, all of these things are probably far too exciting to
apply to me.
So... what's doing it?
I arranged to go and have a full blood count, electrolyte analysis, and
hepatic function test. The analytical processing used in haematology is
heir to knowledge won by humans struggling to understand chemistry and
biochemistry over a period of centuries, but nowadays is mostly automated,
so it's pretty simple, you just pop along, give 'em a few mL of venous
claret (it's always encourgaging that they send it off to the lab in a bag
prominently labelled `Biohazard') and wait for the results to come back.
Inbetweentimes, machines separate your blood into several different
components, humans peer intently at the nature of the isolates, and ponder
upon wether or not your metabolism is broken in some significant way.
I got the sheet back a couple of days later and according to it I am,
haematologically speaking, very reassuringly boring, within expected range
for pretty much everything. For a guy who does little exercise, I am
stuffed full of haemoglobin. The things I wanted to know are all there -
specifically, lymphocyte and erythrocyte counts and morphology are
goodish. I'm not gonna turn into a life support system for a load of
tumors just yet (that'll happen later when the mesothelioma starts).
This test ruled out a lot of things, but still doesn't tell me anything
about why this is idiopathic splenic bloat is happening. The final bit of
interrogation will be an abdominal CT scan, in a day or two. These use
X-rays, so in order to make oneself more radiopaque, one is required to
selectively stuff oneself with heavy atoms in advance of the scan. One
gobbles down a load of barium sulfate the night before (I know all about
that stuff from my Merck Index - same publisher as the Merck Manual,
different topic) to make one's intestines less transparent to the incoming
electromagnetic rays. On the morning of the scan, though, they inject you
with ... well ... something.
The consent form doesn't say exactly what it is with which one is going to
be injected. It mentions that the stuff which will be injected into you is
a radiopaquing agent, implying it's a vasculature contrast medium, and
alludes that the material contains iodine (makes sense, iodine's a heavy
atom, the sort x-rays cannot penetrate) and is non-ionic (exists in an
uncharged state... so what?). Nowhere, however, is the molecule or mix of
molecules actually specified. Iodine in its native aqueous diatomic
state would kill you stone dead if you were injected with it, so
it obviously isn't that. But what is it, exactly? They give an associated
death rate when using this stuff intravenously as less 1 per 180,000. But
which stuff? How can I give them informed consent to shoot me up
with some or other crap if they won't tell me what it is? If they tell me
what it is, I can investigate its metabolic half-life, LD50 and eventual
fate perfectly well in the existing literature, and make a decision.
I'd normally go looking in my Martindales 38th pharmacopoea, but opaquing
agents are not, strictly, pharmaceuticals, so they don't list any, as far
as I can see.
The mention of iodine, lower down in the form, is an important giveaway...
one can whiz off to the Merck Index and directly observe structures of any
molecules whose names start with io- or iodo-, and grep immediately at the
bottom of these entries looking for the words `opaquing agent'. This won't
get all of them (I mean, there's a heap of different ways to iodinate any
of a squillion different molecules for this purpose) but one can at least
acquire something like a clue about their probable natures.
It appears most of the ones in this section of the Merck are variations
on, or oligomers of, 1,3,5-triiodobenzene. Don't get the idea there's
anything spooky about iodine, one needs it for thyroxine synthesis, and
one gets goitred without it, among other things. I think I'm going to be
shot up with any of iobenguane, iobenzamic acid, iocarmic acid, iocetamic
acid, iodamide, iodipamide, iodixanol, iodoalphionic acid, iodopyracet,
ioglycamic acid, iohexol, iomeglamic acid, iopamidol, iopanioic acid,
iopentol, iophenydylate, iophenoxic acid, metrizamide, metrizoic acid,
iopromide, iopronic acid, iothalamic acid, iotrolan, ioversol, ioxilan, or
ipodate. I could sieve these entries by their water and lipid solubility
to narrow it down to ones likely to stay in the blood rather than be
incorporated into my cell walls for the next few years.
None of these are radioactive (of course, they just scatter the x-rays,
they don't emit anything themselves) and I think I excluded all the ionic
ones from the list (and who in hell invents these names?!) But which one?
I got LD50's for mice, rabbits, and just about everything else that moves
there in the Merck, some of these things are actually moderately poisonous
(especially if you're an experimental mouse or rabbit) though you'd have
to shoot a lot more of them up your arm than the equivalent mass of
diacetylated morpine required to kill a heroin user.
I wonder what percentage of the population in general knows what is meant
by non-ionic contrast agent anyway? I know what it means, but don't know
why non-ionisation matters to the procedure.
By signing this form I effectively say to these people, I don't care what
you're gonna shoot me full of, go right ahead. This is, actually, an
_uninformed_ consent document, wherein you put your signature on a chunk
of paper that says that you neither know or care what is going to happen
in this procedure. If, subsequent to some mishap in the scan, you wanted
to get up MayneHealth for compensation, and had made the mistake of
signing this thing, they'd piss their pants laughing you out of court.
And, interestingly, they're right. I actually don't care. So shoot 'em up
and pass the bremsstrahlung, I wanna know what's goin on in my guts.
<predator>
(the next .txt in this series is conway.cat.org.au/~predator/gutful.txt)

21
foolish.txt Normal file
View file

@ -0,0 +1,21 @@
Still with us? Well. Ok. It's April 21. I go to Melbourne on the 23rd and
plan to come back on the 29th.
There's a bigger rant coming (fools.txt) but this one is the little crumb
you get to look at instead of a 404 message.
The meaty stuff is: My neck is getting shittier. Bill the Lump invaded my
left jugular vein about a week ago, blocking it. If he'd invaded the
carotid I'd be stroked out, a dribbling veggie. I'm reasonably freaked out
about this. The axe is falling. So I'm planning my end mode. I want
control over it.
If you have anything terribly important to ask me about anything now might
be good time. The chance might not remain. Heavy epistemological and
philosophical questions are OK as are others.
<predator>
Oh, yeah. I just added this today, May 1. fools.txt is nearly done. Some
of you need to relax, the logs tell me there's people hitting apache every
few hours and shit. Patience, Neo. The answers are coming. 8-)

2191
fools.txt Normal file
View file

File diff suppressed because it is too large Load diff

47
getlaid.html Normal file
View file

@ -0,0 +1,47 @@
<!doctype html public "-//w3c//dtd html 4.0 transitional//en">
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<meta name="GENERATOR" content="Mozilla/4.72 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.2.14-5.0 i586) [Netscape]">
</head>
<body>
<center>
<li>
<b><u><font size=+2><font color="#FF0000">Getting Laid :</font><font
color="#000000">
acquiring your own large, fast data pipe.</font></font></u></b><br>
<BR></li></center>
<ul>
<center>
<li>
<font size=+2>Do you <font color="#000000">really </font>need to get (data
pipe) laid?</font><br>
<BR></li></center>
<center>
<li>
<font size=+2>Problems getting laid commercially</font><br>
<BR></li></center>
<center>
<li>
<font size=+2>How to get laid on the cheap</font><br>
<BR></li></center>
<center>
<li>
<font size=+2>Cat@lyst - helping the community get laid in
Sydney</font></li></center>
<br><font size=+4></font>&nbsp;
<p>&nbsp;<font size=+2></font>
<center>
<p><a href="getlaid2.html">next</a></center>
<br><font size=+4></font>&nbsp;
<br><font size=+4></font>&nbsp;</ul>
</body>
</html>

41
getlaid2.html Normal file
View file

@ -0,0 +1,41 @@
<!doctype html public "-//w3c//dtd html 4.0 transitional//en">
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<meta name="GENERATOR" content="Mozilla/4.72 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.2.14-5.0 i586) [Netscape]">
</head>
<body>
<center>
<h4>
<u><font size=+2>Do you <font color="#CC0000">really</font> need to get
laid?</font></u></h2></center>
<font size=+2>If you want to do the following, it helps to get laid
-</font>
<ul>
<li>
<font size=+2>Run any kind of server</font></li>
<br>&nbsp;
<li>
<font size=+2>Take more concurrent hits with less lag</font></li>
<br>&nbsp;
<li>
<font size=+2>Video streaming / other bandwidth intensive
tasks</font></li>
<br>&nbsp;
<li>
<font size=+2>Provide connectivity for multiple dumb boxes</font></li>
<br>&nbsp;
<li>
<font size=+2>Host content<font color="#990000"> unpalatable to powerful
organisations</font></font></li>
</ul>
<center><a href="getlaid.html">back&nbsp;</a>&nbsp;&nbsp; <a href="getlaid3.html">next</a></center>
</body>
</html>

52
getlaid3.html Normal file
View file

@ -0,0 +1,52 @@
<!doctype html public "-//w3c//dtd html 4.0 transitional//en">
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<meta name="GENERATOR" content="Mozilla/4.72 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.2.14-5.0 i586) [Netscape]">
</head>
<body>
<center><b><u><font size=+3>Problems getting laid
commercially</font></u></b></center>
<ul>
<li>
<font size=+2>Insistence on use of proprietary operating syste<b><font
color="#000000">ms</font></b></font></li>
<br>&nbsp;
<li>
<font size=+2>&nbsp;(un) Fair Use Policies : no servers, few
guarantees</font></li>
<br>&nbsp;
<li>
<font size=+2>High Price (per connect/MB/hr/port; more for
hi-speed)</font></li>
<br>&nbsp;
<li>
<font size=+2>Bandwidth asymmetry - as if the Internet =
television</font></li>
<br>&nbsp;
<li>
<font size=+2>Won't do `weird' stuff: dialup, ISDN, cable, ADSL
only</font></li>
<br>&nbsp;
<li>
<font size=+2>Policy to not connect to some buildings (eg:
ours)</font></li>
<br>&nbsp;
<li>
<font size=+2>Fast data pipe rollout didn't go everywhere</font></li>
<p><br>
<center>
<p><a href="getlaid2.html">back&nbsp;</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <a href="getlaid4.html">next</a></center>
</ul>
</body>
</html>

51
getlaid4.html Normal file
View file

@ -0,0 +1,51 @@
<!doctype html public "-//w3c//dtd html 4.0 transitional//en">
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<meta name="GENERATOR" content="Mozilla/4.72 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.2.14-5.0 i586) [Netscape]">
</head>
<body>
<center><b><u><font size=+4>Reclaiming the bandwidth</font></u></b>
<br><b><font color="#CC0000"><font size=+2>(getting laid on the cheap)</font></font></b></center>
<font color="#CC0000"><font size=+2></font></font>
<ul>
<li>
<font color="#000000"><font size=+2>Parallel several phone lines
(BSD/Linux;
33kbps each)</font></font><br>
<BR></li>
<li>
<font color="#000000"><font size=+2>Co-opt/bribe a neighbor; install
cable,
share use</font></font><br>
<BR></li>
<li>
<font color="#000000"><font size=+2>Take HDD/CD-RW, move to nearby fast
fat pipe :-)</font></font><br>
<BR></li>
<li>
<font color="#000000"><font size=+2>Packet radio (need a license, limited
to 9600bps)</font></font><br>
<BR></li>
<li>
<font color="#000000"><font size=+2>SlyNet - roll out your own
clandestine
wires</font></font><br>
<BR></li>
<li>
<font color="#009900"><font size=+3>Packet microwave at 2.425GHz :
2-10Mbps.</font></font></li>
</ul>
<font color="#009900"><font size=+2></font></font>
<center>
<p><br><font color="#000000"><a href="getlaid3.html">back&nbsp;&nbsp;</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;
<a href="getlaid5.html">next</a></font></center>
</body>
</html>

43
getlaid5.html Normal file
View file

@ -0,0 +1,43 @@
<!doctype html public "-//w3c//dtd html 4.0 transitional//en">
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<meta name="GENERATOR" content="Mozilla/4.72 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.2.14-5.0 i586) [Netscape]">
</head>
<body>
<center><b><u><font size=+3>Reclaiming the bandwidth at
2.425GHz</font></u></b></center>
<ul>
<li>
<font size=+2>Achievable with old, free or relatively cheap junk&nbsp;<br>
(diskless 486-33s, D.I.Y. aerials, ISA WaveLan cards)</font><br>
<BR></li>
<li>
<font size=+2>No radio licensing required (low power, 0.1 Watt)</font><br>
<BR></li>
<li>
<font size=+2>Well supported by Linux; very configurable</font><br>
<BR></li>
<li>
<font size=+2>Usable with line of sight over several km</font><br>
<BR></li>
<li>
<font size=+2>Some interference from rain and domestic
appliances</font><br>
<BR></li>
<li>
<font size=+2>Tiny lag (&lt;3ms), big throughput&nbsp;
(megabit/sec).</font></li>
</ul>
<center><a href="getlaid4.html">back&nbsp;</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <a href="getlaid6.html">next</a></center>
</body>
</html>

735
getting_it.txt Normal file
View file

@ -0,0 +1,735 @@
File: getting_it.txt
Cont: Pred's friendly metastasis. Reality nibbles gently. What the fuck'll
I do now?
I can't remember what it was which provoked this memory. In 1993 I was
doing the practical component of the TAFE explosives course. This was
where I held my first old, sweaty (the nitroglycerin had started to sweat
its way out of the cartridge), stick of AN60 gelignite, which we were
gonna condemn to death by laying it down in the quarry and torching it in
puddle of diesel. A long way away from where we would observe it.
It's been a long time since I've had that creeping, prickly feeling of
fear that accompanied the realisation that the nitroglycerin was migrating
across the skin of my fingers and I'd have a fucker of a headache later,
since nitro' is a potent vasodilator as well as a vicious explosive. It's
the cold grey feeling of discovering you're being infiltrated by something
malevolent, but are powerless to prevent it. Dropping old AN60 from any
height is a good way to become dead fast. I couldn't let it go in any
manner other than was required by the disposal protocol. I could feel the
explosive oil on my fingertips. Yes, I did indeed get a fucker of a
headache later. I have never handled NG since, preferring the nitrated
pentaerythritols and the salami-like sausages, thick as your arm, of 3151
PowerGel.
Whatever it was, it came to me while I was headding up to the doctor's
office via the elevator. Maybe the hydraulic oil of the elevator and the
NG smell the same.
The redheaded flautist, who kindly donated me a pair of khaki pants before
departing for the apple isle (these were the genuine ADI item, too, not
some imitation low-durability crap from a chinese sweatshop), has me under
a momentary vow of monogamy. I mentioned to her after saying I'd cop this
for about a month at most, that since my time is short and I'm grabbing
most things offered to me, that if any carnal offers came up in her
absence I'd probably say yes. She's sounding resigned to my stance, saying
unconvincedly that I should just do what I have to do, but I said that
while we're in the loop, she can negotiate with me about what else we get
up to. She told me to just do what I had to do and tell her a story when
she came back. Wow. This is the same person who without a moment's thought
just walked into the geek room and offered to shag me a few weeks ago. And
we still haven't, though we've been pretty close. I think she's right -
it's gone beyond simply fucking, we're getting to know each other so it's
no longer the straight proteinaceous exchange one can get away with under
the blanket of anonymity which comes from barely knowing each other.
I figure we've got the pathogens and pregnancy aspects under control, so
it comes down to how vulnerable her ego is to the percieved threat of
anyone else who shags me, whom she would consider as a superior or
competitor, or the assumption that I would, or even could, (I'll phrase
this indelicately for maximum effect) fuck her cheaply and forget her, and
I'm sure as hell not about to do that. But then, maybe that's why she
offered to shag me, from her point of view - I'm disposable. Fair's fair.
I dropped her at the airport and rode to the doctor's surgery in Kogarah.
I noticed later her blood on the front of the khakis (and they're not
AusCam so the blood contrasted darkly against the green drill fabric, but
ah, there was nothing else to wear). So did the doctors. I would expect
they'd have an eye for blood.
I had a chat to Aslan _and_ Cozzi, the dudes who spent a few hours playing
about in my guts back in Nov. Cozzi, who resected my cancerous chunk o'
lymph nodality out of my retroperitoneal area, had a look at the scar,
which has healed well. If I have to complain, it could only be because the
scar's fucked up my ol' six pack, even though I never did any work to
obtain either of them. I asked 'em about the homicidal maniac incubating
itself in my neck. They're gonna pass the job to his mate at Randwick and
he will probably opt to chop it out. I am glad I can rely on my previous
tactical slash merchants to be of the opinion that we should slash first,
ask questions later. Okay okay, de Sousa reckons I'm fucked anyhow and I
mostly agree with him, but for reasons mainly related to the need to
support the idea that I've got some sort of a chance (and that I want a
scar I can wear in public for maximum gratuitous egotistical street cred
without freezing my arse off in winter), I'm not going down without a
fight. Finally, someone has the clue. So I see the professorial dude in
Randwick on the 19th. Arrr... precious days elapse, during which time Bill
feeds on my ichor, presumably preparing to launch cytological tentacles
into the important adjacent infrastructure which keeps me alive... little
things like oh, you know, my carotid fuckin' artery. I told 'em I'd been
reading the scientific literature and that it was my opinion that the more
I read about this creeping doom the less I liked it, and frankly the odds
sucked. They said there wasn't much they could do about that. Looks like
medicine is still DIY to some extent these days.
So I'm also off to see Fluhrer on the 13th about some lipopolysaccharides
from strep pyrogenes and oh, what was the other one.. serratia marcassens.
If we fail to provoke massive immune response to this thing and its
invisible buddies by stuffing a few hundred nanograms of immunogenic crap
into it, we'll chop it out afterwards.
It's been a good week for scavenging, but it usually is in the couple of
weeks after Christmasturbation, since all the perfectly good old stuff
gets tossed to make way for more perfectly good new stuff.
I hauled an _astounding_ bit of stereo hardware out of a dumpster last
week, while bicycling breathlessly back from the paint shop adjacent to
where I went to school as a little kiddie in the mid-late 1970s. It's a
serious weapon from Sony, will drive 160 watts root mean-square into eight
ohms, per channel. It has bass enhancement, surround sound and all that
related digital signal processing accoutrementage of which the Japanese
are so enamoured, and which English electrical engineers such as NAD have
correctly held in contempt from the day they built their first amp out of
thermionic valves nearly a century ago. I still haven't figured out how
to program the graphic equaliser, and have not figured out exactly what
much of the rest of it even does.
It doesn't have a damned left/right balance control on it, but at least
the volume control is a nice, massy knob with no dead spots. It is very
spacey to hear in operation. It drives my dumpster-dived (and re-coned)
Technics SB1950s with the ... well, noticable effortless transparency
which comes from an amp which is not working very hard to do what it does.
Liquid sound, man! Excellent, and I don't give a fuck what the snotty
audiophile set sez about it. Skinny Puppy's messianic `Warlock' poignantly
flares my nostrils and... I can't quite explain it ... makes the glands at
the back of my jaw ache (listen to everything after four minutes, ten
seconds into the fifth track on the Rabies album, at as much volume as you
can tolerate). I almost have to weep when listening to the rolling,
oceanic, bass tectonics which underpin the Pet Shop Boys' track Jealousy.
The savage dog twitches to it while she sleeps on the carpet. I haven't
wired the surround drivers into it yet. Ahh. Thank you, oh bountiful gods
of Dumpster.
Along with this audio bounty came a toolbox with lots of good tools and
hardware in it. The tools came up pretty well with a little work involving
some oil and steel wool. Man, I must have found or scavenged just about
every tool in the shed by now... everything from fuel pumps to cathode ray
oscilloscopes. But it's getting crowded. I've started throwing out stuff
that I have accumulated there which had a low probability of my using it
in the next two years. I'm glad of the space.
I mention the paint shop because adjacent to it is the primary school
where I spent the first seven years of forced incarceration in the
pedagogic monster which has consumed most of my life. In the corner of the
playground where the carpark of the paint shop abutts, is a large gum
tree. I planted it in 1977, at the age of six, on a day pouring rain, with
the then state environment minister, Paul Landa. He died of cancer (are
you bored yet?) a few years later. It was but a fragile sapling when I
packed the wet earth around its roots with my clean, small, childish
hands. It's a BIG tree, now, twenty five years later. The only honest
state politician I have ever met, Paul said it would grow to be so, but I
guess he knew he could be sure in his opinion. It makes me smile to see
kids eat lunch under it.
I am cycling more, and the lungs are obviously awaking from a long
slumber. Geez, there's so much more traffic these days, and more
noticable when I'm not keeping up with it on the pushie. I got on the
scales at the veterinarians and they said I am captain to 64.65kg of mass.
But my memory's odd. I went to use my TheftPOS card and I remembered the
PIN from three years ago, which it duly rejected.
I went down to the bicycle shop where I got components for my first
bicycle in the 1980s. It's run now by the son of Ron, who used to run it,
who was claimed by mesothelioma some years ago. I'm on the hunt for a
suspension seat post now I'm back on the road.
I've also started stability testing of my next bit of computing machinery.
It's a mongrel with a tale worth telling. I dragged the chassis (where oh
where do the side panels always go?) in from the roadside last year. The
power supply was a cat.org.au item but was broken since someone dropped it
so hard its circuit board broke on the mounting lugs - I fixed this, and
also soldered in a nice IEC-III noise suppression socket... maybe I'll put
in some MOVs later for spike quenching. I found the cdrom drive on the
roadside too, a couple of years ago. The RAM is cat.org.au's and I'm
testing that too. The Pentium-III CPU came from a mobo felled by errant
onboard electrolytic power capacitor explosion (irremediable, sadly, since
the resulting short blew some of the adjacent regs) and scavenged from
NDARC by Jude Hungerford, who was *sure* it would be useful for something
(yep - a CPU is a Good Thing).
I had to fling the broken GX-150 mobo; the actual motherboard is one from
XML, who said it `had problems', and I figured them out : it was doing
segmentation faults mainly 'cos the jumpering and BIOS settings were
changing the core/bus ratio to something faster than the processor could
handle (and it helped to put a heatsink on the south bridge too) so it'd
just seg-fault itself to death a few minutes after boot. So it's in the
other room, doing memory tests, running lots of concurrent maps of its own
process table entries, running a GUI and factoring huge prime numbers.
It's doing about 733MHz, which is a bit sluggard by modern glitzo
standards but is twice as quick as my not-very current Celeron/366
Robo-608. If it's gonna shit itself I'll know by morning. If not, I'll be
happy. I am glad when I live on a planet where usable recyclable computing
hardware, for which free software is also available, adorns the roadsides
and junk on the living room tables of friends.
The motherboard came my way at Smokering's, the day after I slept in XML's
bed (and we didn't shag tho we did listen to a lot of Yello which I hadn't
heard for 15 years and I remembered almost all of it, too). Which was
before I spent a couple of afternoon hours in the graveyard behind King
St, Newtown under the huge spreadding fig trees as the sun descended,
holding Wolfie in my mosquitophilic arms and failing to escape the feeling
that I was surrounded by a historical example of my next big change in
domicile - holes in the ground with slabs on top.
---
I spent some of today in the back shed with my shirt off, doing the case
metalwork for this Pentium-III machine I'm putting together, which I'm
happy to say spent all night testing itself (a knoppix 2.4.20-xfs kernel,
several instances of top -d0, memtest, a gui, and about thirty
factorisations of large prime numbers - a considerable load average) and
didn't skip a beat. I think, ladeez-an-ginnulmen, we have a winner. The
PCI bus works too, which i can't say was ever the case for the '608.
I love metalwork. I would have elected to do it as a full subject in
highschool but I was considered too bright for that, which strikes me as a
decision diagnostic of shameful disdain for the great engineering arts of
metallurgical cuttin'n'weldin'n'drillin'n'foldin, and I've sure as hell
done more useful things with my limited metalwork skills than I have with
anything I ever learned in, say, higher school certificate Modern History.
It's summer and the back shed (where all the real work happens) is hot and
poorly ventilated even with the exhaust fan on and the door open.
I did the sheet steel work with aviation cutters and a hacksaw (this was
an old ATX tower cover, so pretty easy to retrofit onto a smaller box).
The other case plate came from the aluminium chassis of an obsoleted
19-inch rackmount Digital DECserver MX-200 hub from 1992. I hate wasting
aluminium sheet so I carved it up with a jigsaw and a Dremel tool, and now
it's the side casing of my next machine. Also scored some mains
noise-suppressors out of the ol' DEC item. Cool.
Cuttin' metal requires manual effort. Sweat poured off me, I stank of
burnt cutting lubricant (stuff you put on the blades to make 'em glide
through the cut metal edges more easily) and that rusty tang from the
reaction between sweat and freshly cut iron filings. The aluminium job was
too big for the bench vise so I cradled it in my lap with my left arm and
used my right hand to guide the jigsaw, which has a customised blade in it
which I tooled down with a grinder a year ago for precisely these sorts of
jobs.
It was fast work, and hot alloy shavings rained off the smoking, snarlin'
blade onto my belly and thighs but aluminium cools fast (low specific
heat) and I knew I wouldn't be burned. Fuck this new belly button of mine,
though. My previous belly button, protruding slightly as it did, didn't
catch metal shavings with anything like the amazing efficiency of this new
one, and the shavings are sharp, hard to get, and being aluminium won't be
persuaded out with a magnet. I tried to get 'em with the long-nose pliers;
that didn't work, and I eventually used a hose. Bugger. If I sound to you
like the sort of person who will find anything to complain about, it's
obviously 'cos you've never had alloy shavings stuck in your natal scar -
they're a fuck of a lot more of a nuisance than generic bellybutton fluff.
Normal mundanity - the thing I continue to live for - is biting again. I'm
gonna go back tomorrow and paint the place I was gonna paint in November
but didn't 'cos I got sick. I'm not looking forward to it since my
destestable sister has made the kitchen messy and smelly again. Fuck I
hate, hate, hate cigarettes and the arseholes who smoke them near me. Even
her vacuum cleaner's exhaust stinks of fag ash.
------
Some dudes I meet are telling me about things I consider to be possibly
dodgy cures. The present one about which I've been zealously enthused to
is laetrile, also known as amygdalin, a cyanogenic glycoside from almonds,
which is supposed to destroy cancers. Some people call this stuff vitamin
B17, which is just silly since it sure as hell isn't a vitamin, (tho if
you were going to call it a vitamin, it'd be right at home in the motley
molecular crew which comprises the B's, nomenclaturally speaking) as far
as I can tell, it's not even an enzymatic cofactor anywhere in mammalian
biochemistry.
Laetrile's not any good as an antineoplastic according to my Dictionary of
Plant Toxins (but that's a book about plant poisons, not about oncology),
nor is it any good for this according to my Merck Index. These two tomes
haven't jerked me around before, but the Merck's description struck me as
rather unusually ambivalent in its phrasing - I've never heard of The
Merck putting in an entry for a "putative synthesis". Why anyone'd bother
anyway eludes me - plants *always* get the chirality right.
According to the Merck, the last paper to seriously take the piss out of
laetrile was written in 1982 before whoever wrote it could have had a clue
about what we know now about enzymes in human metabolism. According to
quackwatch there's been a lot of hostile commentry on the material in the
last 20 years. Dudes have gone to gaol for selling it.
I'm thinking maybe what I am up against here is anecdotal evidence
unquantified, and amplified, through the meme-propagating power of the
internet, and exposed to people who are desperate for something to believe
in since they believe (correctly) they're gonna die without some or other
cure... natch, the med industry has its own agendas: if cancers were all
easily cured, nobody'd make any bucks out of oncology, chemotherapy or all
the other fun things we people in Club Metastasis live to enjoy for a
while.
"Don'tcha get a fuckin' chokko when you
watch one of those docos about
those diseases which mean you're born with flippers?
You're feeling sorta well and, next thing you know
it's the Peter McCallum,
for the haircut they give you without clippers."
TISM - www.tism.wanker.com - Faulty Pressing, Do Not Manufacture
I'm never one to dismiss the observations of thousands of ordinary people.
Time to crank up that ancient part of my head into which I hammered
organic chemistry into years ago, and make a judgement for myself.
"Worf, shields up, activate bullshit filters!"
-something Picard never said.
Never done chemistry? Here goes. Don't be afraid, most of organic
chemistry is just a bunch of exercises in electron-pushing and accounting
for it by equivalent amounts of proton theft. They expand this paradigm
into a whole degree at university but it more or less boils down to this:
electrons are the negative things which get pushed around wires
(electron-ics) and are also the material out of which chemical bonds are
made between atoms. A proton is a hydrogen atom without an electron,
protons are positive. Other atoms have more protons in them and need more
electrons to keep 'em electrically balanced (atoms like it when
electrons=protons). Protons repel each other and will rip electrons off
other things to form chemical bonds to them.
Electrons repel each other and like to go where protons are not already
shrouded with too many electrons... so you can shove electrons in one
place in a molecule (molecule=group of atoms glued together with
electrons) and the electrons'll rearrange to accommodate this, which has
consequences for the end structure of the molecule, which will either bond
to something new, throw something away, or rearrange itself to stash the
electron someplace within (frequently this creates a negative ion). You
can shove protons in and much the same, but opposite sorts of things will
happen. So much for lay terminology, let's chow down.
Laetrile is two hexose sugar molecules glyco-bonded to each other, in this
case, one of them is bonded via one of its oxygen atoms to a carbon atom;
this last carbon atom is also bonded to a benzene ring (the -Ph below), a
proton (the H atom) and a nitrile group (which people who haven't done any
chem tend to call a cyanide group, but really, it is a nitrile group -
cyanide's an ion, the nitrile group ain't - big behavioural difference).
glucose
|
mannose-O C%N <-- nitrile
\ /
C
/ \
H Ph <--- benzene ring
The chemically astute will, if they ignore the nitrile (CN thing) in the
top right for a while, see in the ugly ASCII-art above the residue of a
benzaldehyde precursor (Ph-CHO) in the ether bond to the mannose.
Benzaldehyde is the stuff they sell as bitter almond essence in
supermarkets and you'll see a picture of it in a sec when we pull this
stuff apart. Maybe we'd be better off rotating our heads 90 degrees
anticlockwise and calling this thing the glucose-mannose ether of
phenylacetonitrile, but maybe not. Fuck it. Who cares? IUPAC does but
chemical nomenclature's enough of a shit already. One name'll do.
The exact nature of the sugar molecules don't matter especially, they're
the metabolically profitable `bait' that the cell is attracted to... the
cell enzymatically drags larger sugar molecules into itself for processing
because they're energetically worth it. Now, if tumors preferentially
metabolise sugars like glucose (but there's a LOT of different sugars in
biochemistry... mannose, lactose, fructose, maltose, erythrose, threose,
trehalose, ribose, rhamnose, just to name a few from memory) 'cos their
protein and lipid metabolism is somewhat broken, then it makes sense that
this stuff gets processed preferentially by tumor cells, IF laetrile is in
fact metabolised by tumor cells at all - the enzymes which cleave sugars
tend to be fairly picky about what they choose to cleave.
Now we have to think about what happens when a cell tries to eat it.
First it'd rip off the glucose and use that for the usual glycolysis
pathway into the Krebs cycle, leaving the mannose stuck by an ether bond
(R-O-R') to the phenylacetonitrile, probably floatin' around in the
cytosol someplace.
Now my chem's a bit rusty, but if, enzymatically (which is more or less
organic-chemist-speak for magic, which is what biochemists know enzymes do
everywhere, all the time), a cell tries to rip off and metabolise that
remaining sugar by pushin' an electron into that ether bond (tricky -
ethers are pretty inert) I'd expect it'd leave a phenylacetonitrile
radical like so:
O.
|
Ph-C-C%N
|
H
the electron (represented by the lone . ) either has to attract something
electrophilic to bond to, or the electron has to go someplace locally.
The benzo (Ph-) is already stuffed to the gills with these things in its
aromatic bond structure and is just gonna electrostatically tell the
electron to go away; the single bond to the proton can't accept any more
either, and the nitrile's fairly dripping with electrons already. The
radical is unstable but it happens that the oxygen wants to keep that lone
electron to itself, to get the sort of double bond it needs to fill its
outer octet... and oxygen being oxygen (the electronegativity rant can
come another day), it's gonna be pretty forceful about getting it.
So that electron stays right there on the oxy and forces its probability
distribution cloud onto the nearest other thing electrophilic it can bond
to, which is the central tetrahedral carbon. The single bond between the
central carbon and the singly-bonded oxy atom is joined by another single
bond, and (twang!) we get a nice C=O double bond.
[A probability distribution cloud is the best way to think of an electron;
because of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, you can't really say
exactly where an electron is, but you can describe the space of where it
is most likely to be in a given slice of time. Some of these clouds have
some funny shapes... go look up electron orbitals if you're bored.]
This'll push an electron off the central carbon, onto whatever can soak it
up (whatever's the most electrophilic now that the carbon's stuffed with
one more electron than it can usually take) so the radical will degrade to
benzaldehyde and a cyanide radical (a nitrile group with a lone electron
on its carbon atom, which happens to make the whole nitrile electrically
negative, at which point we can refer to it as a cyanide ion):
--->
H
|
Ph-C -C%N
"O
benzaldehyde cyanide
molecule ion
Benzaldehyde tends to get oxidised to benzoic acid fairly quickly in air,
and I guess the same'd happen in oxygenated cells, too, though I can't see
how it could chew up very much of the cell's available oxygen. It would be
bad news for any marginal cell which tried to metabolise this stuff,
especially anything not well oxygenated due to poor vasculature (as tumors
tend to be), since not only has it had much of its oxygen chewed up by
this sudden appearance of something which likes to be oxidised
(consequently the cell momentarilty can't run its respiratory reactions by
shovin' electrons onto the normally available oxygen, which would in the
usual circumstances subsequently steal a couple of protons to form water).
But you'd still need to eat a LOT of benzaldehyde or its dietary
precursors to have this effect.
The real headshot for the cell is that the immediately available cyanide
ion has an innate ability to irreversibly bind to components of, and thus
shut down, the cellular electron transport chain. A cell trying to
metabolise this stuff is gonna have a hard, very short life if it can't
accommodate these two problems somehow. Hmmm. I dunno what benzoic acid's
gonna do for the cell's pH either.. probably not much, it's a very weak
acid.
Ok, so chewing laetrile as a plausible generalised cytotoxic agent passes
my chemical mechanism sanity check. But. But! It immediately occurs to me
that eating this stuff is just gonna protonate the nitrile group in the
low pH environment of my gut (contains HCl, so, uh, about pH=3, about
10000 times more acidic, that is, more prone to donate protons to anything
nearby, than is water, with pH=7) and give me low-grade cyanide poisoning,
which is probably why the almond plant makes the stuff: eat enough of its
seeds and you'll die and be no further threat to its species. At this pH
disaccharides tend to hydrolyse in the gut anyway, leaving me with
phenylacetonitrile derivatives floating around in my gut too, even if the
nitrile doesn't come off and form cyanide.
Also - why my other cells wouldn't also try and metabolise the stuff, and
die trying too, eludes me.... maybe they do but can deal with the damage
and tumors lack some of the enzymes which normal cells use to cope with
damage to their electron transport chain. I don't really know. Someone
mentioned something about mitochondrial rhodanese sulfurtransferase
failure in tumor cells so they can't turn the CN into thiocyanide and
excrete it, so they die. I've never heard of rhodanese and it's not in my
copy of Lehninger, nor my old copy of Stryer, but it's known about at
EMBL.
"Cancer cells, tax accountancy - the ways we all are failing."
-TISM "This Morning I Had Work To Do" - from the Best Off compilation
Time to start chewin' bitter almonds, then? Oh, fuck it, I should face it,
I've already turned into a pill-poppin' freak. Se, B-vitamins, garlic
(well, that's not a pill but it's not something I'm eating because I like
eating it, it's for allyl compounds), A, E. I can't say `it cant hurt' to
take these things, 'cos cyanogenic glycosides *can* hurt. But then so does
Se, and so does retinoic acid, if you eat enough of them, and they're
normal parts of your metabolism.
So now I've gotta go back to the people who swear the stuff'll cure me,
and they're gonna ask me if I've investigated their amazing wonder cure,
and I will tell them yes, I have - but not with the same conclusions as
they have. It's plausible but I can't say I'm convinced yet. But whaddo I
know. It's on the internet so it must be true, right? 8-)
Maybe they'll say, oh, ok, go ahead and ignore our advice, see if we care
if you die. It's only half as insane as shooting up yer metastasis with
dead microbial coats. Which is what I'm investigating day after tomorrow.
But I'm doing a lot of things... I'm altering my biochemistry in a lot of
ways. I am a statistical sample size of one. If I don't die of this stuff
my survival's not going to be attributable to a single thing.
Whatever laetrile does, it's not gonna provoke a long term immunological
reaction anyway, which is why I'm going for the lipopolysaccharides. Can I
think of a way a population of tumor cells could adapt to low dosages of
cyanide? Yes. One or more of them will somehow exhibit a tolerance (why
*should* a tumor not make rhodanese?) and will then go on to be the
progenitor cells which make future tumors. The same way any tumor deals
with any chemotherapeutic agent, synthetic or not.
Jan 12
I was listening to Regurgitator's Unit album today, on this thumpin' amp I
pulled out of the dumpster last week, and it has a great, great track on
it. Thank fuck there's musicians somewhere with their heads screwed on
properly.
All that I am and all I'll ever be
is a brain in a body.
And all that I know and all I'll ever see
is the real things around me.
All I've heard, and it's true -
there ain't no god, there's just me and you.
I don't see a point to this place.
But I'm happy to be floating in space.
I won't mind if you're holding my hand
and life seems sublime when you don't understand
that the world turns around and it don't give a damn
if we all die away and we never come back again.
All that I am and all I'll ever be
is a brain in a body
I live till I die, then rot away
it's a beautiful story.
All I've heard, and it's true -
there ain't no god, there's just me and you.
I don't see a point to this place.
I'm happy to be floating in outer space.
I won't mind if you're holding my hand
and life seems sublime when you don't understand
that the world turns around and it don't give a damn
if we all die away and we never come back again.
Jan13
Manly Beach, South Steyne. I went out and chatted biochem with Joachim
Fluhrer, who is unusual for a doctor in that he seems to actually know in
some detail the sort of cellular biochemistry which one needs to know
about for tumor processes. It's great to crap on with someone who has a
clue and isn't afraid to articulate it.
Despite all the stuff I just raved on about above (trust me - this dude
earned every cent of the $200 he got paid to talk onco-biochem with me for
an hour) he's not experientially convinced laetrile's especially useful
either, and he's of the opinion that we should chop Bill out rather than
inject dead bacterial things into it if someone can remove Bill cleanly
(which given the CT scans we probably can). He suggested some doses of
retinoic acid which struck me as outright toxic. Also folate, but that
makes sense. Bunch of immunomodulatory dietary things. I've bored you with
enough of this stuff already.
----------
Jan 16.
Not that I want you to think I go feeling myself up all the time but I've
noticed Bill The Neck Lump has shrunk. I'm not kidding myself, it's really
happened. Now, while this is much better than its previous agenda of
expanding to devour my whole head, I'm not getting hopeful about it. For
all I know, next week I'll wake up and there'll be lots of other lumpy
Bill-equivalents elsewhere. I think maybe what it means is that there's
tumor cells there (which means there could be others elsewhere), but now
my major scar is mostly healed up (I notice the scar tissue has started to
grow its own superfical microvasculature now) and my serum levels of
growth hormones such as one secretes when one's flesh is traumatised by
the surgeon's blade have returned to normal, they're not growing under
their own instructions. Good. I hope they all fuck off and die, even if
Bill's a pretty convenient sort of lump... I can feel it and gague the
mood of the tumor, to some extent. For easy-access diagnostic purposes it
sure beats having one in, say, your prostate gland. Or your brain.
I spent the day debugging my new machine (can't boot off the slave drive,
so I've swapped it; can't boot knoppix but I think that's the weirdo scsi
device jamming the autoconfig, so I swapped that too; can't get red colour
pixels in quake which I think is a bug in the card, not the driver, so I
took out the Alliance Semiconductor item and slapped in a Tseng ET6000; I
couldn't get the other sound card recognised, slapped in my old one and it
worked fine; otherwise it's great) installing another bit of a LAN, moving
some furniture, and being periodically deafened by the bloody panic alarm
to which some of the furniture was attached by screws.
Feb's coming around quickly. Back to work. I'm sort of looking forward to
it. Graham sent me an email asking if I was up for it and I think I am,
given the way I feel at the moment, which aside from some random gut pain
is actually pretty good.
Jan 17th
Dad dragged home the copy of what my oncologist wrote to my kidney
chopper-outerer on the 23rd of Dec.
Status:
-Post nephrectomy, high-risk renal cancer.
-?Adjuvant therapy
It was his opinion that the lump in my neck was probaby due to
lymphadenopathy. Which is rather like saying the lump in my neck was due
to lymph-node lumpiness. Off I go to Goldstein on the 16th, which is the
day after tomorrow.
Ok. So. Now what? I've got cancer and I've had a few weeks to accommodate
myself properly to this fact. What am I gonna do now?
Is it better to proceed on the assumption that I will survive this? Maybe
it is, even if I won't. Among the consequences of that decision would be
that I could return to my original mundane life and stop documenting it as
if it mattered to anyone else who would care to read about it. I could get
on and write about stuff like the things I did last night, which wasn't
get laid for a change (monogamy to an absent person really is a drag) - it
was scarier and in some ways, better ...
0) Ate a cheeseburger at the McDollars at Heathcote, while waiting for the
rest of the Clan to assemble to do the journey down to Port Kembla. This
was possibly the riskiest thing I did all night. I haven't eaten any of
their stuff for oh, seven years. It tastes exactly the same as I remember
it, which means we've probably both degraded equivalently. I sort of don't
give a fuck now. A friend spent ages searching for a power point to charge
his phone, found one in the ceiling tiles, and was then accosted by a
McDroid for charging his fone off it.
1) motorcycle 100km through extreme fog and light drizzle at 120km/h to
the huge industrial precinct at Port Kembla. I didn't know the way there
so I was following other Clan vehicles and sped to keep up, but it turns
out, you can't miss the Port, yellow-white and blue gouts of flame sear
into the night sky, huge clouds of steam well up from the clanking dark
shapes dotted with the yellow pinpoints of a thousand sodium lamps,
scattered like so many miniature suns. When I arrived and unzipped my
weathersuit I noticed the _stench_of_fear_ wafting out of the pockets of
warm air held against me for the journey.
2) with about 20 other people, explore the vast, recently mothballed Port
Kembla Copper Smelter. The fence is a shit, as is the barbed wire. After
that... not a guard anywhere (and there's a million places to hide).
Everything's still lit up. Evidently nobody watches the security cameras.
The huuuuge vent stack, at least 80m tall, sez something about the nasty
outlet of the plant process - whatever it is they want to waft it over to
New Zealand. The sulfur-dioxide detectors still work, which is good, since
that's the hellish toxic gas which comes off copper sulfide when you smelt
it down to metallic copper... near Port Pirie in South Australia this
same gas changed the pH of the surrounding soil so much that it killed
every tree for miles adjacent to the copper smelter and not a thing grew
back for 20 years. At 10 parts per million it'll kill you if you breathe
it. They add the gas to water and sell it as corrosive fuming sulfuric
acid (hence, lots of stainless steel pipes to guide it around), but there
wasn't likely to be any here, the plant's been shut for months. We wore
gloves to stop us from touching anything corrosive, but I suspected if we
did touch anything corrosive it'd just momentarily pause to eat the gloves
before getting into the meat below. It's that sort of place. Everything,
and I mean everything, is covered with warning signs. Funniest danger sign
of the night:
Entry Prohibited Without Permission From The Acid Technician
Pass the LSD, maaan.
I didn't know what half of it did, it was like being in one HUGE, vastly
scaled up pair of interoperating enzymes, each designed to do one reaction
at kilotonne scales:
CuS + O2 -> Cu + SO2
SO2 + H2O -> H2SO4
Huge crucibles, cranes, hoppers, silos, tanks, motors, analysis and sample
control laboratories, radioactive materials handling arms, floor after
floor of steel mesh and I-beams, miles and miles of pipes and conveyors
and cabling and chain... it just goes on as far as the eye can see. Huge
rotating kilns (I could fit my hand crossways in the gap between the drive
gear teeth of these) sit frozen in position with dark slaggy copper
stalactites hanging off their outlets at 45 degrees to gravity. Below it
all is a train engine, and tracks, part of the railway via which
presumably came the ore. I don't know where it gets made into sheet and
wire and pipe but I guess it'd need to be electrolytically purified first,
judging by the stalactites, it looks like shit when it comes out of the
kiln.
It's untouched by graf artists. It must cost 'em a thousand bucks an hour
just to keep the place lit like this. The whole place looks like you could
just turn it all on again in a day or two. I pissed off when we spotted a
lone forklift driver doing the rounds. Experience has taught me not to
hang around to get busted.
I rode back slower, and slept very well, to be awoken by the sound of a
chainsaw. I was convinced there was nothing left to cut down in this
suburb but I am evidently not correct, the people two doors down are
taking out the ancient paperbark trees in their back yard.
I estimate from being 7.5cm long when it was CT scanned, Bill is not more
than an inch (2.5cm) in its longest dimension. Hmmm. Pass the
cheeseburgers.
18 Jan
I wonder at times why the Flautist has offered me something she is
evidently not prepared to give. What good is her provoking a hardon if she
won't use it? Arr, I'm not one to impose, but it's frustrating. She's been
accepted to go to Brissie, and I am happy for her. Rural Tassie is,
according to her report on her time down there, crawling with crazies.
Maybe I shouldn't go there.
Bill The Lump is smaller again. I have to go to some effort to find the
fuckin' thing now. By the time the interleukin pusher gets to biopsy it
(will somebody, ANYBODY kindly suck some guts out of this adenopathic
lump, please?) it'll probably be in hiding, lurking to pop out again
later. Hmmm. It's 1am, Jan 19th. That's today. They'd better move fast.
Next load of screen-searing bilge will be at
http://conway.cat.org.au/~predator/losing_it.txt
<predator>

BIN
glebe.zip Normal file
View file

Binary file not shown.

603
gutful.txt Normal file
View file

@ -0,0 +1,603 @@
File: gutfull.txt
Cont: the new me, and why I want to be rid of him
Date: 21, 22, 23 Nov 2003
I owe a lot to the likes of Planck, Fourier, Radon, deMarignac, Roentgen,
Maxwell and a bunch of other people. Their legacy is the truly astounding
ability to see through one's bones and their fleshy wrapping, and peruse
internal workings which you could otherwise not without a big long slash
through the external plating beforehand. Lensless RF imaging technology
cannot answer on your behalf the question of wether or not you're prepared
to see what it can show you, but you can't have everything.
What on earth would the entrail-reading Romans have made of CT-scans and
NMR?
Haematology, while it can tell you a lot, can't give you an image. So, two
nights ago, I swilled down an unpalatable beverage of heavy metal sulfate
and yesterday I took all my clothes off, donned a distinctly Roman
disposable gown and was fed head-first into an computerised axial
tomography rig. Which is a huge x-ray machine which takes lots of
exposures from multiple angles, which represent slices of your body;
grunty computers take all those slices and, mainly using linear algebra
with a few layers of other maths on top, build them into human-readable
images of your internals in cross-section, provided these internals admit
enough x-rays to be detectable on the other side of the rotating beam
path (which is why I had to guzzle the astringent white radiopaque slushy
I mentioned earlier).
The aforementioned slushy stays in your GI tract and makes your intestines
show up on the x-ray exposures, but it doesn't make it to your
circulation, since the compound is deliberately chosen because it doesn't
dissolve in your gut acids, which is good 'cos soluble barium compounds
are hellishly toxic. This insolubility is why they also cannulate you and
punch a load of clear orange liquid into your veins - so these too can be
made visible to the short-wavelength eye of the machine. I did ultimately
find out what the contrast medium was - iopamidol - and looked it up in
the Merck. I'd have to shoot up about four kilos of it before I could be
expected to die of poisoning, and the molecule is specifically constructed
to be rapidly excreted by your kidneys.
There's trefoiled IONISING RADIATION HAZARD stickers on the door to the
room, and the radiologist gazes in on you through a VERY THICK window. You
lie on a tray, and the tray is fed, under precise machine control, into
the central tunnel of the CT rig, which is a floor-mounted,
room-dominating contraption with all its interesting pieces hidden by
beige plastic cowlings; The first run is to calibrate the machine to your
particular radiological parameters, the actual scans happen on subsequent
runs. The machine makes low, quiet humming sounds, inches you back and
forth at a slow, precise rate, and you can see through the beam aperture
that something large and heavy is rotating, very accurately, around you,
but you'd never know it was throwing hard EM at the atoms of your body.
The machine powered down, and like a compact disc in a very large player,
I was gently ejected. The radiologist came out and asked me to move my
penis - prone on my belly, it was evidently obstructing their scans. I had
no idea it'd be opaque to that part of the spectrum. It's simultaneously
reassuring and disconcerting to know that they can see so much stuff under
the flimsy blue gown - but who am I to refuse if someone suggests I shift
my dick out of the way of a beam of ionising radiation. So I shoved it
down my leg, then he crammed a few cc's of triiodinated isophthalic acid
up my arm.
Most people report odd effects when shot up with this stuff. I did. My
arsehole felt very hot for a few seconds, then the back of my throat felt
hot, then I swore I could smell some sort of burnt, bleachy stink. With my
guts rendered sufficiently visible to this anchored, domesticated version
of Superman's eyeballs, the radiologist left the room and the machine
inhaled me again.
Then the scan started. The machine tells you to breathe in and hold your
breath (bzzz, scans are happening), then breathe out, but it stops
there... maybe programmers could remember to change this to something
which instructs the scanee to breathe normally. This repeats itself a few
times while the machine gets lots of juicy images and you turn anoxic in
the belief that you have to have empty lungs for no apparent reason, and
eventually give up and breathe like you normally would anyway.
The bloke comes in and says, "We're gonna scan you again, and pay
particular attention to your left kidney." Which it immediately occurs to
me they wouldn't do if everything was normal and boring. Uh-oh. So they
scan that a couple of times. Then he comes in and sends me off down the
corridor to an hilarious old lady in a darkened room, who asks me to lie
down and take my gown off, squirts a load of imaging gel on my gut and
then manually moves an ultrasound probe around on my left flank.
It felt a bit ticklish, but is way more interrogatory than your average
massage. She did this for a LONG time, and got lots of snaps, but didn't
say anything (and I can't see anything on the screen from where I am).
Then she passed me a towel to wipe the goop off, and told me to go and put
my clothes back on.
So, clad again in my usual stuff, I returned to the outside world. I got
the report later that day, shortly before they told me to get myself down
to the nuclear magnetic resonance imaging crew in Kogarah. Which I did. I
read the CT scanner's report in their waiting room. Yatta yatta neoplasm,
renal in origin, yatta yatta kidneys still working, blah blah needs more
investigation. I know enough anatomy and med-lingo to understand what
they're talking about. I have cancer.
I've met the enemy, and it is me. Well, it is _of_ me, anyway. It isn't me
in the sense that it isn't a chunk of cells doing stuff I would like them
to do, and it isn't me in the sense that none of it should be there
according to one's embryological body plan. It is me in that it's
genetically full o' my code, it is me in the sense that my immune system
hasn't identified it as a targetable impostor, hence the normal lymphocyte
count. Hey, maybe I can make money off it, license it and flog it as a
cell line to mol bio companies, once they chop it out? I'm gonna need to,
getting this fucker out is gonna cost me a pile of bux I don't have.
Tumors are immortal, and a sample of this stuff will potentially outlast
me. Enduring fame, in an Eppendorff tube.
Collectively, the DNA in our cells take millions of nucleotidyl insults
every day, but most of them either occur where they don't matter, or are
repaired, or produce cells which commit programmed suicide (apoptosis) or
die an uncontrolled death from regulatory failure (necrosis), or die after
they reach their Hayflick limit (and hence are telomerase-negative and not
immortal). Of the remnant, we get hundreds of potential tumors a day.
Almost all of them get smashed by NK's, macrophages, and other sections of
your immunology, which spot and kill these things which in the process of
becoming tumors lost the molecular passwords which allow them to be
considered part of the whole. Depending on your genes, what diseases you
get, what chems you are exposed to, eventually, a few of these make it to
the immortal league of extraordinary cells.
So, it's a numbers game. Once a few of these things get their act
together, they can grow, but they remain _diffusion limited_ and get no
bigger until one or more of them decide to turn on their angiogenesis
signalling. Then the adjacent arteries and veins start to supply it with
access to the community nutrient lode pumped around your body. This it has
evidently done. It's a big fucker, longest dimensions are 10 x 14 x 18cm,
it's threaded through with vascular supply, some of which probably used to
feed the nephrons in my renal cortex.
Because it's big, and well supplied with blood (it appears, thusly, that
I've been dining for at least two in recent months) it will enlarge,
exponentially, and push other things out of the way (which is why my
spleen felt enlarged - it was forced upwards from below). Because this
growth process entails more and more cells, each with its own chance to
forget to make adherin proteins and thence bud off and become another
tumor, the bigger it is, the more dangerous it becomes, for reasons
unrelated to mere metabolic load. Renal neoplasms have a noted tendancy to
metastatise.
I guess if you're gonna have cancer, this is one of the better places to
have it. No limbs off. They don't have to chop any bones up to get at it,
it isn't anywhere near your personality executes, and one is luckily
bestowed with redundant kidneys so if you have to piss one off, you can do
so without staring down a life of dialysis. At this stage, though, I don't
know if it's a lone primary or a descendant of some creepy oncological
mothership lurking somewhere else.
NMR imaging works on a different principle to X-rays. If you think of
X-rays in the same way as you might think of a very strong, penetrating
searchlight, you're well on the way to understanding them. But NMR is
totally, utterly different and exploits tricky quantum mechanical aspects
of one's own molecular stuffing, to provide images of astounding
resolution - down to microns in the really recent machines.
NMR and CT-machines look pretty much the same to the people fed into them.
They sound very different. CT is almost silent. NMR, which uses huge,
liquid-helium supercooled, superconducting magnets and which bashes them
with powerful changing magnetic fields applied by large coils (producing
magnetostriction - same phenomenon which makes power transformers in the
street produce their characteristic hum), is very fucking loud, so one is
fitted with nonmetallic earmuffs to protect one's hearing. These double as
headphones to enable the NMR operator to tell you when to stop breathing
and breathe again. The headphones have no wires, since the fields
generated by the machine would induce huge currents in such wires and melt
'em; sound comes in through tubing, with characteristic pipe distortion.
One has to have no metal implants, jewellery, anything, when one goes
in, wearing another of those hospital gowns which if not done up correctly
tends to expose one's arse to all and sundry. Funny how I care about that
when my internal organs, which have never seen the light of day, are
about to be displayed by proxy to the world at large.
How it works is roughly like so. You lie down, and a pair of coils
(presumably graphite or some other non-metal, but I really don't know) is
placed, one below and one above the area one wants to look at. These are
the aerials which detect the changes in alignment of your protons (and
carbon-13 nuclei, too, but only barely) when the imposed magnetic field
changes. They feed you into the machine and energise the electromagnet
(which is an idiotically strong, supercooled rare-earth jobbie, something
on the order of 20 Tesla, which would rip any ferromagnetic materials out
of you and embed them in the machine as soon as they energised the
magnet). Your protons become aligned with the (static) magnetic field - in
effect turning you into a weak magnet. Then another coil is energised
which rotates the magnetically aligned protons towards it, and when this
second coil is de-energised, the protons want to re-acquire their
orientation towards the big magnetic field which was turned on the first
time, and when they do they emit RF... you can figure out where they are,
if there is a gradient in the static field, which is of course carefully
arranged. The machine records what the coils detect - which is an RF
signal from your hydrogen atoms, saying what their chemical environment
is, which relates to what kind of molecules they're in, and what sort of
tissues contain them. Heavy math crunching (of the Fourier transform of
the free induction decay spectrum of the alignment of your protons after
they turn the second coil off, for each slice) gets your image.
As the machine electromagnetically sectioned my carcass, stridently
wrestling the raw forces of the universe, I could feel strips of faint
warmth moving up my body ... my protons were dissipating as heat the
energy stashed in them by the imposed magnetic fields (this must be how a
tape head feels when it is demagnetised). It made a lot of loud humming
tones, some very discordant. The equipment produces astoundingly high
resolution images - I'd always wanted to be imaged (is gratuitous MRI the
ultimate in self-obsession?) - and I have had that wish granted, though I
hoped it might be under better circumstances. Ah, well, in 2012 we run out
of helium; no supercoolant, no more MRI scans. Better to do it now.
I did lots of breathing in and breathing out while the machine
interrogated my proton distribution. A while later someone named Lynette
told me she was gonna shoot me up with a contrast dye. This isn't an
iodine-based material, I knew, so I asked her what it was. She said,
gadolinium-somethingorother, and I reckon, probably gadopentenic acid
(geez, the Merck's a handy tome) which is a paramagnetic relaxation
agent... makes things containing it really stand out on MRI. They can't
use a glass needle (they break) or a metal one, so they cannulated me with
a plastic item, they shot me up with Gado', did more scans, and let me get
up and get my clothes back on.
I snuck a look in the room with the pictures in it, with my guts in
cross-section on the screens, and fuck me, it looks detailed and messy.
There's a lot more plumbing than is meant to be there, connected to a big
... thing ... where most of the kidney was. Amazingly the remnants of the
left kidney still works. They said they'd need a while to come to
a conclusion on this one and they'd send the pics and assessment off
tomorrow.
I came home and departed with some gadolinic, slightly iodinated, dense
barytic turds, and thought about the situation a bit. I don't know enough
to really take a position yet. The dog is a reassuring island of blithe
normality, tail wagging as tumor boy dismounts from his 'cycle and takes
off his helmet.
I told mum what the report said. "You know what a neoplasm is, don't you?"
I asked. "It's a tumor. A big one." She got all teary. Later she mentioned
she wondered if this was a secondary to something else, like a lung tumor
she might have, over the years, supplied to me via my proximity to her
tobacco habit. I told her we don't know yet, and speculation is pointless.
I had to admit I kind of enjoyed watching her squirm for a teensy bit,
amazed that she thought, maybe there were real consequences from her
unapologetic, callous, fuck-you stubborn inconsideration of what people
around her like to breathe. I ran a quick thought process, along the lines
of, diag with lung tumor secondary to tobacco smoke exposure, strangle mum
on the spot, go to court, and claim self-defense against proven poisoner.
But that'd be silly. Aside from needlessly enriching bastard lawyers,
there would be more satisfaction in letting her live out the rest of her
life in awareness that she'd carcinogenated me. I wonder, if in running
these sorts of thoughts, I am subtly telling myself to get my head scanned
too.
Dad's sort of odd. He reckons I should cut my goatee off 'cos it'll
interfere with the administration of anaesthesia. He _very much_ gives a
shit how I am going to present myself as a patient in the hospital where
he works. Sends me up the road to purchase some acceptably boring clothes.
And fucked if I'm gonna. The cash goes on Eigen: Rules of the Game;
Lehninger: Bioenergetics; Tainter: Collapse of complex civilisations,
second hand. They should get here in a couple of weeks.
Today (Friday) I get a call, to go and have yet another CT-scan. This time
they want to look at my chest. I go there, and there's a crowd of people
in the waiting room, but they ask me to come in right away, which is
abnormal - the immutable laws of queueing are only broken for the insane,
the very important, or those suspected of dying, and I don't think I'm
either of the first two. The CT-machine at this place, which is made by
weapons manufacturer General Electric, probably sells commercially for
several million bucks, is newer and faster than the one in Hurstville
(and has obviously been got at by the school of design which says
everything needs to look streamlined and aerodynamic), has higher
resolution, is more capable of ionising my dick, and all that.
The injected contrast agent feels just as weird as it did yesterday. Why
does someone want to look in my chest if they've found something in my
abdomen? Obviously 'cos lungs is where these things usually start. If it
has, then the neoplastic freakshow in my belly is a secondary, and I'd say
it's a good bet asbestos, or passive smoking, or something of that nature
has finally come to collect its dues somewhere in the lobes of my
respiratory system.
I walked out of the nuclear medicine / CT-imaging place and walked down
the footpath to the place where yesterday my protons learned to dance, in
the expectation they'd have my scans and they could pass them over to me
so I could 1) deliver 'em to dad, who referred me there and 2) I could get
the straight dope from the enclosed report and look at the scans myself.
If there's anything that shits me it is the _not_knowing_. But there's
some dude at the desk, I think he's a radiologist, and he says I'm meant
to be getting my chest scanned. Uh, yeah mate, I just did that, are the
NMR scans available so I can take 'em over to Hurstville? He says the NMR
scans are here, and he and another one of the diagnostic radiologists and
some kidney-choppin' surgical dude (who dad has watched operating and
approves), are gonna look at all of them together, including the chest one
I just had, on Monday and come to a conclusion about what to do, so they'd
like to keep it all together in one place.
Um, right.
I wander off to the carpark and ride back to Blakehurst.
The pact of silence shits me. I've had more scans than your average
barcode, and _know_ they know what I want to know, and aren't showing me.
I think, am I condemned to cark it sometime in the next few months or
what? Hmmmm.
I decided I'd go round to Turella, bitch about the idiots two levels
upstream of cat.org.au chopping off our web and email feeds, get pissed.
Ooooh, Chatelle Napoleon brandy alternating with Peters Wicked Honey and
Cashew Icecream is very fucking good. I crash in the cot of one of the
locals, and we chat for a while. I let the oncological cat out of the bag.
After a while, she's in the loop to the same extent I am. She invites me
for a shag. Maybe it wasn't the best time for a shag. It's sad to be being
shagged by someone and have them suddenly burst out crying all over you. I
ask why she's upset and she says it's not so much that I have cancer, it's
that I said I wouldn't bother to fight it if it's already an entrenched
aggressive, metastatic one. I guess it would seem like I was rejecting
everyone, by not making an effort to hang around, by choosing to let
myself be removed from their life.
It is in the absence of knowledge that superstition and fear fester. In
the absence of awareness about what is going on inside, the decisional
logic becomes simple. If it's localised, chop it out, cool. If it is
metastatic and distributed everywhere, well, I think - it might be time to
prep an azide milkshake, ride down to a part of the National Park that I
like, dig a hole, climb in, and irreversibly lock my metabolism. Fucked if
I want to be stuck in a cot somewhere, emotional football for a load of
people crying around me as I die, all of whom think they have something
very important to say to me, and who think we're gonna meet up again
later. I want calm, indifferent nature around me.
The timescale of my life looks like it might be dramatically
compressed. Now, most people have reasons to stay. Spouses, rugrats,
careers, infrastructure they expect to use for their lifespans, or God
says they have to stay, or something.
But I look on my life so far, and wonder, is there anything which really
recommends me? Am I worth, in the purely economic rationalist view of the
world, the effort of saving?
Dad seems to think so, I suspect he's been pulling various strings to
get all these scans arranged with such suspicious efficiency. Why does he
want to save me? We get on pretty well but I am secretly convinced I have
been, on the whole, a nuisance to him.
What do I do that makes me worthwhile? To whom do I matter? Why should
anyone miss me on a planet stuffed with millions almost alike? Thousands
of people exist, just like me, with this same sort of predicament, and
quite possibly I will be saved by blind luck alone, they will die and I
will never hear about it.
If I am full o' metastatic malignancy, I'd only go through with the
nauseating bullshit associated with chemotherapeutically fighting such an
illness, not 'cos I feel I really have to do anything special before I
cark it or need to live for some additional thing I have to complete, but
since I feel there's something altogether wrong about my dear old man
having to put me in the ground rather than the other way around. I can't
think of any real justification to prolong my existance. I've lived long
enough to get grey hair, be fucked senseless, blow shit up, play god with
the genomes of living things, learn most of the things I wanted to know,
free myself of religion, despair of the future of my species, travel much
of the world. Some people I want to say bye to are out of the country. I
skipped a few drugs, though, and it's too late to whip up a batch of mesc,
or score a few tabs of LSD. Oh well, tough shit. I should check out the
Powerhouse Museum, the Bletchley Park exhibit, a few other little things.
Go skydiving. Get my naked arse flashed by a speed camera at 100kmh above
the limit. The four remaining books I want to read are already in the
post. Ar, bugger, I haven't finished renovating the kitchen either. Oh
well, tough shit, too. I've done all the good stuff, I reckon.
It is great a) having a molecular biological clue what I am up against and
b) being an atheist. Having no god to beseech or delude myself that I can
plead with, I can get straight to the point. Most people go through the
disbelief, bargaining, anger, depression, acceptance cycle, but I seem to
go to acceptance first, depression second, then back to acceptance.
Knowledge is power. Self knowledge brings power over oneself.
Wills are odd, I never thought I should write one. What stuff do I have
that other people would possibly want? Like I'd give a rat's what happens
to it if I am dead. What kind of person lives a life that leaves not
only nothing to squabble over, but no descendants to squabble over it?
Hmmm. I'll just be a job creation scheme for the Public Trustee, I 'spose.
Funny, when I think I'm gonna die, odd things pop out, like that I
have to discretely dispose of my stash of hardcore porn, so as not to
offend the sensibilities of the people who find it when they go through
the stuff I used to own. Various clandestine possessions also need
stashing in the ground or to be moved on to someone else.
I like black humour. TISM have a lot of songs mentioning cancer, and I
still think they're funny now I have some of my own.
"There's cancer in the south of France
Cancer lurks in Rome.
Cancer circles the while globe,
until it finds you home."
and
"Cancer? I dream of cancer! Cancer can eat my BONES!
Oh, lucky I would consider myself to be racked by cancerous moans -
a fate more evil, a life more lost, the devil for me foresaw!
Imagine the day I awoke to find the Milats had moved next door."
It's saturday morning. Rain's pissing down on the steel roof. I like the
sound. White noise, stochastic arrival of discrete, glistening carriers,
loud enough to drown out the straining engines of the local revheads who
emerge to do burnouts on the wet roads. I am climbed upon by the form
previously feigning sleep next to me, and have one of those strangely
distracted fucks, where everything is sort of done on autopilot and I'm
thinking about something else. I wonder, ferinstance, what _it_ does while
I'm having this shag, how does it move, what does it know about the
blissful fire spreadding through my pelvis when I come. I dunno. I had
this odd idea that there's something defiant about the reproductive act
when performed by a condemned individual, but then, that's crap, I thought
to myself. We're all condemned. Some of us just have the luxury (or curse,
you pick) of knowing when and how. There's nothing remotely defiant about
fulfilling the main purpose for which your organism exists any more than
one is defiant of death while breathing. At least there were no tears this
time.
I haven't told many people what I know: three cat people (so they know why
I'm off-net for a while). They all think it's a bit grim. One said she'd
miss me if I died. Some people don't believe it. I was massaged by a young
lass a few weeks ago and she too noticed the malevolent lump. I SMS'd her
the info and I recieved in reply from her dual-case SMS phone: "DONT FUCK
WITH ME PRED". I sent back "IM NOT" but only because I don't have
lowercase on my wankerfone.
I eat breakky, and am glad my hangover is only a little one. I am tempted
to fanatically read up about renal tumors, but I think it'd only depress
me.
Eventually I ride to Newtown, eat a ham and cheese melt and swill some of
the faintly burnt coffee they flog at the Old Fish Shop on King st. They
usually give me something other than what I ask for, but that's OK since I
get the mistaken order for free. The rain has turned the usual footpath
parade into a serried trickle of umbrellas and bipedal bedragglement.
There's people dressed up the way they are because, to my neverending
amazement, they apparently give a shit who wins the footy. I pop around to
Ned the Anarchist's place but he's out, driving to Wollongong, probably
testing the suspension with his new squeeze. So I pop back to Turella.
I fuck around there for a while, pulling files out of the server via the
age old method of floppy disk 'cos someone's changed the IP numbers again,
grrrr. I'd send mail but our provider's provider has, incredibly, turned
the mail system off, the idiotic bastards. I get a pile of parts to take
back to the shed, there's a GX150 motherboard which I consider well worth
the effort of salvaging and retrofitting into the ATX tall-form chassis I
found on the roadside last week.
I'm about to leave for Blakehurst, taking advantage of a break in the
rain. Ah, ya know you're appreciated when the person who shagged you in
the morning blew a large part of an ounce of good bud on manufacturing
some punchy cannabis cookies. Serious weapons in the fight against pain
and depression. And, a nibble tells me, rather tasty too. Newly appointed
a trafficker of commercial quantities of natural analgesics, I start up
and ride through the drizzle. Hmmm. I hope I can keep mum away from them.
I get back to the Old's place a while later. They're watching the footy on
TV, the volume is up REALLY loud, earthworms in the back garden are
doubtless clued right up about the fucking wallabies. For fuck's sake,
even my wankerfone has stopped telling me where I am and now, instead of a
suburb, displays
GO WALLAB
IES
by default. Puke. I wonder if brain process saturation by televised sport
is a treatable pathology. The game hasn't started, they're half an hour
into the hour of pre-match advertising bait which is now customarily
played before the actual footy. I turn the volume down (normally this
creates uproar if I do it) and have a chat to dad. He does most of the
talking.
"We've looked at the MRI, the CT scans, and we're gonna have a chat to
Peter Aslan on monday. On wednesday, you'll be on his list."
Which is dad-speak for, you'll be in hospital and they're gonna chop it
out. I wonder which anonymous renal patient was bumped off Peter's list to
accommodate me.
"Ok, so they're gonna fling the kidney, right. What I want to know is,
how far has it spread?"
"Looks like it hasn't. One lymph node in the hilus is enlarged, there's no
other involvement, the spleen's normal, the liver's normal, your lungs
are normal."
This should be reassuring, and is, but not completely. Maybe it's
metastatising and just hasn't cooked up anything detectable yet. But I
couldn't have hoped for a better prognostic. Tobacco, meso, and Sydney air
haven't got me yet. Tho, some total strangers are gonna chop me open and
steal my internal organ (they'll pass it on to the histology lab, then
it'll probably be incinerated, incorporated in dog food, or sold to a
biotechnology company as a renal tumor cell line), and I can't say I'd
recommend it as a way to lose weight. Not that at 65kg I need to. If I was
a blob, I'd probably never have felt this thing until it was too well
established to treat.
This evening, I finally got my hands on the actual MRI and CT assessments.
What I like about these people is they don't fuck about when they write
their reports - if you're getting both barrrels, they'll give 'em to you
straight. When three people write stuff like:
"There is a large heterogeneous soft tissue mass in the left hypochondrium
extending to the left loin which appears to involve the middle and lower
thirds of the left kidney."
"There is a mass lesion measuring approx. 14cm in size involving the
lateral portion of the left kidney extending from the undersurface of the
spleen to just above the illiac crest."
"The huge left renal lesion with multiple draining cortical veins can be
seen."
"There are several enlarged feeding arteries from the aorta, either
engorged lumbar arteries or accessory renal arteries supplying the tumor."
it means I'm in for a slashing... it's too big to remove piecemeal
endoscopically (and too risky, they might leave some in). I 'spose you'd
expect that, seeing as it is plumbed into the biggest artery in my body.
I've spoken to dad enough about accidental removal of perfectly good
organs, etc, that I am going to bring along a texta and write on my right
flank before I go in, in large letters:
PLEASE OPEN OTHER SIDE ---->
I slowly notice, everywhere in the patho reports, they studiously avoid
the use of the term cancer. Lesion, tumor, neoplasm. Has political
correctness reached med terminology too?
The rest of the evening is sort of mundane, how I like it. Mutant freak
kidney and I eat some cold fish. We go out to the shed and do some tricky
metalwork on the computer chassis. I love doing this, since we use these
as servers, and get server-level performance out of these sorts of
motherboard, despite their bring deliberately layed out to prevent their
implementation as servers since it would cut into sales of equivalently
performing overpriced servers with logically identical guts. I dunno what
mutant freak kidney thinks of it. That done, mutant freak kidney and I
come in and sit down to type some more of this rant. Hey, you in there,
you're the star in your own suicide drama! Enjoy it while it lasts, you
get the chop as soon as we can arrange it.
Sunday. 23rd Nov.
I have to sort out what the hell's going wrong with this pirate satellite
dish decoder. I reckon they've changed the crypto keys, as I said would
eventually happen. Can I be fucked right now? No. I wash a bunch o'
clothes to wear in the hospital. Walk the dog. Why I suddenly get so much
schadenfreude upon reading in the sunday rag that the Wallabies lost to
England eludes me. Nah. Turns out they retasked the sat; different data
transfer rate, different slice of spectrum, yatta yatta. Our dodgy dealer
knows the score, it's good, and I reprogram the thing, then wait for the
new codes to come down from the orbiting broadcaster.
Mum's spending a lot of time on the fone today, which (of course) impedes
net access here under the parental roof. She's in martyr mode. An old form
master of mine used to refer to such people as `the ones who have to be
the first with the worst'. Finally, she's Got Something Important To Talk
About. But worse than that, these phone calls propagate the news, and
prolly most people don't need to know (why is this rant on the net? Oh,
rank egotism, probably).
She rang up her sister, who, completely unnecessarily, skitzed out
immediately. Rellos I rarely hear about in places I have never heard of
will have detailed information about my urinary tract, what colour my piss
is, and from what planet originated the thing they'll chop out three days
from now. I got on the fone to uncle Des, and mentioned it in terminology
he could understand - one of my beer processing organs is about to blow
up.
The back lawn is carpetted in lush green grass, topped with brilliant
lilac jacaranda flowers, all wet from the unseasonal rain. I savour
walking through it in bare feet as I move things to and from the shed, and
the freaky colour scheme.
I move a bookshelf and a cupboard. Good - mundanity is returning. I fill
in the hospital admission form. I have to go get more ichor sucked outta
my arm tomorrow. And see if I can't score a pair of those electronic
noise-cancelling headphones... hospitals harbour machines going PING all
night, screams, moans, raugous, lunk-busting coughs, pukes, phones
ringing, door slamming, nurses chatting, tele-fucking-inescapable-vision,
and other noises I'd prefer not to hear. I want my own tinnitus and the
thump of my carotid arteries as the blood pounds through 'em.
I might write tomorrow, but I might not. You've suffered enough.
<predator>
(next in this series is conway.cat.org.au/~predator/gutting.txt)

448
gutted.txt Normal file
View file

@ -0,0 +1,448 @@
File: gutted.txt
Cont: 6 days post-op.
I arrived at the hospital at 6:30am, went up to the ward, dumped my stuff
in the cupboard, hung up my clothes (black beanie, black Cave Clan shirt,
black trousers, and some gleaming white sneakers I found a couple of weeks
ago). I put on one another of those arse-baring white gowns, and did the
pre-op checklist... did I want anti-anxiolytics, asked the anaesthetist,
and on hearing the name of the benzodiazepine I decided I'd rather go in
with a clear head. They put on some fetching white compression stockings
on my lower legs, these are meant to lower my likelihood of getting a
venous thrombus while I'm not moving around. I chucked my spectacles and
watch in the bedside drawer. The staff clipped some ID tags to my left arm
and leg. They thought what I wrote on my abdomen was pretty amusing.
Mum and dad were there, and mum was surprisingly cool about it, but she
looked edgy when they both left. I rang her up a little while before I was
taken down to the OR, and she answered the fone in the sort of voice you
expect is going to tell you someone's just died. I could hear the bloody
*dog* moaning sympathetically in the background. I told her, look mum, I
appreciate the concern mum but would you please just bloody relax? I'm ok,
I'm not gonna die yet, I'll be out of here in a few days and this'll all
be over. Dad told me later she appreciated the call, but it didn't stop
her angsting.
Some dude named Alex wheeled me down to the roomful of other trolley-bound
patients who, like me, were stashed there awaiting to be knocked out and
chopped open and so forth. I got caught up in a conversation with him and
forgot to do Professor Derrida Deconstructs. The ceiling tiles were there
to farewell me, as was the anaesthetist, who expertly cannulated a vein in
my left arm, asked me to identify myself and then, injecting a load of
some crap with too many z's in its name to be identifiable by its IUPAC
chemical formalism, popped me off into unconsciousness. Dad told me later
I was too doped out to say anything intelligent as we passed each other in
the corridor outside of the theatres, he on the way to do his ops and I on
the way to do mine.
One of dad's mates, Greg (for whom I did a Playstation mod' a while ago)
popped in while I was on the table, for a lookie. I was very lucky. When
they did the initial incision, they decided they need not do the ugly
lungbusting transthoracic gash I had expected them to do. Nevertheless,
Greg still got more than a worthwhile eyeful. Natch, when they open you up
(skin, muscle, peritoneal lining) the first layer of actual guts they have
to get through is coils of intestines. Generally the surgeons locate the
mesenteric attachments which hold them in position in your abdomen, and
cut 'em off the inner back wall of your bod, then pull the whole lot out
and dump it on your chest, so they can get at the kidneys, main arterial
supply, and lymphatic networks involved in the op. So that your guts
doesn't dry out while you're being worked on, they chuck a couple of wet
towels on top of 'em. High tech, man.
The arteries feeding the mutant freakshow are small and difficult to tie
off without tearing and subsequently bleeding everywhere, so these days
they just staple 'em closed a couple of times with a few stainless steel
staples, between 6 and 11 mm wide, then chop 'em off at the occluded end.
If I fly anywhere now I'll be setting off metal detectors at customs. They
lifted the kidney/tumor out entire, then went to work on the lymph stuff.
Once that was done, someone shovelled my guts back into my peritoneal
cavity, sewed the two sundered halves of my abdomen back together, and
closed me up with a long, subcuticular stitch from sternum to mound. I'm
glad I didn't know a damn thing about it.
First thing I remember when I woke up was more ceiling tiles, mostly
obscured by the face of an intensive care nurse telling me I had to stop
swearing so much, tho I wasn't actually aware I was saying anything to
begin with. Someone had been a bit rough with the air tube, I noticed, I
had bruised lips on the right side of my mouth, tho maybe this was due to
someone smacking me one in the gob for being unacceptably rude while my
anaesthetically drugfucked brain was in the gradual process of rebooting.
I woke up a bit more later on. My throat was dry. There was something
stuck up my nose, which I figured out was a nasogastric tube, which made
it hellish to swallow properly, though that didn't matter since I was on a
nil-by-mouth regime. For some perverse reason I'd also had a long blue
urinary catheter fed into my dick while I was out. I discovered it when
I wanted to take a piss and couldn't feel it happening, but did it anyway
and wasn't immediately swimming in a warm puddle of my own urine. It went
all the way into my bladder and was held there by a hydrostatically
inflatable balloon. Hmmm. Must.... Think .... Pure .... Thoughts. I didn't
want to mess up my reproductive plumbing by getting a hardon while this
thing was embedded in it. A tube from the catheter went into a bag hung on
the side of the gurney and was watched hawk-like by nurses for blood,
cloudiness, and general volume.
There was an IV stuck in my arm, and I also had a central line plugged
into my right jugular vein, stuck onto my neck with sticking plaster. I
half wanted to puke but something was stopping me, which I later found out
was some or other anti-emetic which was being fed in through this central
line along with my delicious, nutritious intravenous saline, potassium,
glucose, antibiotics, and my new best friend, morphine, which is an
awesome pain-destroying alkaloid derived from opium poppies, and next
chemical cousin to thebaine and heroin.
I had control of how much analgesia I got: very simple, if it hurt, I'd
press this button pinned to my hospital smock, and the pain went away,
since more morphine was fed into my veins. I chewed through quite a lot in
the first couple of days. I watched dreamily as I was given jabs of
anticoagulant into the flesh of my thigh every 12 hours and didn't even
feel the needle go in. I spent wednesday night in the ICU and came out on
thursday. An ICU nurse, I think his name was Gray, cleaned my teeth
for me with a cotton swab soaked in mouthwash, which felt like going to
the dentist after a week of eating basalt grit topped with sawdust.
It felt like I was vomiting when they eventually yanked the NG tube out of
my head, and aside from a faintly pukey remnant tang in my turbinates, it
was a great relief to be rid of it.
Intensive care sucks but I think I had a relatively easy time of it, the
old dude in the next bed along, who had also had a kidney out the same day
as I did, was moaning with pain 'cos he couldn't find his morphine button.
Across the room a patient was throwing stuff at one of the nurses,
paranoid that the nurse was stealing his possessions.
My olds came and visited me in the ICU on thursday. I remember the visit
only vaguely.
A physiotherapist asked me to cough for her, and I told here there was
just no goddamned way I was gonna do that 'cos it'd hurt too much. I was
breathing fine, though. She passed me this clear plastic toy with three
lightweight plastic balls in it, each of which would rise up when one
inhaled 600, 900 or 1200 cc's of air per second through an attached
mouthpiece. I could pull all three of them up with a good drag, and hold
them there for long enough to suggest my lungs hadn't filled up with
too much crap. I was very glad, again, that they hadn't slashed my thorax.
I made it back to the regular north ward on thursday night. Everything was
still a bit of a blur. Trev Hyde came along for a visit, and I can't
remember what I said to him. Paul Cozzi came in and mentioned that they
got the kidney all out cleanly, but we all had to wait for the pathology
report to come back in a few days to see if we've really succeeded. I
slept on my back, morphined up to the maximum extent that the patient
controlled analgesia (PCA) machine would admit.
"Drugs are fuckin' fun, pal." -TISM
Yeah. I had some weird dreams, but at least I was asleep.
I was very, very glad I packed the earplugs. Aside from the proximity of
my room to the ward reception and nurse's desk (very loud conversations
when the door was open) I had to deal with the accursed, Pythonesque,
Machine Which Goes BING - a peristaltic pump mounted on an intravenous
drip stand, which had the responsibility of forcing the contents of a
suspended bag of electrolytes and assorted pharma into my veins at a
predetermined rate. While it worked I could hear its internal gears
grinding away faintly, which was quiet enough to suffer and still get to
sleep.
However, for reasons related to running out of fluids to feed me, or the
occurrence of a kink in the lines, or a vein in my arm going awry, it
would chime, BING BONG... BING BONG... BING BONG... for hours if
necessary, and loudly enough for staff in the corridor to hear it so they
could come and attend to it. I found out where the SILENCE button was
fairly quickly but that only gave a minute of respite. Unplugging the
bastard didn't shut it up either, since it had battery backup. But it
dawned on me, in my opiated daze, this demonic item was responsible for
keeping me hydrated and doped up. Arrrgh. And it was plumbed into my
circulation, too. Captive audience. I hoped whoever designed this thing
died and went to a customised hell where an infinity of these things
stretched from horizon to horizon, were cannulated to 'em by an
inescapable web of PVC tubing, beeping furiously, no earplugs in sight,
and nobody came, ever, to turn them off.
On Friday I stood up, got out of bed, and walked around the ward a bit,
slowly, with the help of a physiotherapist, i.v. drip stand functioning as
a kind of walking support. I couldn't stand up properly, I was bent over
since the abdominal stitches still hurt.
I gingerly peeled the long adhesive dressing off my wound. If you buy a
steak at the supermarket you'll notice there's a bit of absorbent padding
stuck to it on the bottom side of it, sodden with blood. Mine was like
that, longer, crustier, more colourful, but clean - didn't look infected
at all. I was impressed that none of it stuck. The pattern intrigued me
for a few seconds before I tossed it in the bin. Whoever sewed me up knew
what they were doing with a needle but I'm stuffed if I know where they've
hidden my old belly button. I had a shower, sitting down, for the first
time in some years, and felt a lot better, and went back to bed, into the
waiting arms of the nicest drug I'd met all week.
Frank came along and dropped off a load of roses chopped from his wife's
garden. They smelled very nice. A couple of my ancient rellos, Mon and
Paul, dropped in to say hi, also bearing a load of flowers. I'm such an
ungrateful bastard about such things... I think of them as more stuff to
take out when I leave the ward. Trev Hyde came in and told me the
condensed version of his life story, which was interesting. He's pretty
old now, considering retirement since the insurance situation is insane
these days. We got to the bit about dying. He's afraid of the judgement
which he thinks will come after he dies. I think religion has shortchanged
him - he's lived a life in fear of god, and will die acutely terrified of
the impending sentence. I was like that once. I ditched god and started
living a decade ago. My death is a cleaner one, where my metabolism shuts
down; my personality submits to the implacable grip of thermodynamic
entropy, and dissolves irretrievably into the molecular noise which my
organism fought so hard against for three decades. There's no succour,
though. Trev thinks he will survive death. I know, in the very neurons
thinking this thought, that I will not. But at least I'm not scared of an
eternity of anything.
Since I was on nil-by-mouth I couldn't drink, or eat, or swallow oral
painkillers. By friday night I finally became tired of having paracetamol
suppositories jammed up my bum and told the nurse I was not gonna have any
more of 'em, which was probably as much of a relief to me as it was to
her. I was gonna miss the morphine when it eventually went away. I also
finally decided to toss the oxygen prongs which had been stuck up my
nose ever since the NG tube came out. The gas came out of the feeder
tubes anhydrous and cold, and gave me recurring bloody snotty nostrils.
They fell somewhere behind the bed and gradually oxygenated the whole
room, hissing quietly in the dark and doing the job anyway. One less piece
of equipment to tie me down.
Stupid little things became important... wether or not I was farting, for
instance. On friday, I took my first crap for a couple of days. I had to
unplug myself from the wall sockets, and carry a bagful of my wee with me,
in order to go to the bathroom. Cozzi was happy about this shitful event
when I told him, since it indicated my reshuffled cabinet o' guts hadn't
adopted some strange kinked or knotted topology not conducive to pushing
partly-digested dinner through it. It surprised me, since I hadn't eaten
anything since tuesday, that anything remained to be discarded.
Simple things scared me. A person came in with a vacuum cleaner. She asked
if I wanted the room vacuumed, and I pulled the bed covers over my face,
shaking my head and pathetically moaning "NOOOOOOoooo!" ... I was in
terror of the agony of any sneezing which might be provoked by whatever
dust the vac' might exhaust into the air in the room. Thankfully she
retreated into the corridor with her allergen aerosolisation weapon in
tow.
A nurse named Nadia walked in and told me she was gonna take my catheter
out. Holy shit! Want a bloke's undivided attention - threaten his rigging.
She plugged a syringe into a port on the protruding end and evacuated the
balloon which held it inside me, then before I could even say "be careful"
she rapidly removed the thing in about one second of blistering urethral
agony. It was great to take a leak normally again but I had to remember to
pay attention when I did it again, having not had to do so for the past
few days.
Saturday came, and with it, finally, a clear fluids diet, so Cozzi asked
me if I wanted to lose the drip, and oh, hell yesssss, I did. So I was
finally freed of that blasted BING generator by the evening. With it,
alas, went my beloved narcotic.
Coz' mentioned that I wasn't allowed to eat any fat for two weeks, since
one apparently tends to get problems with chylomicron accumulation
immediately after lymphatic resection when on fatty diets. Oh, cruel...
the cannabis cookies in the 'fridge at home, built around a fatty,
butter-laden biscuit mix, were now off my list of things to eat, just when
I needed them. This is apparently more problematic with the longer chain
fatty acids, so it'd be sorta-ok to eat fish. Someone had sent up a large
box of chocolate thingos which I hadn't opened. Once the news about the
no-fat diet arrived, I decided to give the chocolates away to the nursing
staff, and they had gobbled 'em all by sunday morning.
On Saturday, Raffo and Tee also showed up and we had a chat, though I
dunno if I mumbled anything especially intelligent. Stuff was still
painful. I'd been on my back for consecutive days, since rolling over
caused pain as my detached guts sloshed about inside my abdomen under the
influence of gravity. Tee understood the significance of what was on the
MRI scan, since she's a nurse, but really, one could suss this out fairly
straightforwardly with the untrained eye. They held it up to the window
and had a gawk at my previous tennant, and were suitably impressed.
Sunday was the first day I got any solid food. My guts rumbled as if not
quite sure what to do with this unfamiliar manna coming down from a
long-empty oesophagus, but oooh, it was good to eat actual food again.
Digesting it was a different matter. I felt the coils move around,
painfully trying to decide how to pack themselves, and my dinner, in my
abdomen. They made lots of noise. They haven't they figured out there's a
load of new space to live in, now half my renal system's gone, but then,
they're guts, not brains, I suppose, so one can forgive them of this
learning deficit. Pack in, dudes, shut up and chow down. Do yer job. Keep
me alive.
Several people came on Sunday. Most of the geek crew from cat.org.au
ventured out on the train. It was good to see 'em.
I got out of bed on Monday morning and walked the ward unassisted,
unemcumbered. Aslan (geez, I'm already misspelling his name, can't
remember if it ends in m or n) came in and told me the histology report
had finally come back. They got all the kidney out and its margins
suggested it hadn't invaded anything nearby, which was reassuring.
However, all but one of the lymph nodes which Coz' resected was
_involved_, which is pathology-speak for invaded by tumor cells. It's
already spread. What this op has achieved is to push me back along the
exponential growth curve exhibited by uncontrolled, proliferating cells,
but not to get me off it.
Aslan said I could go home. I called mum, my long-suffering taxi. I put on
the same clothes as I wore when I came. Black. I had spent the whole time
in a hospital gown so nothing in the pack had been used, adding subtle
idiocy to the ruckus which went into controlling what went into it. I
slung it over my shoulder and walked slowly down the corridor. I checked
out with the sisters on the desk, and suggested there were two jars of
cut-off plant sex organs in my room for which I had no further need and
which might look good on their counter top.
I sat in the lounge and awaited mum's arrival. A man and woman in their
seventies were chatting about their cancer. It struck me I could just as
well be having the same conversation, but they were less bleak about it,
being twice my age, and less clued into its molecular biological nature.
Maybe ignorance is bliss, but in general I find it just leads to one being
bitten on the arse more often than not.
Its formal name, by the way, is renal clear cell metastatic carcinoma. It
will re-emerge. Somewhere, sometime, as surely as night follows day. This
is the way of living things, the logic of cells gone mad. The game is
afoot, and I am it. All your cell are belong to us.
The oncological cat is out of the bag, running loose in my vascular and
lymphatic systems, the intricate fractal ducting which has served me for
so long now subverted to facilitate my destruction. Unlike normal cats
with nine lives, this cat is immortal, clonal, malignant and predatory, as
one might expect.
"I am Locutus of Borg.
Resistance is futile.
You will be assimilated.
Your life as it has been is over.
From this time forward, you will service us."
-Picard.
Well, fuck you, pal.
I was gonna say to it, you'll never take me alive, but then, it *has*
already done so. After all, it *is* me. So the game changes to
scorched-earth.
I know where the azide is, where the ropes are. I have a half-kilo of AN
prill somewhere, too, if I feel the need vapourise my head faster than the
nerves inside it can possibly process the experience. Yeah. Fuck you, pal.
_I_ live here. I'll burn the house down with you in it, if needs be, to
get you out.
I type this with a curling upper lip, snorting air through flared nares,
not quite sure of my own vehemence but rapidly becoming convinced.
Mum drives me home. My guts jiggles as we drive over cracks in the
highway. I don't tell her about the metastatic nature of the thing till I
get there. I am a pretty grumpy guy all day, thinking about this
situation. Chemo and radiotherapy are pretty much useless for this
disease. It has to be fought immunologically. Maybe some recombinant
chemokines would help at this point, but I don't know anything about their
effectiveness yet.
Another option, which I know a little bit about, is the construction of a
DNA vaccine against this thing which has taken me over. We kept some of
the tumor, in order to extract from it some short segments of its DNA
which encode for proteins unique to the surface of the cells which make it
up. Using the usual restriction enzymes and DNA ligases, one splices this
into a mammalian expression vector - a hoop of DNA which is constructed so
that cells injected with it read the DNA and synthesise the protein
encoded thereon. There's a sting engineered-in, however: the hoop of DNA
containing the tumor protein sequence is arranged so that another bit of
DNA, encoding another protein with which the immune system already has the
shits, is spliced in adjacent to the segment codifying the tumor protein.
This hybrid is called a chimaera, or a fusion protein. When the cells
injected with this engineered hoop of DNA make the protein, they'll carve
it up into fragments 9-16 amino acids in length, serve it up on the major
histocompatability Class I and Class II systems to various surveilling
lymphocytes, which will then learn to recognise these fragments, hopefully
go clone themselves up, distribute themselves and attack any cells bearing
any parts of this unnatural molecular construct. From what I read five
years ago in '98 when I was doing honours, this sort of strategy works
well on some viruses, some proteinaceous venoms, and in certain
immunocontraceptive roles. People were only starting to think of
vaccinating themselves against their own tumors back then.
Nobody does it in Oz, but fortunately, labs exist in Deutschland and
Nippon which do this sort of stuff to order, and once fabricated, can send
it back via airfreight. It might work, it might not, I'll have to go trawl
medline to see if it's worth a shot. I am not feeling especially hopeful,
but five years is a long time in molecular biology. Particularly in mine.
It's monday night, no, 3am tuesday morning, and I cannot sleep. I didn't
sleep again last night, I lay there trying to figure out which position
would let me conk out into blessed unconsciousness but none of them did.
I'm a bit hiccough prone, which makes my guts hurt. I'm producing bloodied
phlegm, but not by coughing it up. Panadol isn't a rat's arse on morphine,
but I figured I'd better wean myself off the opiate. I do these strange,
uncharacteristic muscle twitches when I am drifting off to sleep.
The score at the moment:
-1) I have cancer, but not so much of it. This process will
progress, and eventually cancer will have me. When this happens, I
will die.
0) I lost five kilos in four hours with this uh, amazing kidney-free diet,
but I only had 65kgs to begin with.
1) I have a big slash up the middle, which hurts when I try and stand up
straight. It leaks blood a little bit. My belly button has disappeared,
which probably means I have Joined The Unborn 8-)
2) My intestines are playing musical chairs with themselves, which
also hurts. They're rather like an unruly room of schoolkids; take 'em
out for an excursion and they muck up for the rest of the month. I'd
smack 'em if I thought it would improve matters, but that'd hurt too.
3) right 'nad occasionally painful, OW. I hope this is referred pain.
4) I'm shooting blanks. Obviously I did not Think Pure enough Thoughts
while catheterised, or I was damaged when it was fed in, or removed.
Bummer.
5) Bordered by lines of incredible adhesive which refuses to come off with
soap, are several rectilinear patches of hair missing from my arms,
adjacent to bruises where needles were wrongly inserted or pinpricks
where they went in OK. Small black pocks dot my legs where the
anticoags were administered.
It has finally sunk in that I am actually alive, despite all this stuff,
but I'm not out of the shit, not by a long way, and may never be.
Tuesday.
This fat-free diet sort of sucks. It's not like I have a lot of it on me
anyway. Milk with no fat, which is called "Shape" instead of "Taste" for
good reasons, is an insipid, transparent, runny waste of effort, showing
up a bowl of cornflakes as the uninspiring foodstuff it is. I eat toast
with honey for breakfast, with a banana. Mum excelled herself tonight and
cooked up a steamed lemon and pepper barramundi so fiendishly delicious
I'm sure I'd swap it for a kidney again if I had a spare one to donate.
I'm off to an oncologist on Thursday to clue in about the options. A chap
named John Hunter said, in the eighteenth century, that surgery was like
an armed savage who attempts to get that by force which a civilised man
would get by strategem. I've done the armed savagery, but I'm not feeling
especially civilised at the moment. Perhaps when I awake tomorrow I will
be when I chat to the cancer heads. I hope, whoever they are, they speak
molecular biology.
<predator>
(the next in the series is now at conway.cat.org.au/~predator/hunting.txt)
(It is long, and unlikely to be an enjoyable read. You've been warned.)

484
gutting.txt Normal file
View file

@ -0,0 +1,484 @@
File: gutting.txt
Cont: evisceree-to-be gets clues, experiences The Fear, watches the dance.
Is there any diagnostic value in observing what people do in the face of
impending doom? Sunday night, I ate some pizza, dropped a book back to
someone off whom I had borrowed it, then whizzed around to a friend's
place in Newtown, and to a backdrop of Disposable Heroes of HipHoprisy, we
shagged each other to an absolute standstill (surprisingly good music to
shag to, I think). I guess impending massive trauma is as good an excuse
as any for a spot of debauch. Once we could stand up again, I threw on
some clothes and fanged it home on the understanding that the reason we
have license demerit points is, you're supposed to lose 'em. I know for
sure now the speed camera on the Princes Hwy at Kogarah won't get ya if
you drive a 'cycle right in the gutter out of the field of the induction
coils they embedded in the middle of the lanes. Tho, doin' a hundred k's
with your footpeg one inch from the kerb is somewhat dogdy.
No user servicable parts within. Refer to qualified service personnel.
Monday morning, I went to meet the guys who are going to gut me, Mr Aslam,
and Mr Cozzi. Aslam does kidneys. Cozzi does lymphatics. I'd address 'em
as doctor but I've been deconditioned of that habit, since it's not how I
address dad, who has been a DokTa for longer than I have been alive. He
came along for a listen, and also because he's my immediate next of kin.
Aslan and I had a look at the CT scans on a fluorescent backlit screen. On
the right side of my body is a normal kidney. On the other side is a
smattered veneer of (surprisingly, still functional) recognisable kidney
trying desperately to hang onto a fuckin' big chunk o' mutant cellular
bureaucracy gone mad. It is dimensionally about the same size as my head,
if you were to cleave my head down the centre first. I'm not quite sure
how I fit it all in. Into my head popped a quote from Parker (Yaphet
Kotto) in the movie Alien, who delivers the line with exactly the right
emphasis for this circumstance:
"That son of a bitch is HUGE."
The consequences of just how huge were finally revealed. It's not gonna
come out through the usual renal incision. When people as conservative as
surgeons invoke the word _radical_ and follow it with nephrectomy, there's
a gonna be some serious slashin'. They're gonna insert a blade just above
my pubic symphysis, run it all the way up the middle of my six pack (can
they do something about that protruding navel while they're there?) to the
base of my sternum, then do a left turn through my abdominus rectus
(that's gonna fuckin' hurt while I'm healing) and run along under the
margin of my ribs, then go through the pleura of the left lung (which will
collapse for a while, which sucks but I guess I'll find a bicycle pump and
reinflate it later) and through the intercostal muscle between the eighth
and ninth rib. Same thing again with the peritoneal wall. Then they ligate
a lot of heavy-gauge vasculature. I am so glad of the existance of
anasfuckinthesia and really sharp knives carefully wielded.
Let me quantify this. I just measured these distances with a tape measure.
I'm up for ghastly half-meter gash in my torso, half midline, half
centre-to-edge. I am gonna fuckin' fuckin' fuckin hurt for fucking weeks
and it scares me a lot. I hope they have a sewing machine or a staple-gun
handy for when they finish removing the thing, and a spare 44 gallon drum
of refined opiates to dunk me in. Regardless to what level of accuracy it
is executed, it'll more or less be tactical butchery getting into and out
of my carcass.
Aslam reckons they might damage the spleen in the process of doing this
procedure, and damaged spleens tend to bleed all over the place, so they
might have to chop that out too. I don't have a spare one of those,
unfortunately. I'll be more happy if I keep it. To cover the possibility
that I lose my spleen, this arvo, in each arse cheek, via inch-long
23-gauge needles, were administered recombinantly engineered vaccines
against pneumococcus and meningococcus, which are two kinds of bacteria to
which you have an increased (forty times!) probability of succumbing when
you're asplenic. My bum hurts bilaterally. I can sit down, but not move
about without a strong ache in the bottie. Vaccination's a pain in the
arse, but it beats being eaten alive by an opportunistic microbe.
Part of why they need an opening redolent of something I'd normally find
on a CityRail vinyl train seat is because Mr Cozzi is gonna resect all the
lymph nodes up and down my inferior vena cava, in the event that the
suspect lymphatic drainage from our friendly mutant has contaminated them
with metastatic cells.
Tumours all begin as one cell. The one I'm nursing is now several
_billion_ cells, all of whom took time to execute their capitalist genetic
imperative of "go forth and uncontrollably exponentiate". Today arrived
some other clues; first, a pointer to when it might have started; second,
how I could have known about this thing earlier; and third, an insight
into its general nature.
Once Was A Kidney looks about as ugly in NMR images as it does in CT
images, but there's better resolution of the arterial and venous supply.
Tumor cells aren't very clever, collectively; they're effectively clones,
all equally unimaginative and proliferative, rather like an insidious
subspecies of middle management. Whilst busily reinventing half my renal
system as the sort of disease for which abattoirs reject slaughtered
carcasses, the stupid fucker grew into, and blocked off, most of the renal
vein which the kidney uses to return piss-depleted blood to the inferior
vena cava (which is a BIG pipe, I could (very uncomfortably) fit my thumb
into it). NMR shows the occlusion fairly clearly. I thought for a moment
it'd have been funny if it occluded the renal artery and effectively
starved itself before it got a chance to get massive (well, duh), but
that'd just kill my kidney, which would become necrotic and would need to
be removed anyway. Less slasho, but slasho nonetheless.
Natch, the progressively-less-kidney is still being force-fed a load of
pressurised arterial blood from my descending aorta. So ...the thing...
had to find some other place to drain its venous output. Sure enough, it
decided to head downwards, and involved itself in my gonadal vein, on the
left side. When it did this, it raised the venous pressure therein and
de-elasticised the collagen in the veins which take circulatory drainage
from, you guessed it, my left testicle. I have no idea if this means I'm
gonna lose a 'nad, but hey, I have a spare one of those too. Bilateral
symmetry has its privelages.
I've been walking around for a couple of years with a 'nad sac which
occasionally feels like a bag of worms hanging off my pelve, but it
doesn't bug me. I had it checked out by a GP the same day I discovered it
while having a shower at my old squat in Annandale, and he told me what it
was and said, well, if it doesn't bother you, don't worry about it. It
didn't, so I didn't. I mentioned it to dad and he didn't think of
anything, but then he generally operates on people with no scrota. I
didn't think of anything, either. I rationalised it as age-related
idiopathic collagen failure, I'm getting it in my lower legs, too. It
seems, however, that bags are the embryonic form of these cans of worms to
which I hear people refer every so often, one of which I have recently
opened.
Chatting to Aslan today, mentioning my complete lack of symptoms other
than splenomegaly... no night sweats, no pissing blood, no pain ... I was
just in the process of mentioning that I had a left varicocele but he got
the words out two seconds before me. Encouraging - therein lay the
correlation. But when did this appear?
I had to trawl my email archive for "scrotum" to get a clue when this
started, 'cos I remember emailing someone about it. Must have looked odd
in the process table entry on conway -
predator@conway:~$ grep -r scrotum * | more
which for those of you not conversant with the gnu/linux command line
shell means:
search everything under my home directory for the occurence of scrotum
and display anything you find, chopped into individual screenfulls.
Visualise that process as you will.
According to the datestamps on vasquez.zip.com.au and conway.cat.org.au, a
message mentioning my varicocele appeared a few days before Thurs Feb 28
2002. So I've been an oncogene farmer for at least 21 months, and probably
for a few months longer than that, since when the initiating cell started
down its proliferative career path, it needed a few months to get enough
buddies to block a a vein. This is, in its own way, sort of encouraging.
Big, slow growing tumors are generally less prone to metastatis than their
malignant, aggressive, fast-spreading, fast-growing, kill'em all and let
god sort 'em out relatives. If it was likely to be malignant, it's
probably had at least two years to figure it out. It has involved ONE
lymph node. So if we're lucky it still hasn't figured out how to take over
the rest of me, and it can be scooped out more or less entire. Good
riddance, fucker. You can propagate all you like... in a cell culture
bottle where I can feed, nurse and autoclave you at will, bwahahaha...
say... fancy spending the rest of your life in vapour phase liquid
nitrogen, with a handy preservative of 10% DMSO and 5% dextrose?
I'm starting to lose confidence in GPs and not simply 'cos of the "forget
about the varicocele" incident in Feb '02. I popped along to another GP
while I was doing some kitchen renovation a couple of weeks ago (probably
late October), moaning faintly about this splenomegaly and that for some
reason the waist strap on my backpack didn't fit comfortably any more. He
checked for enlarged lymph nodes, palpated my guts asked me if there were
any other symptoms, and when I said no, said not to worry about it. I'm
glad I worried about it a bit more and asked dad to feel my guts one night
in front of the (you guessed it) footy. If I'd taken the same "don't worry
about it" approach to this thing as I did to the varicocele, you'd be
reading this rant in late 2004 or maybe 2005, about my impending death
from inoperable cancer, and how it came to be that I'm up on a charge of
the manslaughter of my general malpractitioner. Maybe I'm getting
infinitesimally smarter about these things as I age. Am I enough of a
prick to send him a copy of the CT report? Yeah. Lift your game, pal.
Ar, shit. It just occurred to me I'm gonna miss Jello Biafra on Thursday
at the Enmore.
I bagged TISM member Jock Cheese's album Platter today and it's pants
shittingly funny and also sad in some places. I wonder if this guy's brain
isn't somehow entangled with mine.
Vote me for President.
I'll ban patriotic sentiment.
Introduce a virus pest control
that reacts to the mention of green and gold.
Up there Calici, in there and fight,
wipe out jingoism overnight
there's no marketing that can stop it
I don't care if there's ten Tony Locketts.
I caught the bus home and remembered how much I like the feeling of my
head vibrating against the glass to the throb of the diesel engine under
the floor of the bus, and that cloud of hot, almondy burnt diesel which
you often walk through when you walk towards the folding entry doors.
I went to a service station and stuffed my wankerfone full'o credit in
anticipation of a ton of SMSs I will have to send in coming days.
I walked up the hill in the rain and enjoyed the light splashing and the
cold, wet, astringent smell that the trees emit when their kino is washed
down their trunks. I've walked up it thousands of times, it was one of my
first big excursions, on the way to and from primary school. I get home
and the dog whinges to me, wanting a walk, but my arse is complaining
about its brush with bacterial proteins, tetanus toxin and aluminium
hydroxide adjuvants and I'm not going to walk much tonight.
I'm getting short with mum. I tell her stuff and she asks questions which
indicate she didn't listen, which is the worst kind of question to ask me
since it makes me uninterested in answering again, making her ask more
questions which indicate she didn't listen the first time. I don't know if
she's going deaf, or senile, or something. Or maybe she's always like that
and I'm getting stroppy.
Tuesday, 10am.
This time tomorrow I'll be on the table, halogen floodlit, peeled open and
hovered over by people who dress in funny green smocks with blue masks,
and wield sharp, disposable blades, various 316 stainless alloy tools,
pass each other the right instruments without asking for them 'cos they're
_in the loop_ and to whom clings the hope of those who would be glad to
see me come out alive. A machine will be doing my breathing for me. I'll
be very thoroughly paralysed, deprived of sensibility, and bits of what
used to be my guts will accumulate, detached, on the table beside me. I
go into the hospital, starved from midnignt tonight, at 6:30 am tomorrow
morning. They carve me up at 9am.
They reckon it'll take 'em about 90 minutes to take the freakshow out, and
about two and a half hours to get all the lymph nodes and other shit, then
insert a drain and sew me up. Procedures of this length are known as major
ops in the trade. I'll spend about four hours splayed on the table, total.
By a perverse twist of fate, dad will be in the theatre next door,
operating. It won't surprise me at all if he comes over and gives me a
haircut while I'm out. I'm gonna be drugged out of it, in intensive care
for a day after this trauma. I hope someone has the good decency to tell
me what day it is if I wake up.
I popped into dad's office this arvo. I figured I might as well make him
the executor of my will, which should be logistically easy, since I can't
think of any instructions and have no worthwhile stash of desirable
goodies for distribution. His parents wrote him completely out of their
wills, which has pissed him off for about thirty years. I don't know if
it'd be appropriate or ironic to leave all my stuff to him. I figure he
can do what he wants with my stuff, but knowing dad, he'll chuck it out.
What would he do with a climbing rack, a 60MHz CRO, weird computer shit, a
stack of CDs, twice his bodyweight in books, a motorcycle? Nah. I don't
care just yet.
There in every classroom, in every secondary school
and in every workplace and every typing pool,
there beside you on the bus with the lifeless stare
nervously outside surgery waiting for doctors there.
Together, loser. Loser.
Loser, loser, losing, lost.
Loser, loser, losing, lost.
There's cancer in the south of France
Cancer lurks in Rome.
Cancer circles the whole globe
'Till it finds you home.
In heart and liver it is waiting
for all of us or most
our very cells join hands and sing
loser, loser lost.
Loser, loser, losing, lost.
Loser, loser, losing, lost.
"Lose your Delusion I" (from TISM - the Beasts of Suburban)
I'm starting to think I should choose more carefully what I slap on the CD
player. Pink Floyd's "Breathe (Reprise)" sprung out of my speakers and
stopped me in mid-breath. I'm not frightened of dying, either. I'm just
frightened of the pain and stupidity of the likely routes to that end when
the process isn't under my control. I am In Harms Way already, but the
escape route is risky, and includes possible iatrogenic damage (a spleen
is a terrible thing to waste) and nosocomial infection. I hate hospitals
for a number of reasons mainly associated with getting a knife in ya, but
also 'cos they're full of microbes which eat antibacterial drugs for
breakfast... cyclosporins, beta-lactams, chloramphenicols, tertacyclines,
you name it. Rip off a couple of atoms and, Borg-like, assimilate them
into the molecular collective. Humanity trained these microbes to learn
these resistance tricks over the last fifty years by overprescription of
antibiotics, and failure to complete courses thereof. I've seen the
plasmid maps of the antibacterial resistance genes these bugs pass between
each other, molecular cassettes of free software, shared by the bacterial
community to defend itself against the semisynthetic chemical onslaught we
throw at it. If anything gets into me while I'm laid open, I'm up for an
ugly septic cytological shitfight, 'specially if I lose my spleen
somewhere in the theatre. Even if everything goes brilliantly, it's still
gonna fucking HURT.
Yesterday, the patho lab upstairs did a blood group and hold on yet more
of my brachially extracted claret, but I noticed they didn't ask for a
crossmatch on the stuff they took out of my arm. This is a good sign.
They're not expecting to need to transfuse me.
I found out that the noise cancelling headphones are three hundred bucks
from Sony, and I think I'll just bring my normal squishy earplugs instead.
Amazingly, for three hundred bucks, they do no digital signal processing
at all - it's all fast analog circuitry. Three hundred bucks is a fuck of
a lot for a small mic, an SMD operational amp and a couple of passive
components on each side of your head. I think I'll have to go track down a
circ diag off the net and go from there. If I get out alive.
Welcome to my last shower before The Slashing. I've chemically mowed off
most of my pubic hair with some thioglycolate goop, so some stranger
doesn't have to do it with a razor leaving pointy ends on the hairs, which
would make it more likely to itch when it grows back. It doesn't help the
scar heal if I scratch it all the time. Anyway, I'm not happy to have some
random person doing alien crop circles in my short'n'curlies with soap and
a razor blade. I might get cut. Or hard. Or something.
I wake up early tomorrow morning with a load of clothes (black), a
toothbrush, a hairbrush, mobile phone (and charger), Kuhn's "The Structure
of Scientific Revolutions", an artline texta. This will all be waiting in
a black backpack which dad insisted upon my using on the grounds of
hygiene (I can't argue - my main backpack amounts to a nylon-substrate
ecosystem which uses me to get around Sydney, and turns wash water black
when I wash it) - but the black backpack is another of dad's `image'
requirements wrapped up in med-speak justification, and it isn't like I'm
gonna go deliberately smearing my backpack on my wound or anything) but
it's unfamiliar to me, and I've had, and sometimes lived out of, my other
pack for ten years.
I think the BOEING emblem looks better since I coloured the E and I out of
it.
Amazing amounts of bullshit went into keeping control of what I finally
put into the pack. My impending hospitalisation appears to have awakened
some long dormant parental pack-yer-kid's-stuff-for-them genes which are
usually only activated when preschoolers are notified of their first trip
to the zoo and need their globites stuffed for the epic land and sea
journey to the far flung gates of Taronga Park.
As part of her melodramatic propensity, mum went on a pathological ironing
frenzy and presented me with a load of razor-pressed tee shirts and shorts
to wear in hospital - all of 'em are dad's, various pharmo company shit
decked in advertising for such things as implantable contraceptives. I'm
think I'm supposed to be grateful for the work she's done on these things,
given as a gift from the concerned. No offense, but fuck off. I'm wearing
what I usually wear, I pack my own shit, and if I had a religion it would
prohibit ironing. It's all my stuff, 'cept for a dressing gown an
acquaintance wore while they were having their guts chopped out last year,
and gave me for the occasion on the grounds that it will bring me luck.
Which is crap, of course, but it will bring me a better R (thermal
transfer co-efficent) if I wear it. It is an unseasonally cold November.
So I took it.
Some strange concepts come out when the shit hits the fan. People ring up
and wish me good luck, knowing nothing whatsoever about the treacherous
mathematical randomness underlying such a wish. There is something sort of
equivocal about a cancer patient saying luck isn't something they've had a
lot of lately, since I did spot the thing, too, hopefully in time to chop
it all out. Nobody seems to notice the contingent Markov chain: in order
to `get lucky' and spot cancer in time to head it off, you have to `be
unlucky' and contract the disease first.
Yea, verily, stochastic processes giveth, and stochastic processes taketh away.
Three people rang me up this evening and said they'd pray for me, which
I'm sure will make them feel better but otherwise be a waste of their
perfectly good CNS activity.
One gave me a couple of quotations from, if memory serves me correctly, a
little tome called Life's Little Instruction Book, a million-selling
publication which I recieved as a present over a decade ago and
disgustedly flung in the garbage as a collection of meaningless, and in
some cases self-contradictory aphorisms.
Someone else, a rello, rang up, concerned because their mum called them
after my mum blabbed to their mum about my illness. We ended up having a
long rant about oncogenic cervical viruses and tumor processes in general.
She said she would worry about me, and I said that would have no impact on
me, and she should just rock on down to BOC Gases, lug home a cylinder of
nitrous oxide, crack open the reg' and just try and fuckin' relax. She
thought that was kind of funny. I hope she doesn't light up a spliff at
the same time, since NOX is known for its propensity to, uh, vigorously
accelerate combustion.
An old workmate of dad's rang up, and asked how I was, but I couldn't
identify him by his voice on the phone, and I answered, `That depends on
who you are. So who are you?' Eventually he coughed the beans. I knew he
knew what I was in for. "I am up for a ghastly slashing - rad nephrectomy
minus optional extras." This dude's a surgeon too, and he knows the
outcomes are not down to luck either.
As confused and crazy as they all seem, being aware that people give a
shit does feel good in an egocentric sort of way. But why do they do it?
Do people feel bad if they don't tell me they're worried? I'd much prefer
people just got on with their lives, heedless of my problem, not worried.
I'll tell 'em the news when it's all over.
In a few hours I'll wake up, get over to the hossie, sign in and dump my
junk. I'll be running a circulatory system increasingly full of
catecholamines, and the cerebrospinal fluid sloshing around my ventricles
will be sodden in home-grown neuropeptidyl trepidation. But fear is OK
provided it can be kept under some sort of control, and I can do that.
Dad blocks all inquiries as to his state of mind, and appears unreadable,
which is worrisome. Makes me feel like he's masking something.
I don't know what to do about mum breathing her cigarette-flavoured,
desperation-tinted, canned wisdom in my direction, borne aloft on a
wheezily delivered aerosol of pathogens freshly exhaled from her
disintegrating, tobacco-plundered alveoli. She's had some hellish bodily
slashes too, in her life, but I know already what I'm in for and it isn't
gonna help to have her dissolve in front of me. I feel for the poor thing,
but I'll be glad to see the back of her weepy preoperative histrionics
when the orderlies mercifully shoo her out of the ward. I'm not equipped
to look at them, they're terribly contagious, and more than anything else,
I don't want to catch the vibe they harbour within.
At half-eight, they'll stick in a main line, get me into the drapery, get
me onto a gurney and wheel me down to the OR. I'll be strongly inclined to
sing this as I glide along the corridors:
The angel of death hovers overhead.
My family come gather round my bed.
Come my colleagues, come literate friends
here is my life wish as my life ends -
I wish I'd slept with more girls.
I wish I'd done more drugs.
I wish you'd all go and get fucked.
(Professor Derrida Deconstructs - TISM "Faulty Pressing Do Not Manufacture")
provided, of course, I can stop laughing long enough to get the words out.
Stuck in the circumstance, it will hit me as astoundingly silly that the
last thing a considerable proportion of the community sees before they die
is hospital ceiling tiles. It's also the first thing they see again if
they survive their surgery. You are on a planet of pressed, painted,
rectangles of suspended bagasse. What a reason to bother to regain
consciousness. I'll be glad to see them again. Who'da thunk it.
I won't need to pack the texta: from my {umops apisdn} perspective with
respect to the intended audience, I got it right on the first go. Since
dad's on a medical tribunal which hears cases in which doctors are
dismissed for rank incompetance, I've been exposed to too many shocking
stories of instruments left in, wrong organs removed, wrong ops performed,
to not try and help out all I can. So on my right abdomen is inscribed a
morbid joke so bad it could almost serve as an epitaph, but if it works,
it won't need to. Hopefully they'll see it after I lose consciousness.
. .
.
\_/
PLEASE
OPEN
OTHER
SIDE
-->
(I had to do it like this 'cos it wouldn't all fit across my abdomen).
Gimme the succinyl choline, Captain Snooze, let's get it fuckin' over with
while I can still maintain the delusion that I'm really not scared shitless.
<predator>
(next in the series is conway.cat.org.au/~predator/gutted.txt)

1208
hunting.txt Normal file
View file

File diff suppressed because it is too large Load diff

1591
ides.txt Normal file
View file

File diff suppressed because it is too large Load diff

92
index.html Normal file
View file

@ -0,0 +1,92 @@
<html>
<head>
</head>
<body>
This is predator's elcheapo minimum effort web page. No, I don't care what
you think.
<ul>
<li>
<li><a href="glebe.zip">glebe.zip</a>
<li><a href="approach.htm"> The approach.txt on drain exploration </a>
<li><a href="barron.txt"> The Barron Falls Power Station expedition </a>
<li><a href="tennyson.txt"> The Tennyson Power Station expedition </a>
<li><a href="aquacave.txt"> Aquacave - probably the best drain in
Brisbane</A>
<li><a href="bentcops.txt">A commentry on police corruption from an
acquaitance of mine
</a>
<li><a href="pestlock.txt"> Why nature's large complex pesticides are less
likely to engender resistance in target organisms than the simple ones we
humans manufacture.</a>
<li><a href="mol.html"> Thoughts on molecular genetics </a>
<li> <A HREF="ADSL.txt"> Building a Linux router / firewall / gateway for
a Telstra
Bigpond ADSL connection </a></li>
<li><a href="realcrak.htm"> Thoughts on the information-systemic nature of
reality </a>
<li><a href="getlaid.html"> The catalyst microwave LAN project (Which I
built, almost) </a>
<li><a href="ROBO-608.jpg"> My whacky industrial robot motherboard. Runs
Debian/GNU Linux </a> </ul>
<li><A href="latitude.txt"> Wanted: parts/spares/discard Dell Latitude XPi
P75 notebooks / laptops </a>
<li><A
href="virus/index.html">Tropism-shaping: a
way out from the therapeutic dead
end of antiviral resistance</A></ul>
<P>
<P>
<P><BR> Code snippets in C to calculate some stuff (thanks to
Andy Nicholson for guidance and bugfixes)<UL><LI> <A
HREF="benfords.c">
benfords.c </A> Calculates Benford's Law probability for a given symbol in
an N-
symbol set. <LI> <A HREF="channelz.c"> channelz.c </A> calculates
Shannon's Channel Capacity for
N channels in bits per second, given bandwidth and Signal-to-noise
ratio. <LI> <A HREF="bits_per.c"> bits_per.c </A> which, for a set
of N symbols, tells you how many bits is intrinsic to each symbol.
</li>
<P><p>
Click on the links below for approx 3Mb .PNG schematics for the (very old)
Kikusui 555 oscilloscope.
<P>
<A href="kikusui555ext_horiz_amplif.png">External horizontal amp</A>
<BR>
<A href="kikusui555highvoltrectifier.png">High voltage rectifier</A>
<BR>
<A href="kikusui555horizontalamp.png">Horizontal Amplifier</A>
<BR>
<A href="kikusui555powersupplyandcrt.png">Power
Supply and CRT stage</A> <BR>
<A
href="kikusui555timebasegenerator.png">Timebase
generator</A>
<BR>
<A
href="kikusui555timebasetimingsw.png">Timebase
Timing Switch</A>
<BR>
<A
href="kikusui555timebasetrigger.png">Timebase
Trigger</A>
<BR>
<A
href="kikusui555verticalamplifier.png">Vertical Amplifier</A>
<BR>
<A
href="kikusui555voltagecalibrator.png">Voltage
Calibrator</A>
Last updated March 29 2003</ul>
</body>
</html>

32
latitude.txt Normal file
View file

@ -0,0 +1,32 @@
My dear old laptop - restored after being given to me initially with the
screen hanging off by its data connector - is becoming hard to maintain,
so I'll eventually need spare bits for it, and since it's many years old,
crucial spares - like the power adaptor, and the drive module for the
display - are a bit hard to obtain. Hence I wish to build up a stock of
replacement guts for it. Redundant parts mean reliability.
Therefore, kind reader, if you're tossing your old, used, beloved and
recently upgraded, Dell Latitude XPi P75D (or in fact any in that series,
with or without cdrom included, so we're talking Latitudes up to P166 I
guess) - regardless of its condition (though it helps if the display
works, the processor hasn't been pulled out, etc etc), - then please
consider the possibility of being paid a little by me to take it off your
hands. It would naturally be more convenient if you were somewhere in
Sydney, Australia, because this is where I live. If course if you just
want to be rid of the thing and know it's going elsewhere than landfill,
and feel like posting it to me, well, that's fine too. I'm not comfortably
wealthy. I do not use Windows, or possess a license for it, so I will
delete that off the harddisk if you donate it.
If it happens that I eventually obtain a huge stock of these parts then
they will become a source for other people with dying Latitudes, who find
themselves in a similar situation. Spares help us all. Landfill doesn't
help anyone.
Please email me at predator at cat dot org dot au, and we'll see if we
can't come to an arrangement.
Live long and prosper!
<predator>

1277
losing_it.txt Normal file
View file

File diff suppressed because it is too large Load diff

2048
march.txt Normal file
View file

File diff suppressed because it is too large Load diff

1167
mayday.txt Normal file
View file

File diff suppressed because it is too large Load diff

1399
mol.html Normal file
View file

File diff suppressed because it is too large Load diff

462
pestlock.txt Normal file
View file

@ -0,0 +1,462 @@
file: pestlock.doc
Derived from File: Azadirac.doc (alpha version)
<modified 20/11/1999>
Bigger IS better : why it is harder to evolve resistance against a complex
poison molecule than it is to evolve resistance against a simple one.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Since before the start of the 20th century, there's been an "arms race"
between pesticide manufacturers and their new killer chemicals, and the
target pests who eventually learn how to tolerate them. It always seems to be
that these synthetics are hailed as a silver bullet, but soon enough the
target organism learns to dodge it. Why might this be the case? And more
pertinently what might be the solution?
This doesn't just happen down on the farm, either. It occurs at all biological
scales. The physical size of the pest animal is irrelevant, since the war is
fought at a molecular level. The wars are being lost : there's plenty of
antivirals to which viruses are now resistant, bacteria which eat multiple
antibiotics for breakfast and survive, fungi which are not killed by
antifungal agents, insects which can happily metabolise insecticides all day
long, and plants which manage to survive despite an onslaught of herbicides.
(It is important that this happens. Some of the things we kill with our
nonspecific poisons are actually our allies, and we need every ally we
can get, but that's another issue.)
Many of the agents employed in the quest to kill various organisms are
extremely effective in their initial application, but less effective with
repeated use. All those drums of "Kill-O" in the shed which did great work
last year will underperform next year and be useless the year after that.
Why? The pests literally engineer a way out. But how do they do it? Why
can they do it? How do we stop them?
To define this problem further we will have to go down to the molecular
arena where these battles are fought out, and first gain an understanding
of what a poison actually does.
Enzymes, poisons, and the art of the evolutionary molecular locksmithing
------------------------------------------------------------------------
A useful aid to understanding the toxicological concepts without having to
drown oneself in the agonies of biochemistry is to use an analogy. Most of us
have a bit of a familiarity with locks, and although the analogy isn't exact
it can give you a good idea of what's going on.
Locks permit gates to be opened and closed by specific keys. In biochemistry
the gates have to open and close at specific times or, amongst other things,
nutrients and raw materials can't get where they need to go. As in real life
the the keys control the state of the locks, and the locks control the state
of the gates. Enzymes often combine the "lock" and "gate" in the one,
dual functional package.
As with locks, in biochemistry, you can have the locks and keys set up in
particular ways. If you have one gate and two locks in tandem, opening one
lock will open your gate even if the other lock is still locked. On the
other hand, you can have a gate with two locks in parallel, each on separate
hasps, so you need to unlock both locks at the same time to open the gate.
In nature, although you will occasionally find a setup where only one lock in
several needs to work for the gates to open and close appropriately, the
set-up is usually parallel, in the sense that all the locks must work or
the gate can't be opened and closed at the right times.
There is one significant difference in biochemistry: you CAN'T change the
keys, because the keys also happen to be very same nutrients and raw
materials that the gate will permit through it!
Locks are constructed a particular way, and will admit only certain types of
key - round keys on vending machine locks, U-shaped keys on Bi-lock locks,
your front-door lock takes a familiar brass Yale key into its keyhole.
Then, of the keys that fit, then only the one with the right wiggles on it
will open the lock.
It's a similar thing with the enzymes which run living things. They are
shaped a particular, specific way, will only let particular substances into
their gaps and crevices, and they are very choosy. Just as you can't fit a
round key into a lock with a U-shaped keyhole, you can't fit molecules into a
given enzyme unless they are shaped just right.
Nature would prefer that she could open and close her molecular locks and
biochemical gates as she sees fit. If she can't do it, certain gates are shut
or open when they shouldn't be, so valuable things escape, or nutrients can't
come in. Things die, simple as that.
It is useful to think of poisons as a kind of a dud key. Whereas normal keys
enable you to open or close a door by unlocking or locking a lock, the poison
key still fits the lock, but has to gum up the lock's working somehow so the
gate can't be opened ever again, or is locked open when it should be shut,
or whatever.
Poisons look similar to the usual stuff a protein interacts with, but are
different in some critical way which happens to ruin the protein. There are
many different interactions. To continue with our lock and key analogy,
it's as if a key has been filed in such a way that it jams against the pins
and won't come out, kind of like a dynabolt: it changes once it is inserted
so you can't pull it out again. This consequently means you lose control of
your gate - it is open or closed at inappropriate moments.
This sort of stuff happens when poisons interact with biochemical systems,
but nature can't change the keys!
It's worth noting that historically some locks were made with detector levers
in them... enabling them to be easily `poisoned' or made unopenable. If you
tried the wrong key, relockers were engaged and then NO key would open the
lock, including the correct one.
It seems now that a lot of our dud keys are in fact no longer jamming the
targetted locks. How do bugs get resistant to our dud chemical keys?
Nature changes the locks.
-------------------------
Nature isn't conscious in the conventional sense. It doesn't say, "Hmmm,
yeah, if I rip off a chlorine atom here I can neutralise this poison."
Instead, routinely, nature's organisms make hundreds of slightly different
versions of their locks - in this case, many versions of target enzymes in a
pest's biochemistry. All of these will still perform their usual biochemical
job, and most of these versions are messed-up by poison. However, because
organisms have twenty different types of amino acids to play with, in each of
several hundred positions in the target protein, they have an amazing range of
lock versions to potentially construct, and chances are that they can come up
with one which will still work with the original key, but which now won't
admit the dud key (poison) which jams up the lock.
The rate at which an organism comes up with a solution is related to a couple
of things, mainly how flexible the organism's improvisational locksmithing is,
and also how often the organism reproduces. Each member of the target
species has a slightly different plan for their own personal locks, which
still use the original key but varies in some other way, which might happen
to make it un-poisonable. Each new member gets a crack at accidentally
inheriting the lucky new lock variety, which still uses the original key
but which won't be wrecked by the dud one. What this means is that the more
often the bug species reproduces, the more bugs there are trying to figure
out what the work-around lock version should be, with each generation of
surviving bugs.
When this biochemical locksmithing problem is solved, the bug that solves it
reaps an enormous benefit. It not only is it now immune to the poison key but
almost all of its progeny have the design for the new locks encoded in their
DNA - resistance is hereditary - so they are immune too.
It all sounds wonderful, but there is a caveat.
If the dud key is complex, and very subtly made to simultaneously interact
with many parts of the lock, or worse still, interacts with many different
kinds of locks at the same time, nature has a much harder time of it and has
to devote serious, often unaffordable resources to build the new locks so it
can run its biochemistry again. It is then that other approaches tend to be
tried, such as systems which recognise dud keys and chop'em up, or which
pump the dud keys out of the organism.
It is here that the lock analogy breaks down a bit and we have to return
into the real world for a little while. There is another analogy which will
be useful, but I'll get to that when I come to it.
Humans make simple poisons, nature makes complex ones.
-------------------------------------------------------
So back to the molecular machinery of resistance in insects. Insects have
been under attack from many organisms for millennia, the most recent being
h.sapiens, which fancies itself a bit of an organic chemist, but we're nowhere
near as clever as Nature at this molecular art. Humans have synthesised and
sprayed all sorts of stuff around to kill insects, and other things.
Maybe some of the names will be familiar... alachlor, aldicarb, aldrin,
atrazine, benomyl, amitrole, 2,4-D, chlordimethiform, carbaryl, carbofuran,
chlordane, chlordimethiform, chlorvenifos, chlorpyrifos, chlorotoluron,
cyclodiene, DBCP, DDT, dicamba, dieldrin, dicrotophos, dimethoate, disulfoton,
endothall, fenthion, glyphos, heptachlor, hexazinone, lindane, malathion,
mancozeb, monocrotophos, oxychlordane, paraquat, permethrin, primicarb,
simazine, thiocarb, trifluralin, zineb.
You might notice a few sounds repeated. For example, chlor- means there
is one or more chlorine atoms in the stuff. It is interesting that halogens
don't show up very often in plant toxins. Phos- and fos- suggest a phosphorus
which is another atom which doesn't tend to show up in natural poisons either.
You might notice a few sounds are repeated frequently. For example,
chlor- appears several times. So does -phos, -azi, -thio/sulf. Thio and sulf
imply a sulfur, which is another uncommon atom in plant poisons, unless you
look at relatives of the onion and garlic familes which tend to use
non-protein sulfur compounds a lot. Pyr- suggests one of several rings with
nitrogen and carbon in them. Carb- suggests a member of a family of the
carbamate family.
A lot of these chemical "Leggo-blocks" show up time and again in humanity's
artificial synthetic pesticides.
There are others, but it doesn't matter that I omit them. I'm using the
phonetic similarity in the names to illustrate a structural similarity in the
pesticide molecules. If you looked at structural drawings of them, or even
had to wrestle with their special chemical names, you'd see similarities
there too.
The "dud" keys we use to jam nature's molecular locks have some commonalities.
They're simple, small and structurally fairly similar. Firstly, they
generally aren't very big, as far as molecules go. Also, since they are made
of heavy atoms, weight for weight, they aren't very complex compared to
equivalently heavy molecules made of lighter atoms. Look at something like
heptachlor - it's basically a loop of carbon atoms where molecular weight
is gained by bolting on a few fat chlorine atoms. The molecule has a lot
of similar and simple branches on it. Which raises a third point: synthetics
often they tend to have similar and simple structural backbones. Our
synthetic pesticides are all simple variations on the same themes, childish
molecular Leggo structures compared with the amazingly complex pesticidal
sculptures nature comes up with.
Complexity is determined by how much stuff you have to build with, and
also how configurable all the bits are. You can only build so much with five
bits of leggo, but nature dictates that by doubling the pieces of leggo, you
get far far more than double the number of ways of putting them all together.
You can, weight for weight, get many more permutations and combinations out
of a given mass of "light" C, O, H and N atoms than you can out of the same
mass of atoms like S, P, Cl and related "heavies". The total mass of the
leggo is not the issue - it is the complexity of its configuration.
Some of the reasons for this are that humans simply haven't been doing
chemistry for several million years and simply cannot cheaply make these
complex backbones which nature seems to do so easily and cheaply. So our
approach is, yeah, let's synth this, then drown it in nitriles or halogens or
something else amenable to synthesis by the bulk chemical synthetic methods
we humans tend to use.
In contrast, poisons plants make and use against bug attack are made naturally
and most of them are made out entirely of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and
to a lesser extent nitrogen. These elements are also the main ingredients in
plant toxins with other atoms in them, like sulfur or bromine.
The reason for this is that probably N, P and S are environmentally scarce
and metabolically not worth the price of manufacture for defense purposes.
Phosphorus is so rare and presumably so precious to the organism's energy
(ATP) and information (DNA) metabolism, that it will not be allocated to
other tasks, because these energy and information metabolism functions are
so critical to the system that there would be a selection pressure against
an organism that didn't allocate P only to these critical tasks. Same for
sulfur, which is a critical component of many proteins but which is
relatively rare in the environment. From a plant's point of view, compared
to N, P and halogens, there's a stack of "cheap" carbon and oxygen around
with which to build complex stuff, so the plant making a toxin to defend
against attack is less pressured not to deplete these elements by using them
to make defensive chemicals.
On the other hand nature might just be better at complex carbon oxygen and
hydrogen chemistry than she is at complex sulfur phosphorus and nitrogen
chemistry. But that's not really central to the issue. The central issue is
the complexity.
Nature seems to rely more on taking whatever is lying around and building a
really complicated pest-repellent molecule, instead of building heavy, but
simple, molecule. The molecules which nature uses as pest repellents, if they
are heavy, get this way by being complicated artworks of light atoms, rather
than being structurally simple molecules with heavy atoms attached to them.
Simple vs Complex Dud Keys
--------------------------
So what? Why should the complexity of a poison matter? It's the interactions.
A large, complex poison molecule will necessarily interact with many parts
of its target enzyme at once. The ultimate poison key is something which
interacts with a lot of the lock components and renders them useless, e.g. a
squirt of adhesive from a hot glue gun, all the way up the inside of the lock,
will jam up that lock in a much more irreparable way, than will a wad of
chewing gum stuck shallowly in the keyhole.
Putting a bubble-gum shield on keyhole is easy: add-on a strip of teflon, and
the gum can't stick to the lock, but you can still use the original keys.
Compare this simple bubble-gum-repulsion problem, to the problem of
redesigning a lock to keep liquid epoxy out of the keyhole, the broach, all
the little pins and springs, and out of the surface where the lock barrel
turns inside the lock body- it's a screaming nightmare if you need to
continue to use the existing keys, which demands that there remains a open
hole in the lock through which the existing key (or the deadly hot glue) can
be inserted.
Hot glue is a hell of a poison for locks, because it gets intimate with so
much of the guts of just about any mechanical lock you can build. Once inside
it forms a complex shape which happens to match all the inner surfaces of the
lock guts. To get around this, the design of the locks must be radically
changed to keep the glue out. This change is so radical, it means you also
need a kind of key which you don't have to actually insert into the lock.
There are locks immune to hot glue. They lack keyholes and their key is a
specially constructed blade of plastic, which contains embedded magnets.
The magnetic field passes through the wall of the lock directly, and needs no
keyhole. You can drown the magnetic lock in as much glue as you want but it
will still work. Magnetic locks are immune to destruction by hot glue guns.
The price we paid for locks immune to a hot-glue poisons, was thet we had to
change not only the lock, but also change all the keys too, because all the
old brass keys don't work in the new locks. When locksmiths first made
magnetic locks they had to start using unfamiliar materials like plastics
(they used to work with metals and ceramics) and they had to learn about
magnetism, which was a considerable lot of new stuff to learn. The magnetic
locks were expensive to construct because the tools needed to make them were
very different to the tools via which the usual metal locks were made.
Of course, the new magnetic locks didn't work with all the old brass keys so
they keys all had to be changed too.
But nature can't change keys, she is constrained to continue to build
locks which are susceptible to ruin by complex poisons. The very nature of
the existing keys render the locks vulnerable to a complex attack.
This means, from an evolutionary point of view, that to get around a complex
poison, MANY changes need to be made to the target enzyme, all at once. On
top of this is the need to maintain the ability to use the existing key. This
is a much bigger ask, just like the design of a lock immune to hot glue.
Each interaction adds itself to the list of problems which need to be solved
to enable the lock to work again, and they *ALL* need to be solved together.
It can take the target insects or plants (or whatever) decades, even
centuries to solve such a problem - sometimes they don't ever solve the
problem (basically they run out of time) and slide into extiction.
[An alternative strategy is the messing-up of more than one lock at the same
time. Sure enough, you find multiple toxins in the same plants. This is an
even bigger ask, because the pest has to evolve several new locks all at
once. Look at plants like barley, onions, horseradish, carrots, tomatos.
They have at least four phytotoxins in them. Look at the common spud, got
about 9 of them too. We usually get around them by cooking the food or
otherwise destroying the toxicity. Most pests don't do this.]
Well if nature is so smart, it probably knows that complex poisons are more
useful and give a better return on the biological resources used in their
development. Does nature tend to use simple or complex poisons? What sort of
pesticides do plants use against the bugs which suck their sap and eat their
leaves?
Nature makes complex poisons
-----------------------------
The hypothesis that the pesticide companies would need be unable to falsify,
in order to prove that their stuff is as difficult to get resistant
to as the sort of complex agents nature has taken millions of years to
patiently evolve, is that
"natural complex pesticides exhibit the same resistance problems as our
simple synthetic ones."
I think the hypothesis has already been falsified anyway, however, in the
course of Nature's ordinary problem-solving. Nature presumably knows about
resistance, after all, various organisms have been fighting chemical wars
against each other long before we ever came down from the trees. The bacteria
and fungi have, particularly, been fighting for aeons - we use the weapons
that the fungi provide in our wars against bacteria, most of our antibiotics
are derived from moulds and other organisms in the fungal realm.
If nature "thinks" big molecules are harder to get resistance too, then they
should be more common in her armament of poisons, than small and simple
molecules. The payoff for designing a poison is then greater, because it
defends the designer for a longer period in evolutionary time. The payoff is
greater than the cost of developing it.
Nature also knows that it takes considerable effort to evolve these things,
and tends to not go over the top by simply bolting on more complexity than
is absolutely warranted in keeping the pests guessing.
So what to expect? Well, few simple poisons, many complex poisons, and a few
really complex nightmares. Such a profile will reflect two things ...
1) nature CAN synthesise complex poisons against pests, when it is worth the
effort to prevent resistance over evolutionary time, and
2) will reach a plateau of complexity when the chemistry becomes too
metabolically expensive or synthetically intractable.
It also has to be remembered that it does the defending organism no good to
get poisoned by its own defensive chemicals, which further constrains its
scope for engineering poisons against pests.
A rough guide, a fingerprint to look for, is the preponderance of carbon in
the sorts of molecules which plants tend to use as poisons against various
pests.
I happened to pick up an expensive book at a half price sale some years ago,
called the Dictionary of Plant Toxins. It happens to list in the back the
molecular formulas of the molecules in the whole dictionary, in increasing
numerical order, starting with the number of carbon atoms in the poison.
Some of the molecules in this count are not toxic to things against which the
plant has had to compete - for example, there are plant toxins here which
kill tumor cells in mice, and plants don't have to compete against mouse
tumor cells. But most of these are toxins made to help the plant survive
attacks by insects, fungi, parasites, plant viruses, bacteria, grazing
animals, and even nearby competing plants.
I counted 'em up. What do we see?
# of Carbons : 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20
Listed toxins: 2 5 2 9 6 16 14 25 15 51 51 36 34 51 169 80 78 52 66 114
# of Carbons : 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40
Listed toxins: 75 68 28 21 17 16 35 10 34 32 17 25 8 13 19 21 10 12 5 9
# of Carbons : 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60
Listed toxins: 19 7 4 1 8 10 9 7 3 3 2 0 1 1 3 1 1 1 1 2
Summary: a number moderately simple toxins (less than 10 carbon atoms)
A hell of a lot of complex toxins (Between ten and forty carbon atoms)
Very few extremely complex toxins (more than forty carbon atoms)
Pretty much what you might expect. It's a trade-off between effectiveness and
the molecular engineering difficulty associated with making a really complex
poison. Hey, YOU try and synthesise a complex molecule with 40 carbon atoms
in it, starting with sunlight, water and carbon dioxide! There is a bit of
bias in the low end, you just can't make much complex stuff with three carbon
atoms. You can make plenty of things with five, and more with oxygen and
nitrogen
thrown in.
The data has been available for years for anyone to look. It probably has
some sample biases (like, protein poisons are very complex but not hard to
make) but I don't think this matters : it was just a bunch of plant poisons
listed in a toxicological dictionary. It happens to fit what we might have
expected if the evolutionary economics of natural synthesis of plant
pesticides were subject to the sorts of trade-offs 1) and 2) outlined a few
paragraphs above.
Ag-pesticide companies tell us they know their chemistry, we know they have
business acumen. You might want accuse the pesticide companies of knowing
this trend and deliberately only designing simple poisons so you have to go
and buy another one when the last simple one you got became worthless due to
the appearance of resistance.
It's a kind of inbuilt obsolescence at the molecular level. It happens to
benefit the chem companies that this is the case. But I never attribute to
malice what can adequately be attributed to stupidity. In this case, it's
stupidity. We just don't yet know how to cheaply make really complex
pesticides to which it is hard for the target organisms to get resistant.
Nature has, incidentally, solved the complexity-of-synthesis issue in a
novel way : modularity. It knows how to synthesise twenty or so amino acids;
but since these amino acids can be daisy-chained by a single, uniform
mechanism, it can make an unlimted number of possible proteins simply by
bolting the amino acids together in different sequences. There is no need to
come up with new chemistry for each new protein, it is simply a matter of
changing the order in which the well-known reactions occur. Like a Rubik's
Cube, you only have six colours to choose from, but depending on the way
you configure the cube you can have billions of combinations of colours, and
getting them is a simple matter of twisting the faces - any child can do it.
Protein synthesis still remains a fairly tricky feat of peptide biochemistry,
we generally employ recombinant bacteria to do it for us because it's
something we humans just can't very easily or successfully do in a test tube.
I'm a synthetic organic chemist, and I know it is terribly, terribly hard
to synthesise complex molecules. Its possible, but the cost in unwanted
byproducts is just too much to make the final pesticide affordable. There is
another advantage. Biological poisons generally biodegrade, and don't
become long term stable environmental contaminants like most of the
organochlorines and organophosphates used in the last five decades. Throw in
the requirement for biodegradeability and we're synthetically and
economically pretty well sunk. By comparison, all of nature's poisons are
ultimately biodegradeable.
So what to do? Use nature's chemicals against pests
----------------------------------------------------
I think the way of the future is clear - stop using simple synthetics and
instead, extract complex pesticides from natural sources. Nature is a much
better pesticide chemist than humanity, after all.
-Mike Carlton

1461
realcrak.htm Normal file
View file

File diff suppressed because it is too large Load diff

95
tennyson.txt Normal file
View file

@ -0,0 +1,95 @@
File: Tennyson.txt
Cont: The report on the infiltration of the disused Tennyson power station
in Brisbane, by Sydney Clan member <predator> 14 May 1999
See: Il Draino 50th Edition
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tennyson Power Station - Another Northern Cave Clan Triumph
During a meeting at an elegant Sydney yacht club with retired Brisbane Cave
Clan member Sheep Feet, <predator> was given a clue to the whereabouts of yet
another chunk of the national grid. Sheep Feet mentioned that, during his
employment in a REAL JOB, he became aware that there was a disused power
station not ten minutes by train from the Brisbane CBD. Since <pred> was
en-route to the abandoned Hydro Power Station at Kuranda (via the disused
gas-turnine at Rockhampton), he decided he'd have a go at the local offering.
Entry is via a short walk from Yeerongpilly station to the northeast side of
Softstone St (UBD map 179 F-5) where one climbs over the fence and walks
east along the grassy riverbank towards the riverside edge of the old
brick building, until one hears the loud 50Hz hum of lots of big
transformers. These throbbing juggernauts are behind prison-bar gates,
some of which are warped to permit entry to slimmer Clan members...
larger persons will need to get down and dirty by getting in through the
old coolant pipes which exit into a canal near the river, but this route
is not recommended since this requires mud immersion, and some of these
pipes are meshed to prevent access. These bars could be jacked or pried
by the usual means but be quick, there is not a lot of cover. There is
security on site but it is fairly inactive. There was notification of an
intruder alarm but it doesnt seem to be active in the bulk of the station.
Once inside, ascend the stairs to what used to be the generator floor.
The six 150 Megawatt generators were similar to, but larger than, the
green giants in the Melbourne station, but they have been removed. Old
tanks, oxy-cut beams, concrete mountains which once cradled massive pumps
and motors adorn the floor. The walls have rails for a 120-ton crane
parked at the west end of the generator hall. All is quiet except for the
occasional pigeon. The understory is dark and and also denuded of
machinery. It's as if the Borg have come and scooped all the machine
elements out of the guts of the building. Eerie that the place should
seem so dead. The offices where the control systems were housed have also
been cleaned out, only the lino remains. The most amazing visage exists
where all the boilers and heat-exchangers have been removed, eight
stories of girders and beams jut and grasp into empty space as if trying
to avoid the rigor mortis which has already overtaken them; industrial
death-throes frozen in time... and it's so VAST.
Tennyson has not been entirely gutted. Some small areas, clothed in
additional layers of locks, fence mesh, ominous warning signs and coils
of razor wire. remain connected to the grid, and highly energised with
the squillions of kilovolts which run Brisbane. Tennyson is now merely a
switchyard for the juice which comes from the rest of SEQEB's network. I
assumed that any intruder detection system would be focussed on these
spots, so I avoided them and headded up ladders towards the roof.
Three floors up, what appears to have been the administration area is
locked off with shiny, newly installed steel-bar doors but there didn't
appear to be much of interest beyond them. I lacked lock-picks or a
hacksaw so I used more staircases and reached the lower roof. This level
has amusing doors which, if you walk through them, permit you a six story
plunge to your impact-related death below, but otherwise the entertainment
value is a bit thin. More stairs and ladders take you to the middle roof,
which has the footings to long-removed smokestacks, and holes which look
ten stories down to the sub-basement. From this level one can also access
the elevator shaft motors and also the conveyor belts and hoppers for the
coal loader system, which is now mainly a gigantic pigeon-shit collector.
Cages ladders lead to the topmost roofs, from where one can see the
Brisbane CBD skyline. You can also see huge alien crop rectangles where
the main smokestacks used to be and, if you're lucky, you can see the
bloody enormous Rottweiler inside the fenced-off compound where the
security guard lives in his caravan. If it isn't inside, be quick and
careful when you leave.
I tagged-up discretely and left the plant by the same tight squeeze
through which I had come in. Walking east takes you to the electric fence
operated by the DPIE, and walking south along this fence takes you to a
convenient hole where it meets the fence for the railway line. The rottie
has about 500 metres to run from the security compound to this hole and
it will leave you more than enough time to get off the substation campus
before it arrives. There is probably plenty more to explore at this place
before it gets converted to yuppie hi-rise. In all, it's a nice bit of
real estate, well worth the effort of fighting with the Queensland Rail
system to get to it.
Next issue I'll write about the disused power station at Kuranda.
<predator> would like to thank Brisbane Cave Clan man Sheep Feet for his
tip-off. In a business where everyone knows some secret hole in the
ground, but can't tell you where it is, accurate intelligence is always
welcome.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
<predator> Cave Clan Sydney : December 23 1999