November 6th, 2024.

- Sid

 

Movin' on up.

Statistics are used much like a drunk uses a lamppost: for support, not illumination.

American sportscaster Vin Scully

In the past twelve years of posting to The Infinite Revolution, I've climbed up almost 8.5 million rungs in the global internet popularity ladder, moving from number 23,702,450 in September of 2012 to 15,213,405.  Yay me.

Interestingly, the number of active web sites has remained around 190 million, whereas the number of inactive sites has more than doubled, going from about 430 million to over 900 million.  It's easy to imagine digital avatars exploring the rotted remains of a website: cautiously climbing through corrupted JPEGs, scrutinizing the fragmented pieces of a database, shoring up the remnants of the HTML architecture - perhaps a suitable concept for a short story.

The most curious part of this numbers game is that according to the report, my global standing has gone down by over five million (granted, I don't know since when), but apparently I was briefly in the top 10 million.  Ah, sic transit gloria mundi...

- Sid

"It is an acquired taste..."

“More rancid yak butter in that?' 'Please,' said Lu-Tze, holding out his cup. ”

“It's the real stuff you got there, Ronnie,' he said, taking a sip. 'The butter we're getting these days, you wouldn't grease a cart with it.' 'It's the breed,' said Ronnie. 'I go and get this from the highland herds six hundred years ago.' 'Cheers,' said Lu-Tze, raising his cup.”

Terry Pratchett, The Thief of Time

"You can get a lot of things in Toronto, yak butter is not one of them."

Tasty Tours food guide Odile Chatelain

This year we're spending my birthday week in Toronto, and for our last day in the city, we did a tasting tour of Kensington Market's eclectic food scene*.  At one of our stops, we were presented with Tibetan black tea with salted yak butter, a beverage option that I would have been unaware of were it not for its semi-regular appearance in the late Terry Pratchett's Discworld fantasy novels. As such, I was probably more excited by the opportunity to sample yak butter tea than the rest of the tour.

How did it taste? Well, as our guide gently commented after surveying the room, it's an acquired taste. That being said, I found that if I treated it more as a broth than a tea, it wasn't that bad - although I couldn't tell you whether or not it was real yak butter.

- Sid

* As an example, during our tour we passed Hungarian-Thai and Jamaican-Italian fusion restaurants. Sadly, we visited neither.  Perhaps a future trip will allow us to sample the cross-over cuisine at Rasta Pasta.