perfidy

A classic, best game of the year, if you ask me. My Ohio State Buckeyes pulled out a three-point victory, winning 42-39.

Yawn. Everybody who gives a crap already knows that. No news there.

Here's the follow-up, guaranteed to keep the rubes all atwitter at least until the next Pick-4 Ohio Lottery drawing:

Go figure. Donald Sensing would likely be displeased.

[wik] Oh, and back to the game - How good a game was it? Michigan's still rated #2 in the AP poll, and is just barely #3 in the BCS. Just as they should be.

[alsø wik] Dang. I completely misread the grotesquely detailed, yet ultimately quite understandable ESPN rankings. Michigan IS still #2 in the BCS, as well as the AP, but the droids at Harris & USAToday have them #3. The only way to avoid a replay of OSU-Michigan, it seems, is for USC to win out against Notre Dame & UCLA. If they do, great, and if they don't, well OSU will have to beat Michigan again. Which they will.

It's not listed in the article as the biggest determinant of success, but it seems to play a large part, and it's a concise, if not particularly easy-to-follow suggestion:

Be an immigrant

The article's actual title is "Immigrants Have Founded 1 in 4 Public Venture-Backed Companies in the U.S. Since 1990", but mine's shorter, pithier, and more memorable. I guess that means that unless the Democrats are successful at undoing the pretend-planning that's been done on the southern border fence, we're going to see a dearth of new venture-backed startups. And yes, that's called "leaping to a possibly unintended conclusion".
 

Ok... I'll play.

Your five desert-island comedies. Mine are:

Young Frankenstein
Ghostbusters
Waiting For Guffman
The 40-Year-Old Virgin
Sixteen Candles

And the runners-up:

Blazing Saddles
The Big Lebowski
This Is Spinal Tap
Airplane!
Schindler's List

I'm pretty damn down with the Belgian strong ale I made last winter, so this is a more or less reprise of that. More or less.

3 cans (9.9 lbs) Munton's extra light malt syrup
8 oz light Belgian candi sugar
2 oz Styrian Goldings leaf hops, about 4.6% AA
1 oz Czech Saaz leaf hops
8 oz aromatic malt
8 oz crystal malt, 60L
2.5 oz chocolate malt
1 whirlfloc tablet
EasYeast Trappist Ale Yeast

Steeped grains in 1 gallon water for 45 minutes at about 160 degrees. Brought 3 gallons spring water to boil in pot and added steeping water. Sparged grainbag in hot water. At boil, added extract, sugar, and Styrian Goldings.

Added 1/2 oz Saaz hops at 45 minutes. Added whirlfloc at the same time. Added 1/2 oz Saaz hops at 59 minutes.

Cooled in ice bath and added to fermenting bucket with about 1 1/2 gallons water to make up 5.3 gallons or so. Pitched yeast at 74 degrees. Placed blowoff tube and stashed bucket in closet. Within 24 hours it was gurgling like crazy. Craaaazy.

Atlantic Pale Ale, Mark II

5 lbs dry malt extract, light
1/4 lb crystal malt, 20L
1/2 lb crystal malt, 40L
1/4 lb crystal malt, 60L
1 oz Perle hop pellets, about 7.6% AA
1 oz Amarillo hop pellets
1 oz Cascade hop pellets
1 oz East Kent Goldings hop pellets
EasYeast British Ale Yeast (liquid)

Steeped grains for 20 minutes or so at 160 degrees in 1 gallon spring water, give or take. I probably should have let it go a little farther as I don't think I extracted the sugars fully. Added the steeping water to 3 gallons of water heating in the pot and sparged out the grain bag. Added extract and Perle at boil. Added 1/2 ounce of each of the other hops at 45 minutes, and another half ounce of each at 59 minutes.

Removed to water bath, and added to about 2 gallons of water in fermenting bucket to make about 5.2 gallons. Pitched yeast at 78 degrees.

Fermentation began within 24 hours and had begun to slow down within 48 - nice and vigorous.

[wik] Very delicious, which is nice. Good hop balance, nice ale character. Good yeast! Some esters, some minerals, and little to no masking of hop profile. Johno say "yes!" The only issue is that, for the third time, I have a little benign mold growth in the bottles. THIS time, it wasn't bad enough to ruin the beer, but I suppose it will in time. Time to replace my buckets!

The body of the former Republican Majority hasn't even assumed ambient temperature yet, and the Democratic leadership are already grabbing the wheel and steering the ship of state right off the cliff (way to mix your metaphors!!!). The Democrats are clearly so confident about their chances in '08 that they feel they can spend their first days after the election fucking with us.

Or... wait. No. They are trying to set the bar of success as low as possible, so even moderate gains seem monumental in retrospect. That's the ticket!!

Or, um.... They... shit. I don't know. What the damn hell could Nancy Pelosi be thinking nominating that half-senescent gasbag John Murtha for House Majority Leader? Rambling speeches, more funding for polka and peirogies, but most of all having the troops home in time for Wapner, come hell or high water!

There must be at least two or three people better suited for the job than Murtha, including both myself and the retarded guy who sells balloons outside the Farragut West Metro stop... what in the world is the strategy here?

Always foolin' with stuff that should just be legislated. Like sandwiches. Is a Burrito a sandwich?. Judges pokin' their noses in where they don't belong.

I thought a lot about the election in the lead-up. I thought about the things I wanted to say to voters, figured out positions on issues, and all of that. In the end, I just decided to keep it shut and let nature take its course. I think the results were positive, and given how delicate the results were in Virginia we can all see that butterflies in Argentina influenced this election.

I'll make one general observation, though. For years now we've been hearing that the "liberal media" was distorting the truth of what's been going on in Iraq, and we've been hearing that from the very top of this administration. I think it is generally recognized now that the "liberal media distortion field" theory was BS, and that the reality distortion field was being emitted directly from the White House.

Take a moment to consider what this means for other top-shelf issues. Administration policy on environmental issues was and is being created by the same folks who brought you the Iraq war, and lied about what we really going on there (as distinct from the reason for the war). Tax policy is being created by these people as well -- we've had a massive tax cut for the wealthiest, and the numbers are in. They got a lot richer. Otherwise, median incomes are down, and Joe Average is worse off than before. And that doesn't even begin to include Joe Average's debt for the war, and for the tax cuts.

While Bush focused the tax relief "love" only at the highest income levels, he saw fit to spread the cost of the wars very evenly across all income brackets.

A tax cut for the wealthy that is not accompanied by spending cuts is a tax increase on everyone else. Period!

I can't help but think that the window for fixing some of the fundamental problems that this society has been facing is simply closed. The politically accessible surpluses that could have made headway on the real problems has been foolishly wasted on an incompetent attempt at nation-building, birthed by an untested superiority complex. The timing couldn't have been worse.

Even though it was inevitable, you still never want to see an article containing a statement like this:

"Let the robot holocaust commence: robots think we taste like bacon..."

I comfort myself that the article in question was posted at a site whose provenance is best described as "marginal" (i.e. "one step above Wikipedia"), but I pass it along, just in case.

Eminent smarty science types maintain that the one thing that truly separates us from all the other animals on the planet is our cleverness. That, and thumbs, but definitely cleverness.

And while there are some things which can hardly be improved upon that have endured unchanged for centuries, even millennia (the wheel, beer, the music of Slayer), that doesn't stop people from trying to perfect the already perfect. Get that? That's perFECT the already PERfect. The written word is such a blunt instrument.

A good friend of mine, an enterprising and endlessly creative cook whose inventiveness, whose cleverness never fails to astound me, found something in the endless wastes of the internet that's so shockingly creative, so incredibly clever, and so far beyond even his most inspired moments, that I just have to bring to your attention.... season shot, the shot made of seasoning.

Cook a game bird in one piece
No shot left in the bird
Season on impact
The answer: Season Shot

Season Shot: Ammo with flavor

Hot damn. It's environmentally sound, potentially quite tasty, and totally safe on human teeth as well. Let's see a dolphin come up with that! Boo-yah!!!!