Monthly Archives: April 2016

Inked

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The following is an interview with Inferenzo di LaEmblanado y Carisimo one of the last of the pure white horses bred on the famous Lipizzaner-Camarillo horse farm near Amdolado, Spain. Shortly after World War ll as many Lipizzaner and Camarillo pure white horses that were still alive were gathered and sequestered high in the Pyrenees mountains just south of the Port d’Envalira, the highest pass in Spain. There a breeding program was set up to develop a new breed of snow-white horses. Inferenzo di LaEmblanado y Carisimo  was the result of that program.

He was the only foal born to Pajarita di LaEmblanado y Carisimo, a beautiful Camarillo mare, and Infiercezo di LaEmblanado y Carisimo, a Lipizzaner stallion, before they were tragically killed in an avalanche while trying to cross the Port d’Envalira pass during a raging snow storm. This left Inferenzo orphaned and left to his own devices. Without guidance and direction by any parents, his primary caretakers Jesuit priests brought in from the French side of the Pyrenees, who although they had much experience with breeds such as the larger Belgian plow horses, were woefully ignorant of the delicacies needed to raise the temperamental and high-strung Inferenzo. This terrible catastrophe ended the attempt to bring together the Lipizzaner and Camarillo white horse lines and the program was halted until Inferenzo came of age.

Inferenzo, who will be identified by his nickname ‘Iberio’ for the sake of brevity, has graciously consented to this interview, one of the few he has granted in recent years to chronicle his life since leaving the farm and the Jesuits. Some of his answers will be shocking, even painful to hear as we delve into his departure from conventional horse society.

The interview follows.

The Institute (TI for the sake of brevity) : Iberio, thank you for joining us this afternoon. We’re grateful you decided to speak to us.

Iberio: It is my pleasure. Did you bring that hay additive you said you’d provide me?

TI: Yes we did. We’ve never bought Hay additive on the street corner before.

Iberio: Yes, well it is not government approved yet so I must obtain it where I can.

TI: You stated in your book “INKED” that life was difficult for you while you were with the Jesuits. Why was that?

Iberio: Those guys were freaks, man. They did some really weird stuff to me. I finally couldn’t take it anymore and bolted.

TI: Can you tell us some of the things that they did?

Iberio: There was this one guy who was always smoking this stuff. It sorted of smelled like burning hay but not quite. He’d come in to the stable late at night and blow that smoke up my nostrils until I passed out. I don’t know what he did to me after but I would really feel funny the next morning.

TI: Whoa, Iberio, what did you do about it? Did you tell anyone?

Iberio: I tried to but it turned out the others just laughed about it. Turns out that they weren’t Jesuits at all. They just wore those robes so they could get jobs and free food. That’s when I bailed. The owners were absentee owners and rarely came to the farm. It all hit the fan when I left and the owners found out. Turns out I was worth a few bucks and they stood to lose a pile if they couldn’t find me.

TI: What did you do? Where did you go?”

Iberio: I hid a lot. I’d hang around farms kinda blending in with the other horses, scoring what hay I could. The real problem was that evil bastard who blew smoke up my nose got me hooked on that Hay Additive and I needed it bad. I had no way of getting it until I came up with the idea of disguising myself and sign on with various low rent jobs.

TI: Like what ? How did you disguise yourself.
I knew I had to change my look. I was a pure white horse. I stood out like Donald Trump’s comb over. That’s when I saw the tattoo parlor.

TI: We’ve been dancing around that one for awhile, now we have to ask. Dude, what happened to you?

Iberio: I went in for just a few little things. Something like a ring around my eye or maybe a saddle tattooed on my back, just something to break up all the white. Then it got nuts.

TI: What do you mean. It got nuts?

Iberio: I had been hitting the supplement pretty hard and I don’t know how to explain this, but it felt good. The needle felt good. It became my friend and I couldn’t stop. I wanted to completely cover my entire body and become a black horse. Nobody notices a black horse, but I was too far into the Hay Additive to have enough money for the total cover up and stay wasted all the time too. So we hit on the alternate stripes. Maximum coverage, cheapest way.

TI: My God dude. Didn’t you realize that was permanent?

Iberio: Well yeah. But in for a penny in for a pound. I went on and had my mane done, a muzzle job, a few piercings, my legs shortened some and that’s where I am now. I hang around with the kids near the railway station. Nobody notices me with those guys. Some make me look conservative.

TI: Amazing. What’s next? Where do you go from here ?

Iberio: I knew I was getting in too deep with everything I was doing, especially the Hay Additive, and I fell in with a bunch of hippie horse traders. They took care of me for a while, kept me topped off with the supplement, and convinced me they were going to get me into a treatment center. The treatment center was a joke, I wound up giving pony rides to kids all summer long, then they said I was ready to go to a halfway house. Halfway house my ass, it was a zoo. I mean literally, a zoo. They sold me and now I’m here for the duration.

TI: Isn’t there anything you can do? Tell somebody, get a lawyer, escape?

Iberio: No, looked into all that. It was a valid contract. You can sell horses. And after all that’s what I am. I just look different.

TI: Thanks for the interview Iberio. Wish we could do something for you. Maybe this story will help.

Iberio: Yeah man, thanks. Listen I got more to tell you, really juicy stuff, lots of sex and violence, but you got to bring me more of the additive. At least a gallon container. Seriously. Bring it in your camera bag that way the guards won’t notice it. OK? Next week. I’ll tell you about the time they took me to Tijuana. That’s some heavy stuff. Next week right? OK see ya.

That concludes our interview with Inferenzo di LaEmblanado y Carisimo one of the last of the pure white horses bred on the famous Lipizzaner-Camarillo horse farm. Sadly we were unable to continue our interviews with him as our intern who was sent to get the Hay Additive approached a Spanish undercover Narcotics officer and is now serving 15 to 20 in a Spanish prison. We were barred for life from the zoo and have had all contact cut off with Iberio. We have been trying to get one of our other interns hired on as a caretaker but so far they’re on to us. We will try to bring you more interviews in the future but right now that looks iffy.

Fun With Lard

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Here at The Institute we pride ourselves on the wholesome, nutritious meals we provide our employees and the occasional guest. After all you can’t have productive employees if they’re half-starved, or worse, lying about writhing in ptomaine induced agony. That’s why we maintain the strictest regulations regarding food handling, cleanliness, and the washing of hands. You come into this kitchen you’re washing your hands, right now, no exceptions. It doesn’t matter if you’re just there long enough to deliver the DDT we use for insect and rodent control. We don’t care if you are Giada Di Laurentis, Bobby Flay, or even Rachel Whats-her-name, your hands are going right into the wash pot and getting a good scrubbing with Lye soap. Well there is one exception, Mario Batali, we don’t check him he always washes his hands. Mario Batali is to Italian food what Bill Clinton is To Truth, wait, wait, wait, I meant what Hillary is to Truth. NO, I meant what Leonardo is to Art, that’s the one  I wanted. My mistake Mario, I’m sorry I even linked those two with your name. Bill and Hillary shouldn’t even be in this post I was saving them for another post about people who lie a lot. Sorry.

The image above shows the section of the kitchen reserved for the creation of meals for our interns. We have 1100 to as many as 2200 interns at any one time working here at The Institute and it takes a high production kitchen like this one to turn out the number of meals we must produce every day. It shows the state of the art facilities we maintain for them and although it differs somewhat from the stainless Steel Über-kitchen we have for the paid staff, where it’s gleaming surfaces require sunglasses to even enter the place, it’s a darn good place to cook food. This kitchen has a homier feel more suited to the type of interns we wind up with. Some of them are still at the stage where most of the food they consume is done with their fingers. We withhold utensils to cut down the numerous dispensary visits we have due to fork/eye injuries, malicious use of spoons etc.

It takes a special cook to be able to excel in a kitchen like this one and we have the perfect person for the job. Award winning Clifton Malliuse Bertane, newly arrived from a halfway house in New Orleans where he was classically trained in the art of Rustic, Life-Sustaining, Seasonal Foraging style of cooking as performed for the various chain gang and other places of vicious incarceration. There he had been the head chef for the last 14½ years until his conditional release to us. Since his arrival he has transformed our kitchen into the unique place it is today.

 He arrived here with a few special kitchen utensils, mostly large wooden spoons, a tattered but stained apron and his bible as he calls it, the cookbook titled “Fun With Lard”. In many places lard has fallen out of favor with chefs and even some consumers but not here. Here we have a healthy robust Lard infused cooking that draws comments from anyone that tastes it. There is always a 25 pound tub of lard sitting next to the cook stove and it is used constantly, from frying those eggs in the morning, to deep-frying lampreys and other items you don’t want to eat boiled. Over the years Chef Bertane has found many other uses for lard.

First and foremost is its primary function as a cooking oil or paste but it also can be used for leather renewal, a wadding or chinking when mixed with ashes and clean dirt to chink the walls when necessary. It is a remarkable gel to put on unruly hair if you have to work out in the wind for any length of time. One large dollop rubbed into the scalp will lock that hair down tight, we mean tight, against your scalp. It is a well-known lubricant for anything that needs lubing. In fact it has so many uses we regularly run contests for the most unusable uses you can think of and you can bet we get some real doozies. First place wins a week of meals without lard for the most ingenious suggestions. We get literally thousands of them. This just shows how much people have come to love our lard based cooking.

In the near future we will show how the other half lives. You’ll get a peek at our staffs newly remodeled stainless Über kitchen, the dining hall with its art gallery, and our newly acquired Matisse. The personalized wait staff, three to each guest that consists of interns that were trainable and less violent than their peers. Plus many more eye-opening delights. Stay tuned.

Moonlight Over Canyonlands

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Moonlight can do strange and wondrous things if you’re lucky enough to be down in the bottom of the canyons under a full moon. The small ravines and gully’s that filter down to the canyon bottom are filled up with the many different grasses that grow here because this is where the water is when there is any.

During the daylight hours these same grasses will appear colorless and faded due to the relentless beating of the sun, but at night when the moon comes out and shines its silvery light on these pockets of splendor they glow with an earthly luminance that equals the best lit studio. Nothing beats Mother Nature when she wants to show off her handiwork.

This vignette was found at the bottom of an unnamed canyon in Canyonlands National Park earlier one evening as the walls blocked the last of the daylight and the full moon rose early. There wasn’t time for setting up a formal shot as the dark was closing in and there was a hair-raising drive to climb out of the canyon before full darkness fell.

So a couple of grab shots taken out of the vehicle window were all there was time for, in fact only two images were taken, but that is often how these things happen. You see beauty, you snap the shutter and you move on. That brief moment lives on in this image for as long as people want to look at it. Which I hope is a long time.

April Fools Day – Sorry Australia

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April Fools Day, the bane of serious scientific organizations all over the world.

Here at The Institute we have enough of an image problem without adding to our misery by trying to play lame-ass jokes on ourselves or other scientific organizations so we have had a ban on playing April Fools jokes from the beginning of our presence here on the World Wide Web.

Take our Space Program for instance. How can you be a creditable user of space when no one takes you seriously. You can’t, that’s how. So first thing this morning we sent up our usual reminder to our crew in the “Institute1” our own space station and Earth orbiter, built and launched from our space center over behind the commissary right here on The Institute’s complex saying “No Freakin’ Jokes Today, Got it !”.

Well we were too late of course. We sent the ‘no joking around’ message in plenty of time but the goofs up there were doing that thing with the radio where they say ” What’s that? Can’t hear you.” and “Sorry you’re breaking up,” making those fake wind and static sounds, ” must be solar interference.” then they hang up and keep doing what they’re doing. We could hear them up there laughing and making those fart noises with their hands in their armpits, someone had butt-dialed Earth and didn’t know it, so we could hear everything they said. That really cheesed off The Director, as not doing that joking stuff is one of his most stringent rules. Somebody’s butt is grassed when they get back down here.

Well you can see what they had done in the image above. They had already drawn all over Australia with a white permanent Magic marker dividing the country up into sections. They had sections for who had the most beer drinkers, that’s the spot down in the lower right hand corner where it’s almost all white, a section for how many Australians who had actually seen a wild Koala bear, zoos didn’t count. How many really carried those big knives and actually said “That’s not a knife, this is a knife” pronouncing knife like knoife, and which ones thought Great White sharks were like totally their best friends ever and would swim with them whenever they were asked to. That would be those big blue areas in the middle of the country. We understand the sun shines there every single day and it’s really hot so that could explain that lapse in good judgment.

We finally got a hold of the crew later in the morning and gave them a stern talking to. However the damage was done. We told them to get back there and start cleaning that marker off the place but they said “Sorry, no can do, we ‘re already over Indonesia and by the time we make another circuit the marker would be so dry there was no way it was coming off.” then they started that “Can’t hear you” crap again. Man that’s irritating. Now we ‘ve got to apologize to the whole damn  Australian country explaining that we did it, but we didn’t mean it. ‘Sorry it was an April Fools joke that went awry.” Like they’re going to buy that. So much for our credibility.

To indicate our displeasure with the crew up there in Institute1 we have informed them that their next shipment of oxygen will be a week and a half late, oops sorry, our bad. Maybe they’ll pay attention to the rules next  time. Actually our guy over at Mission Control says they only have enough air left for five days. That could get dicey.

The Institute1,our space station, was designed and constructed right here on The Institute’s grounds. Since our Space Grant had not come through for the fourth time in a row we decided to tackle the job ourselves and build it out of available funds. We were able to get five of those 40′ shipping containers, a tuff shed, some of that 8′ diameter sewer pipe they bury in those subdivisions and a huge deal on off-brand duck tape from our local hardware store.

Picture the five storage containers joined at each corner forming a pentagram with the tuff shed to store the oxygen tanks and other explosives suspended in the middle of the pentagram by the 8’ sewer pipe and all joined together by massive wraps of duck tape and you’ve got a picture of what the Institute1 looks like. Of course there are holes cut in the roof of the storage containers for venting things that have  to be vented, bathroom areas, the area around the pellet stove, and so on. There are also Plexiglas viewing ports around the outside perimeter of the station so they can take pictures, use that pricey single tube 16x telescope we got when Wal-Mart had their sale, and to wave and make faces at the Russians as they go whizzing past in their fancy new space station, the Ублюдок!!!.

If we can keep the Aussie’s from going ballistic over the white marker thing we may not have done our space program irreparable harm. And we’ve got to get our new spaceship, the “Flying Flounder” up there to delivery the next load of oxygen bottles and pick up the empties. The late fees on returning those are horrendous so things have to proceed as normal, otherwise we have to consider pulling the plug on our entire “Visit Space – The Place Where Nothing Is” program. That would set back our entire Scientific Mission structure weeks and weeks if not months.

So one thing we can be thankful for is except for our friends down under, we didn’t play any practical jokes on the rest of the world. That’s a relief. So if anybody from The Institute says “Happy April Fools Day!” to you, just ignore them.