JW Consciousness Stream - 6 November 2025

This entry represents something like my stream of consciousness for Friday, 7 November, 2025. This is basically like a journal entry that I work on throughout the day.

Originally published to: https://deliverystack.net/2025/11/07/jw-consciousness-stream-7-november-2025/

I'm scheduled to get the stitches out of my foot later this morning!

Last night, Kham dropped me off to have dinner at Chokdee Café Belgian Beer Bar in Vientianne.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/GeyXafHsMarnKvqX8

I go here for a few reasons:

This bar has a Tintin theme. As a child, I read almost every Tintin book, some of them several times. I think they encouraged a reading habit. I bought as much of the entire collection as I could find before my older boy turned two years old. This includes the relatively rare (and really not so great) Tintin in the Land of Soviets, but I've never actually seen a copy of Tintin in the Congo. Some people interpret these books as racist, and I can see how they could be interpreted as insulting, but I put them in the context of their time. My boys are half-Asian and creator Hergé wasn't exactly flattering to Asians. Anyway, the bar is full of Tintin decor, and I lent them my daughters' Snowy stuffed animal until my girls saw it there. I talked to the Belgian bar owner at one point and he didn't even know there is a Tintin store in Singapore, which he had just visited. I bought some character mugs there this summer and within weeks heard from my younger son returning from Spain, who had found a Tintin store somewhere there and bought a few things.
I've gotten to know the primary bartender pretty well, a young Lao guy by the name of "Mac" that speaks enough English to have a decent conversation.
The serve draft beer, which is not very common in Laos.
They also serve many beers from other countries, which is also not very commin in Laos.
They serve decent-but-unhealthy falang (French/Westerner) food at reasonable prices.

Around dinner and a couple of draft Beer Laos, I did some interaction on LinkedIn. Then I was outside waiting for Kham to collect me and I saw a Buddhist monk (or at least, he was wearing the traditional orange robes) enter the bar. In Southeast Asia, you get used to seeing monks all over the place, riding bicyles and smoking cigarettes, but this was the first time I'd seen one at a bar - definitely there to communicate with someone as drinking alcohol is monks don't drink alcohol. They're mostly just people that live in monestaries and follow certain rules, at least temporarily. On his way out, he stopped to talk to me, mostly about his desire to go to America and the his general dislike for Donald Trump.

Overnight, I got a comment about yesterday's stream of consciousness. My friend Dennis appreciated the song links in that post. As I'm feeling that The Clash has returned to relevence this year, I had created some posts about a few of their songs, so I'll link to those here.

Next I'll try to finish up what I havae for the bibliography for the book. I should note that except for audio books, my collection is actually in the USA, so I'm doing my best from memory.

Well, the bibliography is not done, but I'm going to push it and move on.

Bibliography

Now I'm trying to write about my maternal grandfather, Ben Gardiner, who I have written about before:

Ben Gardiner

I'll go to the hospital soon.

Now it's around 12:00. I got the stitches out, which was moderately painful. My appointment to get the pins out is 24 November. Until then, I can only walk on my heel, but afterwards I only need to be careful.

On the subject of walking on my heel, it sucks. Almost everything in Laos seems to be built out of something as hard as concrete. In my house, even the stairs are made from concrete. There is some very thin carpet with no pad under it. I'm a few pounds overweight. My heels hurt here when I'm not overweight or injured, but today they're really hurting.

The walls may have cinderblock or brick inside them, but seem to be finished with something like smoothed concrete. Excluding basic sewer drains, water lines, and electrical trunks, utilities are not built into the walls. People drill through the walls and then lay conduits or exposed pipe or wire over the wall. This results in poor thermal insulation as well as air and even rain leaks. The conduits look really bad when you first see them, but almost everything is built like this here, so you get used to it.

Not all sewer drains have traps, so some smell horrible. There doesn't seem to be any consideration for electrical grounding. In fact there do not seem to be any enforced building codes at all. All of the outlets are two-prong, generally accepting both US and Central European plugs. I was finally able to find an electrical strip that somehow prevents my computer from buzzing and zapping my fingers, but those features return if I plug the printer into one of its USB ports. It's remarkable what conditions such devices can endure. Electronic producs come from everywhere, so almost everything needs an adapter, for example from three-prong US or anything from the UK to two-pring US/Central European.

I don't know much about electricity, but the combination of walls that don't always keep the rain out and no electrical grounding is somewhat worrisome.

Taking a moment to gather some music.

Some semi-random non-musics:

I just learned about the Strudel REPL for making electronic music online:

https://strudel.cc

This is probably staged, but it seems like a valid response to a woman asking ChatGPT how the devil would destroy the minds of the next generation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tP8EI7xV630

I've been working on a chapter about what I see as differences between the genders.