perfidy

Confounding us with their "words". To western ears it sounds like gibberish, but it must be the language of maskirovka, multi-layered and nefarious.

Never mind the science at stake; the ineffectiveness of the proposed American program against not just weapons currently fielded by the commies, but the ones they could quickly manufacture; or the weakness in Russia that American moves like the missile shield spotlight.

If someone could just square this headline:

Putin warns of new Cuban missile crisis

With the last paragraph:

Mr Putin added: "Thank God, we do not have any Cuban missile crisis now..."

I'll say spassiba.

I'm going to be a guest on Turnbaby Talks this coming Sunday evening at 6 PM Mountain (8 PM Eastern). We'll talk about NaNoWriMo, The Milkman, my webcomic, and whatever else I've got going on (It, of course). Please tune in and call in so I don't have to hem and haw the entire time. If you can't listen live, the show will be archived for your future listening pleasure.

For those of you who missed it today, Harry Potter scribe J.K. Rowling outed main character and dead guy Albus Dumbledore, saying "she always thought Dumbledore was gay."

Excuse me, what?

I don't particularly care that he is (well, okay, was - he's kicked the bucket) gay. What bugs me is that she wasn't willing to bring it up in a series that deals with ALL KINDS of adult themes like, um, murder, torture, evil, the inability of governments to effectively control their populace, abuse, etc. My question to Ms. Rowling is this: Why would you bring this up now after you've already written the books and made your zillions of dollars? It does NOTHING to improve (or detract) from the series. Unless her first draft of book 7 was written significantly differently with a working title of, say, Harry Potter and the Unsheathed Wand of Albus Dumbledore, there is no reason she couldn't have actually touched upon (no pun intended - well, hardly any) Dumbledore's sexuality WITHIN the pages of the books. I wonder how many teens dealing with their own sexuality might have felt more comfortable reading about a main character who went through similar trials. I mean, she's J.K.-fucking-Rowling. She outsells the Bible! Any editor who dares to question her will probably have to get his or her resume in order quickly. She could have put this little nugget INTO her book instead of waiting until after everything's done to out the character.

Oh, but wait - the book-buying public wouldn't accept that! A gay character? In today's modern world? *gasp* The scandal!

Never mind the fact that anyone narrow-minded enough to be unable to deal with a homosexual literary character probably wouldn't be able to deal with all the "evil magic" in the series in the first place.

Shame on you, J.K. Rowling, for being a coward.

I didn't try to buy World Series tickets this morning when they went on sale at 10 AM MST. The Rockies, in their questionable wisdom, opted not to allow any sales via phone or box office and went exclusively with online sales. The rationale behind this is that it gives every fan an equal opportunity to buy their tickets.

"What about ticket brokers?" we asked.

"We're limiting sales to only 4 per person. That will stop people from buying up hundreds or thousands of tickets at a time and reselling them," they said.

"But what about people who can write programs to do this automatically?" we asked.

"Hey, look...bunnies!" they said.

And then, after the "box office" was open for approximately two and a half hours, the vendor's server suffered catastrophic failure after trying to swallow about 8.5 MILLION hits. That's 1500 hits a second, folks. Now, I know the Rockies are a super-popular team around the world, but I'm finding it a little rough suspending my disbelief that there were really that many people trying to snag one of the 22,000 tickets for sale. That's about twice the population of the entire state of Colorado. Even if there were a tenth that amount with everyone hitting the site ten times during the first two hours, that's still a ridiculously large sum of people trying to get to watch a team that (honestly) nobody really cares that much about outside of our nice square borders.

The more conspiracy-minded have advanced the theory that this is a Denial-of-Service attack by Red Sox fans. Or Arizona fans. Or Giant Evil Space Robots. In the meantime, the Rockies and the ticket vendor are still trying to figure out what to do.

[wik] It occurs to me that when dealing with a sporting event of this magnitude, going with the lowest bidder for ticket sales might not have been the smartest thing to do.

[alsø wik] Ticketmaster routinely deals with huge venues and events. And online sales are second-nature for them. Cleveland was going to use them if they beat the Sox.

[alsø alsø wik] I am not, nor have I ever been an employee of Ticketmaster.

[wi nøt trei a høliday in Sweden this yër?] The title of this post refers to the countdown page every potential buyer was redirected to, informing them that the page would automatically refresh when the timer reached zero and try to connect once again.

Just like most other people, I tend to lose track of the days as I age.

It's not out of a desire to retain my yoot, clutching it well past the time when it's no longer OK to wear t-shirts advertising liquor brands. I made peace with aging and maturity awhile ago. Still stings sometimes, but fighting it is so pathetic and sad, and anyway, without getting too Holden Caulfield about it, no one likes a phony.

So we get on with our lives, work our jobs and and generate debt and make genetic replicants of ourselves, and while we all know the day (usually) and the date (after some reflection), we just lose the single days, flushed downstream in the time torrent with our last jobs, our old debt, and the baby pictures of grown children.

Occasionally we get a reminder that really hits home how far we've come, that makes us pop our heads above the time stream, look around, and say "Oh, is that where we are", then are overwhelmed by the weight of passing years. In my case, it is a detail- a turn of phrase, a scent (no, really), or, like today, a number.

As of today, the euro is worth $1.43. When I was stationed in Germany, a doillar was worth about 1.40 deutschmarks. I don't recall the exchange rate getting higher than about DM1.37 or so, but a few pennies here, some pfennigs there, and close enough.

So with the relationship inverted, for some reason that triggered my temporal awareness, and the rest of the day I will be thinking about how that year is very nearly the median of my lifespan thus far.

Everyone off the train! It's gonna crash and burn!!

BoingBoing made my morning today by linking to this incredible metaphorical trainwreck that happened last week at a Van Halen concert in North Carolina.

Y'see, the recorded backing synth track that starts "Jump," their concert finale, was played back at the wrong speed - not just at the wrong pitch, but in between pitches, so no matter how hard Eddie tries to find a key to play in that works with the disaster in progress, he can't.

Which is awesome. The Van Halen brothers are widely reputed to be world-class jerkholes, most recently proving this hypothesis by kicking founding bassist Michael Anthony out of the band in the press. That's right, Anthony found out on TV.

So, sit back and dig the horror as Van Halen do their best to carry on as the wheels come off.

[wik] And if you relish the gory technical details of what went wrong, here's an explanation.

Brew #18 - Beamish Genuine Dry Stout clone
(from a recipe in "Beer Captured" by Szamatulski and Szamatulski)

The wife requested a nice dry Irish stout in the mold of Guinness and Murphy's, so it is my duty to oblige.

13.5 oz roasted unmalted barley
6 oz black patent malt
8 oz flaked unmalted wheat
5 lbs light dry malt extract, 2 lbs Breiss, 3 lbs Muntons
1 oz Challenger hop pellets, 7.5% AAU, bittering
.4 oz Fuggles hop pellets, 3.8% AAU, bittering
.25 oz Fuggles hop pellets, flavor
1 Whirlfloc (Irish moss) tablet
White Labs WLP 0004, Irish Ale Yeast
1 Tablespoon 88% lactic acid, added at kegging.

The place I'm getting my grain from now doesn't grind to order (jerks!) so I crushed the grains using a cast iron pan and a sheet pan - which produced lots of dust which had to be filtered from the steeping water it was added to the kettle. Will this cause tannins to come through in the final beer? Sure hope not!

Steeped grains in 1 gal Market Basket spring water at 160 degrees. Sparged grain sack in kettle water at 180 degrees-ish.
Brought 2.5 gal approx Market Basket spring water to boil, added steeping water

Added malt extract and bittering hops at boil

Added whirlfloc and flavor hops at 0:45

Cooled pot in ice bath, combined with 2.3 gals (approx) chilled Poland Spring water. Pitched yeast at 74 degrees. Total volume about 5 1/4 gallons.

OG: 1.044, which means I got amazing efficiency out of my steeping grains. Huh.
Target FG: 1.009-1.010
Actual FG: 1.013, which is high. Maybe I just need to learn to read my hydrometer better, as the target OG was 1.041. Knock three points off each reading and I'm in the zone.

Fermentation proceeded at about 68-70 degrees, a little high for the yeast but I don't really have a choice. Racked to secondary after 8 days and held at 66-68 degrees.

Kegged after 1 month in secondary. Siponing went irritatingly, and I had to leave a good quart of beer in the bottom of the carboy. Final yield, about 4.75 gals.

Added 1 tablespoon of 88% food-grade lactic acid to keg. Force carbonated at 35 PSI.

Delicious stout. Lots of body, and though not milkshake-smooth it is well integrated. Aroma is of roasted barley (natch) and a whiff of malt. Flavor balances a drying roasted note with a malt backbone and just a touch of yeast character - some neutral esters and a touch of diacetyl (which is appropriate to the style). Bitterness is present but not too assertive, and the hop flavor is present but just sort of behind the scenes. The lactic acid added that Guinness tang and really brought everything together. Aftertaste is of roasted barley giving way to sweet malt and Fuggles hops, and a lingering bitterness. I could probably have stood to undershoot the bittering, but that's niggling on what has turned out to be a really good beer.

Anyone else know that song?

I digress...

Last week the wife and I were out in the woods north of here, just south of the border with Cow Hampshire, hunkered down in a blind in the foggy morning dew. And just as the sun peeped up over the horizon, there he was! A magnificent specimen, just sauntering through the meadow before us without a care in the world, making for the Lego cache we'd placed.

Long story short, first day of the season and we bagged us a heckuva prize. Look at this pelt! Gorgeous! And the meat... I did a thigh roast with roasted pears, rosemary and a few juniper berries, and it was spectacular. I'm salting down the rest for winter tomorrow.

Just look at that pelt!!!

Build a man a fire, you keep him warm for the night. Light a man on fire, you keep him warm the rest of his life.

Did your mama hit you? Then you said it right.

Recently, my son has been exposed (as all children eventually are) to foul language, cursing, swearing, oaths, and the like. Surprisingly, little of this exposure has come from me. As responsible parental units, we have taken a moderate approach in discouraging the boy from dropping the F-bomb and its cousins. We don't freak out, we don't appear shocked and horrified; we just calmly beat the crap out of him, point out that it is impolite to say things like that, and that it is something that we generally don't do. This method has proven to be fairly effective.

The other day, I was watching a zombie flick late in the evening. The boy woke up, and we watched some brain munching for a bit. John pointed out, accurately, that there was a rather copious amount of bad words along with the brain eating. I explained that when people are scared, they often use bad words. (Screenwriters also use bad words when they are frightened by deadlines or being viewed as "inauthentic" or "not edgy.") This led to a discussion of the appropriate use of bad language.

The boy played with the envelope a little.

"Well, I'll just use bad words when I'm scared." No, not really.

"Okay, just when there's a spider." Nope. If it's dark. If my sister sits on me. If mommy doesn't buy me a toy. If I see Brittney Spears. If...

Well, I wanted to watch the rest of the movie. "It's time to go to bed, and not use bad words."

"Well, I'll just use bad words when I'm being chased by zombies."

"Son, you have my permission to use any bad word you can think of, as many times as you want." His eyes lit up with the possibilities.

"But only if the zombies come, and not before." Despair. "Now back in bed."

I was reminded of this incident when I ran across this little gem, from someone who takes a rather opposite approach to swearing for the very young:

For reasons that are not yet clear to me, a lot of parents we know are worried about their children learning cuss words. This is a truly charming display of futility. In the world we live in, even the most sheltered Amish child will have learned enough swear words to cuss like a longshoreman or the Irish by the time it is five.

So I am approaching the issue from a much more realistic perspective. I am not going to waste energy keeping Cordelia from swear words. Instead, I’m going to skip a step and just make sure that she is able to use them in more colorful ways than her schoolyard chums.

If some dirty little sprog says she is a poo-poo head, I want her to be able to call him a “ball-draining cum junkie”. She should be able to deflect all those silly little schoolyard taunts by tossing off a casual “Lick my ass, fucktard.”

And if some boy says she has cooties, I want her to fire right back with “Yeah. Well, we’ll see how easy you say that when my cock’s in your mouth.” This doesn’t make any sense, of course, but hopefully it’ll confuse and distract him enough for her to really put the boot in.

I see this as simply giving her the skills she needs to function in a complex and ever-changing world.

[wik] I realized, just as soon as Johno pointed it out, that my post was mysteriously truncated. In reconstituting the post, I realized that the text at the link is different from the quote above. Sometime between Thursday, May 15, 2003 4:55:06 PM and earlier this afternoon, Jeff Vogel bowdlerized (a bit) his own text. This is the new version on his website:

For reasons that are not yet clear to me, a lot of parents we know are worried about their children learning cuss words. This is a truly charming display of futility. In the world we live in, even the most sheltered Amish child will have learned enough swear words to cuss like a longshoreman or the Irish by the time it is five.

So I am approaching the issue from a much more realistic perspective. I am not going to waste energy keeping Cordelia from swear words. Instead, I’m going to skip a step and just make sure that she is able to use them in more colorful ways than her schoolyard chums.

If some dirty little sprog says she is a poo-poo head, I want her to be able to lash out with an uninterrupted spray of obscenities, most of which will have no meaning to either her or her opponent. The enemy may not understand why he has just been called a “fucktard,” of course, but hopefully it’ll confuse and distract him enough for her to really put the boot in.

I see this as simply giving her the skills she needs to function in a complex and ever-changing world.

How disappointing, and how glad I didn't empty the trash after I deleted the word doc that contained the original.