Just Another Point Of View

Captive to an Alien Race

Christopher McCulloh — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 17:43:34 +0000

It had been a law since the Earth was conquered six hundred years ago for children to be forcibly removed from their parents at the age of 11. After your third child was taken, both parents were separated and sent to work in the mines or in the manors serving the Chimra overlords. If you failed to produce children after five years, you were sent at that point. If you refused to “take a mate”, as the Chimra referred to it, by your 25th year, you were sent to the mines then too. Once you had your first child, if you failed to have another within five years, the Chimra “fixed” you.

Once taken, you would never see your child again. Once separated, you would most likely never see your mate again.

Logan refused to allow this to happen.

Ever since Logar had been born 10 and a half years ago, Logan had known he could not. He had held him every chance he got as a baby. He remembered waking up in the middle of the night to find Logar snuggled up against his back at a year and a half old. Or watching him for hours nursing at his mother’s breast as he slowly fell asleep.

Kianna and Logan were in agreement. They had to make it to the Stavinos. The people beyond the sands. The last vestige of rebellion. Legends.

If they got there and the Stavinos were not there, they would become Stavinos. It mattered not if others waited for them. They would not lose their son.

First however, Logan would have to do something about their tracking chips. He lacked the skill to remove them, and it was rumored that if you tried, it would send signals to your brain that killed you. He didn’t doubt it. The tracking chips supressed his and Kianna’s ability to reproduce and if an overlord was so inclined they inflicted great pain.

The chips were implanted somewhere in your body, a random location for everyone to make it more difficult to remove. Through sheer luck theirs were in appendages. He had found that his was implanted in the back of his left hand. Kianna’s was implanted in her second to smallest toe on her right foot. Logar’s, thankfully, was not implanted yet. Until you were taken, you simply wore an array of earings that served the same purpose. Logar would have no trouble cutting off the ear and the toe. The problem was going to be in cutting of his hand.

Skipping Pebbles on the Pond of Space and Time

Christopher McCulloh — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 04:13:50 +0000

Two years ago I began writing this story. I came back to it recently and decided to finish it and submit it to a Science Fiction magazine in hopes of getting it published. I’ve re-written much of the first two chapters (which were all I’d originally written) and have now added two more chapters. It will probably be seven chapters long in the end. Please feel free to leave critiques and comments. I’d really like to see this published, so the more it’s critiqued the more likely I’ll be able to make it better and hopefully good enough to be picked up. I’ll start with just the first chapter and once I have the whole first draft done will post it here. Here goes…

It was Time for the First Jump. (Chapter 1)

Seth had lumbered into his space suit and was adjusting his respirator. No one knew what happened when you went through time, so (despite Seth’s cocky protestations) they made every effort to compensate for any scenario. Gene thought that it was perfectly plausible that you went into dead space and waited until the desired time came for you to re-enter the timeline, and he wanted to make sure that Seth wouldn’t die of decompression if he was placed in a vacuum to be held for re-entry. They supplied Seth with enough oxygen for one week (as well as food). He looked like a goofy turtle with everything he needed being held in this massive shell on his back. He could barely walk. He hated the thing, and always seemed a little too willing to try the jump in plain-clothes.

Gene was tempted to let him do it. After all, it would get rid of him if it didn’t work, which Gene liked to think would make him happy because it would make his life much easier. But Gene wasn’t about to be responsible for sending someone (even someone he didn’t like) to his death.

They had agreed to send Seth one week into the future. No real rhyme or reason for the week long increment, it just seemed like a good amount of time. Long enough to be amazing, but short enough for it to be a bearable wait for Seth if he was aware of the time passing. Really what it came down to was that a week was how long Seth had insisted when Gene told Seth that he would be sending Seth on his first jump today. Fine, no need to have another screaming match, and Gene would be happy to be rid of Seth for a full week, plus Gene could not control when or where Seth went when he jumped anyways so even if they did argue about it he knew Seth would just do what he wanted no matter what.

Once they powered up the machine it would be possible for Seth to go to the future and have himself sent back to the moment after he stepped through the gate the first time, making it appear as if he were simply stepping through a door and coming out the other side. If in the future Gene were so inclined, he could send Seth back to the moment after he had left. That would mean it would almost appear the whole thing did not work. But then in one weeks time Seth would have to jump over the time he had jumped into the future to keep from killing himself, or so Gene theorized. They had all agreed that complicating the first jump like that would be a bad idea. Seth would go, and would stay in the future. One week, a one way trip.

The whole thing was controlled by a satellite, and really the door that the traveler was to walk through was only symbolic and didn’t actually do anything. The traveler had a microchip implanted in his head just behind his ear, which interfaced with his brain through electrical impulses that humans are constantly leaking and absorbing. The traveler simply concentrated hard enough on an exact date that the microchip picked up and broadcast to the satellite; which is why Gene had no control over Seth’s jumps. The satellite would pick up the signal, home in on the traveler and translate forward motion through physical space into forward motion through time to the specified re-entry date.

Walking through the door was the psychological trigger that the traveler needed to initiate the time jump event. To jump back in time, the traveler (once in the future) simply turned on their heel (while concentrating hard enough) and popped back out the other side of the door. The satellite was designed to transform your physical structure into information which it would store and then at the appropriate time retranslate that information back into your physical structure while dropping you anywhere in the world you wanted going forward, but only one place (the other side of the marble door frame) when going back. Kind of a stupid design, but it was a prototype so it was fine.

Travelling backwards was the tricky part since the satellite couldn’t simply “store” your “information” and rebuild you at the specified time. It involved encoding your information onto a single particle and throwing it back through time to a special receiver, which I’ll explain more later, that would then rebuild you the instant it received your signal.

Roger, Gene’s replacement, finished plugging in the final wires and they all held their breath as Gene pressed the big red “power” button. The whole machine hummed to life. The new software successfully uploaded to their satellite with the final patches and bug fixes, and a little green light indicated all systems were a go.

Seth sneered at Gene and began lumbering towards the door. Just before he stepped into the door, he sarcastically called out “beam me up Scotty!” and then stepped through.

It’s an odd thing to describe watching a person, lumbering in a giant turtle-like space suit through a marble door-frame standing all lonely in the center of a dimly lit room, not disappear when you expect them to. That’s not to say nothing happened. It was like watching some sort of cheesy computer animated splice job special effect. As the front of ’space suit Seth’ went in, so the front of ’bruised/scratched/beaten Seth’ came out, until all of Seth collapsed unconscious on the other side of the doorway.

Roger snatched up the phone to call for a medic while Gene scrambled around the console and rushed over to Seth. Seth had a large bump on the back of his head, most likely a concussion. He looked like he had been tortured.

Gene and Roger argued about what to do. If the base was going to be infiltrated some time in the next week, which was the most probable conclusion they were able to come to, they needed to know as soon as possible when that was going to happen. It could be any minute. For all they knew they could be dead in twenty minutes and Seth had tried to come back to warn them. Or either of themselves could be waiting in the future for one of them to jump so they could come back to warn themselves.

In the end they decided that since Roger had gone through basic training and actually served active duty as a spy he was the most qualified to try jumping ahead. They decided they should both get the chip implanted in their heads just to be safe.

It took only a few painful minutes for them to inject the chip behind each other’s ears and then Roger was walking through the door way.

Since Gene was expecting him to appear coming out of the other side of the doorway it was odd when Roger stepped through and simply dissapeared.

Crap. The plan had been for Roger to jump nearly a week into the future, figure out what was going on, and come back to precisely the moment after he had jumped. As the minutes ticked by Gene became more and more anxious.

The medic they had called arrived and began tending to Seth.

“He’s beat up really bad sir” the medic commented. He looked worriedly at Gene, eyeing him up and down as if to say, ‘did you do this?’.

“Just wake him up” Was all he said in reply. The medic sighed and shrugged and got out some smelling salts.

Seth came awake with a start. He looked fearfully at Gene and looked all around the room. ”I’m… am I back? Is this…”

“You’re safe now” Gene interrupted him. The medic wasn’t cleared for any of this and Gene didn’t want anyone to know about any of it if they didn’t absolutely have to. He ordered the medic into the hallway to wait until he was needed again. The medic looked confused and unsure, but complied saying that he supposed Seth would be ok for a bit on his own and strongly encouraged Gene not to allow him to sleep before he received further treatment.

Gene and Seth watched as the medic stepped back into the hallway. As soon as the door closed behind him they began talking at once.

“What happened?”

“When am I?”

“You’re back where you started, we just watched you step through the door in the turtle suit and you came out the other side like this, what happened?”

“You…” Set paused and squinted at Gene. Then he frowned and looked down, “I don’t remember”.

‘Liar!’ Gene wanted to scream at him. What was he hiding?

Seth chuckled nervously, “sorry, the last thing I remember is stepping through that door.” He paused again looking around. ”Where’s Roger?” he asked finally.

“I sent him on ahead to try and find out what was going on. He was supposed to come back immediately, except he still hasn’t. He was supposed to arrive a few hours before you did.” Why had he told him? Any number of lies came to mind now, too late. He did not trust Seth and before his convenient ‘amnesia’ was past he was determined not to reveal anything else.

“Oh.” Was all Seth could muster in reply, still looking at the floor. Then he vomited.

“Good lord. DOC!” Gene threw the door back open, “looks like he’s worse than I thought…”

The medic scowled at Gene and shook his head as if to say, ‘not worse than I thought’ and rushed back in. He began re-checking Seth and after a moment told Gene it would be best if they got him to the infirmary for recovery.

Gene took one last look at the marble doorframe as they exited the lab supporting Seth between them. Where the heck was Roger?

Now THAT’S a Lotion for Men

Christopher McCulloh — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 18:55:39 +0000

So, remember I was complaining about the “Body Cream” that I couldn’t decide if it was lotion or not (It was… I think…)?

Well, I found that someone now makes lotion for men. It even SMELLS like it’s for men (meaning it smells good, but not good like a girl smell good, good like you want to rub that smell on you and smell like that for a girl good).

It’s so much for men that the big bold word “MEN” is actually larger than the product name. It is “MEN body & face LOTION” and it “tackles everyday dryness” and it is “fast absorbing” and “using this is as manly as taming a grizzly while buck naked in the middle of the rockies right after a pack of rabid wolves tuck their tails between their legs and lick your face and ask you to scratch their bellies immediately following you knocking down a tree to make a log cabin with an ax you hewed out of stout oak and iron ore you ripped from the ground with your teeth and chewed into shape all before breakfast when you’ll down an entire pot of coffee so black it puts a full beard on your previously freshly shaven SQUARE CHISELED JAW” (ok so that last part I made up). And to top it all off, it appeals to your desire to get a good deal by saying (almost largest of all) “30% bonus”.

Now THAT’s a LOTION! Bravo Vaseline. Well done.

This Aveeno is actually ok too, very gender agnostic and gets it’s message across very well. Either one of these is acceptable as far as lotion goes.

145.V.17 NE

Christopher McCulloh — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 18:54:42 +0000

[Mainframe]$ tail accessDoorPanel-Preston.log

====Begin Log

Salutations.

It being Iodine day, I have begun my journal as directed by M.

The nature of my work being what it is, the directive has come that all mental evaluations now include regular loggings of our emotional and physical states. Reports are to be given at regular intervals and I fully intend to honour this directive.

I will begin by stating my name: P[-redacted-]

I am unfamiliar with the habit of such logging and find it difficult. For instance it took me nearly 37 minutes to state the preceeding information. However, M. states that I must do so and so I will. It will be tough to keep in mind not to reveal the sensitive nature of my work as M. and Y. are not aware of its contents and it must be kept classified.

I suppose the point of this is to ferret out any emotional flaws and squelch them and therefor I have come to the decision to put pen to ink (so they say, although I don’t know what it means) that which I most do not want to admit for fear of termination or worse.

That being, I fear I am developing feelings for J.

It began, I believe, well over a year ago (143 New Era) on Tertius 14 (Silicon day incidentally).

I beheld her for the first time entering through the far door. I could not help but watch as she moved, as if in slow motion, down the hall. So elegant. So smoothly. The floor where she had been seemed to gleam with a new beauty as if it were made anew.

She did not acknowledge my presence as she passed on the other side. Part of me was satisfied with this as it follows protocol and my sensitive work would allow for nothing less. However, I felt a pang of sadness that she would not even deign to notice me.

Later, and this I am even more horrified to admit, I merely watched as she entered the hallway again from the other direction this time on my side.

I watched in wonder as she slide along the gleaming floor like some sort of angel. The world a better place for her passing. As she approached me I must say I felt an eager wave of hope mixed with a dash of dread. Would I report her should she attempt to infiltrate my domain? My job to… well, we must not speak of it, suffice to say that what she did next has caused a great deal of mental anguish over dilemma of protocol I must follow. I take great pains to do my job well, and my training does not cover such incidents.

She brushed against me ever so slightly.

Eureka!

Heaven and hell both manifest in such a small gesture. Ecstasy that the sylph beauty would deign to graze against me ever so gently. Horror that she would come so close. Do I take this as an attempt against my work, to gain access to the secrets that I hold? Do I report her? Nay! Let not my word be the cause for such a lithe creature to be terminated, it was but merely an accidental graze!

The next day it happened again. Not an millimeter closer, not a millimeter further away. The lightest of touches. It has happened every day from that one to this. Exactly the same. I have yet to work up the courage to talk to her.

I do not believe this is a breach of protocol, but I spend much of my down time trying to process the scenario. To what end is this happening? What does she expect from me? Is this yet some attempt to gain my confidence and get me to grant access to my work? I do not know. So I sit and I wait.

I believe that is enough for today. I am anxious to learn what M. and Y. think of this.

====END LOG

[Mainframe]$ reformat accessDoorPanel -Preston -remove_experimental_AI
formatting………..
removing_AI…..
DONE.
installing aggressive security program…..
DONE.

[Mainframe]$ repath floorWaxer -Jooont -AI_directive=”avoid door frame”
repathing….
Processing “avoid door frame”………..
Processing complete.

exit

Zeke. Walking.

Christopher McCulloh — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 03:16:43 +0000

Just took like 25 steps in a row. Almost walked across the entire living room. 6 or 7 feet at least.

Food For Thought: Prodigal Son

Christopher McCulloh — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 17:54:44 +0000

This has always bothered me. If instead of, or in addition to, going out and telling the son who’s feelings were hurt to go inside and be happy the father had (also) told the prodigal son to go out and speak to his brother, would the two brothers have been reconciled?

I think, yes.

Laugh it Out

Christopher McCulloh — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 04:29:29 +0000

Why I will never ever ever do cry it out.

Tonight something magical happened, but before I get to it, a little history. Almost every night (sometimes multiple times a night) for the past 11 months I have put my son to sleep by rocking/bouncing/holding him.

My strategy for getting him to go to sleep is pretty much this:

Turn on the spinny musical projector thing (not that he likes it, he used to, but now it’s more just a signal that it’s sleepy time. He actually gets upset when I turn it on, because he knows what it means and he doesn’t want to go to sleep)
Hold him (I always start with him facing me with his head on my chest, sometimes he will fall asleep that way immediately, usually he will just squirm into some other random position and get comfy. This can include facing away from me. I try to be very cooperative and guess what he wants. The quicker he gets comfy, the quicker he goes to sleep)
Move (usually I do half-squats semi-rapidly in time with the music. By the end my legs are BURNING. Usually about the time I can take no more he is asleep and I can switch to a sway/gentle-bounce combo)

This whole process takes about 5 minutes. Once he is out, I let “rock-a-bye baby” play three times through and I’m done. I take him to the living room and give him to his mommy to sleep while I get ready for bed, or I go sit in my recliner and rock while I read a book and relax (this used to be a very important step. If I didn’t do this for at least 30 minutes, as soon as I tried to lay him down on the bed he would wake up screaming).

Yes, this sounds insanely easy and almost pleasant. It didn’t always work out so well. I perused numerous “sleep” books (several of which are on my bookshelf) looking for “a better way”. What was I looking for? Well, if I think about it logically, I was looking for an “out”. I was looking for something that would make me feel ok about leaving my child to scream himself to sleep. I knew that the best way for my child to go to sleep was in my arms. What I also knew was that I was tired and bored. I spent a lot of time thinking about the fact that I could be doing “something else” and that I was tired and would too like to go to sleep. I was very frustrated and sometimes angry. Sometimes enough so that I would have to hand him to Julie while I went and calmed down.

I wanted to just be able to take him to his room, lay him in his crib and have him magically close his eyes and go to sleep for the night. Then I could go to my room and do whatever I wanted. Basically, when it comes down to it, I didn’t want to have a baby.

I mean, sure, I “wanted a baby”, right? I mean, “having a baby” is fun, right? Babies are cute and do cute things and make you smile. Except when it’s two in the morning and they are screaming for no discernible reason and you want to be asleep but instead you’re bouncing him and going “shhhh shhh shhhhh” and feel like crying yourself. That’s when you find out what you’re made of.

Just like I’d love to walk out back and pick money off of my money tree, and slice a piece of fat free, calorie free, guilt-free bacon off of my talking-flying pig, I wanted to just walk the baby into the nursery with no real prep-time whatsoever, plop him down on his mattress and watch his little eyes magically slide shut with ner but a lullaby.

Sorry Charlie, doesn’t work that way.

Once I realized that I was starting to resent Zeke for “impeding on my freedom/time/happiness/whatever” I really started thinking things over. Why was I getting mad at him? Is this really his fault? Why is he crying? Why can’t he sleep? Can he do anything wrong? What am I doing wrong?

What I realized is that I was “fighting it”. I hadn’t truly embraced being a father. Sad but true. You’d think that with God giving me NINE MONTHS to prepare, I’d have really committed to it. You’d think that 5 months into actually having him in the world I’d be caught hook-line-and-sinker. Nope, I was still balking. When’s he going to go to sleep on his own? Why do I have to do this? Why can’t he just sleep and stay asleep? Wah wah wah. I need I need I need, I want I want I want. Who’s the baby here anyways???

He is a little human being that I created. God gave him to me to raise. He is my most important priority and job and responsibility in the whole world. He is God’s and does not belong to me. Would I give him to someone else? No. Why? Because I love him. And yet God loves him a gagillion times more than I do and HE gave him to me. I’d better not screw this up. Of all the bad things I could do, that would be the absolute worst. It’s time to encase my feet in concrete and throw myself into the deep-end of this ocean called “Fatherhood”.

Suddenly all the anger, resentment, and whiny-ness melted away. I realized there was NOTHING more important I could be doing than rocking my son to sleep at night. No matter how much time it took. No matter how much sleep I lost. No matter how tired I was. That was my job. So I did it, and I became happy. I learned some tricks too. I got GOOD at it.

What I discovered was this:

Babies need a schedule (step 1. Read a book, step 2. take a bath, step 3. go to bed).
This schedule in no way revolves around the made up construct we call “a clock”. It’s possible that at 9pm sharp, little Timmy will get tired and be easily put to bed each night for a month, but that’s just sheer crazy dumb luck. Depending on naps, level of activity, feedings, visitors, trips, etc. it’s more likely that sometime between 7pm and 1am little Timmy will finally be primed for sleeping. What matters is the order in which you do things leading up to (signalling) impending long-term night-time sleep. Maybe ~around~ 9pm you can get him to sleep, but he’s not an alarm clock that can really be “set”.
Everything will change. He used to like his projector; now, not so much. He used to like laying cradled in my arms while I patted his back, now he screams if I put him that way, except for tonight when he didn’t… Roll with the punches.
It won’t last forever. Enjoy it while you can. Every now and then something amazing will happen

Which brings me to tonight. Two amazing things happened tonight.

First I put him facing me with his head on my chest as usual. He starts fussing (he was really really tired. I waited too long to start trying to put him to sleep) and ends up With his head thrown back and his hands up in the air (he’s trying to escape). I counter attack by doing some squats while turning my entire body (up-left/down-middle/up-right). This immediately begins to soothe him but he stays in that position with my hand behind his head to hold it up. He then starts blowing raspberries at me while he is falling asleep. The sleepier he gets the funnier sounding they get until I’m choking back outright laughter trying not to wake him up. From the other room it sounds like sobs and my wife comes rushing in to see what’s wrong (which of course wakes him up). Mister Buddy: 1, Daddy: 0.

Next he settled with his feet in my left hand, and his head nuzzled into my shoulder with his face turned up towards me. I thought he was asleep. I leaned down and gave him a little kiss on his cheek. He smiled a big toothy grin. It was adorable. I kissed him again. This time he giggled. I kissed him again, now he laughed. His eyes still shut he reaches up and places his little hand on my chin/cheek as if to say, “Daddy, you’re so silly. I love you.” before he fell asleep completely.

Those two little things made me think back down the path that led me here. All the hard work and wondering if I was doing the right thing, and being the only one I know not letting my baby scream himself to sleep. Now here I am with a wonderful bonding experience with my son, him laughing himself to sleep (in under 10 minutes almost every night). I wouldn’t trade it for any other way. It’s harder, but most of the right things in life are.

One last note on cry-it-out (and co-sleeping/breast-feeding in general actually). My new argument against cry-it-out is “look at what a wonderful bonding opportunity you are missing”. One of my old arguments (which I still think is true) against it is, 10,000 years ago, when my great-great-etc-grandpa was living in a cave/ditch/hut/tree/whatever with wild predators lurking about. Would he EVER have just put his son/daughter down on the ground to scream themselves to sleep? NO WAY. The baby would have gotten eaten or something. That dude CLUNG to his baby through the whole night to make sure nothing bad happened. That’s how we were made. Babies were meant to sleep in their parents arms, or at least directly next to their parents. If not, breasts would be detachable, and kids would come with ninja-skills and wolverine claws. Seriously, rocking to sleep and co-sleeping are the absolute most-natural way there is. They just make sense.

Screen printing a Chris Merritt t-shirt

Christopher McCulloh — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 12:14:03 +0000

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Sheep Herding in Indiana!

Christopher McCulloh — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 16:41:47 +0000

We’ve been watching a lot of Dog Whisperer lately. On one of the episodes, Cesar recommended that the people take their dog to sheep herding classes. We were amazed that such a thing existed, and a week later we too found ourselves at sheep herding classes.

I took this little video of it (This was the last thing she did during her second session):

I also took a few pictures:

Some thoughts:

1. The meeting between the woman and the dog could have gone smoother. Dakota was shy, and just wanted to sniff the woman. Dakota was very tentative, and the woman began petting her while she was in that state of mind, which only served to re-enforce her shyness. This caused problems throughout the lesson.

2. The woman was not very clear with her signals, or consistent with what Dakota was and was not allowed to do. I was never really sure as to what she was wanting Dakota to do, and I could tell Dakota was just as confused as I was.

3. At several points the woman hit Dakota in the face with the rake. Once she hit her pretty hard. I was not pleased. Cesar would not have allowed this probably. Maybe I need to be more assertive… Had I known the woman, I would have said something. Had she done it any more than she had, i would have said something. I could tell she wasn’t harming Dakota, but I could also tell that she lost all respect from the dog, and made Dakota simply afraid of her and the rake and want to just stay away from her.

4. Most importantly, I could tell that for at least half of the lesson (there were two sessions, each about 10 minutes) Dakota was loving it. It was like she had died and gone to heaven. There was this magical place with these magical animals that this magical woman let her chase!!!

5. All around, best $15 bucks I’ve spent in quite a while… We’re going to try out another place (which is twice as expensive) and see which we want to go to. One thing I know for sure is that I hope to do this at least once a month…

The place was called “Stock Dog University“. The woman’s name was Ferrah Hiatt. She was really nice, and I think if we had been able to take a little more time to get to know her and talk about what we wanted out of this and what was expected of the dog and what she was trying to get the dog to do, I would have enjoyed it more. I did like it enough at least to definitely consider going back, despite how negative some parts of this post may have sounded…

View Larger Map

The other place we are going to try next is Dogwood Farm. They are twice as expensive, and twice as far away…

View Larger Map

What is wrong with math education.

Christopher McCulloh — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 13:31:15 +0000

The politicians say, “we need higher standards.” The schools say, “we need more money and equipment.” Educators say one thing, and teachers say another. They are all wrong. The only people who understand what is going on are the ones most often blamed and least often heard: the students. They say, “math class is stupid and boring,” and they are right.

Brilliantly written and very interesting. On page 4, when the guy puts a line through the triangle in the box, and then finds out what implications this has for his question… I have to admit, I almost got a tear in my eye. It blew my mind. Then, on page 5, my heart just sank. It was like someone fed me my favorite ice cream (just think about it, maybe with cookie chunks. Maybe with sprinkles. Creamy. Delicious. Maybe some hot fudge drizzled on too) and then told me that they were feeding all of the children in the world frozen card-board drizzled with motor oil so they would “get the idea” of what ice-cream is like. Just read it and see for yourself… seriously…