perfidy

It is my birthday after all. Coincidently, it also happens to be the birthday of this hack poet:

William Butler Yeats was born on this day in 1865, and managed to survive another 74 years scribbling forgettable poetry and dabbling in oriental mysticism and fascism. Strangely enough, I have managed to go 37 years without ever realizing that I shared my birthday with a famous poet. Thanks to Trish, who sent me a nice Birthday card from the Victoria and Albert Museum, for clueing me in.

I am now arguably in my late thirties. I am not sure how to feel about that. The last decade has not been without some success, but the idea that I'm creeping ever closer to 40 is, well, creepy. Nevertheless, it's a happy birthday, and a beautiful day. And dad got me the complete Far Side...

The national flower of Greenland is an ice sculpture in front of the cultural center in the capital city of Godthab.

I love cable television. I love that we live in the future.

I am about to watch a world cup soccer match between Mexico and Iran. There are a dismayingly large number of people in America today willing to believe that the populace of one of these nations is conspiring to overrun us and tekurjobs, and the other is full of people all working in concert to make New York into a glowing crater.

Both those assertions are, of course, bullshit. Bigotry and economic illiteracy aside, the United States does need to get a handle on all the people who want to come to this country, but not by sealing the borders tight. And surely there are many nuclear engineers in Iran working on things that mean bad news for us. But the main body of the populace of each of these countries are just people like people everywhere.

Right now, as I watch the Mexican announcers on Univision flip out as Mexico prepares for its opening match against Iran, all I can see is a bunch of people really happy to be from where they're from, and ready to pin their national pride on a silly game. Some of you may know that I spent some time in Guanajuato as a teenager, and really dig Mexico as a nation, as a people, and as a state of mind.

I love that I can watch Mexican world cup action in Spanish, get the flavor of their fanaticism, soak in the love of the game, and launch myself off the couch screaming "GOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAL! GOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAL!" in support of my peeps to the South. And given that the USA is hard pressed to make it out of the first round in a group that's absolutely stacked with talent including a juggernaut of a Czech team and the Italians and Ghana besides, I might as well go ahead and throw my Cup support behind nuestros vecinos del sud.

¡Luchemos! ¡Luchemos! ¡Vencermos! And similar sentiments!

[wik] Advertisements for Nexium (the purple pill) are just as silly in Spanish.

[alsø wik] Latin American soap operas are priceless entertainment.

[alsø alsø wik] Mariachi music is oddly compelling. Much like polka, which I find to be a balm to the hung-over mind, mariachi is somehow comforting yet energizing. I clearly have brain damage.

[wi nøt trei a høliday in Sweden this yër?] Aside to Buckethead: you should know that I've started playing pickup soccer at lunchtime, hence my sudden interest in the game. I have realized that it's as poetic as baseball and as exciting as football. The only drawback, the one thing that seems wrong to this American mind is this: no professional sporting event should ever end in a tie.

[see the løveli lakes...] Strikeouts, as Crash Davis said, might be fascist, but ties are socialist.

[the wøndërful telephøne system...] Unlike my esteemed coblogger Patton, I love our freedom. And I hate ties.

[and mäni interesting furry animals...] Patton likes ties, value-added taxes, international condom-size harmonization standards, national shoe production quotas, and Volvos.

[including the majestik møøse...] Iran's national anthem is quite lovely. I have no idea what the words are.

[a Møøse once bit my sister...] Evidently, the lyrics in English run

Upwards on the horizon rises the Eastern Sun,
The sight of the true Religion.
Bahman - the brilliance of our Faith.
Your message, O Imam, of independence and freedom
is imprinted on our souls.
O Martyrs! The time of your cries of pain rings in our ears.
Enduring, continuing, eternal,
The Islamic Republic of Iran.

So there you go.

[No realli! She was Karving her initials on the møøse with the sharpened end of an interspace tøøthbrush given by Svenge - her brother-in-law - an Oslo dentist and star of many Norwegian møvies: "The Høt Hands of an Oslo Dentist", "Fillings of Passion", "The Huge Mølars of Horst Nordfink"] Wait'll you get a load of the lyrics to the Mexican anthem! Iran is all about submission to Allah and martyrs: Mexico's is about fucking rivers of the blood of their enemies.

CHORUS:
Mexicans, when the war cry is heard,
Have sword and bridle ready.
Let the earth's foundations tremble
At the loud cannon's roar.

May the divine archangel crown your brow,
Oh fatherland, with an olive branch of peace,
For your eternal destiny has been written
In heaven by the finger of God.
But should a foreign enemy
Dare to profane your soil with his tread,
Know, beloved fatherland, that heaven gave you
A soldier in each of your sons.

CHORUS

War, war without truce against who would attempt
to blemish the honor of the fatherland!
War, war! The patriotic banners
saturate in waves of blood.
War, war! On the mount, in the vale
The terrifying cannon thunder
and the echoes nobly resound
to the cries of union! liberty!

CHORUS

Fatherland, before your children become unarmed
Beneath the yoke their necks in sway,
May your countryside be watered with blood,
On blood their feet trample.
And may your temples, palaces and towers
crumble in horrid crash,
and their ruins exist saying:
The fatherland was made of one thousand heroes here.

CHORUS

Fatherland, oh fatherland, your sons vow
To give their last breath on your altars,
If the trumpet with its warlike sound
Calls them to valiant battle.
For you, the garlands of olive,
For them, a glorious memory.
For you, the victory laurels,
For them, an honoured tomb.

CHORUS

So, I guess the lesson is, never date Mexico's sister.

So yesterday I was all furious and angry, but not at her -- just at certain very bad people who shall remain nameless for the time being...but then today was a good day. Today I drove 600 miles, met my Mom to pick up a sparkle that's been in the family 120 years, watched the sun set and the moon rise at the same time, left the sunroof open 'cause Chemical Brothers sounded so cool, got 31.6 mpg driving around traffic at 75, and reflected on the 38 years I've screwed up; felt nothing but hope and good will towards the next 38, god willing.

It was a good day.

At 9:00 AM this morning, give or take a few minutes, Paraguay and England started a first-round World Cup match. David Beckham and Michael Owen leading an all-star English team in the biggest sporting event in the world.

Now, I accept that Americans don't give a crap about soccer, on the whole. Fine. But it's the fachrissakes World Cup! And right now, I am half-watching that match on Mexico's Univision network, because NBC is carrying the French Open (okay), ESPN is showing Sportscenter (for the 10th time in a row), and ESPN2 is showing... bass fishing???

Je-sus. A country fulla rubes is what we are. In Somalia, the populace is rioting against their new Islamist overlords, because said overlords have banned watching Cup matches. Surely we would do the same if the Superbowl or the World Series were similarly threatened, but c'mon! The best soccer in the world, and ESPN2 preempts it for... bass fishing?

From the Llamabutchers, just click through and play the video.

[wik] While we're on the subject of Llamavideos, they have another one as well. While I am not generally speaking one for wishing others ill, I can't help but admit to a funny feeling in the tummy when I contemplate the demise of Zarqawi. Triumphalism is not a virtue, but in this case, I think not entirely a vice. And the song picked for this one is not, for once, the odious Toby Keith.

[alsø wik] In that same post, Steve makes the point that the next election will be dynamite, huge, when it comes to the common folk appropriating the expropriators. The photoshopping of campaign ads was one of the happier things about the last election, and I think that re-edits and you tube will in fact play a significant (and highly amusing) role in '08.

In the interest of full disclosure, I feel it is important that all the Ministry's readers, ministers, and minions be aware of the events of the past two weeks.

A few of you may have noticed that the Ministry of Minor Perfidy's website went down last week for several days. This was most regrettable.

The outage was the unfortunate result of a negotiation gone bad between myself, an interdimensional supercomputer which calls itself Sheridan, and one of the more testy Ancient Outer Evils. One thing you need to understand about interdimensional supercomputers is that the concept of latency takes on a whole new meaning. Here on Earth, we are accustomed to network latencies on the order of milliseconds, gaps of time that are nearly imperceptible even at their worst. But when the computer is both sentient and relying on logic processors, language interpretation software packages, and RAM caches residing in a cool half-dozen parallel universes, latencies can range from the normal milliseconds to minutes at a time. The net result - get it? Net result? - is that sometimes the right hand literally does not know what the left hand is doing. And this time, as the right hand was agreeing with me and this particularly testy Ancient Outer Evil on the main points of our proposed cross-temporal profit sharing scheme, the left hand was simultaneously insulting the same Evil's mother and trying to impregnate one of our receptionist.

Long story short, I zigged, Evil zagged, and in the ensuing chaos our server room was on the receiving end of some accidental gunplay. I would have thought that a few extra air holes would merely have aided in cooling our massively overclocked machines, but nooooooo, both scrutator and snoogums (ah, stalwart servers both!) went to that great gig in the sky.

It took many thousands of sprite-hours of work and the regrettable deaths of millions of code-gnomes to reconstruct the trillions of bits of data the Ministry has collected over the years. Hard work, backbreaking work, frequently fatal work (ah! brave code-gnomes!), but necessary work if we are to bring you the content, wisdom, and dubious counsel you have grown to depend on (or at least tolerate).

Many thanks to Ministers Ross and Patton for their yeoman's work in repairing the site, to Buckethead for spearheading the entire venture, and to GeekLethal for locking, loading, and figuring out a way to rescue me from Sheridan's hordes of gorgeous yet deadly fembots.

Brew #10 - St. Anky Dark Ale

Anyone meow remember the great American film "Super Troopers" meow?

6.6 lbs Munton's liquid malt extract, light.
3/4 lb crystal malt, 40L
1/4 lb chocolate malt
1/4 lb black patent malt
1 oz Eroica hops, 12% AAU (bittering)
1/2 oz Hallertau Mittelfreuh hops, aroma
1 oz Hallertau Mittelfreuh hops, flavor
1 packet Safale S-04 dry ale yeast (Whitbread strain)

Steeped specialty grains in 1 gallon filtered tap water for 60 minutes at 155-160 degrees. Meanwhile, brought 3 gallons filtered tap water to boil in kettle, and added steeping water. Rinsed grains off well. Added malt extract at the boil. Returned kettle to boil and added Eroica hops. Added 1/2 oz HM hops (real German ones) for the last ten minutes. Added 1 oz HM (real German ones) for the last minute. Nummy num num num.

Removed kettle to ice bath with 30 lbs ice and a couple freezer packs. Added 1 gallon 50 degree water to the fermenter, and added wort, filtering out the trub using the showercap-like contraption I have. Poured back and forth between kettle and bucket to aerate wort. I tried an experiment this time - I sprinkled the yeast into the bucket when most of the beer was in the kettle, and let the turbulence of pouring the beer back in dissolve and disperse the yeast. Twenty minutes later, I shook the bucket some more to make sure the yeast was fully distributed throughout the wort.

I was going to use some liquid ESB yeast for this brew, which probably would have been very good, but there were two reasons not to. First, the batch was a little old, and I wasn't totally confident of getting a good fermentation from the yeast. Second, since I was using Hallertau hops I wanted to have a crisper finish than the softness of ESB yeast would afford. Whitbread should do very well on that count.

This is basically a rerun of Brew #2, which I called a porter. I mean, it was a porter, but lighter than the usual American porters that are around these days. Generally people use roasted malts for the browned, toasty flavors they impart, and I haven't really done that here. Moreover, I tend to like a lot of hops with this grainbill, more aroma hops especially than are really acceptable for the porter style. So, I've decided instead that what I'm making here is more of a Dark Ale. Why the hell not? My Brew #6, Joey Porter, was more in the porter style since I used a bit of darker crystal malt as well as a London Ale yeast that offered nice, round, soft, and minerally notes. It's amazing how basically the same exact grainbill can taste completely different using a different strain of yeast, even if both strains are from the same region of the same country. I love yeast.

I love yeast.

[wik] Ok, so not great. The yeast was nice, but high-attenuating, and the quarter pound of black malt came through too much. Also, the very estery and fruity flavor profile completely hides any hop aroma. I'd need to use some flavoring hops and a load of aroma hops to get a hoppy nose out of this. Worst of all, the batch was contaminated and I had to dump the last case before the bottles blew. Dang dang dang dang.

Holy shit! Johno's posting again! I thought he was dead! Shuffled loose this mortal coil and joined the heavenly choir! Deceased! Defunct! An ex-pundit!

In troof, I was merely... resting. And I do have lovely plumage.

The fact of the matter is, I started a new job a few weeks ago that has monopolized all my daytime brainspace, and have been moonlighting in a gig that has taken up the rest. So, sorry everyone. It's Friday, I'm dead-dog tired, and I'm drinking a homebrew.

And in a bizarre peanut-butter-in-my-chocolate moment, I have made a discovery.

Two weeks ago I bottled my latest pale ale. The first couple were absolutely delicious. Go me!

The third, that's where it gets interesting. Remember my Belgian Ale? Well, an unsanitized bottle from that batch that I poured and merely rinsed out must have made it into my batch of sanitized bottles on bottling day. Because the beer I am right now drinking is fascinating, an American pale ale with the crisp bite of Chico ale yeast and the soft citrus notes of Cascade and East Kent Goldings hops, and the spicy tang of Belgian ale from the oopsie-left-over yeast in the renegade bottle. Apparently that Belgian yeast is a fierce competitor, because it's what did the work of fermenting the priming sugar and left its very prominent stamp on the beer as a result.

I have to say, for this being a real no-no in homebrewing terms and proof positive that my sanitation could be better, it's one hell of a delicious mistake. Seriously, next time I might do this on purpose just for larfs, because folks, my mistake is goooooood.

Somewhat belatedly, a link to Ministry Crony Mapgirl, who hosted the 51st Carnival of Personal Finance during Perfidy's recent interregnum. Since she asked nicely, go, read, and become wise in the ways of personal finance.

[wik] Also, wish her well in her budding romance with her new, fancy youngin'.